The Healers

by Cleeves, Ann

  Hunter watched Ramsay move away from the car. When he was sure the Inspector held the boy’s full attention he opened the passenger door slowly. Then waited. There was no response from Slater. The car was parked sideways on to the house and the passenger door was out of his line of view. Hunter rolled out of the car and into the shadow of the tractor shed. He lay still, breathing heavily. In the distance he heard the conversation between Ramsay and Slater continuing. There was a smell of grain and old sacking. The floor was covered with dried hen droppings.

  He crawled on his stomach away from the car, keeping to the shadow, thinking that this jacket had cost him a fortune and that the force had better cough up for a replacement. He knew he had to find a way into the house. The kitchen door was no good. He couldn’t get to that without Slater seeing even if a sudden, miraculous cloud covered the moon. He knew there was a front door with a storm porch, on the side of the house that faced the garden, and decided to make for that. When he reached the orchard he stood up. He was round the corner of the house and out of Slater’s line of view. But he knew he had to be quick. Slater might notice at any time that he was no longer in the car. He pushed his way past the washing and through a tangle of overgrown shrubs.

  The door of the storm porch was unlocked. It was stiff, as if it had warped and was seldom used, but it gave way at last to Hunter’s tugging. The inner door had panes of bubbled glass and it was impossible to see inside. Hunter stood still for a moment, trying to hear if the conversation between Ramsay and Slater was going on, but Ramsay had lowered his voice so much that he could not tell. Perhaps Slater had come downstairs and was waiting on the other side of the door, with the shotgun in his hand. He turned the handle and pushed. The door was locked.

  Swearing under his breath he looked about him for a hiding place for a spare key. The front of the house was in shadow, and though his eyes had become accustomed to the gloom he could make out nothing in detail. He felt along the window ledge. His fingers found nothing but a thick layer of dust. There was a filthy doormat on the floor of the porch but no key underneath it. He retreated into the garden.

  On each side of the porch was a large terracotta pot, which in Cissie Bowles’s day might have held a flowering plant. Now each contained soil and a few dried up weeds. Hunter lifted each pot and felt underneath. Nothing. He scrabbled around in the dry soil and in the first pot he tried there was a large key. He cleaned off the muck and returned to the path. The key was rusty but it fitted.

  ‘Open, you bugger,’ he muttered, thinking that all he needed now was for the door to be bolted on the inside.

  The key turned remarkably easily. He put his shoulder against the door, turned the handle and pushed it slowly open.

  At first it seemed pitch-black inside. He could hear a clock ticking, Slater’s voice insistent but indistinct upstairs. Then he saw he was standing in a wide hall. Stairs, with a banister to one side, led away from him. He hesitated. Sod the heroics, he thought. Let’s get Lily out and let the cavalry deal with the lunatic upstairs. But he was pleased to think that for her he would be the cavalry.

  He felt his way around the downstairs rooms. There was a lounge, crammed with furniture, a dining room, damp and cold as a cellar with a huge mahogany table but no chairs, the kitchen which was flooded with moonlight. No sign of Lily. The bastard ‘s got her upstairs, he thought, and felt a rush of adrenalin.

  He stood in the hall listening, but he could only hear Slater, relentless as a politician, going on and on about never having been understood.

  Perhaps she’s dead, he thought. He started up the stairs, testing each tread with his foot before putting his weight on it, listening after each step for some sound from Lily. A cry or a movement from one of the other upstairs rooms.

  There was nothing.

  At the top of the stairs he stopped. Sean’s voice was very clear now, still ranting.

  ‘She believed in them, you know,’ he said. ‘She believed they could make everything better. I knew she was fooling herself. Some things you can’t heal. Not just by talking.’

  Slater was in the bedroom over the kitchen. It too would have the moon shining directly in through the window. The door was slightly ajar and white light spilled out on to the landing.

  Hunter moved softly along the landing, looking in the other rooms for Lily. There was a big square bathroom with a gurgling cistern, bedrooms with unsavoury beds and threadbare carpets, a huge commode like a throne. As he pushed open one door quietly there was a rustling of movement, but it was only a family of mice scattering to the holes in the skirting board. So Lily must be in the room with Slater, he thought. Why, then, was she so quiet?

  ‘We’ve got a suicide pact, you know.’ Slater’s voice came suddenly. ‘You won’t take either of us alive.’

  The door to Slater’s room was panelled, with a dark and peeling varnish. Hunter pushed it open a crack further. He could see Slater’s back. The man was almost hanging out of the window, shouting to Ramsay, waving the shotgun to make his point. Hunter thought he might overbalance and go tumbling into the farmyard below.

  Lily was standing in the corner beside Cissie’s high lumpy bed, with her back to the wall. She looked at Hunter. He gestured her to walk towards him but she did not move. She was wearing her nightdress, a long, white calico shift with a shawl thrown over the top. Hunter saw then that this was no victim waiting to be rescued. She did not seem frightened. She was watching Slater sadly, waiting for him to run out of steam. She thought he was making a fool of himself but she was prepared to indulge him. For awhile.

  Sean turned back into the room. Still he could not see Hunter.

  ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘ I’d rather kill you than let you talk to that pig. He was tricking you. Can’t you see?’

  Lily moved slowly away from the wall.

  ‘Go on then,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Kill me then,’ she said firmly, ‘if that’s what you want. I don’t care one way or the other.’

  She walked towards him. Her bare feet made marks on the dusty floor. They were long and bony and they reminded Hunter of a bird’s feet.

  Slater raised the shotgun towards her. In the farmyard below Ramsay was becoming anxious. They heard him calling, ‘Sean! What’s going on, Sean? Why don’t you come back and talk to me?’

  Frustrated and helpless, Hunter stood very still. He knew that any movement might panic Slater into firing. Lily walked right up to him, so the barrel of the shotgun touched her chest.

  ‘Love,’ he said. ‘I only did it for you.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  ‘I thought you’d realized,’ he said.

  She lifted the barrel of the shotgun so it pointed towards the ceiling, then she took it from his hands, cradling it carefully in her arms like a baby.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ he said.

  She turned and threw the gun on to the bed.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come on.’ She hugged him to her, so his head was on her shoulder, and looked over him at Hunter who came into the room and emptied the gun. They did not move, even when Hunter went over to the window and shouted out to Ramsay: ‘It’s all right, boss. It’s all over.’

  Later, back at the police station, Ramsay asked:

  ‘How did you manage that then? The Indiana Jones trick. Disarming your man with a single blow.’

  Hunter paused. For a moment there was a temptation to lie. It would have been a much better story if he’d been more than an onlooker. He still felt cheated that there’d been no chance for action after all that build up.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘ It was Lily. She persuaded him to give himself up.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Ramsay said. ‘ Lily Jackman.’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  It was almost dawn when they sat round in the incident room listening to Ramsay tell the story. Bleary-eyed and crumpled, they were too tired to interrupt and they wer
e surprised that he found the energy to keep going. He wanted to explain it, he said, though they thought that motive wasn’t really important not now that the case was over. They should be celebrating.

  ‘It was quite simple,’ Ramsay said. ‘Obvious really once you realized that the story about Faye Cooper was just a distraction. Slater sent the anonymous letter to confuse us. And because he’s always resented the Abbots and the time Lily spent with them. He moved James McDougal’s body for the same reason. To make us think that the murder had something to do with Faye…’ His voice dropped so they could hardly hear. ‘And I suppose it did have a lot to do with the girl in a way.’

  He paused and took a breath, not to make a drama out of it because by now they all knew at least the basics of what had happened, but because he wanted the facts straight in his mind before he started.

  ‘Lily Jackman killed Ernie Bowles on that Saturday night,’ he said. ‘She was on her own in the caravan after she’d finished work. Slater, as we know, had wandered off and bumped into his hippy friends. He was stoned out of his brain and sleeping it off in their van. Perhaps that explains some of his feelings of guilt, something of what happened later.

  ‘Lily wanted to make tea but there was no water in the caravan. She took the plastic container to the farmyard to fill it up from the outside tap just as Ernie Bowles arrived back at Laverock Farm from Otterbridge.

  ‘We know what state of mind he was in. He’d arranged to meet a woman through a dating agency and Jane Symons wasn’t at all the sort of person he’d planned. He’d expected sex, and that obviously wasn’t going to happen. And then she’d had the nerve to leave him in the restaurant when they were still halfway through the meal. Ernie was disappointed, angry, frustrated. He wanted to lash out at someone. We know he’d had a fair lot to drink. We know, too, that he’d been sniffing round Lily Jackman for a long while. So when he saw her, in the light of the headlamps, probably not wearing a great deal, bending over the tap in the yard, he thought Christmas had come early.

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t intend more than a bit of a grope. He put his arm around her, tried to give her a kiss, hoping to rescue something from the evening. She pushed him away, and that’s when he really did get mad. He’d been rejected once that evening and it wasn’t going to happen again. He pulled her struggling into the kitchen. It was quite clear to Lily that he intended to rape her. But he was drunk, unsteady and unfit. She was taller than him. Strong enough to lift the sacks of flour and grain in the health food shop. And she was desperate. She got her hands around his throat and she strangled him.’

  He paused again and looked round at them. They idled across their desks, heads in their hands, but he had their full attention.

  ‘You see why I say there are similarities with the Faye Cooper case. Daniel Abbot attempted an assault on Faye, but she didn’t fight back. She’d been told by Magda Pocock that she had to take responsibility for whatever happened to her, so she blamed herself. Lily Jackman did fight back and committed murder.’

  ‘That wasn’t murder,’ Sally Wedderburn said. ‘Not the way you’ve described it. That was self-defence.’

  ‘Why didn’t she call us in then?’ Rob Newell asked. ‘If she’d called us at the time, explained, the most serious likely charge would have been manslaughter.’

  ‘She panicked,’ Ramsay said. ‘ You must remember that she’d had dealings with the police before and she hadn’t found them particularly sympathetic. She believed the New Age travellers’ mythology. She thought we were all corrupt and brutal, that we wouldn’t take her story seriously. It’s not really surprising that she went back to the caravan and tried to pretend that it had never happened. Later she came to discover that one or two of us are human after all. She had decided to trust us and confess. That’s what provoked Slater’s little outburst tonight. By then he had a vested interest in keeping her quiet. Besides implicating him in murder it would have made her independent of him again: he wanted to feel that she needed him.’

  He stopped and took a sip of almost cold coffee from his mug.

  They wished he would get to the point, wondered what he was rambling about.

  ‘It was a mistake to convince ourselves that the murders had all been committed by the same person.’ He looked across the room like a teacher in a lecture theatre. ‘I’m sure you’ve all worked out why Slater killed the McDougals.’

  There was no response. They were too tired to play his games.

  ‘What did Lily do on the Sunday?’ he demanded. ‘ Come on. Think.’

  ‘She had lunch with the Abbots,’ Sally Wedderburn said. ‘And then she went to Magda Pocock’s Insight Group.’

  ‘Where she worked in a pair with Val McDougal,’ Ramsay said. ‘And that’s another parallel with the Faye Cooper investigation. Faye went to a Voice Dialogue session at Juniper Hall. She found it impossible to hide her anxieties and guilt from Magda, who was working as her therapist. Lily had spent all Saturday night alone in the caravan worrying about what she’d done. I don’t think she’d even confided in Sean Slater at that point. In the emotional atmosphere of Magda’s group I think she’d have found it impossible to keep it to herself. Perhaps using one of the other voices, through Voice Dialogue, she told Val exactly what had happened.’

  ‘Why didn’t Mrs McDougal tell the police then?’ Hunter said. ‘Someone tells you they’ve committed murder you get in touch with the police. She might have been into all that New Age crap but she was a teacher, a respectable woman.’

  ‘I don’t think she was sure it had actually happened,’ Ramsay said. ‘Bowles’s body wasn’t discovered until Monday. Perhaps she thought it was an outrageous fantasy. Even if she did believe Lily, do you really think she would have turned her in? I think she would have seen that as a sort of betrayal. Everyone involved in Magda’s group would have assumed that what they said there was confidential. I can imagine her going back to Lily, urging her to give herself up, but in the end leaving the responsibility to her. Of course she never did contact Lily again because on Monday night, just as news of Bowles’s death was coming out, Slater killed her.’

  Outside the sky was getting lighter and there was a burst of birdsong. Hunter sat on his usual perch on the windowsill and looked out over the playground. Ramsay continued.

  ‘Lily confided in Slater on Sunday afternoon, as they walked home from the group. He went to meet her. She told him that she’d strangled Ernie Bowles and that Mrs McDougal knew the whole story. In the morning they pretended to find the body in the farmhouse kitchen and we were called in. She says she didn’t know Slater had murdered Val. Not at first. Perhaps she guessed what he’d done but she didn’t want to admit it to herself. She preferred to imagine her murder as a convenient coincidence. It was only after James’s death that she realized she’d have to do something.’

  ‘Slater killed Val McDougal just to protect the girl?’ Newell said.

  Ramsay nodded. ‘ That’s what he’s admitted. Lily was babysitting for the Abbots. There was no one at Long Edge Farm because the Richardsons had a do at the agricultural college. Sean knew about that – there were posters up all over the town. Anyway, he was prepared to take a chance. We know that he’s got a record for car theft and there would have been other vehicles left outside the holiday cottages. He drove the Fiesta into Otterbridge and parked it in front of the McDougals’ house. He wasn’t concerned about anyone seeing the car. He didn’t think it would be possible to trace it back to him. I’m not sure what he would have done if the family had been there. He would probably just have driven away. But the house was empty so he waited. He went into the garden and found the nylon rope. When Val McDougal came back to her house he was ready for her…

  ‘He had parked the Fiesta at Long Edge Farm and had walked to the caravan before Lily was home from babysitting. I think if she’d ever asked him if he’d murdered Val, he’d have told her. But she didn’t ask. Later he typed the anonymous letter which sent us chasing after the story of Faye Cooper. He�
��d heard all about Faye, of course, from Lily. The letter was franked in Newcastle because he gave it to a feed rep to post. That was just a coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t understand why he didn’t just leave it at that,’ Newell said. ‘Why did he go after the boy? James didn’t know that Lily had killed Bowles.’

  ‘But Slater couldn’t be sure of that, could he? There was always a risk that Val had passed on Lily’s story. They were close, after all. Everyone said that. More like friends than mother and son. And then he knew that Win Abbot planned to visit the boy. It would be an opportunity for James to pass on his suspicions, hints perhaps that Val had given. Sean convinced himself that Lily was in danger again, He was quite unbalanced, of course, more infatuated every day, it was as if he wanted to prove to Lily just how devoted he was.

  ‘This time he didn’t bother to steal a car. He took the Land-Rover instead. He was quite reckless and drove down Mittingford High Street, giving our inebriated farmer a shock on the way. Do we know yet where he parked in Otterbridge?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ It was Newell, full of himself. He’d carried out the boss’s instructions and got a result. What does he want? Hunter thought. A pat on the head? ‘An old chap who works part-time as a gardener saw the Land-Rover. It was in a little cul-de-sac just round the corner from the McDougals’.’

  ‘Sean followed James for most of the way by foot,’ Ramsay said. ‘Until he realized where he was heading and he came back for the Land-Rover. When he got to the cemetery, it was empty except for James, sitting on a bench, dozing. It couldn’t have been easier for him.…’

  Ramsay’s voice trailed off. For the first time that evening he too was feeling tired. They looked at him, wondering if he had finished, hoping they could go to their beds, but he continued:

  ‘When I went to see him later that night he was working in the garden at Laverock Farm. He made a joke about not having made much progress for a whole day’s work. I should have realized then that he hadn’t spent all day in the garden. Lily made the connection. I think that’s when she found she couldn’t delude herself any longer.