A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy

by Cleeves, Ann

  For a moment she thought of making a fight of it, of denying everything. There was no way he could find out now what had happened between her and Dorothea. Then he looked up, so the light caught his face and she saw that he was really interested in her, in a way that the doctors and the nurses with their professional understanding had never been. It occurred to her that if she talked to him she would not have to write the letter after all.

  ‘You did lie, Mrs Bowman, didn’t you, about the time Mrs Cassidy left you yesterday afternoon? She came into your room and spent at least half an hour with you. We have a witness who can confirm that.’

  We had a witness, he thought, and held his breath to see if she swallowed it.

  ‘Yes, Inspector, I’m afraid that I lied.’ The last of the light left the room and she got up awkwardly to switch on a tall standard lamp with a heavy fringed shade which stood in one corner.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘Because I wanted the conversation between Dorothea and me to remain confidential.’

  She looked at him with something of her old defiance.

  ‘You do see,’ he said gently, ‘that now that’s impossible?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem important any more,’ she said.

  ‘Dorothea came into your flat when she brought you back from the hospital?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She was in a hurry but I asked her to come. There was something I wanted to discuss with her.’

  ‘Would you tell me what that was?’

  She stared at him, her hands knotted on the bony lap. She wanted to believe that he would understand.

  ‘It was a question of morality,’ she said. He did not reply and waited for her to continue. Why did he have so much more patience with Emily Bowman, he wondered, than he did for Theresa Stringer?

  ‘I was considering taking my own life,’ she said quickly. ‘I wanted her views.’

  She was pleased to see that she had not shocked him and that he felt no inclination to laugh. He considered her words carefully.

  ‘You must have known,’ he said gently, ‘what Mrs Cassidy’s position would be.’

  Emily Bowman paused. I admired her, she thought. I expected too much of her. She wanted to explain.

  ‘I hadn’t expected,’ she said slowly, ‘ that she would be so … rigid.’

  Emily remembered Dorothea’s horror when, stumbling, she had tried to explain her intentions, her motives: ‘You can’t even think of it,’ Dorothea had said. ‘ You know it’s quite wrong.’

  Ramsay waited for Emily to continue. Again she was reminded of the young priest. She wanted to be honest with him.

  ‘I had always thought her sympathetic,’ Emily Bowman said. ‘Open to new ideas. We had considered her rather progressive. Her reaction came as a shock. She spoke, even, about the devil. It wasn’t very helpful.’

  It had been horrible, she thought. Dorothea’s certainty, her energy, her impersonal pity had been demeaning. It had reduced Emily to an example in a theological argument.

  ‘Did you kill her?’ Ramsay asked.

  Emily moved in her chair.

  ‘I just wanted to stop her talking,’ she said. ‘She would go on about the sanctity of life. There was a bread knife on the table – she’d had no lunch and I made her a sandwich. I picked up the knife and turned towards her. She didn’t realise. She was very trusting. She kept on talking, telling me all the things I didn’t want to hear, too good for me to bear. You’re young and you wouldn’t understand. I meant to kill her. What right did she have to stand there preaching? How could she know?’

  ‘What happened?’ Ramsay asked.

  ‘I missed,’ she said simply. ‘I meant to kill her and I missed. I didn’t even have the strength for that.’

  ‘But you cut her wrist,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And there was, I suppose, some satisfaction in that. There was a lot of blood. And at least she was quiet for a while.’

  ‘She must have been very shocked,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘No, not very. I don’t think anything shocked her. And she was too busy, I think, trying to save my soul.’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘She must have convinced you.’

  ‘Because I’m still alive, Inspector?’ She seemed to find the idea amusing. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps she was more persuasive than I like to admit. Or perhaps I’m less brave than I thought I was.’

  She sat back in the chair, preoccupied with her own thoughts. Ramsay thought she was a formidable woman. He hoped she was telling the truth now. If she was lying it would be impossible to tell.

  ‘What time did Mrs Cassidy leave here?’ he asked.

  ‘At about quarter past four. Your aunt appeared almost immediately afterwards. The game of bingo in the common room had just finished – that usually ends at quarter past I think.’

  ‘Wasn’t Dorothea worried about leaving you alone?’

  ‘Not too worried,’ Emily said. She smiled. ‘She had enormous faith, you know. Besides, I promised her I wouldn’t take all my pills last night. It was the only way to get rid of her.’

  ‘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.

  Chapter Nineteen

  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 yo
u 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.