by Cleeves, Ann
She would emerge from the toilet with her bra and vest in her handbag, like a naughty schoolgirl, mildly triumphant that she had not been caught, only to find that there was no need for the rush. There was always a different excuse for the delay. They said that the machine had been switched off for maintenance or that they were short-staffed. Everyone else seemed to take the waiting in their stride, even to enjoy the opportunity to compare the hours of travelling and side effects, while they drank the dreadful WRVS tea. Emily hated it.
From the large waiting room with its pitiful attempts at homeliness – flower-patterned wallpaper, curtains, easy chairs – she was summoned eventually to a bench in the corridor. Here at least there was something to look at. She could see into the control room where radiographers in white uniforms were working the x-ray machines. One of the most complicated pieces of machinery had a brass plaque attached to it, saying that it had been bought by the Chester-Le-Street Ladies Circle. Why didn’t they mind their own business, Emily sometimes thought bitterly, the ladies of Chester-Le-Street? If it weren’t for their generosity perhaps I wouldn’t have to put up with this nonsense. Then she would be called in by one of the radiographers who had the professional cheerfulness of a nursery nurse.
‘Mrs Bowman,’ she would say. ‘ Strip to the waist, please.’
As if I don’t know that I have to take my clothes off, she thought, after a month of this. But she would go in meekly and suffer the indignity of being positioned on the table – sometimes by a man – and the lonely strangeness of the x-ray treatment itself which lasted only a matter of minutes.
Then there was always the wait for the ambulance to take her home.
A young woman doctor had broken the news to her that she had cancer. She had been very gentle, very sympathetic.
‘Sit down, Mrs Bowman,’ she had said. ‘Don’t hold in your feelings. Cry if you want to. It’s bound to be a shock.’
But Mrs Bowman had not felt like crying. The first sensation had been of exhilaration. This is it then, she had thought. It’s all over but I’ve had a good life. She had one son, but for years he had lived in New Zealand. No one would miss her. She had never been one for taking risks and this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. There was something dramatic about being incurably ill and she had expected a sudden change in her condition, then the final adventure of death. She had not expected the fuss, the tedium and the discomfort of this treatment. It seemed to her a complete waste of time. Even the young doctor had the decency to admit that it had little chance of succeeding. Yet there seemed no way of stopping the process. Emily felt powerless in front of their misguided humanity, their determination to do all they could to save her.
Stop! she wanted to say as she lay on the table and the machine above her head clicked and buzzed. Leave me alone. Really. I’ve had a good life and I’m ready to go now.
But she was so worn down by the waiting and the WRVS tea that when she finally got to the treatment room she did not have the courage or the energy to say anything.
She must have fallen asleep in her chair by the window and she woke quite suddenly, shivering, knowing that she had had a bad dream but was unable to remember it. The sun was full on her face and very hot. The skin on her shoulder was burning.
‘Let the air to your body,’ the radiographers would say. ‘ Take your clothes off for at least an hour every day.’
Emily Bowman breathed deeply, still disturbed by the dream, then pursed her lips. If they thought she would sit naked in her flat where any of the other residents might come in and see her they were very much mistaken. Yet she could feel the sun irritating her burnt skin and knew she would have to move. Besides, by now her bladder was full and she needed to go to the bathroom. It was one of her nightmares that she would be forced to ask the ambulance driver to stop on the way to the hospital. She stood up slowly and walked with difficulty to the bathroom. She was on her way back to the chair when Annie Ramsay burst into the room.
‘This is my flat,’ Emily snapped. ‘I’d be grateful if you had the courtesy to knock.’
She flushed with anger and the release of the tension caused by the waiting. One of the compensations of her illness was that she no longer cared what people thought of her. She was excused rudeness. She could say exactly what she chose.
Annie Ramsay was unperturbed by the hostility. Since Emily’s arrival at Armstrong House she had taken it upon herself to make the woman feel welcome, bringing home-made cakes and invitations to the afternoon bingo sessions with each visit. Emily Bowman had reacted to the attention at first with haughty politeness and later with more direct requests to be left alone. Annie Ramsay seemed not to hear or to understand.
‘It’s no trouble, man,’ she would say, settling into Emily’s only easy chair with her knitting. ‘We’re neighbours and both on our own. It’s a pleasure to have someone to chat to.’
But we have nothing in common, Emily wanted to say. My husband worked in a bank and yours down the pit. You’ve probably never read a book in your life and the very idea of bingo makes me want to scream. But as the cancer and the radiotherapy sapped all her energy she resisted less. She even began to find some relief in Annie Ramsay’s visits. She talked so much that Emily was required to make no contribution to the conversation. There was something relaxing about Annie’s gossip. It was like easy melodic popular music. Her irritability at these regular interruptions had become meaningless and ritual.
Annie Ramsay was a small woman, very tough and thin with stringy arms. All her clothes seemed too big for her. Her sparse hair was permed every month into tight curls.
‘We mustn’t let ourselves go,’ she would say to Emily, ‘ just because we’re on our own.’
At the Armstrong House socials she would make a bee-line for the unattached men and flirt with them. Sometimes Emily suspected that she had been drinking.
Now Annie seemed strangely subdued. Emily thought she had been crying.
‘I’ve some news,’ Annie said. But even in her sadness she found it impossible not to make a drama of the situation, so she added: ‘You’d best sit down. I’ll not take the risk of telling you while you’re standing. The shock might have you over.’
Although it was still in full sunlight Emily returned to the chair by the window, because from there she had a view of the main street and would see the ambulance arriving.
‘What is this all about?’ she said but her eyes were still on the traffic outside. When she turned back to the room Annie was crying again.
‘Come on,’ Emily said, more kindly. ‘It can’t be as bad as all that.’
‘It’s Dorothea Cassidy,’ Annie said in a whisper. ‘She’s dead.’
At first she could not tell if the woman had heard her. There was no reaction and that was disappointing. Everyone else in the place had expressed shock, horror and a desire for all the details. Emily Bowman had been a regular at St Mary’s until her illness had meant she couldn’t get out. She knew Dorothea Cassidy as well as any of them and Annie thought it would have been more fitting to show some grief.
‘Did you hear?’ Annie said more loudly. ‘Dorothea Cassidy is dead.’
‘I heard,’ Emily said. She shivered again as she had done when waking from the dream. She was not surprised. I wish it had been me, she thought. It should have been me.
‘It was me that raised the alarm,’ Annie Ramsay said. She could not keep the self-importance from her voice. ‘ She was coming to talk to the residents’ association about her work in Africa. She had slides, you know, of all the poor little black babies. When she didn’t turn up I knew something was wrong. I felt it in my bones. That’s why I phoned our Stephen. I thought he’d know what to do.’
Emily Bowman dragged her eyes away from the street below her.
‘What happened?’ she demanded. ‘How did she die?’
Annie Ramsay had been waiting for the opportunity and leaned forward.
‘She was murdered,’ she said. ‘Str
angled to death. Two boys found her in Prior’s Park early this morning.’
Emily shut her eyes, then opened them and fixed Annie with a fierce stare.
‘How do you know all this?’ she said. ‘Have you spoken to your nephew about it?’
‘No,’ Annie answered with some regret. ‘I phoned the station earlier but they said he was busy. I heard it on Radio Newcastle. The police are asking for anyone who saw her yesterday to come forward.’
Emily moved uncomfortably in her chair.
‘I saw her yesterday,’ she said carelessly, though she must have been aware of the excitement it would cause Annie. ‘She was here in the afternoon. She came to visit me.’
At that moment the warden knocked on the door and said that Inspector Ramsay was downstairs and would like to speak to Annie.
Annie Ramsay took her nephew to her own flat. She did not want Emily Bowman to steal her glory and decided she would save the information that Dorothea Cassidy had been to Armstrong House the previous afternoon until the end of the conversation. She walked beside him down the wide corridor, holding on to his arm, hoping all her friends would see her. In her flat she sat him in her favourite chair and made him tea, ignoring his insistence that he was in a hurry.
‘Now, pet,’ she said. ‘How can I help you?’ She thought it was the most natural thing in the world that he should come to her for help.
‘I want you to tell me about Dorothea Cassidy,’ he said. ‘I know you go to St Mary’s. What was she like?’
‘She was a treasure,’ Annie Ramsay said. ‘Man, we were lucky to have her there. She brought the whole place to life. And the laughs we had!’
‘In what way did she bring the place to life?’
‘She was all questions. She made us think. When you’re old like us you take it all for granted. We were brought up to go to church – not like the bairns these days – and for some of us it has no more meaning than a trip to the Co-op. Then she came and the talks we had …’ She wiped her eyes.
‘There must have been some opposition,’ he said, ‘if she began to challenge the old ways of doing things.’
‘Ah well,’ she said, ‘you get stick-in-the-muds everywhere.’
‘What about Walter Tanner?’ he asked. ‘ Is he a stick-in-the-mud?’
‘Man,’ she said, ‘he’s the biggest stick-in-the-mud in the world.’
‘Dorothea’s car was found in his drive this morning,’ he said.
The gem of information cheered her. ‘But that’s only next door.’
‘That’s why I’m here. Did you see anything last night?’
‘Why no. If I’d seen it last night I’d have told you.’
‘Would you have noticed it?’
She paused, considering. ‘ No,’ she said. ‘Probably not. My flat’s at the front, you see. You canna see Tanner’s house from here.’
‘And you didn’t go out last night?’
‘No,’ she said and smiled. ‘I wouldn’t have minded going to the fair but I was worried about Dorothea. Besides, I couldn’t find anyone to take me.’ She looked at Ramsay intently. ‘Tanner wouldn’t have killed her,’ she said. ‘They might have had their differences but there’s no violence in him. He’s too boring for that and he’s not a bad man.’
‘What did he do before he retired?’ Ramsay asked.
‘His family had that posh grocer’s in Front Street. You must have seen him in there.’
Ramsay shook his head but he remembered that his ex-wife, Diana, had shopped at Tanner’s. ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere else,’ she would say to her friends. ‘It’s the only place in Northumberland where you can get a decent piece of Brie. And real old-fashioned service.’
‘What about Edward Cassidy?’ Ramsay asked. ‘Whose side did he take in all this?’
‘Edward Cassidy never took a side in his life. Not since he moved to Otterbridge at any rate. He’s spent so much time sitting on the fence you’d think he’d have a hole in his pants.’ She stopped suddenly, aware that Ramsay was impatient and wanting to move on.
‘I’ve some news for you,’ she said. ‘Something I think will help. Mrs Cassidy was here yesterday afternoon.’
‘Did you see her?’
‘No,’ she said regretfully. ‘I must have been at the bingo. But I can introduce you to someone who did. Her name’s Emily Bowman. She’s very poorly. Cancer.’ She whispered the word. ‘Mrs Cassidy came to visit her regularly because she couldn’t make it to church. Shall I take you to meet her?’
But Ramsay was not prepared to give his time to another old lady. It was interesting, of course, but visiting the sick was a traditional occupation for a vicar’s wife and he was convinced that in the end it would be Dorothea’s other activities which would lead to her murderer. He wanted to find out about the case conference.
‘I’ll send Hunter, my sergeant, along. He’s doing house-to-house inquiries in the street.’ He smiled at her. ‘You’ll like him,’ he said. ‘He’s a good-looking chap.’
Then he left, because what motive could an old lady who was dying of cancer have for murder?
Clive Stringer was in the garden picking up litter that had blown there from the street when the policeman arrived at the flats. He was in plain clothes but Clive’s experience of the police went back to early childhood. There was something about the way they stood, their confidence, the way they looked about them that gave them away. He continued to pick up the litter, moving with slow, stooped movements over the grass, filling the black plastic sack which he carried in one hand. He was wearing gloves. The warden always insisted that he should wear gloves when he was working with the rubbish. She was afraid that he would catch germs. Yet every time he put a scrap of paper or a can into the sack he glanced sideways, so he saw the tall policeman walk away from Dorothea’s car and into the front door of Armstrong House.
That’s it, he thought. They know. It didn’t occur to him that there was no way they could know. He continued to work but when the old man from next door came out of his house he dropped the plastic sack and put the gloves in his pocket.
Distracted for a moment from his worry, he grinned maliciously and followed Walter Tanner up the street.
In the small house Walter Tanner had felt trapped. There were things he needed to do but he felt he could not leave while Hunter and the police constable stood outside on the pavement. They might ask where he was going. He began to devise some fictitious explanation but felt suddenly ashamed that he could have considered such deceit. He hadn’t sunk, he hoped, to lying. It was unnecessary. He went to the kitchen and began to wash up his breakfast dishes. Usually he left the plates on the draining board but today, because he wanted to delay for as long as possible a decision about going out, he dried them on a threadbare tea towel and put them away. By the time he had hung the tea towel to dry on the oven door and returned to the living room the car had disappeared from the drive and Hunter and the constable were on the other side of the road, knocking on doors, talking to neighbours. Even if they saw him leave the house, Tanner thought, there was nothing they could do to stop him. He had not, after all, been placed under some sort of house arrest. This anxiety was ridiculous.
But he waited until Hunter was right at the end of the street before leaving the house. Hunter was the one who frightened him. He would not listen to excuses or explanations. There would be no shades of grey with Hunter. Out in the street Tanner felt very exposed. He hurried, making his short legs walk very fast. He turned once and saw the half-wit from Armstrong House lurching up the street behind him.
What’s the matter with the boy? he thought. Why is he persecuting me like this?
He walked faster until he was almost running but it did no good. When he caught the bus towards the Ridgeway Estate Clive Stringer was right behind him and sat in the seat across the aisle from him, grinning all the time.
Chapter Six
The social services office for north Otterbridge was only a street away from Armstrong House and it back
ed on to the park. Ramsay wondered whether the geographical closeness had any significance but came to no conclusion. The street was wider than where Walter Tanner lived and the houses were larger. There were smooth green lawns and trees to ensure privacy. The only indication that the social services were housed in the building was a discreet sign by the gate and a car park at the end of the drive. Next door there was an exclusive private nursery and as Ramsay left his car he heard the fluting sound of a Joyce Grenfell nursery nurse calling to her charges. He wondered what the social workers’ clients who lived on the Ridgeway Estate thought of it all. It would be like walking into another world.
The senior social worker who had worked most closely with Dorothea Cassidy was called Hilary Masters. Ramsay had never met her, though Hunter had come across her when he was investigating a series of school arsons, and for a while she had been the subject of his canteen gossip. He had nicknamed her the Snow Queen.
‘Talk about icy,’ he had said. ‘Man, she’d freeze your balls off.’ He had spoken with regret. ‘She’s a beauty, mind.’
‘Perhaps,’ Ramsay had said tartly, ‘she’s just discriminating.’
‘Aye well. Perhaps you’re right. She might go for your type. But I like my women to have a bit of life in them all the same. There’s something weird about that one.’
Because of that exchange Ramsay felt Hilary Masters was worthy of admiration – he had never trusted Hunter’s judgement – and as he waited in the reception room he was nervous, and at the same time prepared to be disappointed.