Somehow, Jude’s absence increased Carole’s confidence. She started her research online, at the laptop in the spare room, seeking out alternative therapists in the local area. The number of listings surprised her. All kinds of services were offered in Fethering and Fedborough, extending to Worthing and Brighton to the east, Chichester and Portsmouth to the west. She went through them meticulously. Some were individual practitioners, others attached to therapy centres. It took a long time to find the name she was looking for.

Having found it, she was faced by a dilemma. Jude, of course, had a strict code of ethics in medical matters, but Carole was not restricted by such considerations. And, in spite of the level of success she’d seen her neighbour achieve with various clients, her own level of scepticism about the whole healing business remained high. Though she would never have dreamt of lying to anyone in the NHS, she thought alternative therapists were fair game.

So, she rang through to the Magic of Therapy Centre in Smalting and made an appointment that afternoon to see Dr Robert Rawley.

‘So, it’s the right knee, is it, Mrs Seddon?’ he asked.

The Magic of Therapy Centre operated from a converted – and presumably deconsecrated – church. Smalting was a small seaside village to the west of Fethering. Its residents thought they were socially superior to Fethering’s. Mind you, Fethering’s thought they were socially superior to Smalting’s. But Smalting didn’t have a cultural excrescence like the former ‘council housing’ of the Downside Estate within its boundaries, so its residents reckoned that settled the argument.

Dr Rawley was a long thin man, dressed in a black shirt and black jeans. Carole preferred her doctors in sports jackets like the ones at Fethering Surgery. But then what could you expect from practitioners who embraced alternative as well as traditional medicine?

Carole had not yet taken her knee to the proper doctors. She knew what would have happened if she’d gone to Fethering Surgery. She almost definitely wouldn’t have secured an appointment with the one doctor she trusted there – and whom she used to think of as ‘her doctor’. She would instead have been fobbed off with some eleven-year-old trainee, who would have looked at her knee and referred her to St Giles’s Hospital in Clincham for an X-ray. Whose inconclusive results would take weeks to arrive back at the surgery. And when they did arrive, the surgery would forget to tell her and she’d have to ring them.

She wasn’t expecting anything very different going private at the Magic of Therapy Centre, but she reckoned the expense was justified as part of her investigation in Bill Shefford’s death.