‘What are you saying?’ he said. ‘Do you know who killed them?’
She shook her head, disappointed, because he could not understand that she only wanted to explain how things were.
‘She had another ready-made son,’ he said. ‘The stepson Patrick. Did she try to mother him too?’
‘She tried,’ Emily said, ‘but the last thing he wanted was mothering.’ Ramsay looked at her.
‘She was an attractive woman,’ she said. ‘She charmed them all. She couldn’t help it. She probably enjoyed it. We all like a bit of flattery.’
‘But Patrick Cassidy has a girlfriend.’
‘That makes no difference.’ She spoke sharply because he was questioning her judgement. ‘I saw the way he looked at her. The vicar saw it too but his head’s so deep in the sand he wouldn’t do anything about it. It wasn’t healthy the three of them living there.’
Ramsay remembered the brooding, unhappy poems in Patrick’s room and thought they must have been written for Dorothea, not Imogen.
‘I see,’ he said. And he felt he knew Dorothea Cassidy for the first time. She had charmed him too, even in death.
They sat in silence. Outside it was almost dark. He stared blankly out of the window and he saw the case, as if he had come to it freshly, with a new perspective. He thought of Joss Corkhill’s evidence and of something Walter Tanner had said. He thought of Clive’s divided loyalties and his obsession with time. He knew, then, who had killed Dorothea Cassidy.
Now he was left with the problem of what to do with Emily Bowman. He could hardly ask her to promise, as Dorothea had done, not to kill herself. Emily Bowman seemed to guess what he was thinking.
‘Don’t worry, Inspector,’ she said. ‘The moment’s past. I won’t do anything melodramatic. At least not tonight.’
He paused. The last thing he wanted was to offend her. ‘Does this treatment, which causes the discomfort, go on indefinitely?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank God. Only two more weeks.’
‘It might be better,’ he said, ‘to postpone a decision until then.’
‘So it might,’ she said and smiled at him.
‘Would you like company?’ he said.
She smiled again. ‘Yes. Send Annie in to see me. She can make me some of her dreadful tea and talk about the men in her life.’
Outside it seemed hotter, more humid. When he swung open the double-glazed door from Armstrong House to the street it was quite noisy too. From across the river there was traditional fairground music and a siren which blew every time one of the rides reached a climax of speed. Occasionally a woman’s scream tore through the background sound. By now the carnival parade would be over, the floats drawn up on Abbey Meadow in a circle like a Wild West wagon train. The participants would be dispersing to the fair and the pubs. Soon the whole senseless performance would be over for another year.
Ramsay sat in the car and spoke urgently into the radio to Hunter. They would need a search warrant, he said. They might have some trouble getting a conviction without Dorothea’s diary and handbag, and he thought he knew where they might be found. Only then did he tell Hunter who they were looking for. He gave the sergeant no time for questions.
‘Bring them in,’ he said. ‘I have to speak to them both.’
He left his car where it was, in Armstrong Street, close to Walter Tanner’s front door. Perhaps I should speak to him, he thought. Check the details first. But he knew by now how desperate the murderer had become and that there was no time. It would be impossible to park in the centre of Otterbridge. This was as close as he could hope to get, so he walked down the quiet street towards the small gate which led to the park.
The policeman on duty there seemed surprised to see him, but recognised him and let him through without a word. There was no one else about. The respectable elderly residents had their curtains drawn against the noise and everyone else would be in town. The festival gave a legitimate excuse for them to drink too much, for rowdy exhibitionism. They would tell each other that it was tradition.
At almost the same time, the night before, Dorothea Cassidy had been carried down this path and laid to rest on the flower bed. The park was as quiet now, at ten o’clock, with the pubs still open, as it had been in the early hours of the morning. There were lamps in the park but they were a long distance apart and it was not, after all, so surprising that the revellers, on their way home in the dark, had failed to see a body at their feet.
The belief that Dorothea had been moved to the park in the early hours of the morning had been his first mistake. There had been many more. He had thought the murderer would be rational, clear-sighted; he realised now that each move had been a response to panic. He had to get to the town before the killer panicked again.
Chapter Nineteen
It had seemed to get dark suddenly. The sun disappeared and almost immediately afterwards the fairy lights along the river were switched on and so were the spotlights directed at the abbey and the town walls. The visitors who were climbing into coaches to take them home were enchanted. How pretty the town was! they said. What a delightful evening!
In contrast, with nightfall the fair became a more menacing and exciting place. Children were taken home, protesting and exhausted, carried on parents’ shoulders, and the site was left to the gangs of teenagers, to the older men who stood in the shadows and watched them jealously and to the police with their photos and their questions. The rides seemed to become more noisy and frantic.
Joss Corkhill had spent all evening successfully avoiding the police. His friends on the fair had helped him, allowing him to crouch beneath the hoop-la stall or in the canvas folds of the hot-dog tent. It had become a game – spotting the plain-clothes detectives at a distance and making sure Joss was out of the way before they arrived at the ride where he was working. None of them had any time for the police. They had been harassed too often, blamed for crimes they had never committed. Now they felt the concentration of the police on the fairground was an injustice. Anyone in the town could have murdered that vicar’s wife, they said. Why blame it on one of us? We didn’t even know her and old Joss wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Joss had been drinking all evening and had reached the euphoric peak which was the highlight and purpose of all his drinking bouts. He did not always achieve the high, and he knew it would be quickly followed by depression, but while it lasted he was magnificently content. He wondered now how he had ever become entangled with Theresa Stringer and her bloody family. Why had he wanted her to travel with him so much anyway? He was better on his own. As he played his strange game of hide and seek all over the fairground, he felt the exhilaration of the chase. Nothing else had any importance at all.
He was back at work on the Noah’s Ark when he saw the pretty woman who had been at the fair the night before with Dorothea Cassidy. He was standing on the ride with his back to the safety rail, keeping an eye on the crowd for the fuzz. Despite the alcohol he balanced perfectly, even when the ride was at its fastest. He knew the two giggling girls sitting near to him were watching him, and he intended, as the ride slowed, to offer to help them off. Then he glimpsed the pale young woman, just for a moment, in the crowd. He was tempted to find one of the policemen, to point her out and say: ‘That’s the one you want.’ But why should he? Let the police do their own dirty work.
Imogen Buchan did not know why Patrick had brought her to the fair. The noise and the crowd made her feel sick and faint. She had eaten very little all day. Patrick’s phone call had summoned her to a pub in the town centre, close to the church and she had thought they would talk, there would be explanations, and the tragedy of Dorothea’s death would bring them close together again. There would be a return of the old intimacy. She would help him through his grief. Instead he had dragged her from one packed pub to another and when she tried to take his hand, to express some sympathy, he pushed her away. Then he had insisted that she go with him to Abbey Meadow.