‘What about the colour?’ Ramsay would say impatiently when she phoned him. ‘You must have seen that.’
But she had to tell the truth and say she had no idea. She was able, however, to give him an accurate time, because as the car drove off the bell in the primary school on the main street was rung and the children ran out to the lollipop lady on the zebra crossing. The school day finished at a quarter to four.
She spent a few minutes looking at the children, trying to recognise the ones who lived locally, delighting in how brown and healthy they were. When she looked back into Armstrong Street she saw Walter Tanner walking from the direction towards which the car had driven. She had never liked Walter Tanner – his mother had gone to school with Annie and she had always found her a snooty cow – but as she watched him walk slowly along the street she was moved to pity.
‘It was as if he had all the cares of the world on his shoulders,’ she would tell Ramsay later.
‘But the time? What time did Mr Tanner get home?’
‘Ten to four,’ she would say, quite certain, tempted for a moment to lie, just to please him.
‘Are you sure that it couldn’t have been earlier?’
And she would shake her head disappointed and frustrated because she couldn’t be of more help.
She had watched Walter Tanner shuffle down the street to his front door and pause there as if he needed to collect his breath. She had seen him take out his keys, then push open the door, surprised at not needing to use them. She had missed the arrival of the ambulance, Gordon Hunter and the pathologist, because she had decided by then that detecting might run in the family and she could do some investigating of her own.
It had occurred to her while she was sitting in the sun that Thursday was the day the church was cleaned. There was a rota. Annie took her turn with the other ladies to polish pews, hoover the floor and do the silver. Dorothea had tried to persuade some men to be involved in these domestic chores but they had been surprisingly resistant. So, someone would have been in the church the evening before. The hoover, the dusters and the polish were kept in the scullery next to the vicarage kitchen. If Dorothea had returned to the vicarage after all it was possible that one of the cleaning ladies had seen her.
Annie Ramsay found the rota in the drawer of her kitchen table. The first two names against 20 June were of no interest to her. They were active pensioners, keen bowlers, who did their cleaning early in the morning to leave the rest of the day free for their sport. The third was more hopeful. She went under the improbable name of Cuthbertina David and she lived in a flat in Armstrong House.
Cuthbertina David was a tall, angular woman with wild, white hair and enormous flat feet. She was deaf and her hearing aid seemed little use to her. Annie Ramsay stood in the corridor and knocked on Cuthbertina’s door. She was very excited. There was no answer. She knocked again, growing more and more impatient and frustrated. She knew Cuthbertina was there. If the deaf old bat didn’t come soon she would have to fetch the warden for her key. At last the door opened.
‘Eh, I’m sorry, hinnie,’ the woman said. In contrast to her manic appearance her voice was soft and melodic. ‘I didn’t hear you. Come in.’
‘I’ve come about Mrs Cassidy,’ Annie yelled. ‘You must have heard about the tragedy.’
‘No, hinnie. What tragedy’s that?’
‘Didn’t the police come to talk to you this morning?’
‘I’ve been in all morning and I’ve seen no one. But maybe they knocked and I didn’t hear the door.’
Annie shouted an explanation of what had happened, then came to the point.
‘It was your day for church cleaning yesterday,’ she said.
‘Aye,’ Cuthbertina said. ‘ I can’t do any heavy work now. Not with the arthritis so bad. But they let me do the silver. I can sit to do that.’
‘Did you have to go to the vicarage?’
‘Of course. Like I always do. Even if they’re all out there’s a key to the back door in the vestry.’
‘Were they all out yesterday?’
‘No. I thought someone would be there because Mrs Cassidy’s car was parked in the drive.’
‘Did you see Mrs Cassidy?’
‘Yes. She was in the kitchen with the lad, Patrick. I thought she might give me a cup of tea. She’d just made a brew, but they seemed to be busy, serious, you know. I don’t think the lad saw me even, he was that engrossed.’
‘What were they talking about?’
‘Eh, hinnie, you know what my hearing’s like. I didn’t go into the kitchen, only the scullery. How could I tell?’
‘What was the time?’ Annie Ramsay said. ‘Do you know what the time was when you saw her in the vicarage?’
‘Aye,’ Cuthbertina said. ‘It was half past five. I looked up at the church clock.’
‘Did you go back later to take the cleaning stuff?’
‘No,’ Cuthbertina said. ‘I thought I’d leave it in the vestry just this once. I got the idea Mrs Cassidy wouldn’t want to be disturbed.’
Triumphantly Annie Ramsay scuttled back to her flat to phone her nephew to tell him the news and receive his admiration.
Chapter Fourteen
When Imogen arrived in Otterbridge she drove straight to the vicarage. Edward Cassidy had the kitchen door open before she could get out of the car and he walked out on to the square patch of gravel at the side of the house, shielding his eyes from the bright sunlight with one hand, to see who it was. She could tell at once that he was disappointed and they stared at each other, not sure what to say. He was so grey and confused that Imogen wondered if he might be physically ill.
‘I was looking for Patrick,’ she said at last. ‘ I wanted to help. I don’t know…’
He shook his head.
‘He’s not here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where he went.’ Then plaintively, ‘He’s taken my car.’
‘How is he?’
‘Upset. Dreadfully upset. He was very fond of his stepmother.’
Oh yes, Imogen thought bitterly, we all know how fond he was of Dorothea.
He tried to persuade her to come into the house with him, to take some tea, share the burden of waiting for Patrick, but she refused. She knew Edward wanted to talk about Dorothea and she could not stand that. She almost ran back to her car and drove away too quickly, so that the wheels spun on the gravel and the cats that had been sleeping on the back doorstep in the sun ran into the house.
She drove through the town to her parents’ house. She thought Patrick might try to get in touch with her there. The progress through the crowded streets was slow and she swore to herself and hit the horn with her fist when pedestrians would not move out of her way. In the square by the alms-houses some sort of pageant was in progress. It was full of children in medieval dress. Bloody festival, she thought. The whole town goes mad at this time of the year.
Her parents lived in a large semi-detached villa in one of the quiet streets close to the park. She had long since stopped thinking of it as her home, though she had never lived anywhere else, except in a nurses’ home for the first few months of her training. And she’d hated that. All along the street, in the gardens and by the side of the road, trees were in blossom. Much of it was past its best so the pavement and parked cars and the tidy front lawns were covered with the shrivelled pink flowers. Her mother laughed at the neighbours’ attempts to sweep the dead blossom away. ‘ What does it matter?’ she would say. ‘There’ll only be more tomorrow. What tedious lives those people must live if they can think of nothing better to do.’