Free Healers by Ann Cleeves

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