Ann Cleeves - A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy

‘I’ve been so silly,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Imogen said, under her breath, as she returned to the office.

Hunter stepped out of the lift into bright sunshine and felt immediately happier. He was faced by an empty day room and an open door into an office where a staff nurse was writing. All the ill people were decently out of sight. The nurse looked up and gave him an impatient professional smile. She was pretty in a pale, washed-out way. She should use more make-up, he thought. It would make all the difference. He smiled back at her and glanced automatically to the hand on the desk to see if she was wearing a wedding ring. He had always fancied women in uniform.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

Too right, he thought. There’s a lot you could do for me.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said. ‘I’m Gordon Hunter from Northumbria Police. We’re trying to trace the movements of a woman. She was in this building yesterday and may have come to visit one of the patients on your ward.’

As he approached her he could see that she looked very tired. The skin under her eyes was bruised and strained.

‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked.

‘She was found murdered in Prior’s Park early this morning,’ he said. ‘I expect you’ll have heard about it.’

She shook her head. ‘ No. How terrible! I was on an early shift this morning and I didn’t know.’ There was no emotion in her voice and he supposed that nurses, like policemen, were accustomed to sudden death.

He set the photograph in front of her. It was a recent picture of Dorothea, taken by her husband. She was sitting at her desk, rather serious, as if she had been disturbed while working. Hunter watched the nurse glance down at it. She suddenly turned very pale and he realised that she must be exhausted. It was a bloody shame, he thought, that nurses were so over-worked. How could a man persuade one to go out with him if she was dead on her feet.

‘No,’ she said at last, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t recognise her. But she might have been on the ward yesterday afternoon. I don’t see all the patients’ visitors. We’re very flexible about visiting here. Some of them have to travel long distances. They come and go pretty much as they please.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see.’ He was tempted to ask her if she was busy tonight, if she felt like a Chinese meal and a few drinks, but he could tell there would be little point.

‘Were there any other nurses on the ward yesterday?’ he asked.

‘Of course. But none of them are here now. I swapped my shift.’

‘What about domestics?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, apparently not very interested. ‘You could ask the supervisor.’

‘Doctors?’

‘I think Rosie Stewart, the registrar, was here. But she’d have nothing to do with the visitors.’

It was a wild goose chase, he thought. Just as he’d anticipated.

‘I’ll have to get the photograph circulated,’ he said. ‘ If she was here someone must have seen her. Who should I ask about that?’

She pointed him back down the stairs, pleased, he thought, to be left alone to her work in the sunshine.

When Hunter returned to the waiting room Annie Ramsay and Emily Bowman were there, sitting together against one wall, drinking tea from polystyrene cups. The room was almost empty now and the WRVS ladies were clearing up and counting the money from the till. The nurse behind the desk was reading a romantic magazine. When he came in through the door Annie Ramsay jumped up and waved to him though it would have been impossible for him to miss them.

‘That’s good timing,’ she said brightly. ‘Mrs Bowman’s just come out of her treatment, haven’t you, hinnie? We’ll finish our tea and then we can be off.’ She looked at Hunter with her small and curious eyes. ‘Did you have any luck?’

He grunted non-committally and shuffled his feet to show that he was a busy man and wanted to be away.

‘No,’ Annie Ramsay said, ‘ I didn’t think you would.’ She turned to Emily Bowman and added with malice and enjoyment: ‘Such a pity our Stephen couldn’t come. I say there’s nothing to beat experience.’

She helped Emily to her feet and imperiously sent Hunter to fetch the car.

Upstairs on the ward, Staff Nurse Imogen Buchan left the office, locked herself in the lavatory and was violently sick. She ran the tap to hide the noise she was making, then washed her hands and began to splash water over her face. When she returned to the office the student was there, leaning against the desk. On seeing Imogen she began talking in a bored, complaining way about her boyfriend. He was so jealous, she said. She only had to look at another man and he was furious. You’d think he intended to kill her. Imogen sent her back on to the ward with menu cards and closed the door.

She knew the number of St Mary’s Vicarage, Otterbridge, without having to look it up and dialled with trembling fingers. Outside people were starting to arrive for the afternoon’s visiting and she realised she could be disturbed at any time, yet still she kept the receiver to her ear and prayed that someone would reply.

Please, she pleaded to herself. It can’t be true. Let there be some mistake.

But when she left the hospital at the end of her shift there were pictures of Dorothea Cassidy on every noticeboard. The woman’s eyes seemed to be following her down the corridor, making Imogen feel that even after her death there was no escape from her.

When Ramsay had first come to Otterbridge to work he had been surprised that such a prosperous town should tolerate an estate like the Ridgeway. Surely, he thought, the rate payers would demand that it be tidied up, that the graffiti be removed. But although the Ridgeway residents’ association did their best they had little power and the estate was invisible to the rest of the town. There were no through-roads and the only glimpse the more affluent residents of Otterbridge had of it was from the train and even then the houses were hidden by the old cars and decaying furniture which had been tipped down the embankment.

Hilary Masters drove on to the estate without comment. Outside the community centre a small crowd was gathered to watch the decoration of a lorry for the carnival parade that evening. The theme for the event was Otterbridge, Ancient and Modern, and there were people trying on peculiar tunics which Ramsay thought were supposed to be Roman togas. The scene was chaotic, good-humoured. It was school lunchtime and an elderly lollipop man leaned on his stick and watched them drive past. In the playground boys defied the heat and chased after a football. On every corner there was a scruffy ice-cream van and through the open car windows Ramsay could hear the conflicting tunes of their chimes. Outside the houses women sat on the pavements and chatted. They took no notice of Hilary’s smart new car. They were used to social workers in the Ridgeway.

Theresa Stringer’s garden came as something of a shock. The grass was brown and straggly through lack of water, like all the others in the street, but there was a pond, with a concrete bridge across it and a pair of gnomes with fishing rods.

‘That’s Joss Corkhill’s influence,’ Hilary said. ‘ He probably dreamed it up after a night at the pub and spent hours building it. He’s like a kid.’

The front door of the house was open and Ramsay could see a hall with bare floorboards leading to a small kitchen. There, Theresa Stringer and her son sat at a painted wooden table eating chips from newspaper. Ramsay recognised the teenager who had been lurking in the Armstrong House garden when he went to see his aunt.

Hilary stopped on the doorstep and called in, ‘Theresa, it’s me, Miss Masters. Can we come in?’