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.
Chapter Fifteen
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.
‘Come in!’ he said, with some desperation. He was obviously afraid of being left alone. He led Ramsay into his study, then stood, looking aimlessly around the room. The photographs he had shown Ramsay so proudly, earlier in the day, had been removed from the album and were scattered over the desk. One caught Ramsay’s eye and he remembered where he had heard the name of the staff nurse Hunter had spoken to on the cancer ward. He said nothing but saved it for later.
‘I’m so worried, you see,’ Cassidy said. ‘I couldn’t stand it if there was another tragedy.’
The words seemed prophetic and Ramsay wondered if he must know something about the death of Clive Stringer, then saw that the vicar was preoccupied with his own family, his own security. Cassidy looked up at the policeman and said simply, ‘I don’t think I could bear to be all alone. Not now.’
Then he sat heavily on the chair by the desk and stared out to the garden.
‘I’m afraid,’ Ramsay said, ‘I’ve more bad news.’
The clergyman turned his head slowly to face him. He was very frightened.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘What’s happened?’
Ramsay answered the unspoken question first. ‘It’s nothing to do with Patrick,’ he said. ‘Clive Stringer died this afternoon. I understand he was one of your parishioners.’
Cassidy leaned back in his chair.
‘How dreadful!’ he breathed. ‘ Poor Clive.’ But Ramsay was disturbed to find in the words a sense of relief and almost of satisfaction. Cassidy showed no curiosity about how Clive had died.
‘He was murdered,’ Ramsay said. ‘Almost certainly by the same person as your wife.’
‘Murdered?’ He spoke the word slowly, even calmly – as if the news was too much for him to take in. ‘I don’t understand…’ Ramsay was afraid he would break down. With an effort he pulled himself together and continued. ‘How can I help you?’
‘I have to know,’ Ramsay said, ‘what connection there could be between Clive Stringer and your wife.’
‘Connection?’ The man repeated the word automatically. ‘I don’t think there was any connection. Not in that sense. Dorothea brought him to church. She befriended him and his family. She was good with children…’
‘Was Clive made welcome in church?’ Ramsay asked. He tried to remember his last visit to an Anglican church. It was to a family baptism and the regular members of the congregation had seemed affronted by the invasion of strangers who stole their place in the pews and sang the hymns with unseemly gusto. The church had not seemed a particularly democratic organisation and it was hard to imagine Clive Stringer mixing on equal terms with either the Walkers or Walter Tanner.
‘I don’t know what you mean, Inspector,’ Cassidy said sharply, sensing the implication behind the words. ‘Everyone is made welcome. The Church of England isn’t a social club for the middle classes.’
But as he spoke them the words seemed trite and meaningless.
‘All the same,’ the inspector said gently, ‘Clive can’t have been an easy person to accommodate. His language, his appearance, his delinquency must have made him an object of attention.’