“Take care,” Lily said, and she sprinted away through the meadow to the caravan.
Sean was waiting for her. She threw herself into the caravan. She was drenched to the skin. He was holding a big white towel. He wrapped it around her and took off her wet clothes and dried her as if she were his baby. Then he sat her in the corner and made hot chocolate and told her he would look after her. It was like the old days, when they had first met up. Somehow he was old self again.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “Magda wanted to talk.”
“Tell me about it later,” he said.
He blew out the paraffin lamp and they made love to the sound of the rain.
Chapter Fifteen
The detectives based in Mittingford were starting to form a cohesive team. There were shared rituals, in-jokes and a scapegoat called Newell who never washed his coffee mug or took his turn at making tea. Ramsay watched the team develop, sensed their frustration, wished he could give them a result.
Their world was this town and the surrounding farms. Ramsay knew the names by heart: Long Edge, Laverock, Denton, Holywell, could picture each of the farmers. They talked to retired farm labourers and the visitors staying in the Long Edge holiday cottages. Slowly they built up a picture of Ernie Bowles, the people he met, his weekly round of market and boozing. Then, when they took on the Val McDougal case too, they concentrated on the Alternative Therapy Centre, made visits to the regular clients and the occasional visitors who dropped in for homoeopathic remedies and advice.
On a large old blackboard in the incident room these two groups Bowles’s acquaintances and the patrons of the Alternative Therapy Centre were represented as two circles of names joined to the centre like spokes in a wheel. The circles only met through Lily Jackman and Cissie
Bowies. There was no other significant connection. After a week that was the most important conclusion the team had come to. Because they were based in Mittingford Val McDougal with her home in Otterbridge seemed on the very edge of the Alternative Therapy circle, almost incidental. Ramsay was aware of that. They hadn’t concentrated on Val enough. Next week he would send more officers to talk to her friends and colleagues and trace her movements in the days before her death. Then perhaps there would be a third circle and she would be in the middle.
But now it was Saturday night and they were all spending their overtime payments on beer in the small dusty bar the landlord had given them for their own use, to keep them away from the regular punters. Ramsayjoined them for a couple of pints for the sake of team spirit but he wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t just police company that put him off, the blue jokes, the aggressive consumption of alcohol. He’d never enjoyed any sort of social gathering. Too many inhibitions, he supposed. Diana, who adored parties, had called him a boring old fart. Affectionately at first but then with irritation. He thought Prue was still to be disappointed by his lack of social skills. At ten o’clock he left the bar. He called goodbye but nobody noticed his leaving.
He found it impossible to sleep. In the hotel’s restaurant the town’s rugby club was holding its end-of-season dinner, and bawdy songs were being bellowed long after the party in the private bar had broken up. In the end he got up, and sat by the window and tried to plan his interview with the elusive Magda Pocock.
Hunter, on his way to bed, was attracted by the noise in the restaurant. He was a football man, had a season ticket to St. James’s Park and was rather suspicious of rugby, with all that maw ling and rolling in the mud. But he was quite prepared to take advantage of the free beer that was swilling around and it was almost three before he returned to his room.
The next morning at breakfast he was pale and unusually quiet. Ramsay hadn’t often seen him with a hangover, and hoped it meant he’d keep his thoughts to himself when they interviewed the rebirther.
Despite his headache, Hunter ordered bacon and eggs. The force were picking up the expenses of their stay and he intended getting his money’s worth.
“Peter Richardson was here last night,” he said. “At the rugby do. Shouting his mouth off. About Ernie Bowles and what he’s going to do when the Laverock land’s his.”
“He seems to be taking a lot for granted,” Ramsay said. “Even if the crowd from the Old Chapel decide to sell the land, surely there’ll be an auction.”
Hunter shrugged. “I had the impression that his old man had already done a deal with them.”
“If that’s true Magda Pocock should know. She’s the senior partner in the practice.”
“That’s the line we’re going to take with her then? She’s the senior partner so she’s the most to gain from Ernie Bowles’s death.”
“No!” Ramsay said sharply. “I hope we can be more subtle than that. I’m just as interested in what she can tell us about Val McDougal. No one can explain what she was like. Quiet, shy, intimidated by her husband. Not a woman with any confidence or self-esteem but there must have been more to her than that. If she was so inoffensive why would anyone want to kill her?”
Hunter thought his boss was talking nonsense as usual. What did it matter what the woman was like? It was facts: forensic facts, blood samples, witnesses’ descriptions that solved murders, not what the woman was like. The psychology of the victim, they called it, as if the poor cow had asked to be strangled. She hadn’t and nor had Ernie Bowles if it came to that.
It was Sunday but the Old Chapel was open. It was their busiest day and at ten o’clock, when Ramsay and Hunter walked along the wet pavements from the pub, there was already a coach pulled up outside it. A group of middle-aged Americans climbed out. They had the dazed look of people who are not quite sure where they are. Then enthusiasm took over again as they went in search of souvenirs, their Midwestern voices drowning out the bells being rung in St. Cuth bert’s church across the street.
In the Alternative Therapy Centre Magda Pocock was waiting for them. Ramsay recognized her at once. She had been featured a few weeks before in a Sunday colour magazine. There was a Slavic look to her face. She had wide cheekbones, thick eyebrows and a mane of grey hair. There was nothing of her daughter’s sandy, faded look, nothing to suggest the two were related. Except the fanaticism, Ramsay thought. They had that in common. He could imagine Magda as a nineteenth-century Christian missionary converting whole continents through the joy of her certainty. Perhaps the image was so strong because of the word itself. Rebirthing made him think of being born again and fundamentalism.
“Sit down,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like some coffee?”
“Thank you.”
“We don’t usually see patients on a Sunday,” she said, ‘so we can sit here, in reception. More comfortable, I think, than my treatment room.”
“But you run your Insight Group on a Sunday.”
“Once a month, yes. I expect you’ll want to ask me about that.”
It must have been Rebecca’s day off too, because Magda went away to make the coffee herself. While they were waiting, Ramsay riffled through the leaflets on the coffee table until he found one on re birthing
Rebirthing is conscious connected breathing,
it said. Which didn’t tell him much.
“You should try it, Inspector,” Magda said in a gently mocking voice. “It might change your life.” She handed him a cup of coffee.
“Did it change Val McDougal’s life?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, serious now. “Really. I believe it did.”