A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy Read online

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  Contents

  Ann Cleeves

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Ann Cleeves

  A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy

  Ann Cleeves is the author behind ITV’s VERA and BBC One’s SHETLAND. She has written over twenty-five novels, and is the creator of detectives Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez – characters loved both on screen and in print. Her books have now sold over one million copies worldwide.

  Ann worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She is a member of ‘Murder Squad’, working with other British northern writers to promote crime fiction. In 2006 Ann was awarded the Duncan Lawrie Dagger (CWA Gold Dagger) for Best Crime Novel, for Raven Black, the first book in her Shetland series. In 2012 she was inducted into the CWA Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame. Ann lives in North Tyneside.

  Chapter One

  Two boys found Dorothea Cassidy in Prior’s Park. It was June, Midsummer’s Day. Although it was only seven in the morning it had been light for hours. The boys were on their way to begin a newspaper round and took a short cut, as they always did, along a footpath through the park. Cycling was forbidden but at that time in the morning there was no one to complain. The boys were in high spirits. It was the week of the midsummer carnival and they had spent the evening before at the fun fair on Abbey Meadow. They were over-tired, but excited at the prospect of another night at the fair. They shouted to each other, riding over the short grass, their tyres making tracks in the dew. The day was clear but there was still a trace of mist over the River Otter, winding through the ruins of the abbey and the spokes of the Big Wheel on the opposite bank. Later it would be hot.

  The park was extensive and well laid out – in the summer months coach parties came from all over Northumberland to see the rose gardens. The boys rode past the children’s swings and the tennis courts then followed the path along the river which led towards the centre of town.

  Dorothea was lying in a border of flowers close to the path. The border was still in the shadow thrown by the tall trees and shrubs beyond it, but even in the shade it would have been impossible to miss her. She wore sky-blue dungarees and a knitted jacket in blues and golds. On her feet were sandals made of red, plaited leather. Her hands were folded across her breast so they could see her wedding and engagement rings against the brown skin of her long fingers. She was lying on her back, crushing the small plants beneath her, and despite the rich soil and the leaf mould her face was quite clean.

  The first boy braked sharply and almost caused a collision. They dismounted and stared, not believing what they saw. She looked like part of the design of the flower bed, surrounded by the brightly coloured and symmetrically patterned plants.

  Both boys were fourteen and thought they were tough but even a regular diet of horror movies had not prepared them for the reality of what now confronted them. They looked around for adult help.

  The younger boy came to his senses more quickly. He began to see the potential of the discovery. They might get their names in the papers, he said. It might even provide an excuse for a morning off school.

  ‘One of us should stop here,’ he said, ‘and the other should fetch the police. Do you mind staying?’

  The other shook his head. He could not take his eyes off the woman. He thought she was like a statue from a museum. Her skin was blue and looked very cold. He was tempted to touch her, almost expecting the hard, smooth surface of plaster or marble but he knew better than to do that. He had heard about fingerprints. He watched Jamie pedal furiously away towards the town centre, then turned back to her. He had never seen anyone so beautiful. There must be something wrong with him, he thought. He must be really weird. How could anyone fancy a dead woman? He crouched protectively by the flower bed, watching her. A breeze from the river scattered the petals of a dying flower and one rested on her cheek like a tear.

  When Detective Inspector Stephen Ramsay was woken by the telephone he expected the call to concern work. Who else would phone at six thirty in the morning? Yet when he heard his aunt, speaking in such a loud, shrill voice that he held the receiver at arm’s length, he was not surprised. She had been widowed for twenty years but kept the same hours as when her husband had worked down the pit and had needed a good breakfast inside him before he went out. She considered it a wickedness for anyone able-bodied to be in bed after seven in the morning. A wickedness and a waste.

  ‘Well,’ she demanded. ‘Have you found her?’

  Ramsay leaned across the bed and pulled open the curtains. The early sunlight made the trees on the other side of the dene seem very close and he could hear wood pigeons through the open window.

  ‘I’m at home,’ he said mildly, ‘not at work. They hadn’t done when I left last night.’

  ‘This is serious,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t just wander off. Not Mrs Cassidy.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We’re taking it seriously.’ He had learned that it did no good to lose his temper with her. Her persistence was unaffected by anger. If he answered her questions she would eventually leave him alone.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘ I hope you are. Everyone here’s very upset.’

  She had her own flat in a sheltered accommodation scheme run by a local housing association. The move from the old coal-board cottage had given her a new lease of life. She was into everything there, knew everyone’s business. The other elderly residents held her in regard because she claimed a direct line to the police. They felt it gave the building special protection. She encouraged them in that belief and he had often been phoned at unwelcome times about missing pension books and the horror of dogs fouling the communal garden. He visited her once a week to have tea in the little over-heated living room and quite often there would be a queue of residents waiting in the corridor to consult him as if he were the chiropodist. She would show them in one at a time and he would do his best to answer their questions and satisfy their demands.

  Hunter, his sergeant, would mock the weekly visit to the old people’s flats but Annie had always been Ramsay’s favourite aunt and, despite the demands she made on him, he still felt a responsibility and an exasperated affection for her. When Stephen was a child Annie had seemed less worn out, less worn down than the other women he knew, perhaps because she had no children of her own. There had also been something theatrical about her. His mother had disapproved of her and said she showed off. But Annie had been the provider of treats – the best seats at the panto at Christmas, picnics in the dunes at Druridge Bay – and while other adults’ attempts to please
often left him with a sense of anti-climax, her treats were as magnificent in reality as they had been in expectation.

  It was Annie Ramsay who had phoned him the evening before about the disappearance of Dorothea Cassidy.

  ‘She was supposed to be speaking at our social club half an hour ago,’ she had said, as if it were his fault. ‘But she’s not turned up.’

  ‘Give her a chance,’ he had said. ‘Perhaps she’s ill or her car’s broken down. Or got held up in the carnival traffic. You know what the roads are like this week. Perhaps she’s just forgotten.’

  ‘Aye,’ Annie said. ‘Maybe. She’s a bit of a reputation as a scatterbrain.’

  And Ramsay thought that with that observation he would be left in peace. But three quarters of an hour later Annie was on the phone again.

  ‘She’s still not here,’ she said. ‘ I’ve just been in touch with her husband. He’s not seen her since this morning. And if her car had broken down she would have rung. She had this talk in her diary. I watched her write it down myself. You’ll have to do something.’

  So Ramsay had done something. It hadn’t been easy to persuade his colleagues in Otterbridge police station to take her disappearance seriously. There was the fair and the folk festival and they were all busy. But in the end they had listened. Other women might run off with their fancy men, get legless in Idols Nightclub in Whitley Bay and have to sleep it off on a friend’s sofa before they dared go home to their husbands. But this was no ordinary woman. Dorothea Cassidy was a vicar’s wife.

  Sergeant Gordon Hunter had never found any reason to move out of his mother’s house. It was comfortable there and even when he was younger he had felt no need to establish his independence. She had never attempted to cramp his style. If he brought one of his girlfriends back to stay the night his mother would make breakfast for them both the next day with her usual good humour. Gordon considered such attention his due. He was a single child and had always been spoilt. Besides, since his father had left home to move in with the landlady of one of the roughest pubs in the town centre, his mother had no one else to look after. What else would she do?

  His father’s desertion had bewildered him. The pub was a dirty, run-down place and when Gordon visited him there the man seemed exhausted. He helped in the pub after work, carrying crates from the cellar, changing barrels, then sat staring with besotted admiration at the ageing beauty behind the bar.

  ‘She’s wearing me lad,’ he would say. ‘And I love it.’

  Now, in the carnival week, the young men who travelled with the fair hung around the pub and there were reports of fights there every day.

  ‘Serve him right,’ Gordon’s mother said when she heard. But she did not care enough about her husband to wish him any real harm. She was happy as she was and all the excitement she needed was provided vicariously by Gordon. Best of all she liked to sit with her son in the evenings, drinking tea or sweet sherry while he talked about his work. She had few friends of her own and was immensely proud of him.

  Early on Midsummer’s Day Gordon Hunter went out for a run before work. He was very competitive and when a colleague had bet him that he couldn’t complete the Great North Run he had begun training seriously. Usually he found the daily run an effort but on that Friday he enjoyed it. The weather was beautiful and the tidy gardens of the council estate where he lived were full of flowers. He moved easily and his breath came regularly. Two young women, factory workers in tight jeans and white overalls waiting at a bus stop, watched him with admiration and giggled appreciatively as he passed. When he returned to the house he had to wait for a moment for his mother to let him in and he stood, running on the spot, hammering on the door and calling irritatedly for her to come.

  ‘Sorry, pet,’ she said. ‘ I was on the phone.’

  She was soft, overweight, untroubled by anything. There was a smell of bacon and fried bread. She always had breakfast ready for him when he returned.

  Hunter walked in, breathing deeply, shaking his hands to relax the muscles in his wrists.

  ‘It was Mr Ramsay,’ his mother continued. ‘He said could you phone him. It’s urgent.’ Then in the same calm, conversational voice she added: ‘ There’s been a murder.’

  There were two entrances to Prior’s Park. The first was close to the town centre by the road bridge that went over the river into Front Street. It was large, with heavy wrought-iron gates, and was the one most often used. The second was small and discreet and led from an established residential area with quiet leafy streets. Now both entrances were blocked and policemen were turning away angry commuters who used the park as a short cut to the town. Outside the main entrance two police cars were parked and a small crowd had gathered. Ramsay and Hunter had to push through the milling people and were watched with resentment as they strolled unimpeded into the park.

  They walked down the footpath along the river bank in the opposite direction to that taken earlier by the boys. The mist over the river had cleared and the sun was already hot. The constable who had been first on the scene stood by the body but nobody else had arrived. The three men stood at the edge of the footpath and looked down at the woman. The sun had risen above the trees and now her face was bathed in light. The colours of her clothes had the radiance of stained glass. Hunter whistled under his breath.

  ‘She doesn’t look like a vicar’s wife to me,’ he said.

  Ramsay said nothing. Annie had told him that Dorothea Cassidy was thirty-three and he trusted her abilities as an intelligence-gatherer implicitly. Yet he had expected the woman to look middle-aged, dowdy, not only because she was a vicar’s wife but because of her name which he associated with women of his mother’s generation. She did not look to him at all like a Dorothea. She was slim, taller than average, with high cheek-bones and a wide mouth. Despite the bulging eyes and swollen tongue, which gave an indication of the cause of her death, he could tell that she had been lovely. Her short curly hair, protected from the soil by the crushed petals of the bedding plants, was copper-coloured and had obviously been well cut. She wore silver earrings with a small blue stone and several silver bangles.

  ‘What about the cause of death?’ Hunter asked.

  Ramsay looked at the blue tinge of the skin. ‘I think she was strangled,’ he said. ‘But we’ll have to wait for the pathologist’s report.’

  He crouched to look at the body from a different angle and saw a pink strip of sticking plaster on her left wrist. He lifted the hand gently.

  ‘That looks recent,’ Hunter said. ‘Do you think it’s important?’

  Ramsay shrugged. How could he tell at this stage? He was tempted to make a sarcastic remark but said nothing. He supposed that he and Hunter should make some effort to get on.

  By now it was the peak of the rush hour and they could hear the roar of traffic along the Newcastle Road beyond the trees.

  ‘I wonder where she was killed.’ Ramsay was talking almost to himself. ‘She must have been put in that position. She didn’t fall naturally with her arms folded like that. But if she was moved it must have been immediately after death, before the onset of rigor.’

  ‘How did they get her here then?’ Hunter said. ‘It’s a fair distance from the road and she’d be no featherweight.’ He thought it was all too contrived and elaborate. He preferred cases he could understand: a punch-up in a bar, a jealous wife stabbing her husband. You knew where you were with cases like that. Here he suspected that nothing was as it seemed. It would suit Ramsay, Hunter thought bitterly. He liked things complicated.

  ‘Then there’s the question of time …’ Ramsay went on. ‘She was supposed to be speaking to the old folks at Armstrong House at seven thirty. She couldn’t have been put here then. The park would still be full of people. Someone would have found her last night even if the murderer could have got her here without being seen. So where was she all evening before she was killed?’

  He turned to the uniformed constable who seemed unable to take his eyes off the woman’s fa
ce.

  ‘Do they lock the park gates at night?’ he asked. ‘Does someone check that the park’s empty then?’

  ‘They lock the main gate at sunset,’ the man said, ‘but there’s no way of blocking off the lane on the other side and they don’t bother about that.’

  ‘I suppose she might have been killed in the park then posed there in the flower bed,’ Ramsay said.

  ‘Well, what was she doing here late at night all on her own?’ Hunter said angrily. ‘A woman like that. You’d have thought she’d have more sense.’

  ‘A woman like what?’ Ramsay asked mildly.

  ‘Well, man, you know. Respectable. The only people to come into Prior’s Park after dark are courting couples and kids sniffing glue. You’d expect a vicar’s wife to be inside watching the telly or …’ he dredged his mind for a suitable activity for a vicar’s wife ‘… knitting for the elderly.’

  Ramsay looked down again at Dorothea Cassidy. He studied the wide mouth and imagined her laughing at the idea.

  ‘She doesn’t look the knitting sort to me,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll be one of those layabouts who travel with the fun fair,’ Hunter said definitely. ‘They’re all the same the gippos. There’s always trouble when they’re about. There was that rape two years ago when the fair was here.’

  ‘We don’t know if this was a sexual attack,’ Ramsay said. ‘ It doesn’t look as if she’s been raped. Not in those dungarees. But of course we’ll have to wait for the lab report.’

  ‘What about the husband?’ Hunter asked. ‘Has he been informed yet?’

  ‘No,’ Ramsay said slowly. ‘I rather wanted to do that myself.’

  ‘How did he seem last night when he knew his wife was missing?’

  Ramsay shrugged. ‘He wasn’t too concerned apparently. Not at first, anyway. He said it wasn’t unusual for her to be late. She wasn’t naturally punctual, he said. She was easily distracted.’

  Hunter looked disapproving. ‘It seems a strange set up to me. You’d have thought she’d have to be home to get his tea.’