Healers by Ann Cleeves Page B

walker and a lot of their courting had been done in the hills. Like Prue and Ramsay they had often stopped off afterwards for tea and cakes in the Old Chapel cafe.
    Paul Simonsides almost threw the evidence away. It was a small square of card used as a bookmark in a standard text on adult literacy. He glanced at it, thinking it might be a dental appointment card. It was that sort of shape with that sort of print and so creased and dog-eared that it was obviously old. In handwritten script on the printed form an appointment had been made for Mrs. McDougal for 6 p.m. on July 20th of the previous year. But not for a scrape and polish. The appointment was made with Daniel Abbot, acupuncturist. And it was at the Alternative Therapy Centre in the Old Chapel, Mittingford.
    That was too much of a coincidence even for
    Ramsay’s superior. The investigation became a joint enquiry and because Ramsay had been there since the beginning of it, he took charge.
    Hunter had ignored the murder of Val McDougal. He had always found it hard to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Instead he continued with his own routine policing. He didn’t usually enjoy researching into suspects’ backgrounds, but this time it was different. He really wanted to know. He told himself he was interested in finding out what sort of person ended up on the road, but it was more complicated than that. He had convinced himself that Sean Slater was a murderer and wanted to prove it. About Lily Jackman he was obsessively curious.
    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