The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5) (31 page)

He didn’t seem surprised or upset that she could guess his movements. ‘I was just going to check my Facebook. I knew I wouldn’t be long. I thought I could do the washing up afterwards.’

‘What happened then?’ She kept her voice gentle. She didn’t want to scare him or stop the flow of the story.

‘I heard a noise outside.’

‘A car?’ How else would an intruder get here? She tried to remember if she’d passed a vehicle in the lane. Certainly there’d been nothing coming the other way up the track.

‘No,’ Alex said. ‘Footsteps.’

‘And you could hear those over the noise of the wind?’

‘They were on the gravel path just under my window. And we don’t have double-glazing in the cottage.’

She nodded to show that she believed him and to encourage him to continue talking.

‘But by the time I got up to look outside, there was nobody there. I thought I’d imagined it. It’s easy to get spooked all by myself in this place.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Anybody would be. I shouldn’t have let you stay here on your own.’

They sat for a minute in silence. She wiped the milk from around her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘Where was the cat?’ she asked. ‘Was it in the kitchen while you were eating? Cats seem to know when there’s food about, don’t they?’

‘She wanted to go out,’ he said. ‘I opened the door for her to go into the garden. She hated the bad weather and I thought she’d be scratching to come back in straight away, but she didn’t. I went upstairs and thought I’d shout her in as soon as I came back down.’

‘I’m sorry I interrupted you.’ Vera sat back and waited for the rest of the story.

‘I was still at the window,’ he said. ‘I’d looked out and there was nobody there. Then a light came on in the chapel.’

‘My God! You must have been petrified!’

‘I was going to bolt all the doors and call the police,’ he said. ‘That was the first plan.’ She thought he was beginning to recover from the shock. He uncurled his legs, seemed almost embarrassed by his previous outburst. Sat upright. Set the half-drunk mug of chocolate on the table with something like disdain. Too cool for chocolate too.

‘That would have been a sensible plan.’

‘But I couldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t sit here. Some sitting duck. Helpless, waiting for the killer to come.’

Vera thought he’d seen too many horror movies. Or he could tell a good story.

He looked at her with something of the old competence. This was the man who had greeted her on her first visit to the Writers’ House. ‘I had to
do
something.’

‘So you went into the chapel?’ she said.

‘Outside the storm was so wild I could hardly think. It was brilliant actually. Liberating. It reminded me of when I was a boy and used to swim in the sea. Nothing but the noise of the surf. For a while I stopped being scared. After all, what did it matter?’

‘So you went into the chapel?’ she asked again. She preferred the quiet, scared Alex to the manic one.

‘Yes.’

She thought she would have to prompt him, but he continued almost immediately. ‘There was nobody there. The light was still on. Then I saw Ophelia.’ He looked up at her and gave a quick smile. ‘That was what we called the cat. Mother’s idea.’ He paused for a beat. ‘I couldn’t take it in. I couldn’t believe anyone would do that. Like it was a sacrifice. And then there was the robin on the table.’

‘What did you do then?’ Vera had finished her drink. It was obvious that Alex didn’t want his. She wondered if he’d notice if she took it.

‘I couldn’t stay there. I went outside. Screaming. Something like:
Where are you? Come out!
I ran round the house to the terrace, in case he was there.’

‘It was dark,’ Vera said. ‘How could you see?’

‘I’ve lived here since I was nine. I could find my way round with my eyes closed. Literally.’

‘And then?’

‘I stood for a moment on the terrace. Letting the wind blow against me. Listening to the sea. I wondered . . .’

‘What did you wonder?’ She took his mug and finished the drink. Enjoyed it immensely. More than she had her own. Stolen pleasures.

He looked up at her again. ‘I wondered what it would be like to run down the path to the shore and run into the sea and keep on running until I drowned.’

‘Bloody cold,’ she said. ‘That’s what it would be like.’

‘I didn’t do it.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You had more sense.’

‘I came back round to the yard and I saw the door of the chapel closing.’

‘That would have been me,’ she said. Her voice comfortable. Ordinary. She thought he could do with more of the ordinary in his life.

‘Yes, it was you.’ He curled his legs under him again and sat there in silence. He didn’t object when Vera told him she’d like him to spend a few days in hospital. ‘Shock does weird things to us.’ Perhaps he was relieved after all to have an excuse to leave the house. When the hospital car came to collect him he was docile. He carried a small bag with a pair of pyjamas and a toothbrush inside it and reminded her of an obedient child.

Joe Ashworth couldn’t get worked up over a dead cat. Or a dead bird. The inspector wanted him, immediately, to drive out there in the worst storm of the autumn, and for what? In these conditions it would be dangerous just getting to the end of the road.

He explained all this to Vera Stanhope, keeping his voice reasonable. There was never any point in losing his temper with her. She liked it when she provoked a reaction. In the end he came up with a lie, ‘Anyway, I can’t drive. I’ve had a couple of drinks.’

Even she couldn’t order him out after that.

He wasn’t sure what had kept him at home, because he would have enjoyed the drama of the drive through the windy night, being Vera’s confidant and right at the heart of the case. That evening he would even have been glad of an excuse to get out of the house. The wind always made the children wild and the weather meant they’d been cooped up all day. Guilt, he thought. Nobody did guilt like good Catholics. Not that he had anything to feel guilty about, except a vague attraction to a female academic.

All the same he did his penance: cleared the dishes after supper, pulled apart the squabbling children, took on bathtime single-handed, read each of the bedtime stories. When they were alone at last, he sat with his wife on the sofa, his arm around her shoulders, cuddling together like teenagers. Thought there was nobody in the world he would feel so at ease with. He couldn’t imagine Nina Backworth watching old episodes of
The Simpsons
and laughing with him at the same jokes. Later he took Sal to bed and they made love. Afterwards he lay awake, listening to her breathing, loving her with all his heart and soul and pushing away the feeling that there should be more to life than this.

In the morning he was first in the incident room for the briefing. Guilt again. Maybe he should have responded to Vera’s call after all. Holly was there before the inspector too.

‘Did the boss phone you last night?’ he asked. He wouldn’t have put it past Vera to drag Holly out, after he’d refused to go.

‘No, why?’

‘She was out at the Writers’ House. Somebody had killed Miranda Barton’s cat, laid it out in the chapel, like a sacrifice, she said.’

‘Gross!’ Holly wrinkled her nose, as if she were there in the chapel with the smell of damp stones and dead cat in her nostrils.

‘Gross indeed.’ And there was Vera, breezy and energetic, as if she’d had twelve hours’ sleep, though she’d probably been up all night. Followed by Charlie, who looked as if he’d been up all night, though he’d probably fallen asleep in front of the television at nine o’clock and had been pretty well comatose until about half an hour before.

Vera stood in front of the whiteboard and pinned up a photo of the animal, a knife in its belly and the guts exposed. ‘Now here’s the big question: has young Alex gone loop the loop and killed the poor beast himself, or is someone trying to scare the shit out of him? And if it’s the latter, why?’ She took another blown-up photo from her canvas bag and stuck it on the board too. ‘And if you’ve got a thing about cats, why kill a small, inoffensive bird too?’

‘It’s like someone’s sending us a sort of message,’ Holly said. ‘The apricots, the dead animals.’

‘And the hankie at the Miranda Barton scene,’ Vera said. ‘Don’t forget the hankie!’

‘But nothing left with Ferdinand’s body in the glass room,’ Joe said. ‘Why was that different?’

‘There was something left, though, wasn’t there?’ Joe thought he’d never seen Vera this hyper. She looked around at them and waved her arms. ‘Come on, people! Think about it!’

‘The knife,’ he said slowly. ‘We always thought the knife was left to throw us off the scent and implicate Joanna Tobin, but it could have been a sign or a message as well as that.’

‘So what’s going on here?’ Vera demanded. ‘And who’s behind it? Let’s have a few ideas. It doesn’t matter how daft they sound.’

‘Alex could have done it,’ Joe said slowly. ‘He has a car and had access to Nina’s address through the Writers’ House bookings. He’s not stupid and could have worked out where her spare key would be. We don’t know where he was the night before last. He could have been watching and waiting. He could have broken into her flat.’

‘Why would he do that, though?’ Holly asked.

Joe thought she would have contradicted him whatever he’d said. Before he could think up a cogent reply, Charlie broke in: ‘Because he’s a loony, like the boss said. If he killed his own mother, why would he think twice about sticking a knife into a cat? Or having a thing about expensive fruit? He’s a cook, isn’t he, and it’s food. Sort of related.’ He paused. ‘And if we’re talking about crazies, does anyone know what Joanna Tobin was up to that night?’

‘If
you
carry on talking like that, Charlie, I’ll make sure you’re sent on the next diversity-awareness course.’

Joe could tell that Charlie was about to make another flippant remark when he realized that Vera wasn’t joking.

Another silence while she drummed her fingers on the desk and looked exasperated.

‘Lenny Thomas has a conviction for burglary,’ Holly said. Her voice was tentative. She remembered the inspector’s earlier pronouncements about jumping to conclusions. ‘He might have played the trick with the key.’

‘Lenny doesn’t have a car.’ Joe felt an irrational need to defend the man. Just because he’d sat in his flat and drunk his tea? Because his elderly neighbour liked him?

‘He has friends, though.’ Holly’s voice, bright and triumphant cut into Joe’s thoughts. ‘Friends who also have convictions for burglary.’

‘Stop behaving like a bunch of bairns.’ Vera could have been a long-suffering parent. ‘We’re all supposed to be on the same side here. If it comes to that, I dare say Winterton would know a thing or two about breaking into houses. We need to know where he was the night someone got into Nina’s place. And Chrissie Kerr, though I’m damned if I can come up with a motive for her. She’s on the periphery of the case too.’ She looked at them. ‘Good old-fashioned policing, eh? Let’s ask some questions, check out the movements of our suspects. The boring stuff that leads to convictions.’

The boring stuff,
Joe thought,
that you’ve spent all your career avoiding.

‘What about Jack Devanney?’ he said, partly to spite her. ‘He wasn’t on our original list of suspects, but we’re all agreed that he could have been at the Writers’ House for the murders. Can we see him killing the cat and the bird, playing the stunt at Nina’s place?’

‘Oh, aye,’ Vera said. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past our Jack if he thought he was protecting Joanna. And in his mind the objects cluttering up the crime scenes might be all about distracting us. He could be devious if he wanted.’

‘So that leaves Rickard,’ Joe said. ‘The only one on the list that we’ve not discussed yet. Didn’t you go to see him yesterday?’

‘And he’s the only one we can dismiss.’ Vera wrote Rickard’s name on the whiteboard and put a cross beside it. ‘There’s no way he could have driven from Craster and got to the Writers’ House before me with enough time to set up the theatricals in the chapel. Even if he were fit, which he isn’t. He can hardly walk.’

Joe was going to push the point, to ask what Vera had discussed with Rickard. Why had she gone to see him anyway? But then she looked at him and he kept his mouth shut. He’d ask her later when they were on their own.

‘Are you saying we can dismiss Rickard from the murders too?’ Holly looked up from her notebook. Kept her voice bland so that she wouldn’t incur Vera’s wrath by getting it wrong.

‘I don’t see how he could have done the stabbing,’ Vera said, ‘with the arthritis in his hands. But maybe if he was angry enough or desperate enough—’ She broke off and looked at them. ‘But that’s speculation. So let’s sort out the actions for the rest of the day. The greengrocers and the credit cards – any news on that, Joe?’

‘Only negative. If anyone bought the apricots in Jesmond, they paid cash.’

‘Of course,’ Vera muttered almost to herself. ‘They would. Our killer’s too clever to be caught out like that. I don’t think we’re looking for what Charlie would call a loony. Not in the conventional sense, at least. So it’s a question of driving round and asking who bought a big bag of apricots for cash. Flash a few photos around. Try the supermarkets too. Charlie, that sounds like one for you.’

Charlie nodded.

‘Joe, you go out to Myers Farm and speak to Joanna and Jack.’

He looked up surprised. ‘You want me to go on my own?’ He thought Vera would want to be around too.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘They don’t bite.’

He thought he wasn’t so sure, where Jack was concerned.

‘And, Holly, get on the phone to Cumbria. Get them to check out Mark Winterton’s movements over the last few days. If they’re arsey, refer them to me. Or if you fancy a trip out west, go and do the legwork yourself.’

Charlie looked up sharply. ‘I’ve got contacts out west.’

‘I know you have,’ Vera said. ‘And that’s why I’ve asked Holly to do it.’ She smiled serenely in Joe’s direction. ‘We need to take care about apparent conflicts of interest.’