There was a silence.
“We ordered a meal,” she said. “I tried to talk to him, find out about his life on the farm. I thought that would be safe ground.”
“What did he say about the farm?”
“It was rather a litany of complaint. About how much work there was for one man, how little money it brought in, how lonely he was. I stopped being frightened of him then. He just seemed very pathetic. That’s when I decided to leave. I told him I had to go to the ladies’ cloakroom and walked out through the back door. I suppose it was a very cowardly thing to do, just to leave him sitting there. And rather unkind. But I didn’t want to spend any more time with him, and I didn’t see why I should.”
The words were defiant. It would have come hard to her to walk out, Ramsay thought, after years of always doing the decent thing.
“I stood in the backyard of the Ship with all the empty barrels and I burst into tears. It wasn’t so much that Mr. Bowles had upset me. It was disappointment, I suppose. Injured pride.”
“Did anyone see you there?” Ramsay asked.
“Sorry?”
“Did anyone see you in the yard?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The kitchen’s at the back of the hotel. Perhaps one of the staff would have seen me. Why?”
“You were one of the last people to see Mr. Bowles alive,” Ramsay said gently. “You do see that we have to corroborate your story.”
“Oh yes! Of course. I should have realized.” She thought again. “When I pulled myself together I walked round the side of the hotel and into the street. I met Mr. Jones there, my boss. He asked me if I was all right. I suppose I looked upset. I said I was fine but I let him walk me to my car. I thought Mr. Bowles might come chasing after me.”
“But he didn’t? You never saw him again?”
“No.”
“During the time you spent with Mr. Bowles did he mention that he’d arranged to meet anyone else later that evening?”
“Oh no,” she said. “Definitely not.” She blushed a deeper shade of scarlet. “I had the impression, you see, that he’d expected to spend the night with me.”
“Did he talk about friends, business acquaintances? Anyone he’d had a row with?”
“No,” she said. “There was nothing like that’
“What about his tenants? Sean and Lily. Did he mention them?”
She shook her head.
“Well, what did he talk about?” Hunter demanded, losing patience. “Apart from the farm.”
“His mother,” she said. “He talked about his mother.”
“What did he say about her?”
“Nothing really. Nothing specific. He just wanted to talk about her. For me to know how important she’d been to him. I think that was it.”
They stood for a moment on the pavement. It was dusk. In the little house Jane Symons turned on the light and drew the curtains.
“That doesn’t get us much further forward then, does it?” Hunter said. He was disappointed, felt the interview had been an anticlimax. Then he reconsidered, brightened. “If anything it points more to Slater. We know now that Bowles went home alone.”
“Not exactly,” Ramsay said. “We know he was alone when Mrs. Symons left him. That’s all.”
Ernie Bowles would have been furious, Ramsay thought. And frustrated. He’d made all that effort, only to be stood up. What would he have done to try and mend his hurt pride? Find another woman, surely. And the fact that he’d arrived at the farm at ten o’clock made it seem that he’d found one quickly.
“Tomorrow I want all the pubs in Otterbridge checked,” Ramsay said. “Especially the ones where women hang out on their own. And in Mittingford. He might have gone back there when he was stood up. Find out if anyone saw the Land-Rover. And I want to know if anyone was hitchhiking along the road he’d have taken. He might have picked someone up.”
“Yeah,” Hunter said. “OK’
Ramsay had been expecting some complaint. Hunter hated that sort of routine checking. But he seemed hardly to have been listening.
Hunter had found himself suddenly thinking of Lily Jackman, and how it wouldn’t be so bad coming back to a place like this, a little house in a suburban street, if she were there, waiting for him.
Chapter Nine
On their way back to Mittingford Ramsay and Hunter drove past the Otterbridge College of Further Education. When it was opened in 1967 the college had won an award for its design, now it had degenerated into shabbiness. The concrete was stained with damp and the paint was peeling. Hunter regarded the place with affection. It always evoked a twinge of nostalgia. He had hated school and left as soon as he could, then went on to the college to re-sit O Levels and try for an A Level in Technical Drawing. Which he had just scraped through. While he was a student there he had passed his driving test. His mother, somehow, had found the money to buy an old Escort and in the back of the car he had made his first sexual conquests.
That was fifteen years ago, he realized, and he wondered, as he had on the pavement at Orchard Park, whether it might be time for him to think of settling down. The interview with Jane Symons had made him uncharacteristically uneasy. To be that desperate! he thought. That old and that desperate. What if I’m like that in fifteen years time, left with the feeling that I’ve missed the boat? For some reason the girl in the caravan had got under his skin. He couldn’t forget her.
Deliberately, he pushed the thought away, and went on to consider the chances of getting Sally Wedderburn into bed. He’d always fancied redheads and he’d had his eye on Sally for months. She’d been going out with some slob in the serious crime squad and he’d even heard rumours of an engagement, but he’d always liked a challenge. In the hot-house atmosphere of a murder investigation, he thought, with everyone living away from home, drinking too much to relieve the stress of the day’s disappointments or to celebrate small victories, in that atmosphere anything was possible.
Val McDougal would have liked to go to the acupuncture lecture in the college. Magda had announced it during the group and asked them all to give their support. Val would have done almost anything for Magda, but tonight she was working late. She always worked late on Monday. She took a numeracy course for mature students recruited from a nearby industrial estate. Business and Education in partnership. That was what it was all about now. Most were women and most were conscripts sent along by a couple of personnel managers who wanted to be seen to be doing something about training. Val usually enjoyed the class but tonight she found it hard to concentrate.
At seven-thirty they had a coffee break and trooped off to the cafeteria.
“What’s wrong with you tonight then, Val?” asked one woman, who still wore the white overall she used at work. “Going down with something, pet?”
“Perhaps I am,” Val said. “Some sort of bug.”
“We don’t want you going sick on us, do we, girls? We’d miss our Monday nights. I would anyway. If school had been a bit more like this I might have done something with my life.”
“You’d have been a brain surgeon, would you?” said her friend. “Instead of a packer at Fullertons.” Fullertons made toiletries for most of the big chain stores. You could always tell the women who worked there. They smelled faintly of chemicals and cheap perfume.
“You never know I might and all,” said the first woman, waiting for them all to laugh. “What do you think, Val? Make a good brain surgeon, would I?”
“Why not?” Val replied, although she had only been half following the conversation. They laughed again and shared round the cigarettes. They could not imagine what troubles Val might have. She lived in a big house with a husband who worked at the University and two sons you could be proud of. She didn’t get letters from the Gas Board threatening to cut off the supply or the police at her door because one of the kids had got into bother again.