Ann Cleeves - A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy

Sergeant Gordon Hunter had never found any reason to move out of his mother’s house. It was comfortable there and even when he was younger he had felt no need to establish his independence. She had never attempted to cramp his style. If he brought one of his girlfriends back to stay the night his mother would make breakfast for them both the next day with her usual good humour. Gordon considered such attention his due. He was a single child and had always been spoilt. Besides, since his father had left home to move in with the landlady of one of the roughest pubs in the town centre, his mother had no one else to look after. What else would she do?

His father’s desertion had bewildered him. The pub was a dirty, run-down place and when Gordon visited him there the man seemed exhausted. He helped in the pub after work, carrying crates from the cellar, changing barrels, then sat staring with besotted admiration at the ageing beauty behind the bar.

‘She’s wearing me lad,’ he would say. ‘And I love it.’

Now, in the carnival week, the young men who travelled with the fair hung around the pub and there were reports of fights there every day.

‘Serve him right,’ Gordon’s mother said when she heard. But she did not care enough about her husband to wish him any real harm. She was happy as she was and all the excitement she needed was provided vicariously by Gordon. Best of all she liked to sit with her son in the evenings, drinking tea or sweet sherry while he talked about his work. She had few friends of her own and was immensely proud of him.

Early on Midsummer’s Day Gordon Hunter went out for a run before work. He was very competitive and when a colleague had bet him that he couldn’t complete the Great North Run he had begun training seriously. Usually he found the daily run an effort but on that Friday he enjoyed it. The weather was beautiful and the tidy gardens of the council estate where he lived were full of flowers. He moved easily and his breath came regularly. Two young women, factory workers in tight jeans and white overalls waiting at a bus stop, watched him with admiration and giggled appreciatively as he passed. When he returned to the house he had to wait for a moment for his mother to let him in and he stood, running on the spot, hammering on the door and calling irritatedly for her to come.

‘Sorry, pet,’ she said. ‘ I was on the phone.’

She was soft, overweight, untroubled by anything. There was a smell of bacon and fried bread. She always had breakfast ready for him when he returned.

Hunter walked in, breathing deeply, shaking his hands to relax the muscles in his wrists.

‘It was Mr Ramsay,’ his mother continued. ‘He said could you phone him. It’s urgent.’ Then in the same calm, conversational voice she added: ‘ There’s been a murder.’

There were two entrances to Prior’s Park. The first was close to the town centre by the road bridge that went over the river into Front Street. It was large, with heavy wrought-iron gates, and was the one most often used. The second was small and discreet and led from an established residential area with quiet leafy streets. Now both entrances were blocked and policemen were turning away angry commuters who used the park as a short cut to the town. Outside the main entrance two police cars were parked and a small crowd had gathered. Ramsay and Hunter had to push through the milling people and were watched with resentment as they strolled unimpeded into the park.

They walked down the footpath along the river bank in the opposite direction to that taken earlier by the boys. The mist over the river had cleared and the sun was already hot. The constable who had been first on the scene stood by the body but nobody else had arrived. The three men stood at the edge of the footpath and looked down at the woman. The sun had risen above the trees and now her face was bathed in light. The colours of her clothes had the radiance of stained glass. Hunter whistled under his breath.

‘She doesn’t look like a vicar’s wife to me,’ he said.

Ramsay said nothing. Annie had told him that Dorothea Cassidy was thirty-three and he trusted her abilities as an intelligence-gatherer implicitly. Yet he had expected the woman to look middle-aged, dowdy, not only because she was a vicar’s wife but because of her name which he associated with women of his mother’s generation. She did not look to him at all like a Dorothea. She was slim, taller than average, with high cheek-bones and a wide mouth. Despite the bulging eyes and swollen tongue, which gave an indication of the cause of her death, he could tell that she had been lovely. Her short curly hair, protected from the soil by the crushed petals of the bedding plants, was copper-coloured and had obviously been well cut. She wore silver earrings with a small blue stone and several silver bangles.

‘What about the cause of death?’ Hunter asked.

Ramsay looked at the blue tinge of the skin. ‘I think she was strangled,’ he said. ‘But we’ll have to wait for the pathologist’s report.’

He crouched to look at the body from a different angle and saw a pink strip of sticking plaster on her left wrist. He lifted the hand gently.

‘That looks recent,’ Hunter said. ‘Do you think it’s important?’

Ramsay shrugged. How could he tell at this stage? He was tempted to make a sarcastic remark but said nothing. He supposed that he and Hunter should make some effort to get on.

By now it was the peak of the rush hour and they could hear the roar of traffic along the Newcastle Road beyond the trees.

‘I wonder where she was killed.’ Ramsay was talking almost to himself. ‘She must have been put in that position. She didn’t fall naturally with her arms folded like that. But if she was moved it must have been immediately after death, before the onset of rigor.’

‘How did they get her here then?’ Hunter said. ‘It’s a fair distance from the road and she’d be no featherweight.’ He thought it was all too contrived and elaborate. He preferred cases he could understand: a punch-up in a bar, a jealous wife stabbing her husband. You knew where you were with cases like that. Here he suspected that nothing was as it seemed. It would suit Ramsay, Hunter thought bitterly. He liked things complicated.

‘Then there’s the question of time…’ Ramsay went on. ‘She was supposed to be speaking to the old folks at Armstrong House at seven thirty. She couldn’t have been put here then. The park would still be full of people. Someone would have found her last night even if the murderer could have got her here without being seen. So where was she all evening before she was killed?’

He turned to the uniformed constable who seemed unable to take his eyes off the woman’s face.

‘Do they lock the park gates at night?’ he asked. ‘Does someone check that the park’s empty then?’

‘They lock the main gate at sunset,’ the man said, ‘but there’s no way of blocking off the lane on the other side and they don’t bother about that.’

‘I suppose she might have been killed in the park then posed there in the flower bed,’ Ramsay said.

‘Well, what was she doing here late at night all on her own?’ Hunter said angrily. ‘A woman like that. You’d have thought she’d have more sense.’

‘A woman like what?’ Ramsay asked mildly.

‘Well, man, you know. Respectable. The only people to come into Prior’s Park after dark are courting couples and kids sniffing glue. You’d expect a vicar’s wife to be inside watching the telly or…’ he dredged his mind for a suitable activity for a vicar’s wife ‘… knitting for the elderly.’

Ramsay looked down again at Dorothea Cassidy. He studied the wide mouth and imagined her laughing at the idea.