A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy

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 did 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.’

It seemed impossible to Ramsay that Clive should have made a mistake. He had been so insistent about the time. Why, then, would he want to lie?

‘What now?’ Hunter asked. He was like a small boy whose attention wanders easily. All the talk made him restless.

Ramsay stood up and walked to the window. He could see the old town walls which had been built to keep out the marauding Scots and the crowds already starting to gather for the evening’s parade. He opened the window and there was the faint sound of fairground music. Some of the smaller rides must have already started.

‘We have to know where Dorothea Cassidy was yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘She can’t have vanished without trace.’

Yet, he thought, looking down at the crowd, there were so many people in Otterbridge during festival week, that it might be possible to disappear into them.

He was going to give Hunter more detailed instructions when the phone on his desk began to ring, and then immediately afterwards the phone on Hunter’s desk in the adjoining room. The two calls must have come through to the switchboard within seconds of each other. Later Ramsay checked and found that they were both logged for four o’clock.

Hunter took the call that came into his room. It was from a policeman who had picked up Joss Corkhill.

‘Tell your boss I want a medal for this,’ the man said breathlessly. ‘His bloody dog bit my leg.’

‘Where are you?’ Hunter asked.

‘On the by-pass close to the Ridgeway Estate.’

Then Ramsay received his news: Clive Stringer was dead.

His first reaction was numbness, a sense of failure. He had botched the Corkhill arrest and should have realised that the boy was vulnerable. He had decided, after all, that Clive was probably Corkhill’s accomplice. He was quite certain now that the boy’s death confirmed Corkhill’s guilt. And when Hunter came bounding back into the office with the news that Corkhill had been picked up he thought the case was all over.

But as more details came in Ramsay’s certainty turned to confused panic. He learned with horror that Walter Tanner’s house had been used for the second murder. There was no suggestion that Corkhill had ever met Tanner, let alone that he had a reason for wanting to implicate the church warden in Clive’s death. Tanner had become an obvious suspect.

Hunter wanted to be at the scene of the crime. He bounced impatiently from one foot to the other like a runner at the start of a race. Ramsay knew his mind would already be racing in tabloid headlines.

‘Well?’ Hunter demanded. ‘Are you coming?’

Ramsay shook his head. ‘Not yet. You go. Take charge. See what you can get out of the old man.’

Delighted, Hunter ran off, jumping down stairs three at a time, slamming doors, making as much of a drama as he could manage. Ramsay sat quietly at his desk waiting for information.

It came relentlessly, proving conclusively that Corkhill could have played no active part in Clive’s murder. The arresting officer reported that Corkhill had been standing on the by-pass for at least an hour waiting for a lift. He was drunk and disreputable and no one had stopped. He had been seen by a number of council workmen who were digging up that stretch of road. Then the pathologist who had arrived promptly at Tanner’s house to examine the body had said that Clive was only recently dead. He had died perhaps only a matter of minutes before Tanner found him, he had told Ramsay cheerfully over the telephone. Certainly not more than half an hour. So Ramsay realised that unless there was the coincidence of two murderers in Otterbridge, each separately choosing to implicate Walter Tanner, Corkhill had not killed Dorothea Cassidy. Ramsay ordered more black coffee and knew he would have to start from the beginning again.

From his office he made several phone calls. The first was to Hilary Masters.

‘Hold the line a minute,’ the receptionist said, ‘while I check that she’s in.’

Then there was the social worker’s voice, cool and professional, matching the formality of his own. He told her, unemotionally, that Clive Stringer was dead and there was a silence. He wondered if she had been called away from the phone but when at last she answered it was obvious that she had been crying.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was fond of him.’

He was terribly moved but could think of nothing to say to comfort her.

‘I’ve sent a WPC to tell Theresa,’ he said, ‘but I thought you would want to visit.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

There was a silence. ‘Who killed him?’ she cried suddenly. ‘Was it Joss?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘ We’ve brought in Mr Corkhill to help us with our inquiries but it’s unlikely that he’ll be charged.’

He realised he was hiding behind the jargon. He did not know how to respond to her distress.

‘Then who was it?’ she cried again.

‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘ Not yet.’ He had never felt so inadequate.

‘Will you be coming to talk to Theresa today?’ she said. ‘Will I see you there?’

‘I won’t be there until later,’ he said. ‘I know you’re very busy. Perhaps you won’t have the time to wait.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait. I think I should be there when you talk to Theresa. Besides…’

Her voice trailed off and yet he was left with the sense that a promise had been made, that the possibility of contact between them had been established, and he was as excited as a boy.

The next phone call was made to the Walkers. His determination that he should start again at the beginning made the Cassidys an obvious target of investigation. When the phone rang Dolly was picking raspberries, stooping under the nets which were supposed to stop the birds taking the fruit, and she heard the bell through the open kitchen door. It took some time for her to disentangle herself from the net and she expected the phone to stop before she reached it but it continued with a persistence that frightened her. When she picked up the receiver her hand was shaking.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Hello?’ She expected it to be her husband.

‘Mrs Walker,’ Ramsay said. ‘I wonder if I might speak to Edward Cassidy.’

She felt defensive, as if he had accused her of neglecting her duty.

‘He’s not here,’ she said and felt herself blushing. ‘He insisted on going home. We tried to persuade him but he wasn’t himself at all.’

‘Patrick then? It is rather urgent.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Patrick’s not here either. We were rather worried about him. He went off in such a state. Actually my husband’s out looking for him.’ Then she stopped abruptly, feeling strangely disloyal.

Ramsay probed gently for precise times – when exactly had Patrick left them? What time did they leave the vicar in Otterbridge?

She sensed that something was wrong and became flustered and evasive. She was no good about time, she said. Ramsay would have to talk to her husband. But when the Major returned from his unsuccessful attempt to find Patrick Cassidy, he persuaded her that it was dangerous to lie and that the police had their own methods to get to the truth. He thought it might be safer to distance themselves from the Cassidys.