A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy (2 page)

His father’s desertion had bewildered him. The pub was a dirty, run-down place and when Gordon visited him there the man seemed exhausted. He helped in the pub after work, carrying crates from the cellar, changing barrels, then sat staring with besotted admiration at the ageing beauty behind the bar.

‘She’s wearing me lad,’ he would say. ‘And I love it.’

Now, in the carnival week, the young men who travelled with the fair hung around the pub and there were reports of fights there every day.

‘Serve him right,’ Gordon’s mother said when she heard. But she did not care enough about her husband to wish him any real harm. She was happy as she was and all the excitement she needed was provided vicariously by Gordon. Best of all she liked to sit with her son in the evenings, drinking tea or sweet sherry while he talked about his work. She had few friends of her own and was immensely proud of him.

Early on Midsummer’s Day Gordon Hunter went out for a run before work. He was very competitive and when a colleague had bet him that he couldn’t complete the Great North Run he had begun training seriously. Usually he found the daily run an effort but on that Friday he enjoyed it. The weather was beautiful and the tidy gardens of the council estate where he lived were full of flowers. He moved easily and his breath came regularly. Two young women, factory workers in tight jeans and white overalls waiting at a bus stop, watched him with admiration and giggled appreciatively as he passed. When he returned to the house he had to wait for a moment for his mother to let him in and he stood, running on the spot, hammering on the door and calling irritatedly for her to come.

‘Sorry, pet,’ she said. ‘ I was on the phone.’

She was soft, overweight, untroubled by anything. There was a smell of bacon and fried bread. She always had breakfast ready for him when he returned.

Hunter walked in, breathing deeply, shaking his hands to relax the muscles in his wrists.

‘It was Mr Ramsay,’ his mother continued. ‘He said could you phone him. It’s urgent.’ Then in the same calm, conversational voice she added: ‘ There’s been a murder.’

There were two entrances to Prior’s Park. The first was close to the town centre by the road bridge that went over the river into Front Street. It was large, with heavy wrought-iron gates, and was the one most often used. The second was small and discreet and led from an established residential area with quiet leafy streets. Now both entrances were blocked and policemen were turning away angry commuters who used the park as a short cut to the town. Outside the main entrance two police cars were parked and a small crowd had gathered. Ramsay and Hunter had to push through the milling people and were watched with resentment as they strolled unimpeded into the park.

They walked down the footpath along the river bank in the opposite direction to that taken earlier by the boys. The mist over the river had cleared and the sun was already hot. The constable who had been first on the scene stood by the body but nobody else had arrived. The three men stood at the edge of the footpath and looked down at the woman. The sun had risen above the trees and now her face was bathed in light. The colours of her clothes had the radiance of stained glass. Hunter whistled under his breath.

‘She doesn’t look like a vicar’s wife to me,’ he said.

Ramsay said nothing. Annie had told him that Dorothea Cassidy was thirty-three and he trusted her abilities as an intelligence-gatherer implicitly. Yet he had expected the woman to look middle-aged, dowdy, not only because she was a vicar’s wife but because of her name which he associated with women of his mother’s generation. She did not look to him at all like a Dorothea. She was slim, taller than average, with high cheek-bones and a wide mouth. Despite the bulging eyes and swollen tongue, which gave an indication of the cause of her death, he could tell that she had been lovely. Her short curly hair, protected from the soil by the crushed petals of the bedding plants, was copper-coloured and had obviously been well cut. She wore silver earrings with a small blue stone and several silver bangles.

‘What about the cause of death?’ Hunter asked.

Ramsay looked at the blue tinge of the skin. ‘I think she was strangled,’ he said. ‘But we’ll have to wait for the pathologist’s report.’

He crouched to look at the body from a different angle and saw a pink strip of sticking plaster on her left wrist. He lifted the hand gently.

‘That looks recent,’ Hunter said. ‘Do you think it’s important?’

Ramsay shrugged. How could he tell at this stage? He was tempted to make a sarcastic remark but said nothing. He supposed that he and Hunter should make some effort to get on.

By now it was the peak of the rush hour and they could hear the roar of traffic along the Newcastle Road beyond the trees.

‘I wonder where she was killed.’ Ramsay was talking almost to himself. ‘She must have been put in that position. She didn’t fall naturally with her arms folded like that. But if she was moved it must have been immediately after death, before the onset of rigor.’

‘How did they get her here then?’ Hunter said. ‘It’s a fair distance from the road and she’d be no featherweight.’ He thought it was all too contrived and elaborate. He preferred cases he could understand: a punch-up in a bar, a jealous wife stabbing her husband. You knew where you were with cases like that. Here he suspected that nothing was as it seemed. It would suit Ramsay, Hunter thought bitterly. He liked things complicated.

‘Then there’s the question of time …’ Ramsay went on. ‘She was supposed to be speaking to the old folks at Armstrong House at seven thirty. She couldn’t have been put here then. The park would still be full of people. Someone would have found her last night even if the murderer could have got her here without being seen. So where was she all evening before she was killed?’

He turned to the uniformed constable who seemed unable to take his eyes off the woman’s face.

‘Do they lock the park gates at night?’ he asked. ‘Does someone check that the park’s empty then?’

‘They lock the main gate at sunset,’ the man said, ‘but there’s no way of blocking off the lane on the other side and they don’t bother about that.’

‘I suppose she might have been killed in the park then posed there in the flower bed,’ Ramsay said.

‘Well, what was she doing here late at night all on her own?’ Hunter said angrily. ‘A woman like that. You’d have thought she’d have more sense.’

‘A woman like what?’ Ramsay asked mildly.

‘Well, man, you know. Respectable. The only people to come into Prior’s Park after dark are courting couples and kids sniffing glue. You’d expect a vicar’s wife to be inside watching the telly or …’ he dredged his mind for a suitable activity for a vicar’s wife ‘… knitting for the elderly.’

Ramsay looked down again at Dorothea Cassidy. He studied the wide mouth and imagined her laughing at the idea.

‘She doesn’t look the knitting sort to me,’ he said.

‘It’ll be one of those layabouts who travel with the fun fair,’ Hunter said definitely. ‘They’re all the same the gippos. There’s always trouble when they’re about. There was that rape two years ago when the fair was here.’

‘We don’t know if this was a sexual attack,’ Ramsay said. ‘ It doesn’t look as if she’s been raped. Not in those dungarees. But of course we’ll have to wait for the lab report.’

‘What about the husband?’ Hunter asked. ‘Has he been informed yet?’

‘No,’ Ramsay said slowly. ‘I rather wanted to do that myself.’

‘How did he seem last night when he knew his wife was missing?’

Ramsay shrugged. ‘He wasn’t too concerned apparently. Not at first, anyway. He said it wasn’t unusual for her to be late. She wasn’t naturally punctual, he said. She was easily distracted.’

Hunter looked disapproving. ‘It seems a strange set up to me. You’d have thought she’d have to be home to get his tea.’

Ramsay wondered briefly what Diana, his ex-wife, would have made of Hunter’s views on the responsibilities of women. Ramsay had known from the beginning that she wasn’t the sort of woman to wait at home to cook a policeman’s tea and her independence had nothing to do with the breakdown of their marriage. There was something about Dorothea Cassidy that reminded him of Diana, the full mouth perhaps, and he turned suddenly away from her to speak to the constable who had been sent, because he was a regular member of Cassidy’s congregation, to identify the body.

‘Did she have any children?’ he asked.

The man shook his head. Ramsay was surprised, then relieved. He could picture her with a baby in her arms. Now who’s being tempted into stereotypes? he thought.

‘One of the first priorities is to find her car,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult. It’s quite distinctive. A twenty-year-old Morris Thousand estate. Her husband had it done up for her at one of those specialist garages as a present.’ He turned absent-mindedly towards Hunter. ‘Can you organise that?’

Hunter nodded and took out his radio.

‘No,’ Ramsay said. ‘ Take the car back to the station. There’s no more to do here. I’ll join you when I’ve seen the vicar.’

Hunter walked off towards the bridge, pleased at last to have something to do.

Ramsay knew that he would have to get to the vicarage quickly if he wanted to break the news of Dorothea Cassidy’s death to her husband. The tragedy would soon become general knowledge. Yet he found it hard to move away. Like the school boy who had found her, he was tempted to kneel and touch her. He turned towards the young constable who stood now with his back to the body staring blank-eyed across the river towards the abbey.

‘What was she like?’ Ramsay asked. ‘ What did you think of her?’

The constable turned back to face the inspector but he shook his head, too upset to speak.

In the large vicarage kitchen Edward and Patrick Cassidy sat facing each other and pretended to eat breakfast. There were reminders of Dorothea everywhere – in the plants on the deep window-sill, in the chaos of laundry in the basket on the washing machine, even in the scrubbed table which she had found in a junk shop in Morpeth and brought home strapped to the top of her car. Yet although both men were thinking of Dorothea, neither spoke of her directly.

‘Where were you last night?’ Edward Cassidy said abruptly.

Patrick looked up from his coffee and for a moment his father thought he would refuse to answer. He had been so moody lately.

‘I was at the fair,’ he said. If Dorothea had been there he would have found it possible to explain why he had been drawn by the noise and the colour and the cheap, tacky prizes. He would have said that in the crowd he felt anonymous. It was a good way to escape. But Dorothea had disappeared and he knew he was responsible for driving her away.

‘On your own?’ his father demanded, disbelieving.

How much does he know? Patrick wondered. How much did she tell him?

‘Yes,’ he said sullenly. ‘On my own.’

‘I don’t know what’s going on!’ Edward Cassidy cried. ‘ Why isn’t she here?’

Patrick looked at his father carefully, unconvinced by the outburst. He had been caught out by his father’s histrionics before. Once Edward had confessed to him that as a young man he had ambitions to be an actor. ‘I would have been very good,’ he had said laughing. ‘It isn’t very different after all. Every sermon’s a performance.’

Patrick found the notion troubling, though it explained a lot. Did anyone know his father well? Perhaps even Dorothea had been taken in by him.

‘I’ve got to get a move on,’ he said. ‘ I’ll be late for college.’

The front doorbell rang and Edward leapt to his feet and rushed to answer it. Patrick watched without emotion, but moved to the kitchen door so he could hear what was going on.

It was Dolly Walker, the church warden’s wife. Patrick recognised her middle-class, rather vague voice, and heard his father immediately become charming. If Edward Cassidy had expected to find Dorothea at the door he hid his disappointment well.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘Of course I knew the Mothers’ Union wanted the parish hall today for the coffee morning. I should have opened it for you. I’ll fetch the key.’

Dolly did not ask if Dorothea would be there to help. She knew that Dorothea had no interest in her coffee mornings.

Patrick went upstairs to his room to fetch books and bag. As he came down a few minutes later he hesitated by the telephone in the hall, but before he could make up his mind whether to make the call, the doorbell rang again and his father shouted from the study:

‘That’ll be Dolly Walker returning the key. Can you go?’

Patrick opened the door quickly. He would pretend to be in a hurry to reach the university then there would be no opportunity for awkward questions about Dorothea. But instead of Dolly Walker with her blue silk dress and fluffy grey hair there stood a tall, stem man who stared at Patrick curiously and frightened him.

Ramsay followed Hunter across the park to the street. As he walked along the footpath close to the water there was the smell of mud and vegetation from the river. Apart from the rumble of traffic in the distance the place was very quiet. No one had been allowed into the park and the usual cries of squabbling children, the inevitable hum of the motor-mower, were absent.

He reached the main road at eight thirty. The church clock had just chimed the half-hour. The bridge was clogged with cars tailing back from the traffic lights in Front Street. Between two lamp-posts across the road a large banner announced the Otterbridge Carnival and Folk Festival. Already he could hear some busker playing ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ on a scratchy violin. All week the town had been overrun with strangers, filling the pubs to listen to the music, crowding into the fair on Abbey Meadow. Tomorrow it would all be over and the clowns and mime artists and jugglers who held up the traffic and disrupted the routine of the town would be gone.

Ramsay spoke briefly to the policemen by the gate who were turning people away from the park, then joined the crowd walking towards the town centre. Office workers in shirt sleeves crossed the road between stationary cars and sauntered on to their businesses. The shops were starting to open and some owners were setting goods for display on the pavements. There had been good weather for weeks and the place had a Continental air. Everyone Ramsay passed had a suntan and in his dark suit he felt sober, pale and over-dressed.