Healers by Ann Cleeves Page A

the connection.
    “I’m not sure. Out for a meal with a friend, she said.”
    “And the name of the friend?”
    Charles shrugged. “I’m not sure. Someone she met when she was on holiday last year.”
    “What did she do on Sunday?”
    “I don’t know. I went into the university to do some work. I think she went for a walk. She was here when I got back, helping James get ready to go away.”
    “And she didn’t seem at all upset or distressed?”
    “Of course not. She wasn’t that sort at all.” But Ramsay thought he would have been so wrapped up in his own affairs that he would not have noticed.
    “Perhaps you could give us the names of some of her friends,” Ramsay said. “People who knew her well. People she might have confided in.”
    “She didn’t have many friends. Not of her own. Wives of my colleagues, of course, but no one she was close to. Occasionally people phoned to speak to her. Last autumn she went away for a weekend break. Somewhere in Cumbria. She’d had a heavy term and needed time to recharge her batteries. That’s what she said, though her work never seemed that demanding to me. I think she got to know some people then.”
    “And they were the people who phoned?”
    “I think so. Yes.”
    When Ramsay pressed him for details of the weekend trip he could not help. His affair with Heather had been at the height of its passion then and he had been grateful just to have two days to himself.
    “It was a really busy time,” he told Ramsay. “The start of the academic year. You know. I expect she told me where she was staying but really I don’t remember. No. I never had the phone number of the hotel. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets. Someone at the college might know.”
    But her friends from college knew nothing about her holiday either. They remembered her going away, thought it would do her some good. She was too conscientious. Put her heart and soul into her work. She’d swapped one of her classes so she could have Friday afternoon free. But they couldn’t remember where she’d been going or even if she’d said.
    Perhaps she had a lover? the police probed gently. Perhaps that was why she kept the weekend away so secret.
    “Val? A lover? You must be joking. She wouldn’t know where to start.”
    They seemed to find the idea laughable and the impression grew of a reserved woman, well-liked but painfully shy with everyone but her students. The sort of woman who wouldn’t make waves. Certainly not the sort of woman to get herself murdered.
    In the end Ramsay put the second murder down to coincidence. Though he’d never liked coincidences and kept his own copy of the interview with Charles McDougal just in case. For two days the investigations went on in tandem. Ramsay’s team, based in Mittingford, were in charge of Ernie Bowles’s murder and an inspector from Otterbridge set up an incident room in police headquarters and took over the Val McDougal case.
    The connection with Ernie Bowles came through routine policing, the sort of detailed and repetitive work that Hunter hated. The principal of the Further Education College had cleared Val’s desk and gave the contents to the police for checking before they would be released to her husband. The young detective constable given responsibility for going through the piles of papers, the year-old diaries, the unmarked exercise books, was called Paul Simonsides. He was engaged, unofficially, to Sally Wedderburn, the fiery redhead of Hunter’s fantasies, and made up for her absence with long, if unromantic, phone calls. Sally had been excited about her place on the Bowles investigation. She saw it as her first real chance to shine. She had talked at length about the weird New Age connections, the hippy travellers who had come to rest on Ernie Bowles’s land. And Lily Jackman’s work in the Old Chapel. She had mentioned that specifically. Paul Simonsides was a big man but not the slob Hunter imagined. He was a keen hill