The Various Haunts of Men (27 page)

He remembered perfectly well. She had been one of the instantly trusting ones, drinking everything in and determined to turn her life around. The second time she had been, the change had already been noticeable. It took so little, he had thought, nothing they couldn’t have done for themselves, yet they came to him, and came back for more, needing
permission, needing to be led by the hand, without any confidence in themselves. He felt sorry for them really.

‘So what’s happened to her?’ He checked his pockets. ‘Have you got a fiver?’

‘In my desk drawer, but listen … it was headlines, I said. The police are appealing for anyone who’s seen her. She hasn’t been home.’

‘Yeah, right, lots of people don’t go home, home stinks, they’ve had it
up to here with home, you can’t blame them.’

He walked out of his room through to the cubbyhole Annie had as an office and got the tin out of the desk. Seventy-five pounds.

‘The last two paid cash,’ Annie said coming up behind him, ‘but don’t take it all, Colin, there’s an electricity bill to pay.’

He took thirty.

‘Do you think you ought to ring them? Say she was up here?’

‘What for? I shouldn’t
think I was the last person to set eyes on her.’

‘They asked for any information.’

‘Nothing we can give them.’

He looked down at the appointment book. Just one and not until three o’clock and tomorrow, again, just one in the morning. Not good.

‘Time to do a spot more advertising,’ he said to Annie. ‘I’ll give it some thought over my sarnie.’

Colin Davison looked ordinary, walking down the
hill towards the Green Man Wholefood Café, an insignificant man anywhere between forty and fifty with nothing of the charismatic Dava about him. Something happened when he dimmed the lights and put on his robe, something came over him to give him power and presence whenever a client walked in. He felt it and he knew it worked. Colin was no cynic. In his own way he believed in what he did, though
by no means in everything he said. Look at this girl, Debbie … See how she’d benefited from it. He did what other people could not – doctors, psychiatrists, even beauticians.

If he tarted it up a bit, that was harmless enough and it all helped – the blue card, the appointment at the time ‘most propitious for you’, the music he played, the lines he gave them to learn. They needed him.

The café
was quite full, and as he went in Stephen Garlick saw him and indicated a spare seat next to him in the window. Colin got a plate of cheese-and-tomato quiche and salad and a cinnamon muffin and took them over. He liked Stephen, who kept the shop that did next-to-no business selling candles and incense burners, wind chimes and dream catchers, eco-friendly washing powder and face creams not tested
on animals, and books about everything from feng shui to vegan cookery. He was a bit of a dreamer, and a 100 per cent believer, recycler and animal rights activist, honest and incorruptible. Sometimes, when he was with Steve, Colin felt slightly ashamed.

‘Hi.’

‘Health and happiness,’ Steve said. ‘I was hoping to catch you.’

‘Problem?’

‘Yes, but not mine. Or, well, not only mine. Have you heard
about the person who’s taken 12 Hen Lane?’

Colin shook his head, his mouth full of the warm and very good quiche. They could cook here, especially the pastry. You just had to avoid some of the weirder stuff.

‘His name is Anthony Orford.’

Colin looked blank.

‘No one is sure exactly where he’s come from, possibly the north of England though somebody else said Brighton. He moves around every
few years, maybe when things get a bit hot for him.’

‘God, you’re not on the grapevine, you
are
the grapevine. Who is this guy?’

‘An alternative therapist.’

Colin put down his fork. ‘That’s worrying. There are enough of us up here already and too few clients to go round. What’s his line?’

‘He calls himself a psychic surgeon.’

‘Oh my God. I’ve heard of him. He opens up, he’s chock-a-block
for months, word gets round about him really fast and they come from all over the country to see him.’

‘What’s he do exactly?’

‘Claims to be taken over by the spirit of some doctor who lived like a hundred years ago and performs operations … only they’re not. But people seem to think they are.’

‘Come again?’

‘I’m not sure how he does it but his reputation goes before him. He’s cured people
of big things … tumours, ulcers, MS … Once people discover where he is, the queues will form and the rest of us will be empty.’

‘It won’t do me any harm … or this place.’ Stephen looked round. ‘And I shouldn’t think you need to worry, it’s different from what you do.’

‘Yes, but people choose between us, not many of them go the rounds.’ Debbie Parker came to his mind. She’d been to other therapists,
she’d told him so, though all of them in Lafferton.

‘Did you hear the lunchtime news on local radio? Annie came charging in to tell me. Apparently, there was a police appeal for a girl who’s gone missing.’

‘Why, do you know her?’

‘She came to see me. Fat girl with a bad skin. Nice. Innocent sort of kid. I wouldn’t want her to have come to any harm.’

Stephen drained his mug and got up. ‘I’ve
got to get my bike’s new brake pads put on before I open up.’ Stephen was strongly anti-car, though he just about tolerated the fact that Dava needed his old van to travel the seventeen miles from home up to Starly every day.

‘Do you know when this chap is opening up?’

‘The psychic surgeon? No idea. They’re doing work there now though, the decorators are in. Can’t be long.’

Colin groaned. He
had read enough about Anthony Orford to know he was a serious threat to his own business. He was unsure exactly how he gained his reputation, or whether there was anything to it, though he suspected not and he didn’t think he liked the sound of it. Talking to people, getting them to relax and meditate and focus on things outside themselves, even prescribing vitamins and herbal treatments, all the
things he himself did, were fine but he had never pretended to be a healer, never claimed to cure any illnesses, though he was sure a lot of people who came to see
him were relieved of some stress-related symptoms. Headaches and tiredness and irritable bowel syndrome caused by tension might disappear, though he would never make promises. Cancer and heart disease and multiple sclerosis – that was
a whole different ball game and pretending to perform operations on people was way out of line. It shocked him. People like that gave decent therapists like him, trying to make a living and give unhappy people a bit of help, a seriously bad name.

He finished his lunch, walked down to the newsagent to pick up the
Guardian
and then took his usual three-quarters of a mile detour round the town at
a fast pace, which was all the exercise he could fit in during the day. As he turned into the top of the lane leading to his consulting room, he saw a black Rover 45 draw up outside. A woman and a man got out and after searching round for a few seconds, as everyone did, found the bell. Colin stayed where he was and watched as Annie opened the door, and let them inside.

He had no clients until
three so what was this? He went down the hill and looked at the car. It was anonymous, and there was nothing at all on any of the seats or the parcel ledge, nothing in the door pockets except a folded road map. What kind of people had a completely clean and empty car? He put his key in his door.

‘Colin? There you are.’ Annie’s face was dramatic. ‘The police are here.’

Of course. He went into
the cubbyhole that served as a cloakroom, washed his hands, rinsed his mouth and retied his ponytail. He had better be like this, ordinary in a jacket, than wearing his robe with his hair flowing. Annie had put them in his room, where the man was
examining the wallcharts of the chakras and astrological signs and the woman was sitting with one leg over the other – good legs, he noted – writing
something.

‘Sorry, I was out on my lunch break. I’m Colin Davison.’

He had always believed in being charming to the police, even if it was only when they stopped you because the exhaust was hanging off the van. It was surprising how often it paid off.

‘Detective Sergeant Freya Graffham, and this is DC Nathan Coates.’

Colin shook hands with them both and sat down at his desk. No point, he thought,
in pretending he didn’t know what this was about.

‘I take it you must be here because of Debbie Parker?’

If the policewoman was surprised by his directness she did not acknowledge it by a flicker.

‘That’s right. How did you hear about her?’

‘I didn’t, actually, it was Annie, my assistant – she heard the news bulletin on Radio BEV and came in to tell me straight away. It’s awful.’

‘Debbie
was a patient of yours?’

‘I call them clients, Sergeant. I’m not a doctor. Yes, she came to see me twice. The second time was only this week. Nice girl.’

‘Can you tell me why she saw you? Was she ill?’

‘Well, as I said, I’m not a doctor. If someone’s actually physically ill and they haven’t consulted their GP, I send them straight there. If they have already been and they just need some spiritual
uplift and aid with the deepest part of their psyche to help in their healing, that’s fine and we work on that.’

‘And did Debbie say she’d been to her doctor?’

‘Yes.’ It seemed better to lie. They weren’t going to
know. ‘Her real problem was her lack of self-esteem. She needed a lot of work on that. I was beginning to get her to look deeply into herself and discover her true nature, her true
path. She had no knowledge of the guidance she could find and she was very responsive.’

Gobbledegook, she was thinking. It might as well have been written across her forehead.

‘How’d she seem when she last came here?’ The young man, who had one of the ugliest faces he’d ever seen. He and the Debbie girl would have suited one another.

‘Well, I told you, we were working together on some of her
deep-seated –’

‘Yeah, yeah, but did she seem just dead unhappy? You know what I’m saying – as if she might try and run away?’

‘If you mean do I think she was suicidal, then no. Nothing like.’

‘Do you take any details of your client’s personal lives, Mr Davison?’

He quite liked the woman. She was straight, not asking one thing and getting at another. He gave her one of the smiles that never
failed.

‘Not really. I discover a great deal as I get to know them … by intuition, by meditation with them, by what they choose to tell me of themselves. I have names and addresses obviously, and any family relationships which may be inharmonious are often uncovered. I can always sense them. But bare details of parents, siblings, all that, I don’t put down.’

‘Did Debbie say anything at all in
the course of her sessions which you think might give us any lead as to where she might have gone?’

He sat looking at his desk for a long time. The room
was silent. Neither of the detectives moved or interrupted.

In the end, he said, ‘I’d need to meditate about it. Debbie had a lot of things that needed straightening out, stuff from her childhood that still affected her … I’m not a psychiatrist,
you understand, but people recall things that have happened and that are clouding their present well-being, and meditation and other therapies help to clear them away. Debbie wasn’t happy about herself but she was getting in tune, getting more positive, beginning to see her way. That’s a very exciting time when it happens. She was moving forward.’

‘So not as likely to run away as she had been?’

‘Her way of running was down into herself, into the darkness.’

‘Did she mention any friends – anyone she was thinking of going to see?’

‘No.’

‘What kind of treatment did you give her?’ The man again.

Colin sighed. ‘I suggested she change her diet. Wholefoods, fruit and vegetables and wholegrains, plenty of organic mineral water to drink. No dairy fats, sugars or caffeine.’

‘Penance then.’
The detective constable was grinning at him. It improved his face 100 per cent.

‘It benefits most people.’

‘I bet. Anything else?’

‘Exercise. Debbie didn’t take any, or not to speak of. Again, it’s advice most people need and it’s always beneficial. A lot of what I do is to suggest very obvious lifestyle changes and at the same time we work on spiritual energies and inner harmonies.’

‘What
kind of exercise?’ the sergeant asked.

‘She was too unfit to start running or even jogging, and to swim, which is the best of all, she’d have to travel to Bevham. I suggested she start by walking, going a bit further each day, good brisk walks. She needed to be in the fresh air as much as possible, preferably in natural surroundings.’

‘Do you know where she went to walk?’

‘She mentioned the
towpath by the river but I wasn’t keen on that. Running water is very therapeutic but towpaths are just the sort of places where flashers and that kind of damaged person lurk. Not a good idea for a young woman on her own.’

‘Do you know Lafferton?’

‘Yes, but I don’t live there.’

‘Is there any other place she might have liked to walk?’

‘Well, obviously, the Hill. The Wern Stones up there have
ancient origins, it’s a place of very positive energies. As well as fresh and a good healthy climb.’

‘So you suggested she go on the Hill?’

‘I can’t remember if I actually suggested it – I mean, that might have come from her. She lives near it, doesn’t she, and it’s the most well-known bit of Lafferton apart from the cathedral, so it would be obvious, wouldn’t it?’

‘Did she tell you she had
actually been walking there? Perhaps when she came back to see you the second time?’

‘I don’t remember. I’ve a lot of clients, you know, my appointment book is full weeks on. I think she definitely said she’d been walking … and I noticed – you can tell when someone’s started to move with the rhythm of the natural world.’

‘So she never mentioned going on the Hill to you?’

He didn’t like this.
He’d been open and straight and given up the time and he didn’t like them digging and digging, going on about one thing. What did they think?