Silent Voices (Vera Stanhope 4) (31 page)

‘That’s somewhat of an exaggeration.’

‘He admired you,’ Vera went on as if there’d been no interruption. ‘Admired your drive and the way you went for what you wanted. It must have been flattering to have a bright lad like that hanging off your every word.’

And Morgan couldn’t help giving a little smile. Even here, with the two cops watching on, he couldn’t help being pleased with himself. ‘We had a couple of interesting discussions. As you say, he was a bright lad. Working in a place like this, you can miss intelligent conversation.’

‘Of course,’ Vera said. She had to bite her tongue to stop herself from asking if that was why he’d taken up with Mattie and Freya. For the quality of the conversation. ‘When did you last see him?’

‘The afternoon before he died,’ Morgan said. ‘It must have been then.’

‘Tell me about it.’ This chair was comfortable, more comfortable than any of the furniture in Morgan’s flat. Vera had to force herself to concentrate. Suddenly she thought it would have been very easy to drift off to sleep.

‘We met for a coffee in the lounge. Something we did most of the days when our shifts coincided.’

‘How did Danny seem?’ She shuffled her bum forward so that she was in a more upright position.

Morgan took time to answer and that made Vera suddenly feel wide awake. Was he putting together a story in his head? That would mean he had something to hide.

‘I thought he was a bit jumpy,’ Morgan said at last.

‘In what way, jumpy?’ She leaned forwards, elbows on her knees, right in his face.

‘You know, tense, wired up. Perhaps he’d just had too much coffee. There could have been no more to it than that.’

‘Mr Morgan, you’re used to interpreting people’s physical responses. It’s how you make a living, how you persuade unhappy people to trust you. People like Lisa, who works here. People who can’t really afford your charges. And then you get your
patients
to confide in you. I want to know exactly what you made of Danny’s state that afternoon. And exactly what he said.’

The room was very small and there was no natural light. It had a background smell that was faintly aromatic, a result of incense perhaps or scented candles. But now Vera could smell fear on the man who sat so close to her.

‘Like I said, he was wired up,’ Morgan said. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. ‘Hyper. At first I thought it might be drugs, but I think it was just adrenalin.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Nothing specific. Really. Nothing that would help you find his killer.’

‘I really don’t think you’re qualified to make a decision about that.’ Vera’s voice rose in volume so that it filled the room.

‘He was asking questions,’ Morgan said. ‘About Jenny Lister and her part in the Elias Jones case. “You knew her, man. What was she like? Was she as prim and self-righteous as the papers made out?” It was rather distasteful actually. I’d have thought Danny would be above that sort of gossip.’

‘Did Danny tell you that he’d met Jenny? That Jenny’s daughter had once been the love of his life. That he blamed Jenny for splitting them up?’ Vera hadn’t put this thought into words before, but she was sure it was true. And it gave Danny a motive for murder.

‘No,’ Morgan said. ‘He didn’t tell me any of that.’ His voice was quiet and measured.

‘It doesn’t surprise you, though!’

‘No, it doesn’t surprise me. The interest he was taking in the Jenny Lister murder sounded like more than voyeuristic prurience. It seemed to me that it was personal.’

‘Do you think he killed her?’

There was a pause. Morgan looked at her, said nothing.

‘It must have crossed your mind. All those questions.’ Vera waited again for an answer. At last it came.

‘He could have done,’ Morgan said. ‘Yeah, he was so wound up that he could have done.’

But you would say that
, Vera thought.
If you were the murderer, what else would you say?

Morgan looked around the room, like some performer, Vera thought, waiting for applause after a particularly dramatic moment. Well, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. She continued the interview in the same tone as before. ‘Do you remember anything else about your conversation with Danny the day before he died?’

Morgan frowned. ‘He went on about friendship. About how important our friendship was to him. He’d met lots of people in Bristol, but no one he could really be himself with. There was so much posing at university. I suppose I should have felt flattered, but by then I was just keen to get home and didn’t even take in everything he said. I’m afraid I cut him off and told him I had to rush. I feel very bad about that now. If I’d listened more carefully, been a true friend, perhaps his death could have been avoided.’

Vera allowed him a moment of self-satisfied and mournful reflection before continuing. ‘You didn’t tell us you and Freya were in the hotel the morning Jenny Lister was strangled.’

It was the last thing he was expecting and the look on his face made her feel like singing.

She went on, ‘I know you have a very low opinion of the police, Mr Morgan, but you must have realized that we’d find out.’

‘Freya attended one of the exercise classes for pregnant women.’

‘Very nice.’ She looked at him, waiting for him to continue, eventually running out of patience. ‘And you, Mr Morgan? What were you up to?’

‘I was here,’ he said. ‘In this room. Catching up on some paperwork.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’

‘Because, Inspector, you didn’t ask me.’

Walking back to the car, Vera wanted to talk to Joe about the interview. She felt she’d handled it almost perfectly and with remarkable restraint, would have liked that recognized. But he’d switched his mobile back on and had it stuck to his ear, listening to the missed calls.

‘Well?’ When at last he put the phone back in his pocket.

‘One from forensics. They found some scraps of paper unburned on the bonfire in the Shaws’ garden. Thought we might be interested. They reckon it’s Jenny Lister’s writing.’

‘Her notebook,’ Vera said, her thoughts firing away in all directions. ‘Maybe the outline of the stuff she was writing about Mattie.’

‘They’ve transcribed it and sent it as an email.’

‘And the other?’ Because Ashworth was tense and troubled, not as excited as he should have been by the forensic news.

‘From Connie Masters. Saying she’s OK, just taking a couple of days away.’

‘Well,’ Vera said. ‘That’s good, isn’t it? A bummer because we can’t show her the photos, but at least we know she’s safe.’

‘I’m not sure.’ He’d reached the car and stopped, looking back to the hotel. It was dusk and all the lights were on. ‘She sounded odd. I’d like you to listen to it.’

That night it rained, a sudden torrential downpour like a tropical storm. It began as Vera was running towards her house from the car and she was drenched by the time she’d got the door open. She stood just inside and shook herself like a dog, in her head blaming Ashworth, who’d kept her standing in the Willows car park, listening over and over again to the voicemail left by Connie. Maybe the woman did sound a bit strained, but Vera always felt flustered when she found herself talking to an automated voice too. She thought her sergeant was over-reacting, making a fuss about nothing. He’d insisted they go to the cottage in Barnard Bridge and they’d even looked inside again, but of course there was nobody there. Connie had explained in her message that she’d be staying away for a while. Without all that fannying about, Vera would have been home in the dry.

Driving north, she’d thought she might call in to see her hippy neighbours for an hour to wind down. They were always welcoming. There’d likely be a pan of soup on the range and some of the home-brew that was a more effective relaxant than anything a doctor would prescribe. Now she couldn’t face the idea of wrapping herself up in waterproofs and paddling through the mud. Instead she lay in the bath listening to a gloomy play on the radio, then changed into the faded tracksuit she wore instead of pyjamas in the winter.

Because she had the idea of soup firmly in her mind, she went in search of some and found a tin at the back of the larder that must have been there since Hector was still alive. Oxtail. His favourite. Heating it in a small pan, the smell brought him vividly to life. Hector, big and bullying, picking away at her confidence. Blaming her, she thought now, for being alive when her mother was dead. But what sort of parent would Vera have made if she’d had the chance to have children? Crap, she thought. She’d have been crap too. Much worse than Connie, or Jenny Lister, or even Veronica Eliot.

There was a small room at the back of the house that she used as an office. Piles of paper that she had to climb over to get in, a computer that would soon be fit for a museum. She fired it up and went to make a cup of tea while it chugged into life. It still hadn’t quite made it by the time she returned with her mug and a packet of chocolate digestives. She had a quick memory of the child doctor who’d sent her to the health club to get fit, imagined her disapproval, then dismissed it. Digestives were wholewheat, weren’t they? Healthy enough.

There was time for her to eat three biscuits before her email account was displayed on the screen. She opened the message from the scientist who’d been looking at the scraps of paper found in the bonfire burning in the garden at the Shaw house. Vera had asked Karen about the bonfire during the first interview in the neighbours’ house. ‘Did you or Derek light it before you went to work?’ It had seemed odd to Vera even then. Bonfires were for weekends, when you had the time to keep an eye on them. And Karen had looked at her as if she were mad, obviously had no idea what she was talking about. The bonfire had been nothing to do with her or Derek.

Vera had persisted. ‘Danny then? Did he help you out in the garden sometimes?’

At that, Karen had shaken her head sadly. ‘Danny didn’t really do helping. In the garden or anywhere else.’

So the bonfire had been started by the murderer. That was the way Vera saw it. A mistake. Better to take any incriminating paper away with him and dispose of it carefully. So why the hurried fire in the garden? What was that about? Why the rush?

There were really only scraps of text. Handwritten. By Jenny Lister. The forensic handwriting woman had been certain of that. It said so in the email:
I’d be quite happy to appear in court. I’d stake my reputation
. . . Blah, blah. Very dramatic. But good enough for Vera.

They’d retrieved three different pages containing text, it seemed, and all three were partially charred, one so severely that they’d been lucky to get anything. The first page was the most intact, but contained what looked like a final paragraph. At least, the writing stopped a third of the way down the page. According to the lab, one corner was burned so the ends of some of the sentences were lost, and they’d re-created the pattern of the writing as accurately as they could on the screen. Vera thought that it wasn’t hard to make out the sense.

Social-work bollocks, Vera thought. If Jenny had been hoping to write a popular book to explain her job to the layperson, she wouldn’t achieve it with stuff like this. Was she talking about Mattie in this piece? Vera assumed so. In that case, Vera had learned nothing from the notes on this page. Still, assumptions were always dangerous. There was no indication here about the gender of the subject of the case study, and Jenny could have been writing about somebody quite different. Besides, she’d been working with Mattie since she was a child. Would the model social worker really admit that she hadn’t ‘properly addressed’ Mattie’s problems during all those years of intervention?

Vera moved away from the computer and stretched. In the lean-to at the back of the house she could hear rain dripping. The flat roof there leaked when the wind blew from the west. Usually it did blow from the west. She fetched a bucket and a bowl to catch the drips and went back to the office. Outside it was raining more heavily than ever.

The second piece was certainly about Mattie, at least to some extent, because she was named. If the piece had finally achieved publication, Vera assumed that Jenny would have chosen a pseudonym for her, but at this early point of the process she clearly hadn’t seen the need. There was one complete sentence, then a number of gaps. It seemed that sparks had burned isolated little holes in the paper, without setting the whole sheet alight. That at least was how it looked from the scanned image that the lab had attached, along with the words within the body of the email on the screen.

The complete sentence still read like an official report or undergraduate textbook:
It is sometimes a mistake to blame an outsider for disrupting the balance of a family, when other factors could be in force.
Did this mean that Jenny was making an excuse for Michael Morgan? Was she implying that Mattie was solely responsible for the death of her son? The rest of the words were scattered apparently at random as short phrases, separated by the burn marks.