A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy (15 page)

He fidgeted and worried like a confused old person at a day centre who believes he has been deserted.

‘Of course we’ll take you back,’ Dolly said. ‘Or if you prefer you can spend the night here.’ She found his selfish preoccupation with what was to become of him a little embarrassing. It was unlike him. Usually he had impeccable manners.

No, no, he said. There were so many things to do. He knew he was being a nuisance but he would really rather be at home. Patrick after all would go back to the vicarage. They should be together. Perhaps if it wasn’t too much trouble they could go now. He stood up, his glass still in his hand, and waited for them to arrange it.

‘Of course,’ Dolly said and by now there were tears in her eyes. He was usually so confident, so able to put on a good show. ‘We’ll come with you and wait at the vicarage until Patrick gets home.’

Then he turned on them and shouted, his voice querulous and pitiful.

‘No!’ he cried. ‘You don’t understand. I have to be on my own.’

When he saw how offended and hurt they were there was a brief show of the old charm. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘ You must forgive me. I’m really not myself today.’

He drank the remainder of the wine and allowed Dolly to take his arm and lead him back towards the house.

They had a big BMW and sat him in the back of it, treating him still like an invalid. If it had not been so hot Dolly would have tucked a rug around his knees. The Major drove slowly, avoiding the pot-holes in the lane, and in Otterbridge they were held up by two men on stilts who paraded down the centre of Front Street. All the same when they arrived at the vicarage the church clock showed only two o’clock. Later, when the police asked questions about the time, Dolly was tempted to lie, but the Major told her that liars were always caught out and anyway it was impossible to believe that Patrick or Edward could have murdered that half-wit from Armstrong House. What motive could there be? The police asked too if Patrick was already back at the vicarage by the time they returned with the priest. Again, reluctantly, they told the truth. No, they said, there was no sign of Patrick’s car when they saw Edward into the vicarage and sat him in the study, surrounded by his photographs of Dorothea.

Imogen Buchan finished her shift at the hospital at two o’clock. She changed quickly out of her uniform in the cloakroom then hurried away, past the smudged posters of Dorothea Cassidy, to the staff car park to collect her Metro. There were other nurses on her ward who had finished shift at the same time and they lingered in the cloakroom, sharing gossip, planning some social event to which Imogen had not been invited. They took little notice when Imogen hurried away. One of them put a finger under her nose to express snootiness, then they all giggled and returned to their conversation. They acknowledged that Imogen was a brilliant nurse but she had never fitted in. If they had been closer friends they would have known that Patrick Cassidy was Imogen’s boyfriend. Someone might have recognised the connection with the murdered woman on the poster and told the police. But Imogen had always kept her private life to herself.

When she had decided on nursing as a career her parents were, at the same time, disappointed and relieved. They would definitely have preferred her to go to university, but though they would never admit it to Imogen they realised she was unlikely to get high enough A-level grades for a good university place. Her parents were both English teachers at the High School and had inside knowledge. Imogen’s teachers said that she worked very hard but she didn’t have Miranda’s intellectual edge. Miranda was her sister, two years older, and already at Oxford.

So Mr and Mrs Buchan greeted Imogen’s tentative suggestion that she should go in for nurse-training with enthusiasm. She obviously had a
vocation
, they said. Of course they would respect her decision. And that was the line they took with friends. They thought Imogen was
so
brave not to opt automatically for university, they told the stream of dinner-party guests who came to the house that summer. They knew she had a lot to give. Imogen, who hated the gatherings where the talk was of novels she had never read and of the philistine horrors of the National Curriculum, would blush awkwardly and turn away.

Now Imogen was twenty-two and qualified, quite competent to take charge of a ward. More competent, her colleagues often agreed, than some sisters they could mention. She found in nursing something at which she could excel. At last she had her own field of interest and her parents could stop comparing her unfavourably with Miranda. Imogen had such a sense of responsibility! they said. Such dedication!

Despite this, Imogen was vaguely conscious that during her training there had been an element of competition with her sister, all the more humiliating because Miranda was unaware of it and spent her time at university in a sleepless round of parties and political activity. Imogen had been so determined to succeed that before she was qualified her social life had been non-existent. Her time off was spent at home, writing up her patient studies, preparing the next essay. With the other students she was shy, embarrassed. In those three years she had never had a real boyfriend, and their casual talk of affairs and separations made her feel inadequate. They put her quietness down to snobbishness; she sensed their hostility and grew even more reserved.

Yet on the ward, especially with the elderly or the very ill, she blossomed. The patients seemed unintimidated by her, more comfortable when she was there. The other students came to resent her skill. When they had all qualified there was less pressure to do well and she had more confidence. She would have welcomed then the opportunity to go out with them, but they had stopped asking.

She had met Patrick through her parents at one of their dreadful dinner parties the autumn after she qualified. He was just about to start at the university. Ann Buchan had joined a support group set up by Dorothea to provide funds for the orphanage where she had worked in Africa and an improbable friendship had developed. In Imogen’s view the women had nothing in common. Her mother had a middle-class tolerance to every point of view, except conventional Christianity, which she dismissed quite categorically as superstition. Yet she seemed to admire Dorothea immensely and the Cassidys became regulars at the house. On this occasion Patrick had been invited too, probably, Imogen suspected, to provide company for her, as if she were a child and unable to follow the adult conversation. Miranda had disappeared early back to Oxford, claiming that Northumberland bored her.

It was mid-September and it had been raining steadily all day, so when the Cassidys arrived they would have to run up the path under dripping trees. When the doorbell rang Mrs Buchan was still upstairs, not quite ready for them.

‘Open the door, darling,’ she shouted down to Imogen. ‘And get everyone a drink.’

But a drink of what? Imogen wondered with horror. If they wanted wine it would be impossible. She had never once opened a bottle without leaving shreds of cork floating on the top. And she never knew exactly how much to give.

Yet when she opened the door Patrick stood there alone, as obviously unhappy about the dinner party as she was. Could they borrow an umbrella, he asked grudgingly. Edward and Dorothea were still in the car and had forgotten theirs. Outside it was dark and he stood under the porch light, his hair plastered against his forehead, very tall. She wanted to reach out and touch his wet jacket and kiss his wet hair. Her stomach dipped and her head spun. It was the first time she had felt such a physical attraction. So this is what it’s all about? she thought, astonished. All that gossiping and giggling in corners. I never realised. She found two umbrellas and walked with him down the path to the car.

‘There’s no need to come out,’ he said, but she thought he was glad she was there. They took an umbrella each and walked in single file up the path, kept apart by the spokes. Then they gave one to Edward and Dorothea and shared the other. The Cassidys ran off laughing towards the house, splashing in the puddles on the muddy path. Patrick and Imogen followed slowly and he put his arm around her waist to hold her in out of the rain.

‘Isn’t he a bit young for you, darling?’ her mother had said when she started going out with him. ‘He’s only eighteen. Only a boy. We were rather hoping you would find a nice doctor.’

That was only half a joke. Doctors were graduates with a high status and a good income. But she accepted Patrick as second best, as she had accepted nursing. He would be a graduate too one day and there was something charmingly old-fashioned about being the son of a clergyman. Mrs Buchan told her friends that age was irrelevant these days and Patrick was so mature for an eighteen-year-old.

‘Perhaps,’ she would say, hopefully, ‘he will introduce Imogen to some culture.’

And occasionally she would question her daughter after an evening out with Patrick: ‘Where did he take you, darling? Did you see that new thing at the Playhouse?’

‘No,’ Imogen would say vaguely. ‘We were out with friends, for a meal, you know …’

But that was a lie. She would have considered time in the theatre or a restaurant as wasted. Patrick had a friend with a room in one of the halls of residence and usually they went there to make love. At other times they walked, for miles, along small country roads or they sat by the river and talked. In the beginning they never squandered their time together by sharing it with other young people.

A different mother might have been concerned about her daughter. Imogen became so wrapped up in her infatuation for Patrick that she gave up all her other interests. She lost touch with the few friends she had kept from school. When she was not at work she thought of nothing else. If there was a day when he could not see her she brooded, imagining some secret betrayal. Nothing mattered so much as their relationship. She found it difficult to sleep. She stopped eating regularly and grew thin, paler than ever. The weight loss suited her and gave her a luminous, insubstantial quality, but she always seemed tired.

If her mother noticed the change in Imogen it did not worry her. She was in love. What could be more natural? Ann Buchan was busy with the preparation for exams, her voluntary work, with entertaining. Imogen worked shifts and spent every hour she could with Patrick. Mother and daughter hardly ever met. It was Miranda, home for a long weekend to sleep off the effects of a particularly hectic term, who said:

‘Bloody hell, Imo, what have you been doing? You look positively anorexic.’

Still Ann Buchan was not concerned. Eating disorders happened to silly sixteen-year-olds, not mature nurses. Work on the cancer ward was particularly stressful and Imogen was tired, that was all. She met Imogen one night in the kitchen as her daughter was heating up a bowl of soup in the micro-wave, and made what she thought was a helpful suggestion:

‘We hardly ever see you now, darling. Have you ever thought of moving in with Patrick? Getting a flat, perhaps, in town. It would be less tiring for you both and we might see more of you on your days off.’

Ann Buchan was proud of herself. She thought it broadminded to have suggested that arrangement, but to her surprise Imogen did not reply. She stared at her mother in silent resentment and went to her room leaving the soup uneaten.

That conversation with her mother came back to Imogen as she drove along the winding road which led to Otterbridge. It was half past two. She switched on the radio, but the local news was all about the murder of Dorothea Cassidy and she switched it off again, quickly, trying to pretend that the tragedy had never happened.

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.