A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy

by Cleeves, Ann

  Imogen Buchan finished her shift at the hospital at two o’clock. She changed quickly out of her uniform in the cloakroom then hurried away, past the smudged posters of Dorothea Cassidy, to the staff car park to collect her Metro. There were other nurses on her ward who had finished shift at the same time and they lingered in the cloakroom, sharing gossip, planning some social event to which Imogen had not been invited. They took little notice when Imogen hurried away. One of them put a finger under her nose to express snootiness, then they all giggled and returned to their conversation. They acknowledged that Imogen was a brilliant nurse but she had never fitted in. If they had been closer friends they would have known that Patrick Cassidy was Imogen’s boyfriend. Someone might have recognised the connection with the murdered woman on the poster and told the police. But Imogen had always kept her private life to herself.

  When she had decided on nursing as a career her parents were, at the same time, disappointed and relieved. They would definitely have preferred her to go to university, but though they would never admit it to Imogen they realised she was unlikely to get high enough A-level grades for a good university place. Her parents were both English teachers at the High School and had inside knowledge. Imogen’s teachers said that she worked very hard but she didn’t have Miranda’s intellectual edge. Miranda was her sister, two years older, and already at Oxford.

  So Mr and Mrs Buchan greeted Imogen’s tentative suggestion that she should go in for nurse-training with enthusiasm. She obviously had a vocation, they said. Of course they would respect her decision. And that was the line they took with friends. They thought Imogen was so brave not to opt automatically for university, they told the stream of dinner-party guests who came to the house that summer. They knew she had a lot to give. Imogen, who hated the gatherings where the talk was of novels she had never read and of the philistine horrors of the National Curriculum, would blush awkwardly and turn away.

  Now Imogen was twenty-two and qualified, quite competent to take charge of a ward. More competent, her colleagues often agreed, than some sisters they could mention. She found in nursing something at which she could excel. At last she had her own field of interest and her parents could stop comparing her unfavourably with Miranda. Imogen had such a sense of responsibility! they said. Such dedication!

  Despite this, Imogen was vaguely conscious that during her training there had been an element of competition with her sister, all the more humiliating because Miranda was unaware of it and spent her time at university in a sleepless round of parties and political activity. Imogen had been so determined to succeed that before she was qualified her social life had been non-existent. Her time off was spent at home, writing up her patient studies, preparing the next essay. With the other students she was shy, embarrassed. In those three years she had never had a real boyfriend, and their casual talk of affairs and separations made her feel inadequate. They put her quietness down to snobbishness; she sensed their hostility and grew even more reserved.

  Yet on the ward, especially with the elderly or the very ill, she blossomed. The patients seemed unintimidated by her, more comfortable when she was there. The other students came to resent her skill. When they had all qualified there was less pressure to do well and she had more confidence. She would have welcomed then the opportunity to go out with them, but they had stopped asking.

  She had met Patrick through her parents at one of their dreadful dinner parties the autumn after she qualified. He was just about to start at the university. Ann Buchan had joined a support group set up by Dorothea to provide funds for the orphanage where she had worked in Africa and an improbable friendship had developed. In Imogen’s view the women had nothing in common. Her mother had a middle-class tolerance to every point of view, except conventional Christianity, which she dismissed quite categorically as superstition. Yet she seemed to admire Dorothea immensely and the Cassidys became regulars at the house. On this occasion Patrick had been invited too, probably, Imogen suspected, to provide company for her, as if she were a child and unable to follow the adult conversation. Miranda had disappeared early back to Oxford, claiming that Northumberland bored her.

  It was mid-September and it had been raining steadily all day, so when the Cassidys arrived they would have to run up the path under dripping trees. When the doorbell rang Mrs Buchan was still upstairs, not quite ready for them.

  ‘Open the door, darling,’ she shouted down to Imogen. ‘And get everyone a drink.’

  But a drink of what? Imogen wondered with horror. If they wanted wine it would be impossible. She had never once opened a bottle without leaving shreds of cork floating on the top. And she never knew exactly how much to give.

  Yet when she opened the door Patrick stood there alone, as obviously unhappy about the dinner party as she was. Could they borrow an umbrella, he asked grudgingly. Edward and Dorothea were still in the car and had forgotten theirs. Outside it was dark and he stood under the porch light, his hair plastered against his forehead, very tall. She wanted to reach out and touch his wet jacket and kiss his wet hair. Her stomach dipped and her head spun. It was the first time she had felt such a physical attraction. So this is what it’s all about? she thought, astonished. All that gossiping and giggling in corners. I never realised. She found two umbrellas and walked with him down the path to the car.

  ‘There’s no need to come out,’ he said, but she thought he was glad she was there. They took an umbrella each and walked in single file up the path, kept apart by the spokes. Then they gave one to Edward and Dorothea and shared the other. The Cassidys ran off laughing towards the house, splashing in the puddles on the muddy path. Patrick and Imogen followed slowly and he put his arm around her waist to hold her in out of the rain.

  ‘Isn’t he a bit young for you, darling?’ her mother had said when she started going out with him. ‘He’s only eighteen. Only a boy. We were rather hoping you would find a nice doctor.’

  That was only half a joke. Doctors were graduates with a high status and a good income. But she accepted Patrick as second best, as she had accepted nursing. He would be a graduate too one day and there was something charmingly old-fashioned about being the son of a clergyman. Mrs Buchan told her friends that age was irrelevant these days and Patrick was so mature for an eighteen-year-old.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she would say, hopefully, ‘he will introduce Imogen to some culture.’

  And occasionally she would question her daughter after an evening out with Patrick: ‘Where did he take you, darling? Did you see that new thing at the Playhouse?’

  ‘No,’ Imogen would say vaguely. ‘We were out with friends, for a meal, you know …’

  But that was a lie. She would have considered time in the theatre or a restaurant as wasted. Patrick had a friend with a room in one of the halls of residence and usually they went there to make love. At other times they walked, for miles, along small country roads or they sat by the river and talked. In the beginning they never squandered their time together by sharing it with other young people.

  A different mother might have been concerned about her daughter. Imogen became so wrapped up in her infatuation for Patrick that she gave up all her other interests. She lost touch with the few friends she had kept from school. When she was not at work she thought of nothing else. If there was a day when he could not see her she brooded, imagining some secret betrayal. Nothing mattered so much as their relationship. She found it difficult to sleep. She stopped eating regularly and grew thin, paler than ever. The weight loss suited her and gave her a luminous, insubstantial quality, but she always seemed tired.

  If her mother noticed the change in Imogen it did not worry her. She was in love. What could be more natural? Ann Buchan was busy with the preparation for exams, her voluntary work, with entertaining. Imogen worked shifts and spent every hour she could with Patrick. Mother and daughter hardly ever met. It was Miranda, home for a long weekend to sleep off the effects of a particularly hectic term, who said:

  ‘
Bloody hell, Imo, what have you been doing? You look positively anorexic.’

  Still Ann Buchan was not concerned. Eating disorders happened to silly sixteen-year-olds, not mature nurses. Work on the cancer ward was particularly stressful and Imogen was tired, that was all. She met Imogen one night in the kitchen as her daughter was heating up a bowl of soup in the micro-wave, and made what she thought was a helpful suggestion:

  ‘We hardly ever see you now, darling. Have you ever thought of moving in with Patrick? Getting a flat, perhaps, in town. It would be less tiring for you both and we might see more of you on your days off.’

  Ann Buchan was proud of herself. She thought it broadminded to have suggested that arrangement, but to her surprise Imogen did not reply. She stared at her mother in silent resentment and went to her room leaving the soup uneaten.

  That conversation with her mother came back to Imogen as she drove along the winding road which led to Otterbridge. It was half past two. She switched on the radio, but the local news was all about the murder of Dorothea Cassidy and she switched it off again, quickly, trying to pretend that the tragedy had never happened.

  Chapter Twelve

  Hilary Masters dropped Stephen Ramsay at the police station at half past two. The catch on the passenger door was stuck and she had to lean over him to release it. Her fingers were trembling and she remained with her arm across his chest, fiddling with the handle, for some time. It was a knack, she said, when at last it opened. She laughed but seemed flustered. Their closeness, as she stretched to reach the door, seemed to have disturbed them both.

  What about a meal when this is all over? he wanted to say. We’ve more in common than you realise.

  He sensed her loneliness and it pleased him to think he might help her. For the first time since Diana had left him he felt the possibility of committing himself to a relationship. The two women had nothing in common. Diana was dark, impulsive with a furious temper. Yet he was curious about Hilary in the same way as in the beginning he had been curious about Diana. That was the attraction. But he could not find the courage to make the invitation. By then the door was open and she was upright, as poised as ever, staring in front of her as if to suggest that she was a busy woman and he had already taken up too much of her time.

  Hunter was in the canteen, sadly eating a yoghurt. Since he had begun training for the Great North Run he had taken to choosing healthy foods – salad, fruit, the cranky vegetarian dishes which the canteen staff occasionally prepared and which were always left over at the end of the day – but he had never enjoyed them. Now, after the trip to the hospital, he persuaded himself that he deserved something more substantial. His failure to discover what Dorothea Cassidy had been doing there hurt his pride. Worse, he’d had to listen to Annie Ramsay in the back seat telling Emily Bowman what a brilliant man her nephew was.

  ‘He was brainy even as a bairn,’ she had said. ‘The first in our family to get to the Grammar. Eh, Emily, you should have seen him the first day in his uniform. Little grey shorts and a cherry-red cap and blazer.’ Then she had called across, ‘ Did you go to the Grammar, Mr Hunter?’

  He said that in his day it was all comprehensive but she sniffed disdainfully as if that made no difference to anything. Stephen was a clever man, she said, and Mr Hunter was lucky to work on his team. It was almost more than the policeman could bear.

  Hunter stood up and ordered a sausage sandwich, joking with the woman behind the counter as he waited to be served. He took it back to his table just as Ramsay came into the room.

  ‘Five minutes,’ Ramsay said. ‘In my office.’

  Hunter nodded. He pressed the bread of his sandwich together so the grease dripped through and bit into it hungrily. Ramsay chose black coffee and a cheese roll then disappeared. Hunter finished the sandwich, wiped his hands on a paper napkin and followed him.

  ‘Well?’ Hunter said, leaning against the doorframe of the inspector’s office. ‘How did you get on with your social worker?’ He spoke as if social workers, like mothers-in-law, were inevitably a source of humour.

  I don’t know how I get on with her, Ramsay thought. How can you tell what a woman like that is thinking about?

  He drank coffee and kept his voice cool. ‘I think we have a possible suspect,’ he said. ‘His name’s Corkhill, Joss Corkhill. Does the name mean anything to you?’

  Hunter shook his head. Ramsay pushed a computer printout of the man’s record across the table towards him.

  ‘Dorothea Cassidy was at a social services case conference yesterday morning. It was to decide whether or not a child should be taken into care. Dorothea had discovered that the girl was probably being battered by the mother’s boyfriend – that’s Corkhill. He’s working on the fair at the Meadow and wants to move on when it packs up – with the mother. Dorothea tried to persuade her to stay here with her kids. Corkhill’s a boozer with a pretty violent temper. He was expected back at the house this lunchtime, but he didn’t turn up.’

  Hunter nodded, impressed but unwilling to give Ramsay any credit for the discovery.

  ‘Where’s Corkhill now?’

  Ramsay shrugged. ‘ He was at the fair this morning. I’ve put out a general alert. He’ll not have got far.’

  ‘So it’s all over,’ Hunter said. It was the sort of case he could understand after all. A man with too many beers inside him losing his temper with an interfering busybody of a woman.

  ‘I don’t know …’ Ramsay said. ‘There’s a coincidence. The family is called Stringer and there’s a boy, a half-brother of the child who’s been taken into care, who works at Armstrong House.’

  ‘Is that important?’

  Ramsay shrugged again. ‘Dorothea was there visiting yesterday and she was supposed to be giving a talk to the old people in the evening. It might be relevant.’

  ‘Have we got a time of death yet?’ In the past Hunter had dismissed Ramsay’s doubts as a form of cowardice, but Ramsay had been right too often for an ambitious man like the Sergeant to ignore him.

  ‘Provisional,’ Ramsay said. ‘ Between ten and midnight.’

  ‘But I thought she was reported missing early in the evening.’

  ‘She was,’ Ramsay said. It was the thing that was troubling him most. ‘ I wish I knew what happened to her after she left the Stringers’s at quarter past five.’

  ‘Perhaps she was abducted,’ Hunter said. ‘Kept against her will. Was there any sexual assault?’

  Ramsay shook his head.

  ‘What’s the theory then? Was Corkhill waiting for her when she came out of Theresa’s house?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Ramsay said. ‘She had a car. He didn’t. If he’d approached her between the house and the car someone would have noticed. Perhaps he was waiting for her at Armstrong House. He had an excuse for being there through Clive.’

  ‘I think I saw the boy hanging round there this morning,’ Hunter said. ‘A vacant-looking lad …’

  Ramsay nodded. ‘Clive Stringer can drive. He’s no licence but he’s been done for taking and driving away several times. Perhaps Corkhill used him to get rid of the car. He was out last night. He claims to have been at the fair but that’s no sort of alibi. He’s simple and might have chosen to leave it close to where he works, just because it was familiar.’

  ‘It would tie in with the evidence of the only witness I could find in Tanner’s street,’ Hunter said. ‘He claims to have seen the car being badly driven all over the road. That might mean an inexperienced driver.’

  ‘The lad won’t be easy to interview,’ Ramsay said. ‘I’ve had one go at him. He’s frightened of something. Perhaps I’ll ask the social worker to talk to him. She might get more out of him than me.’

  Was that an excuse, he wondered suddenly, a means of seeing Hilary Masters again?

  ‘At least we can work out a timetable of Mrs Cassidy’s movements well into the afternoon,’ he said briskly, putting all thoughts of the immaculate Miss Masters firmly from his mind. ‘What time di
d she leave Emily Bowman?’

  ‘At about half past three,’ Hunter said, ‘after she’d taken Mrs Bowman to Newcastle General Hospital for her x-ray treatment.’ He explained that there was someone in the hospital Dorothea wanted to see.

  ‘I’ve arranged for some publicity on the wards and the out-patient department,’ he said, ‘but there’s been no response yet. I spoke to a staff nurse – Imogen Buchan. She was there all yesterday afternoon but she didn’t see Mrs Cassidy.’

  Ramsay looked up from the notes he was taking. The name was unusual but strangely familiar. He thought he had heard it recently, but could not place it. He worried about it for a moment then gave up.

  ‘Was Mrs Bowman definite about the time?’ he asked. ‘ Clive Stringer claims that Dorothea went into Mrs Bowman’s room and was still there at four o’clock.’

  ‘He must have made a mistake,’ Hunter said. ‘Or he’s lying. She didn’t go into Mrs Bowman’s flat when they got back from the hospital. According to the old lady, Mrs Cassidy helped her into the lift then left. She was in a hurry, Mrs Bowman said, and only took her to the lift because everyone else was playing bingo and there was no one to help.’