A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy (10 page)

‘Could I go with your social worker?’ Ramsay asked. ‘I have to talk to Miss Stringer about Dorothea’s visit yesterday. She might find it easier to talk to me if I’m with someone she knows.’

Hilary Masters stood up. ‘If you feel you need my staff’s protection,’ she said icily, ‘ I’m sure we can come to some arrangement.’

The sarcasm surprised him. He had thought that they had reached some understanding. Suddenly he felt a wave of sympathy for her and realised she must be as lonely as he was.

‘Thank you for your time and your help,’ he said. He wanted to show her that he admired her, that he realised she was good at her job. ‘ I must congratulate you. You have a very detailed knowledge of what must be only one of hundreds of cases your staff are supervising.’

She looked at him, unsure whether or not he was mocking her, but when she saw it was meant as a compliment she answered seriously.

‘I told you, Inspector, it’s never a trivial matter to take a child into care, no matter what the tabloid papers say. I always want to be sure of my facts. Besides, I know the family well. Before I was made a senior I was the Stringers’ social worker. It was the first case I took on when I arrived here, newly qualified. You might say that Theresa and I have grown up together.’

Ramsay did not know what to say and left the office nervously, surprised that he cared so much what impression Hilary Masters had gained of him.

At the last minute Hilary Masters decided to visit the Stringer family with Ramsay. He decided that she was what Diana would have called a ‘ control freak’. She was afraid that the young social worker who had directly supervised the family would let down her team, that his attitude would reflect badly on her. She preferred to be in command of situations. He could understand the attitude. Diana had called him a control freak too.

‘We’ll go in my car,’ she said, taking charge again. ‘I know where we’re going. It’ll be quicker.’

He said nothing and followed her downstairs, waited while she gave instructions to the receptionist then followed her outside. It was nearly midday and very hot. The car seat burned through the back of his shirt and even with both windows open he began to sweat. Hilary Masters remained cool and frostily pale. She drove well with a minimum of effort. They went down Armstrong Street, past the old people’s flats. Hunter was still knocking at doors and Ramsay was torn for a moment. Perhaps, after all, he should speak to the old lady who had seen Dorothea in the afternoon. But he did not want Hilary Masters to think him indecisive and he said nothing.

His sergeant was continuing that morning’s thankless task of looking for a witness who might have seen Dorothea Cassidy’s car being driven on to Tanner’s drive. Most of the residents seemed elderly, deaf. It was so rowdy during festival week, they all said. They preferred to be in their beds.

He came to a house where he thought the residents must have recently moved in. The grass in the front garden was long and an estate agent’s board had been pulled out and lay against the wall. Through the living-room window he could see evidence of renovation. There was little furniture. The upstairs curtains were still drawn. Hunter rang the bell. There was no reply and he rang it again and banged on the door with his fist. Inside there was a muffled thud and an angry voice demanding to know what the hell was going on. He rang the bell a third time and there were footsteps on the stairs. The door opened.

It was obvious to Hunter that the young man inside had a hangover. He recognised the symptoms. He would have to be treated gently.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘ I’m from Northumbria Police. Perhaps I could come in?’

And the young man, wrapped only in a bathrobe, slow-witted with the drink, could do nothing to stop him.

‘What’s the time?’ he demanded, as Hunter walked straight through to the kitchen and put on the kettle for tea.

‘Eleven o’clock,’ said Hunter.

‘Bloody hell, I’m late for work.’

‘That’s all right,’ Hunter said. ‘You can tell your employer you were helping the police in a murder inquiry. They can phone me if there’s any problem. Do you keep the tea in here?’

‘Murder?’ the young man said. ‘What murder?’

Hunter sat him down and made sure that he was listening properly, then explained about Dorothea Cassidy.

‘Her car was found this morning parked in a drive on the other side of the road. We’re looking for witnesses who might have seen it driven there. Where were you yesterday evening?’

‘In a pub,’ the man said. ‘In several pubs.’ He moaned. ‘I’m a morris man.’ Then, as Hunter seemed not to understand. ‘You know, morris dancing. We were performing as part of the festival.’

‘What time did you get home?’ Hunter regarded the man suspiciously. He looked more like a rugby player than a morris dancer. It seemed a strange activity for a grown man.

The man shook his head painfully. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘ Late. Well after midnight. I walked back.’

‘Was anyone about in the street?’

‘No. I don’t think so. They go to bed very early round here.’ He stood up and poured himself a glass of water. ‘ There was the drunk …’

‘What drunk?’

‘I suppose he was drunk. He nearly knocked me off the pavement when his car veered off the road.’

‘What sort of car was he driving?’

‘It was one of those Morris Thousand estates. My mam and dad had one when I was a kid.’

‘Are you sure the driver was a man?’ Hunter asked.

‘I’m not sure of anything. I was pissed. The car came up the road towards me. The road was clear but it swerved so two of the wheels were on the pavement. I jumped clear and it drove off.’

‘Where did it go then?’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t interested. I just wanted to get home to my bed.’ He paused. ‘It might have stopped further down the street, but I can’t remember.’

‘Tell me what the driver looked like,’ Hunter said.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see. There are only a couple of street lamps along here and his headlights dazzled me. It could have been a woman. It could have been anyone.’

It was all he could say. Hunter tried to bully more information out of him but in the end he gave up. No one else in the street had seen or heard anything, so Hunter moved on.

Annie Ramsay had been planning to visit the St Mary’s coffee morning, but after her nephew’s visit she decided she would not go. There would have been some pleasure in explaining that it had been she who had first alerted the police to investigate Dorothea’s disappearance but she was afraid of missing further excitement. Besides, by now the event would almost be over and she would be roped in to clear up.

Although she usually disliked sloppy eating she made a sandwich for an early lunch and ate it from a tray on her knees, sitting in an easy chair pulled up close to the window. From there she could see the main entrance of Armstrong House and she saw Hunter appear suddenly below her. She recognised him – Ramsay had brought him to a couple of the weekly tea parties for moral support. Without finishing her lunch she set the tray on the window-sill and jumped to her feet, afraid that Hunter might find Emily Bowman’s room without her assistance. In the corridor she paused, uncertain whether she should take the lift or the stairs to the ground floor. Usually she took the lift but surely a fit young man like Hunter would want to walk and she was afraid of missing him. She grasped the banister firmly and with determination began the descent to the ground floor.

Half-way down she realised she had made the right decision. She heard light young footsteps and the warden calling up to him:

‘Mrs Bowman is number thirteen. The second on the left.’

She turned a corner and he was there, sprinting up the stairs towards her, so quickly that she was afraid he would pass her before she could catch her breath to speak.

‘Mr Hunter,’ she gasped. ‘It
is
Mr Hunter?’ He stopped and she held out her hand to him and smiled. ‘You know my nephew,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect you recognise me. It’s Annie Ramsay.’

He was balanced on his back leg with his front foot on the next step. He smiled at her. He was good with old ladies. He just had to turn on the charm and they adored him.

‘I’m glad I caught you,’ Annie Ramsay went on. ‘I wanted to warn you about Emily …’ She paused, still wheezing from her hurried flight from her room. ‘She’s very poorly.’ There was another hesitation then she mouthed noiselessly, ‘Cancer. She’s riddled with it.’

In her strategy to be present at the interview it was the most effective thing she could have said. Hunter was terrified by illness. He could face road accidents without squeamishness and once when an ear was severed from a thug’s head in a pub brawl he had picked it up and taken it to the ambulanceman in case it might be reattached. But disease was different. It struck at random, without provocation. It robbed a person of everything Hunter considered important.

Annie Ramsay must have recognised his unease because she pressed home her point.

‘She has to go to the General every day for x-ray treatment, poor thing. I don’t know how she puts up with it.’

Hunter hated hospitals. He said nothing.

‘I was wondering,’ Annie said, as if she were doing him the biggest favour in the world. ‘I was wondering if you’d like me to be there with you. When you talk to her. Just in case, you know …’

He nodded gratefully and in triumph Annie climbed the stairs again to Emily’s room.

It was Annie who tapped on the door and Annie who went in first.

‘Emily, dear,’ she said. ‘ There’s a policeman to see you. It’s all right. It’s Sergeant Hunter. He’s a friend of my nephew’s. He wants to talk to you because Dorothea came to visit you yesterday. They’re trying to trace her movements.’

Emily Bowman was sitting in the same chair. She was still waiting for the ambulance. It gets later every day, she thought. Goodness knows what time it turned up yesterday. The visitors looked at her. They thought she had been dozing, unaware of her obsessive attention turned on the street. Once she had been a large, powerfully built woman. Now she seemed all bone, hard and fleshless, with knotted knuckles resting on a bony lap.

‘Emily, dear,’ Annie said again. ‘I don’t believe you’ve had any dinner. Let me open a tin of soup while you talk to the detective.’

Emily shook her head. Why didn’t the ambulance come? The only time she had to relax was in the afternoon and evening when it was all over for the day. And yesterday, even that had been spoiled …

‘I’d like some tea,’ she said, suddenly grateful that Annie Ramsay was there. The policeman, tall and healthy, frightened her. Perhaps she should never have admitted to having seen Dorothea Cassidy the day before. As it was there were secrets between her and Dorothea which could never be told. She remembered the last conversation between them and closed her eyes with pain and guilt. She turned sharply to the policeman.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, Sergeant?’

Hunter nodded uncomfortably. ‘That would be very nice,’ he said.

The room was hot. Usually he teased old ladies, flirted with them, made them believe that they were young and attractive again. He realised immediately that Emily Bowman would not be taken in. He resented Ramsay for having sent him there. He should be out looking for real villains. It was inconceivable that this old lady could be capable of murder.

To hide his discomfort he sat on a hard-backed chair close to the table and took out his notebook. ‘I understand that you saw Mrs Cassidy yesterday afternoon. What time was that?’

‘At about half past one,’ Emily said.

‘Were you expecting her?’

‘No.’ Emily paused. ‘ No, but I wasn’t surprised to see her. She had taken to calling in if she was in the neighbourhood.’ And that was true enough, she thought.

‘So it was just a routine visit?’

‘No,’ Emily said. ‘Not exactly. When she arrived I was still waiting for the ambulance, just as I am now. Dorothea offered to take me into the hospital for treatment. I have to go every day.’ Then she added, as if she did not want to make too much of it, ‘At least every week day.’

Annie Ramsay had been listening to the conversation through the open kitchen door.

‘I didn’t know that,’ she shouted above the hissing of the kettle. ‘I didn’t know Dorothea took you in to the General.’

‘No,’ Emily said. ‘Well. You don’t know everything.’

‘It was kind of her, mind, to drive you all that way.’

The patronising note in Annie’s voice stung Emily to reply.

‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘There was someone she had to see at the hospital anyway. I wasn’t putting her out.’

‘How did Mrs Cassidy seem?’ Hunter asked, interrupting the conversation between the women.

‘Well enough,’ Emily said, then feeling that was not quite enough: ‘Maybe a bit quiet. Perhaps she was concerned about the person she had to visit at the General. Families were always a worry, she said. Perhaps she was lucky never to have had children.’

‘What did she mean by that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Emily said firmly. ‘I didn’t like to pry.’

‘Did she mention her meeting at the hospital when she brought you home?’

‘No,’ Emily said. ‘ She didn’t stay. She saw me to my flat then went away. She’s a busy woman.’

‘What time was that?’

‘Half past three.’ She was surprised that she lied so fluently, and quickly turned back to the window to hide her astonishment.

Annie Ramsay came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray with cups and saucers and a tin of biscuits. She set the tray on the table and handed a cup to her friend. The tea was stronger than Emily liked but she took it gratefully and sipped at it.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ Annie said, excited, not content just to watch the interview but wanting to push the action along. ‘Why doesn’t Sergeant Hunter take you in to the General, dear? Then you can get your treatment without having to wait for the ambulance and you can show him where Mrs Cassidy went. The warden can phone the hospital to cancel the ambulance for you.’ She paused, then whispered, ‘Perhaps he’ll be able to discover a clue.’