A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy (23 page)

‘Did she come to see you later?’

‘No,’ Emily said. ‘I was surprised. She said she would come, either before her talk to the Residents’ Association or afterwards. When she didn’t come I thought she’d given up on me. It was quite a relief.’

‘Did Dorothea tell you where she intended to go after leaving here yesterday afternoon?’

‘I’m not sure. She said so much I found it rather exhausting.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘ Do try to remember.’

She looked up at him. ‘Of course. Don’t misunderstand me, Inspector. Despite what I said, I liked Dorothea Cassidy and admired her conviction. I was jealous of it. I’m not deliberately trying to obstruct your investigation.’

He stood up and moved towards her to look out of the window. The curtains of Walter Tanner’s front room were drawn against the prying eyes of the neighbours. A uniformed policeman stood outside.

‘She was going to see Clive Stringer’s mother,’ Emily Bowman said suddenly. ‘We saw Clive leave the building and walk towards the bus stop over there and Dorothea said, “Poor Clive, I don’t know how he’s going to react to it all.’”

‘Did she explain what she meant?’

‘No.’

‘You have heard,’ Ramsay said, ‘ that Clive Stringer was killed this afternoon?’

She would not meet his eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d heard.’

‘Were you here all afternoon? Did you see him?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘ I noticed he’d gone missing when your sergeant gave me the lift to the hospital. I should have said something then, but it was always happening. He frequently wandered off.’

‘And later this afternoon?’ he persisted. ‘ Did you see anything then?’

She shook her head.

‘I was in this chair,’ she said, ‘but I was asleep. The treatment always makes me tired.’

‘You knew them both,’ he said. ‘You must have some ideas. Tell me about them.’

Of all the people he had talked to that day he thought she saw the situation most clearly. At first she was suspicious. She thought he was flattering her, then she saw the ghost of her old lover and she began to speak. She wanted to show him how perceptive she was, how clever.

‘Dorothea was a fanatic,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise to what extent until she came here yesterday. She was ruled by her conscience, by principle. I suppose I should find that admirable but it didn’t make her easy to get on with. Principles are all very well but you shouldn’t let them get out of hand. She thought compromise was wicked.’

Ramsay said nothing. Was this leading anywhere or was it Emily’s response to being lectured the day before?

‘She would have had more sense if she’d had a family of her own,’ she said. ‘She could never have children. She tried to accept it but it wasn’t easy for her. I was late having a family and I know what it was like – watching your friends with babies, holding them, feeling jealous every time you saw a woman in a maternity smock in the street. It affected her. If she had had children perhaps she wouldn’t have felt the need to look after the rest of us so much.’

‘Did she treat you all like children?’

She nodded. ‘She thought she knew what was best for us.’

‘And Clive?’ he asked. ‘Where did he fit in?’

‘He was a ready-made son. Dependent, simple as a five-year-old, desperate for affection. What more could she want? We thought she was being so kind, so generous. But it wasn’t good for the lad. He already had a mother. It was a dangerous way to carry on. It confused him.’

‘What are you saying?’ he said. ‘Do you know who killed them?’

She shook her head, disappointed, because he could not understand that she only wanted to explain how things were.

‘She had another ready-made son,’ he said. ‘The stepson Patrick. Did she try to mother him too?’

‘She tried,’ Emily said, ‘but the last thing he wanted was mothering.’ Ramsay looked at her.

‘She was an attractive woman,’ she said. ‘She charmed them all. She couldn’t help it. She probably enjoyed it. We all like a bit of flattery.’

‘But Patrick Cassidy has a girlfriend.’

‘That makes no difference.’ She spoke sharply because he was questioning her judgement. ‘I saw the way he looked at her. The vicar saw it too but his head’s so deep in the sand he wouldn’t do anything about it. It wasn’t healthy the three of them living there.’

Ramsay remembered the brooding, unhappy poems in Patrick’s room and thought they must have been written for Dorothea, not Imogen.

‘I see,’ he said. And he felt he knew Dorothea Cassidy for the first time. She had charmed him too, even in death.

They sat in silence. Outside it was almost dark. He stared blankly out of the window and he saw the case, as if he had come to it freshly, with a new perspective. He thought of Joss Corkhill’s evidence and of something Walter Tanner had said. He thought of Clive’s divided loyalties and his obsession with time. He knew, then, who had killed Dorothea Cassidy.

Now he was left with the problem of what to do with Emily Bowman. He could hardly ask her to promise, as Dorothea had done, not to kill herself. Emily Bowman seemed to guess what he was thinking.

‘Don’t worry, Inspector,’ she said. ‘The moment’s past. I won’t do anything melodramatic. At least not tonight.’

He paused. The last thing he wanted was to offend her. ‘Does this treatment, which causes the discomfort, go on indefinitely?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank God. Only two more weeks.’

‘It might be better,’ he said, ‘to postpone a decision until then.’

‘So it might,’ she said and smiled at him.

‘Would you like company?’ he said.

She smiled again. ‘Yes. Send Annie in to see me. She can make me some of her dreadful tea and talk about the men in her life.’

Outside it seemed hotter, more humid. When he swung open the double-glazed door from Armstrong House to the street it was quite noisy too. From across the river there was traditional fairground music and a siren which blew every time one of the rides reached a climax of speed. Occasionally a woman’s scream tore through the background sound. By now the carnival parade would be over, the floats drawn up on Abbey Meadow in a circle like a Wild West wagon train. The participants would be dispersing to the fair and the pubs. Soon the whole senseless performance would be over for another year.

Ramsay sat in the car and spoke urgently into the radio to Hunter. They would need a search warrant, he said. They might have some trouble getting a conviction without Dorothea’s diary and handbag, and he thought he knew where they might be found. Only then did he tell Hunter who they were looking for. He gave the sergeant no time for questions.

‘Bring them in,’ he said. ‘I have to speak to them both.’

He left his car where it was, in Armstrong Street, close to Walter Tanner’s front door. Perhaps I should speak to him, he thought. Check the details first. But he knew by now how desperate the murderer had become and that there was no time. It would be impossible to park in the centre of Otterbridge. This was as close as he could hope to get, so he walked down the quiet street towards the small gate which led to the park.

The policeman on duty there seemed surprised to see him, but recognised him and let him through without a word. There was no one else about. The respectable elderly residents had their curtains drawn against the noise and everyone else would be in town. The festival gave a legitimate excuse for them to drink too much, for rowdy exhibitionism. They would tell each other that it was tradition.

At almost the same time, the night before, Dorothea Cassidy had been carried down this path and laid to rest on the flower bed. The park was as quiet now, at ten o’clock, with the pubs still open, as it had been in the early hours of the morning. There were lamps in the park but they were a long distance apart and it was not, after all, so surprising that the revellers, on their way home in the dark, had failed to see a body at their feet.

The belief that Dorothea had been moved to the park in the early hours of the morning had been his first mistake. There had been many more. He had thought the murderer would be rational, clear-sighted; he realised now that each move had been a response to panic. He had to get to the town before the killer panicked again.

It had seemed to get dark suddenly. The sun disappeared and almost immediately afterwards the fairy lights along the river were switched on and so were the spotlights directed at the abbey and the town walls. The visitors who were climbing into coaches to take them home were enchanted. How pretty the town was! they said. What a delightful evening!

In contrast, with nightfall the fair became a more menacing and exciting place. Children were taken home, protesting and exhausted, carried on parents’ shoulders, and the site was left to the gangs of teenagers, to the older men who stood in the shadows and watched them jealously and to the police with their photos and their questions. The rides seemed to become more noisy and frantic.

Joss Corkhill had spent all evening successfully avoiding the police. His friends on the fair had helped him, allowing him to crouch beneath the hoop-la stall or in the canvas folds of the hot-dog tent. It had become a game – spotting the plain-clothes detectives at a distance and making sure Joss was out of the way before they arrived at the ride where he was working. None of them had any time for the police. They had been harassed too often, blamed for crimes they had never committed. Now they felt the concentration of the police on the fairground was an injustice. Anyone in the town could have murdered that vicar’s wife, they said. Why blame it on one of us? We didn’t even know her and old Joss wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Joss had been drinking all evening and had reached the euphoric peak which was the highlight and purpose of all his drinking bouts. He did not always achieve the high, and he knew it would be quickly followed by depression, but while it lasted he was magnificently content. He wondered now how he had ever become entangled with Theresa Stringer and her bloody family. Why had he wanted her to travel with him so much anyway? He was better on his own. As he played his strange game of hide and seek all over the fairground, he felt the exhilaration of the chase. Nothing else had any importance at all.

He was back at work on the Noah’s Ark when he saw the pretty woman who had been at the fair the night before with Dorothea Cassidy. He was standing on the ride with his back to the safety rail, keeping an eye on the crowd for the fuzz. Despite the alcohol he balanced perfectly, even when the ride was at its fastest. He knew the two giggling girls sitting near to him were watching him, and he intended, as the ride slowed, to offer to help them off. Then he glimpsed the pale young woman, just for a moment, in the crowd. He was tempted to find one of the policemen, to point her out and say: ‘That’s the one you want.’ But why should he? Let the police do their own dirty work.

Imogen Buchan did not know why Patrick had brought her to the fair. The noise and the crowd made her feel sick and faint. She had eaten very little all day. Patrick’s phone call had summoned her to a pub in the town centre, close to the church and she had thought they would talk, there would be explanations, and the tragedy of Dorothea’s death would bring them close together again. There would be a return of the old intimacy. She would help him through his grief. Instead he had dragged her from one packed pub to another and when she tried to take his hand, to express some sympathy, he pushed her away. Then he had insisted that she go with him to Abbey Meadow.

‘I should go home,’ she had said. ‘They’ll be wondering where I am. They’ll be worried.’

‘Sod them!’ he had said, and pulled her roughly by the arm, past the carnival floats over the dark and trampled grass to the fair. She had never liked the speed of the big rides. Even the galloping horses made her feel sick, she said, trying to make a joke of it, trying to lighten his mood. But he would not listen to her. He pulled her with him into the waltzers and sat with his arm around her, his fingernails digging into her shoulder, his head very close to hers. He seemed to take a delight in her terror, smiling when she screamed. Then he took her on to the Big Wheel. She gripped the safety rail and shut her eyes. The chair rose slowly as other riders got on beneath them. When they reached the highest point of the circle he rocked the chair violently so she was certain he would tip them both out.

The centre of the town was so choked with traffic that Hilary Masters decided to park her car at the social services office. It would be easier to walk to her flat which was in a new block close to the river. The fresh air seemed to make Theresa more alert, but Hilary walked close beside her, protectively. It took longer than she had expected to reach the town centre, she had forgotten that the park had been closed to the public. When they got there the carnival parade was already over and she was unreasonably upset that she could not show Theresa the decorated lorries.

‘Never mind,’ she had said, as if speaking to a child. ‘There’s always next year.’

‘I want to find Joss,’ Theresa said as they crossed the bridge. ‘I’m going to the fair to find Joss.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ Hilary said dispassionately.

‘I’m going to find Joss,’ Theresa repeated. ‘If you don’t come with me I’ll go by myself.’

So Hilary followed Theresa on to the field. She hadn’t been to the fair since she was a child, she said. It wasn’t her scene. The place seemed fraught with danger and she looked, with her social worker’s disapproval, at two kids who were clowning around at the top of the Big Wheel.

When it got dark Edward Cassidy could stand waiting for his son no longer. He knew sleep would be impossible. He could not bear to shut the curtains because he wanted to catch the first glimpse of the headlights of Patrick’s car, but the flashing lights of the fairground threw strange shapes on the walls and everywhere he thought he saw the shadow of Dorothea, laughing at him. He knew he was exhausted, but he knew too that he could not stay in the vicarage.

He left the light on in the hall and the door open and went outside. Even in the vicarage garden the noise overwhelmed him. The screech of machinery and of amplified pop music seemed unnaturally loud. He walked down the drive into the busy town centre and was swallowed up by the crowd. He saw everything in sharp outline, heard everything clearly – distinct phrases spoken by people he passed in the street, the strain of the Northumbrian pipes which came from an open pub window. He was watching and listening for Patrick, hoping to see the familiar lanky silhouette marching up the street in front of him, hoping to catch a few words spoken in a voice he recognised. He wanted to tell Patrick that they had both been fools.