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. ‘Strangled 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.
The social services office for north Otterbridge was only a street away from Armstrong House and it backed 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.
He was shown into a large, airy office and saw a tall woman in her thirties. She was single, obviously independent and Ramsay thought she would be ambitious. She was dressed in a cotton skirt and blouse in swirling pastel colours which did not suit her. Her legs were very long and her feet rather big. Yet she was, as Hunter had said, a beauty. Her face was startling – oval, flawless and perfectly symmetrical. She sat behind her desk and stared at him with calm grey eyes.
The police station had been in touch with her and she was expecting him.
‘Inspector Ramsay,’ she said. ‘How can I help you?’
He felt ill at ease with her. Partly it was her perfect face and her air of competence, but he felt too that she was magically perceptive. She seemed to know his weakness just by looking at him. But he was not disappointed by her.
‘I’m investigating the murder of Dorothea Cassidy,’ he said. ‘I understand that she was here for a case conference yesterday.’
She paused, as though wondering if it were against her principles even to tell him that.
‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘She was here yesterday.’
‘Can you tell me what the conference was about?’
She frowned. ‘Is it relevant to your investigation?’
‘It might be. We’re trying to trace Mrs Cassidy’s movements yesterday. She was seen at lunchtime on the Ridgeway Estate. Perhaps you could tell me who she had gone to visit there.’
Hilary Masters sat quite still.
‘A woman called Stringer,’ she said. ‘Theresa Stringer.’
‘Was she the subject of the case conference?’
‘No,’ she said reluctantly. ‘It was her daughter, Beverley. We had to decide whether or not she should be taken into care.’
‘What decision did you come to?’
‘We decided that we would go for a place-of-safety order.’
‘What does that mean?’
She looked at him as if offended by his ignorance. ‘It means that we thought she would be at risk if she were left at home.’
He wondered if the measured, uninformative answers were designed to provoke him to anger. Why was she so politely hostile? Did she dislike him personally or simply distrust all men in authority? He recognised her prickly defensiveness as part of himself.
‘What sort of risk was she in?’ he asked evenly. ‘Neglect, sexual abuse, physical abuse?’