‘Is she at the university too?’ Ramsay asked.
‘No, no,’ Cassidy said impatiently. ‘She’s a nurse in the general hospital.’
‘How did Imogen and Mrs Cassidy get on?’
‘I don’t know. Well enough. Patrick didn’t bring her here very often. You know what young people are like.’
‘Would your wife have had any urgent reason to speak to her yesterday?’
‘No. Of course not. What is this all about?’
But Ramsay only shook his head, as if he were making polite conversation to pass the time until Patrick returned.
‘Have you had any other visitors today?’ he asked. ‘Since the Walkers brought you back to the vicarage?’
Cassidy shook his head.
‘And you’ve been here all the time?’
‘Of course!’ The clergyman was almost shouting. ‘I’ve been waiting for Patrick.’
There was a pause and the church clock struck six.
‘I’m afraid I must ask you some more questions about your movements yesterday,’ Ramsay said gently. ‘Just to confirm your story. There’s been a minor discrepancy. Probably nothing important.’
Cassidy stared at him blankly.
‘You say that you left here at about quarter past five. Patrick said that he arrived home soon after. He just missed you, he said. We have a witness who states she saw Mrs Cassidy’s car in the drive at half past five. She saw Patrick and Mrs Cassidy having tea together in the kitchen. They were rather strained, she thought. Patrick never told us about that meeting. Can you think of any reason for his wanting to keep it a secret?’
‘No,’ Cassidy said. ‘How should I know? You’ll have to ask him.’
‘We will ask him,’ Ramsay murmured. The sun, lower than it had been in the morning, now shone directly through the window, making the room breathlessly hot. Ramsay was thinking that he should leave. He imagined Hunter at Tanner’s house, fuming, waiting for more instructions, for some idea of what was going on. He could send somebody else to the house to wait with Cassidy for Patrick’s return. But just as he was about to go the vicar, oppressed it seemed by the heat and the silence and the tension of waiting for his son, began to talk.
‘I think Dorothea must have been disappointed in me,’ he said. ‘Before we married she only really knew me from my books and they were written a long time ago. It is rather easy to stand up for one’s principles in print. I think she must have been disappointed in the coward she had actually married.’
‘And Dorothea?’ Ramsay asked. ‘Did she have principles?’
The vicar sat forward in his chair. ‘I rather think,’ he said, ‘ that she had too many.’
Chapter Sixteen
Walter Tanner sat in the dusty living room and stared with increasing hostility at Gordon Hunter. Although the policeman had arrived more than an hour before, he had only just begun to give Tanner his full attention. At the start it had been noise and self-important bustle, with Hunter standing in the hall directing a stream of strangers upstairs. There were still police cars outside and a small crowd of the less inhibited neighbours gathered to watch. From the landing came men’s loud voices and someone was whistling. For a moment Tanner felt something of the excitement and exhilaration that came to him when he was gambling. In the betting shop there was noise, a breathless sense of risk and the feeling that in the minutes of watching the horses on the television in the corner of the shop he was really living. This is a gamble, he thought, as somebody else came to open the door and stamped up the stairs without waiting for an invitation. How much I tell the police, how I play the situation, it’s all a gamble. Then he looked at Hunter’s face and thought that, as in the bookmaker’s, the punter was always destined to lose.
‘You can’t expect me to believe that this is all coincidence,’ Hunter said. He was standing, leaning against a solid bookcase with one shoulder. He knew that this was his big chance for promotion and he was convinced Tanner was a murderer. I’ll show Ramsay that you don’t have to have been to the Grammar to get results! he thought. ‘A murdered woman’s car and now the boy’s body,’ he said. ‘It’s about time you started telling us what it’s all about. Where were you this afternoon?’
Tanner took a deep breath. This was it. He was under starter’s orders.
‘I was on the Ridgeway Estate,’ he said.
‘Were you visiting someone?’ Hunter demanded. ‘Was it Stringer? Something to do with the church?’
Tanner smiled and showed uneven nicotine-stained teeth. Keep it light, he thought. Keep it confident. Make it seem that there’s nothing to hide. Some of it they’ll find out anyway.
‘No, Sergeant,’ Tanner said. ‘Hardly that. I was there to visit my bookmaker.’
‘Do you expect me to believe that?’ Hunter said. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’
‘Not at all, Sergeant. I have a little flutter occasionally. Nothing substantial, of course. It’s a little harmless fun since I retired.’
‘There were witnesses?’ Hunter said.
‘Of course, Sergeant. Of course.’
And they had not got much further than that when Ramsay arrived from the vicarage. He had been back to the station to pick up a car and Hunter watched it draw up with anger and disappointment.
That was typical, he thought. Ramsay had arrived to steal the glory, just as Tanner was about to confess. But Ramsay, it seemed, was unconvinced about Tanner’s guilt. Hunter met him in the hall and tried to persuade him to take the retired grocer to the police station for questioning.
‘Put him in the cells for an hour,’ he said. ‘That’ll persuade him to talk.’
‘How does he seem?’ Ramsay asked.
‘Cocky. Too bloody cocky. Seems to find it funny.’
‘Perhaps he’s hysterical,’ Ramsay said. There was after all something ridiculous about a body in a bath. It was like a second-rate horror movie.
‘But the evidence!’ Hunter said. ‘The car and the boy’s body. And now you tell me there was motive too. The vicar’s wife had found out about his gambling and Tanner couldn’t stand the lad. It’s too much of a coincidence.’
‘Perhaps the murderer has a perverse sense of humour,’ Ramsay said. ‘Or a grudge against the old man. And we don’t know that Dorothea had found out about the gambling. It’s only a possibility.’
He was distant, as if his attention was elsewhere and he was going through the motions of considering Hunter’s opinion. Of all the inspector’s moods Hunter found this the most irritating.
‘Is there anything else I should know?’ the sergeant demanded. ‘Something relevant which might be worth a mention?’
Ramsay blinked as if shocked by the crude sarcasm but he answered calmly.
‘Dorothea Cassidy went back to the vicarage late yesterday afternoon. She met Patrick. The witness says the atmosphere was strained but she’s deaf so she’s probably rather unreliable. And I know who Dorothea went to see in the hospital yesterday.’
Hunter remained defiantly silent. He would not give Ramsay the satisfaction of asking for the information.
‘It was the staff nurse you spoke to,’ Ramsay said. ‘Her name’s Buchan. Imogen Buchan. She’s Patrick Cassidy’s girlfriend.’
Hunter swore under his breath.
‘There is something else,’ Ramsay said. There bloody would be, Hunter thought. ‘Joss Corkhill saw Dorothea Cassidy at the fair last night. Or he says he did. He might be a malicious witness playing games but I think I believe him. She was with a young woman whose description fits that of Imogen Buchan. He should be at the fair all night. We’ll send someone round with a photo to make sure.’
Still Hunter insisted that they should take Walter Tanner to the police station but Ramsay pulled rank and refused. The double murder had attracted the attention of the national press. They were jumpy and took delight in coming too quickly to conclusions. The phrase ‘helping the police with their inquiries’ would be seen by them as a euphemism and Annie Ramsay’s evidence made it impossible that Walter had killed Clive. Even if the boy were waiting for Tanner inside the house he would hardly have had time to commit the murder between arriving home and phoning the police. There was Dorothea, of course; still a chance that Tanner had killed her. But in that case who had murdered Clive? And what could be the motive? Ramsay felt that Tanner was useful because he had been close to Dorothea and understood the politics of the church. But he certainly wasn’t a suspect in his own right.