A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy (20 page)

‘No. Of course not. What is this all about?’

But Ramsay only shook his head, as if he were making polite conversation to pass the time until Patrick returned.

‘Have you had any other visitors today?’ he asked. ‘Since the Walkers brought you back to the vicarage?’

Cassidy shook his head.

‘And you’ve been here all the time?’

‘Of course!’ The clergyman was almost shouting. ‘I’ve been waiting for Patrick.’

There was a pause and the church clock struck six.

‘I’m afraid I must ask you some more questions about your movements yesterday,’ Ramsay said gently. ‘Just to confirm your story. There’s been a minor discrepancy. Probably nothing important.’

Cassidy stared at him blankly.

‘You say that you left here at about quarter past five. Patrick said that he arrived home soon after. He just missed you, he said. We have a witness who states she saw Mrs Cassidy’s car in the drive at half past five. She saw Patrick and Mrs Cassidy having tea together in the kitchen. They were rather strained, she thought. Patrick never told us about that meeting. Can you think of any reason for his wanting to keep it a secret?’

‘No,’ Cassidy said. ‘How should I know? You’ll have to ask him.’

‘We will ask him,’ Ramsay murmured. The sun, lower than it had been in the morning, now shone directly through the window, making the room breathlessly hot. Ramsay was thinking that he should leave. He imagined Hunter at Tanner’s house, fuming, waiting for more instructions, for some idea of what was going on. He could send somebody else to the house to wait with Cassidy for Patrick’s return. But just as he was about to go the vicar, oppressed it seemed by the heat and the silence and the tension of waiting for his son, began to talk.

‘I think Dorothea must have been disappointed in me,’ he said. ‘Before we married she only really knew me from my books and they were written a long time ago. It is rather easy to stand up for one’s principles in print. I think she must have been disappointed in the coward she had actually married.’

‘And Dorothea?’ Ramsay asked. ‘Did she have principles?’

The vicar sat forward in his chair. ‘I rather think,’ he said, ‘ that she had too many.’

Walter Tanner sat in the dusty living room and stared with increasing hostility at Gordon Hunter. Although the policeman had arrived more than an hour before, he had only just begun to give Tanner his full attention. At the start it had been noise and self-important bustle, with Hunter standing in the hall directing a stream of strangers upstairs. There were still police cars outside and a small crowd of the less inhibited neighbours gathered to watch. From the landing came men’s loud voices and someone was whistling. For a moment Tanner felt something of the excitement and exhilaration that came to him when he was gambling. In the betting shop there was noise, a breathless sense of risk and the feeling that in the minutes of watching the horses on the television in the corner of the shop he was really living. This is a gamble, he thought, as somebody else came to open the door and stamped up the stairs without waiting for an invitation. How much I tell the police, how I play the situation, it’s all a gamble. Then he looked at Hunter’s face and thought that, as in the bookmaker’s, the punter was always destined to lose.

‘You can’t expect me to believe that this is all coincidence,’ Hunter said. He was standing, leaning against a solid bookcase with one shoulder. He knew that this was his big chance for promotion and he was convinced Tanner was a murderer. I’ll show Ramsay that you don’t have to have been to the Grammar to get results! he thought. ‘A murdered woman’s car and now the boy’s body,’ he said. ‘It’s about time you started telling us what it’s all about. Where were you this afternoon?’

Tanner took a deep breath. This was it. He was under starter’s orders.

‘I was on the Ridgeway Estate,’ he said.

‘Were you visiting someone?’ Hunter demanded. ‘Was it Stringer? Something to do with the church?’

Tanner smiled and showed uneven nicotine-stained teeth. Keep it light, he thought. Keep it confident. Make it seem that there’s nothing to hide. Some of it they’ll find out anyway.

‘No, Sergeant,’ Tanner said. ‘Hardly that. I was there to visit my bookmaker.’

‘Do you expect me to believe that?’ Hunter said. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘Not at all, Sergeant. I have a little flutter occasionally. Nothing substantial, of course. It’s a little harmless fun since I retired.’

‘There
were
witnesses?’ Hunter said.

‘Of course, Sergeant. Of course.’

And they had not got much further than that when Ramsay arrived from the vicarage. He had been back to the station to pick up a car and Hunter watched it draw up with anger and disappointment.

That was typical, he thought. Ramsay had arrived to steal the glory, just as Tanner was about to confess. But Ramsay, it seemed, was unconvinced about Tanner’s guilt. Hunter met him in the hall and tried to persuade him to take the retired grocer to the police station for questioning.

‘Put him in the cells for an hour,’ he said. ‘That’ll persuade him to talk.’

‘How does he seem?’ Ramsay asked.

‘Cocky. Too bloody cocky. Seems to find it funny.’

‘Perhaps he’s hysterical,’ Ramsay said. There was after all something ridiculous about a body in a bath. It was like a second-rate horror movie.

‘But the evidence!’ Hunter said. ‘The car and the boy’s body. And now you tell me there was motive too. The vicar’s wife had found out about his gambling and Tanner couldn’t stand the lad. It’s too much of a coincidence.’

‘Perhaps the murderer has a perverse sense of humour,’ Ramsay said. ‘Or a grudge against the old man. And we don’t know that Dorothea had found out about the gambling. It’s only a possibility.’

He was distant, as if his attention was elsewhere and he was going through the motions of considering Hunter’s opinion. Of all the inspector’s moods Hunter found this the most irritating.

‘Is there anything else I should know?’ the sergeant demanded. ‘Something relevant which might be worth a mention?’

Ramsay blinked as if shocked by the crude sarcasm but he answered calmly.

‘Dorothea Cassidy went back to the vicarage late yesterday afternoon. She met Patrick. The witness says the atmosphere was strained but she’s deaf so she’s probably rather unreliable. And I know who Dorothea went to see in the hospital yesterday.’

Hunter remained defiantly silent. He would not give Ramsay the satisfaction of asking for the information.

‘It was the staff nurse you spoke to,’ Ramsay said. ‘Her name’s Buchan. Imogen Buchan. She’s Patrick Cassidy’s girlfriend.’

Hunter swore under his breath.

‘There is something else,’ Ramsay said. There bloody would be, Hunter thought. ‘Joss Corkhill saw Dorothea Cassidy at the fair last night. Or he says he did. He might be a malicious witness playing games but I think I believe him. She was with a young woman whose description fits that of Imogen Buchan. He should be at the fair all night. We’ll send someone round with a photo to make sure.’

Still Hunter insisted that they should take Walter Tanner to the police station but Ramsay pulled rank and refused. The double murder had attracted the attention of the national press. They were jumpy and took delight in coming too quickly to conclusions. The phrase ‘helping the police with their inquiries’ would be seen by them as a euphemism and Annie Ramsay’s evidence made it impossible that Walter had killed Clive. Even if the boy were waiting for Tanner inside the house he would hardly have had time to commit the murder between arriving home and phoning the police. There was Dorothea, of course; still a chance that Tanner had killed
her.
But in that case who had murdered Clive? And what could be the motive? Ramsay felt that Tanner was useful because he had been close to Dorothea and understood the politics of the church. But he certainly wasn’t a suspect in his own right.

When Ramsay returned to the room Tanner was standing up, smoking a cigarette. He looked at Ramsay hopefully, seeing him as an ally, someone to rescue him from the bullying Hunter. Ramsay took a seat, waited until Tanner had stubbed out the cigarette, then spoke quietly.

‘When did Mrs Cassidy find out about your gambling?’ he asked.

Walter stared at him, his mouth slightly open. He clearly thought the man must be some sort of magician. He was too shocked to deny it.

‘Well?’ Ramsay persisted gently. ‘It was a recent discovery, wasn’t it?’

This was a guess but he imagined that Dorothea would never allow a situation she considered unsatisfactory to go on indefinitely. She would use all her energy to do something about it.

Walter Tanner nodded.

‘How did she find out?’

‘She’d been visiting a family on the Ridgeway,’ Walter said unhappily. ‘She saw me going into the bookies.’ The exhilaration which had sustained him through the interview with Hunter had left him.

‘What did she do?’ Ramsay asked.

Tanner paused, trying to find the words, stammering over them and when he spoke Ramsay was surprised by the power of them.

‘She tormented me,’ he said. ‘She was so certain … so morally superior … so horribly kind.’ And so beautiful, he thought. A vicar’s wife had no right to be so beautiful.

‘What did she expect you to do?’

‘To stop, of course. She seemed to think that it would be easy. “I really don’t see the problem,” she said. “ You don’t need that sort of thing. Not you, Walter. Not with your faith.”’

‘But it wasn’t that easy?’

‘It was impossible,’ he said. ‘ I knew she was right and I tried to give it up but it was like a terrible addiction.’ He paused again and ran his tongue over his lips. ‘ Then she thought I should make the whole thing public. She said I needed the support and encouragement of the whole congregation. If it remained a secret I’d never stop.’

‘Did she threaten to tell the others?’ Ramsay asked.

‘No,’ Walter said. ‘To be fair, she never did that. But she was always here, putting pressure on me. “ Why don’t you tell them at the PCC meeting?” she would say, and then throughout the meeting she would be there, staring at me, waiting for me to speak. She didn’t see that her interference just made things worse. It made me realise what a mess I’d made of my life. I couldn’t stand it.’

‘When was Mrs Cassidy last here?’ Ramsay asked.

‘On Saturday morning. She came to ask me to Sunday afternoon tea.’

‘But you didn’t go, did you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘ I couldn’t face it.’

‘Did you kill her?’

‘No,’ he said, with a strange, comic dignity. ‘I wouldn’t have killed her.’

There was a pause, the sound of footsteps on the stairs, the slam of the front door. The house was suddenly quiet.

‘Has anyone else got a key to your house?’ Ramsay asked. ‘The lock wasn’t forced.’

Then after some thought, Walter answered. ‘No. When my mother was ill a woman came in to look after her. She had a spare key. I don’t think we ever got it back.’

‘How do you explain the fact that the door was open?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose I forgot to lock it when I went out. I was upset.’

‘Tell me about Clive Stringer,’ Ramsay said. ‘ Why did you dislike him so much?’

‘I didn’t dislike him,’ Walter said. ‘Not really. It was what he represented.’

‘What was that?’

‘I suppose,’ Walter said slowly, ‘he represented all the changes Dorothea had made in the church. He made me uncomfortable.’

‘You have no idea what he was doing here this afternoon?’

‘None,’ Tanner said. ‘If Dorothea had been alive I would have suspected her of sending him. She had some silly idea that we might be friends. But of course that’s impossible.’

‘Yes,’ Ramsay said. ‘ That’s impossible.’ He felt a sudden deep sympathy for this sad little man. The violation of his privacy by the murderer was a crime in itself.

From outside, a long way off and distorted by amplification, came the sound of rock music. The carnival parade was about to start. Ramsay realised it was already evening. On the Ridgeway Estate Hilary Masters was waiting with Theresa Stringer to speak to him. It was too hot, too complicated and he longed for a moment to escape to his cottage in Heppleburn, where there would be a breeze up the valley from the sea, and complete silence. He stood up.

‘Are you going?’ Walter Tanner said in a panic. Perhaps he was afraid that he would be left again to Gordon Hunter.

‘Yes,’ Ramsay said. ‘We’ll both go now and leave you in peace. Someone will be back later to take a statement.’

On the doorstep he paused. Hunter was waiting by the front gate, angry that his opinion had been disregarded, fuming. Ramsay wanted to say something to Tanner to show him that he thought well of him. What right had Dorothea to judge him so harshly? He knew what it was like to be lonely, unpopular, frustrated.

‘Mrs Cassidy must have cared about you,’ he said, ‘to have shown so much interest.’

But the thought seemed to give Tanner no consolation. ‘ She cared too much about everyone,’ he said. ‘ That was the problem.’

He stood in the porch and watched the men walk down the street towards their cars.

Beside the cars the men paused. Ramsay could sense Hunter’s hostility but had neither the patience nor the skill to deal with it. Perhaps the tension, the edge of competition made them more effective, he thought, but life would have been more comfortable if they could have got on.

‘What do you want me to do now?’ Hunter asked.

‘Go back to the station and co-ordinate the team working the fair,’ Ramsay said. ‘We’ll need photos of Dorothea and Imogen. That was the last time Dorothea was seen. You could see if you can get hold of the Buchan girl too. If she was working this morning she should be free now. The hospital will have an address and phone number for her. She might know where Patrick Cassidy is.’

Hunter nodded reluctantly. It made sense.

‘I’m going to the Ridgeway,’ Ramsay said, ‘to talk to the boy’s mother. Miss Masters from the social services is with her.’

He added the last sentence as an afterthought, dropping it in as if it had no significance, but Hunter was not fooled. He smirked, imagining the interest he could stir up in the canteen. Ramsay and the Snow Queen he would say, his voice full of innuendo. They’d make a good team. The thought cheered him up and he drove away.