Slater had a record for at damage and a number of motoring of fences taking without the owner’s consent and driving without MOT or insurance. An outstanding fine remained. The criminal damage related to a farmer’s property in Somerset crops were flattened and windows in the farmhouse were broken during a confrontation following an impromptu festival on his land. Lily Jackman had also been charged with the criminal damage, then the charges had been dropped and she had been cautioned.
Hunter, who had a nose for these things, smelled funny business and phoned the arresting officer. Although the incident had happened more than a year before, the officer still remembered it. It obviously rankled.
“Strings were pulled,” he said.
“How?”
“The mother’s an MR You’ll have heard of her. She sails under her maiden name Bridget Dunn. She’s got a constituency in Bristol and she’s well known round here. A good supporter of the police even in difficult times. She never asked for favours but someone must have thought we owed her one. It was decided that the girl’s offence wasn’t serious enough to warrant the embarrassment which would come her mother’s way if the relationship came out in the press.”
“So it was all hushed up?”
“And they were shipped pretty smartly out of the district.”
“To end up on our doorstep,” Hunter said gloomily. “Well, they’ll find it harder to hush up murder.”
He wasn’t surprised about Lily’s background. Whatever you thought of it, he told himself class always showed. It made her more intriguing, even more distant.
Sean Slater’s background was quite ordinary. Hunter was able to dig out some biographical details but didn’t feel he could understand him and certainly couldn’t understand how he’d ended up with a lady like Lily Jackman. He’d been born in a new town in the West Midlands to respectable working-class parents. He’d done reasonably well at school, better at least than Hunter himself. He’d got a place to read English at one of the less glamorous universities and then, as Hunter put it, after one term he’d flipped. Perhaps the freedom was too much for him, perhaps he’d just cracked up under the strain of academic life. In any event he’d drifted away to join a group of hippies at Stonehenge and until he’d settled in the caravan at Laverock Farm he’d been on the road ever since.
His parents had been frantic and had contacted the police to report him missing. They only knew that he’d disappeared from his hall of residence with twenty pounds in cash and a book of Keats’s poetry. The police traced him through friends and talked to him, but they had no power to drag him back home. He was an adult and able to do as he pleased.
There was no explanation, either, of the midnight wanderings. Hunter tried to find a pattern to them. Was he working? Keeping the work secret and fiddling his benefit? Was there another woman somewhere? Hunter imagined a second caravan in the hills, with a lover, perhaps even children, a secret existence, but no evidence came to light. When he asked Richardson’s farm worker, who lived in a cottage by the Mittingford Road, the man said he had seen Sean about but he couldn’t remember exactly when.
“He always seems to be there,” he said, ‘flitting up the lane or across the hill. Like a bloody ghost come to haunt you.”
A similar blank was drawn on the blue Transit van in which Slater had claimed to have stayed on the night that Ernie Bowles died. Enquiries had been made all over the county but no one had seen it. Hardly surprising, Hunter thought, as it was a figment of Slater’s imagination.
On Tuesday morning he went to the health food shop and talked to the huge woman who owned it. He was told that Lily had been working at the Old Chapel for nearly a year. She was punctual and reliable, always willing to work overtime. Yet despite the positive response to all his questions, Hunter sensed a reserve.
“What’s she like then?” he asked. “How does she get on with the rest of the staff? Friendly is she?”
“No’ the shopkeeper said, ‘she could not really be described as friendly. She rather keeps herself to herself.”
“A bit stuck up?” Hunter prompted.
“Probably not,” the shopkeeper said uncertainly, wanting to be fair. “But that’s sometimes the impression that she gives.”
It was the impression she gave to Hunter. He sat in the cafe drinking coffee and watching her, knowing that he had other work to do but unable to leave.
Chapter Eleven
With the knowledge that Val had consulted Daniel Abbot, Ramsay went back to Charles McDougal. The son James was home too, and it was the boy who let him in. He called to his father then disappeared upstairs, leaving Ramsay only with the impression of intense grief-a white face and large dark-rimmed eyes. Charles McDougal wandered into the hall.
“Ah,” he said. “Yes, come through. I’m just in the kitchen.”
He was staring in a bemused way at the washing machine. A pile of his laundry was on the floor.
“I don’t know which button to press,” he said, ‘to get the door open.”
He looked up pathetically at Ramsay who pressed the release trigger so the door sprang open.
“Great,” Charles said. “Great.” And he pushed the shirts in, then looked at Ramsay again, expecting him perhaps to set the machine in operation. But Ramsay had moved away to the open kitchen door. Let the man work it out for himself.
It was early evening and the sun was still warm. From one of the neighbouring gardens came the smell of the first barbecue of the season. The garden at the back of the McDougals’ house was long and narrow and even to Ramsay’s untutored eye it was loved. The lawn was neatly edged and there were already splashes of colour in the borders.
“Val’s pride and joy,” Charles said. He seemed to-have lost interest in his washing and had joined Ramsay by the open door. There was something of a sneer in his voice, as if gardening was beneath him. “She spent all her spare time out here.”
They walked together on to the roughly paved patio. “It’ll be too much for me,” he said. “I suppose I’ll have to get someone in. If I decide to stay here.”
In his mind he was already moving on, making plans for the future.
“Can I offer you something?” he asked. “Tea? A glass of wine?”
Ramsay shook his head.
“Shall we go in then?” It was his university voice, brisk and authoritative. His domestic helplessness was set aside. “I expect you’ve more questions to ask.”
“I’m afraid so.”
He took Ramsay into a small study and sat behind the desk. It was not an attempt to intimidate but he was making a point. I’m an intelligent man, he was saying, with a position in society. I don’t suppose you deal with people like me very often.
“We think we may have come across a link between your wife and Ernest Bowles,” Ramsay said. “It’s not an obvious link and of course we’re keeping an open mind about its importance.”
He handled his dislike of Charles McDougal by being bland and polite, qualities which had irritated his wife Diana into divorce. He set the appointment card, wrapped in a clear plastic envelope, on the desk.
“We found this among your wife’s possessions at college,” he said. “Did you know that your wife had consulted an acupuncturist?”
“No,” Charles said. He picked up the card and studied it.
“Mr. Abbot practises in Mittingford,” Ramsay said. “He’s an acquaintance of Mr. Bowles’s tenants. It’s a tenuous link but of course we’ll have to follow it up.”