Ann Cleeves - A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy

Not once since Easter Sunday had Imogen actively blamed Dorothea for what was happening to her. She had too little confidence for that. She blamed herself, bottled things up, and grew thinner and more frail and beautiful. She just wanted Dorothea out of the way.

Now she had got what she wanted and there was nothing left but this dreadful panic. She lay on her bed and stared up at the ceiling, at the cracks in the plaster she remembered from childhood illnesses, when fever had made the patterns dance in front of her eyes.

I didn’t really want her out of the way, she thought. Not literally. Not like that. She would have been able to handle the situation, she thought. Patrick would have seen sense in the end. She would have come to terms with it, if only Dorothea hadn’t decided to meddle, if she had not turned up at the hospital with her unendurable compassion and her pretensions to sainthood.

Dorothea had arrived on the ward without warning the afternoon before. She had run up the stairs from the radiotherapy out-patients’ waiting room and looked glowing, radiant. It was a quiet time and the other nurses were in the canteen having lunch. Imogen was on her own in the office. She had looked up from the desk and there was Dorothea, smiling, slightly out of breath.

‘I’m worried about you,’ Dorothea had said, coming straight to the point. There was never any small-talk with Dorothea. She despised it. ‘ You haven’t been looking well lately. I never get a chance to see you on your own at the vicarage. Patrick keeps you all to himself.’

‘I’m fine,’ Imogen had said, looking blankly out of the window.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Dorothea had said and sat down on the visitors’ chair, frowning slightly to show her concern. ‘You’ve been miserable for months. Look at all the weight you’ve lost. What’s Patrick been doing to upset you? Or is it work?’

And then, despite herself, Imogen had blurted it all out, and Dorothea had listened, fixing Imogen with such a concentrated look that it seemed that nothing in the world mattered more to her than Imogen’s happiness. And she had promised to put everything right.

Imogen had gone home from work that night not sure what to expect. She had wanted to believe that Dorothea had a magical power to arrange things, but was afraid that the meeting between them might provoke some crisis. She had shut herself in her bedroom. Her parents were preparing to go out and she could hear them calling to each other between the bathroom and their bedroom about what earrings went best with her mother’s dress. Then the doorbell had rung with an unusual ferocity and she had fled down the stairs to answer it. Patrick stood on the doorstep, as he had on the night they met, but he refused to come in.

‘I want to talk to you,’ he said.

‘Come in. My parents are going out soon.’

‘No. Not here. Get your things. We’ll go to the pub.’

She did not know what to make of him. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. He seemed angry, restless, embarrassed.

They had walked down the road, scattering the dead blossom with their feet, not speaking. There was a pub on the corner of the next street and they stopped there. The inside had been ripped out to make one huge bar and there was juke-box music and flashing one-arm bandits. At the door Imogen hesitated. Usually he hated places like this. She expected him to walk out and find somewhere else, but he went straight to the bar and bought drinks for them both without even asking what she wanted. He led her to a corner.

‘What have you been saying to Dorothea?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘The truth. That you care about her more than you care about me.’

She realised at once how childish that sounded but it was too late.

‘You’re mad,’ he said, but he was starting to blush. The colour spread from his cheeks to his neck and even to his hands. He drank the beer very quickly, tipping back his head to pour it down his throat. ‘ She’s almost old enough to be my mother.’

‘What has that got to do with anything?’ she said impatiently.

‘You shouldn’t have spoken to her,’ he cried. ‘It’s upset her. She doesn’t trust me any more. She thinks I should leave the vicarage.’

There was a pause and the fruit machine beside them clattered and spewed out brass tokens into a dirty metal tray. The skeletal young man who was playing the machine left them where they were and impassively pulled the handle again.

Patrick turned to her and took her hand. ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said, trying to convince himself as much as her. ‘ It’s you I care about. You know that.’

She saw then that he was ashamed of his passion for Dorothea. It scared him, made him different from all his friends. He would prefer to love her.

‘Well then,’ she had said, standing up, wanting to get her own back for all the times he had hurt her. ‘ Why don’t you prove it?’

And she had walked out of the pub, leaving him there, embarrassed and defensive. She had not seen him since then. She had waited all day at work for him to call, but there had only been the policeman with his photograph of Dorothea and the news that she was dead.

The memory of the conversation in the pub made Imogen’s head spin more than the bout of measles she had had when she was a girl. She got off her bed and walked to the window. She had a view of tennis courts and the bowling green and beyond to the river. Usually there were spry old gentlemen in smart blazers bending over the green, but today it was quiet. The police must still be keeping people out of the park. At one time she had imagined herself and Patrick old, still together, but now that seemed impossible.

As she turned back from the window the phone began to ring.

When her parents came in an hour later, with arms full of exercise books, desperate for a gin after a day at school, the house was empty and Imogen had disappeared.

As he walked from the police station to the vicarage Ramsay tried to pinpoint what made this case so different from all his other investigations. There was the character of the victim of course. Vicar’s wives did not usually get themselves murdered. But there was also the point that she was emotionally involved with a quite disparate group of people, who had nothing in common but the fact that they had been caught up in Dorothea’s compassionate enthusiasms. Besides her immediate family, there was Theresa Stringer with her pathetic dreams of starting a new life with Joss, the old lady with cancer in Armstrong House, and Walter Tanner, incongruously a gambler and church warden. In most domestic murders the suspects came from the same social group, and the rivalries and tensions that resulted in the involvement of the police arose from the situation they shared. Here the only thing that gave the case any real cohesion was Dorothea Cassidy herself.

When Ramsay arrived at the vicarage Patrick Cassidy had still not returned and the vicar opened the door. The church clock was striking five thirty and there was the same noise of commuter traffic as when the inspector had been there in the morning. It was still very hot. Cassidy was flushed and anxious and a faint smell of alcohol hung about him. He seemed perpetually on the verge of hysteria. He stood in the shadowy hall and peered out at Ramsay.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘It’s you. I had expected it to be Patrick. He drove off in my car earlier this afternoon and nobody knows where he’s got to. He’s a deep boy, you know. Very deep. It’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking even when one suspects he’s in terrible pain.’

Ramsay immediately noticed the change in him. Even his appearance was different. He was untidy, stooped. There was a stain on his shirt which might have been mayonnaise.