The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5) (13 page)

That was the start. Very melodramatic, Vera thought. She remembered snatches of a book programme on Radio 4 and came up with a different word. Very gothic. She wondered if it had really happened that way, or if Joanna had re-created a story to suit her heightened mood. Perhaps her relationship with Paul had been more mundane, almost sleazy. She was a schoolgirl who wanted to escape from strict parents and a boring home life. And he was an older man who wasn’t going to turn away a bonny lass when she’d thrown herself at him. Was the overblown language of the story the result of Joanna’s lack of medication at the time of writing? Or had she first seen her husband as the romantic figure described in the story? And as the theatrical villain he later became in the work?

As she read on, the lack of factual detail in the piece irritated Vera. She’d hoped there would be something here to help her in the investigation. But while the scenes of the couple’s life in Paris, especially those describing Maggie’s unravelling into depression, were vivid, little was specific. Paul left the apartment every day to go to work, but there was no mention of the address of their home or of exactly what he did to earn a living. Of course Vera could ask Joanna about her life in France, but Joanna was still a major suspect.

Besides, how could this be relevant to the murder? Did Vera really think Joanna’s ex-husband had manipulated events at the Writers’ House? The notion that a stranger had been murdered just to implicate Joanna, to torment her further, seemed fanciful even at this time of night. Why bother now after all these years? Perhaps Joe Ashworth had been right not to pursue the idea. After reading the pages through for a second time, Vera put them on the floor beside the bed. After all, she could hardly justify spending more time and energy on this line of enquiry. She fancied another whisky as a nightcap – she deserved it after reading all that stuff – but by now the room was freezing and she couldn’t face her cold feet on the bare kitchen floor. Her last thought was that she should have brought the bottle to bed with her.

At the team briefing the next morning the question of Joanna’s past came up. Joe Ashworth was leading the session. Vera sat at the back, determined to keep her mouth shut and let him get on with it. She didn’t want to compromise the investigation by taking a leading role. Nor was she keen to let slip that she’d been back to visit Joanna the night before. He began with a recap.

‘Of all the folk staying at the Writers’ House, only seven had the opportunity to kill Tony Ferdinand. The rest were together between lunch and the discovery of the body. There’s no news yet from the search team on the murder weapon.’

Holly stuck up her hand. Vera thought she would have been the sort of child to sit in the front row of the classroom and tell the teacher if he’d got something wrong.

‘Yeah?’ Joe reacted just as the teacher would have done.

‘There’s Chrissie Kerr, the publisher, too. She was at the Writers’ House in the morning to give a guest lecture. She stayed for lunch.’

‘And drove away before Ferdinand died.’ Joe glared at her.

‘Nothing to stop her pulling in at the top of the bank and coming back on foot.’

Vera thought they were like squabbling kids and decided it was time to step in or they’d be there all day. ‘Any connection between Kerr and Ferdinand?’ she asked. ‘Any possible motive?’

‘Not that I can find,’ Holly said.

‘Let’s put her down as an outsider and carry on, then.’ Vera sat back in her chair and waited for Joe to continue.

He pointed to the photos of the Bartons, stuck on the whiteboard. ‘So we have mother and son, Miranda Barton and her son Alex. They run the place.’ He turned to Holly, icily polite: ‘You were going to dig around into the business’s finances. What have you come up with?’

‘Well, it’s hardly making them a fortune,’ Holly said. ‘But they’re not on the verge of bankruptcy, either. Miranda bought the house years ago when she was making a decent living out of her writing. There’s hardly any mortgage. She must have got the idea of setting it up as a writers’ retreat when her books stopped selling. It makes sense really. A sort of value-added B&B. And New Writing North covers the cost of the bursaries, so it’s all profit .’

She looked at Ashworth over her specs. ‘I don’t see any motive for either of them. If anything, they have something to lose if the murder has an impact on bookings.’

Vera thought there was an edge of competition in every conversation between these two. Holly was waiting for Joe to contradict her and was looking forward to another argument, but he didn’t give her the satisfaction.

Vera raised a finger. ‘They seem an odd pair to me,’ she said. ‘The woman’s all showy emotion, and you’d think the lad was made of ice. Chalk and cheese.’

Joe looked at her expecting more, but she shook her head. ‘Just making the point.’

He turned back to the whiteboard and pointed to another photo. ‘Next, Lenny Thomas. Worked for Banks Open-cast until he developed back problems two years ago. Since then he’s lived off invalidity benefit. He’s got a council house in Red Row. Divorced with one kid. A bit of a history when he was a kid – car theft, burglary. One period of probation and six months’ imprisonment. Nothing recent. Not since he started with Banks.’

‘How does he fit in with the arty set?’ This from Charlie, bags under his eyes you could carry golf clubs in, last night’s takeaway curry on his jersey.

Vera was tempted to jump in again at this point, but she allowed Ashworth to speak first. ‘They’ve adopted him as their own working-class pet,’ Ashworth said. ‘They’re kind, but patronizing. They wouldn’t want to be thought snobby.’

Well done, lad!

‘Motive?’ Holly asked. She was still sulking because Joe was getting all the attention.

‘According to Lenny Thomas, Tony Ferdinand had said he could find him a publisher and turn him into a star. Maybe it was all talk, and Lenny got resentful and lost it.’

‘The trick with the knife, and the forged note to Joanna, would hardly be his style, would it?’ This was Holly betraying her own prejudices.

‘You mean he’s not bright enough to think of it, because he once drove a truck on an open-cast for a living?’

Don’t let her bug you, Joey-boy,
Vera thought.

‘Besides,’ Joe went on, ‘we don’t know the note to Joanna was forged. And we’re not going to find out. She claims it was burned. She’s still got to be our prime suspect.’ He pointed to the photo of Joanna. It had been taken recently, and Vera wondered where they’d got hold of it. She was wearing a red sweater and her hair was blowing away from her face. ‘Joanna Tobin. Living the good life with her partner, Jack Devanney, in the hills above Clachan Lough. Like Thomas, she was one of the students who’d been awarded a free place on the writers’ course. She was found close to the body with a knife in her hand. Problem is, the knife doesn’t fit the wound. So was she set up? Or was she playing some sort of elaborate game with us? A sort of double bluff.’

He paused and turned towards Vera. ‘She spent ten years of her married life in France, and records of that time only came through this morning. She assaulted her husband, attacked him with a knife, then attempted suicide. The doctors diagnosed some sort of psychotic episode and she was never charged. She escaped from a French psychiatric hospital and made her way back here, with the help of Devanney. It seems she’s been on medication ever since.’

Except she stopped taking it for a few weeks before going to the Writers’ House. Because she fancied herself in love, as Jack had feared?

‘Case over, then!’ Charlie looked up from the paper cup he’d been staring into since he’d sat down.

‘That’s dangerous talk, Charlie, and you know it.’ Joe’s voice was sharp. Vera wasn’t sure if he was really angry or if this was a show for her benefit. ‘There’s no evidence to connect her to the victim. If you start looking for proof to nail an individual, you’ll likely try too hard and find it. Doesn’t mean it’s real. Now’s the time to keep an open mind. So let’s move on.’

Joe pointed to the next photo on the board. The photo was old and looked as if it had been dug out of an old HR file. ‘Mark Winterton. Former inspector with Cumbria Police. Not much use as a writer, according to the staff at the place. So what was he doing there? It would be good to establish some link between him and the victim. Or with Joanna Tobin. Charlie, can you do that? There’s an address near Carlisle for him. Not so far from where Tobin lives, as the crow flies.’ Charlie nodded. He was used to being shouted at and didn’t bear resentment for long.

‘The last two are tutors. Nina Backworth, academic and writer. She admits to hating Ferdinand and blames him for screwing up her writing career. So she has the most plausible motive, but again there’s no forensic evidence to link her to the victim.’ Ashworth paused and looked round the room to check he had their full attention. ‘Then there’s Giles Rickard. He’s done very nicely from his writing recently. A house in Normandy and a flat in Highgate.’ He looked at Charlie ‘That’s a flash part of London. And he’s got a holiday cottage up the coast in Northumberland. Which is how he came to be invited as a tutor on the course. He claims that he had no professional contact with Ferdinand, and they seem only to have met at the occasional publishers’ party. According to Rickard, who seems a nice old chap. But maybe we can’t entirely trust him. Because he forgot to tell us that he was best mates with Joanna Tobin’s ex-husband, Paul. And when I googled him I found a scathing review of one of his books in the
Times Literary Supplement.
Written by our victim.’

Nina Backworth woke with a start and she didn’t know where she was. It was still dark. At home, in her flat in Newcastle, there would be enough light from the street lamps for her to make out the shadow of the wardrobe, and she’d hear the background buzz of distant traffic. Here, briefly everything was strange. She heard footsteps in the corridor outside her door and there was a moment of panic. Her body was rigid with fear and her pulse raced. Someone had broken into her flat. The image of a bloody body crouching in a dark corner flashed into her mind, half-nightmare, half-daydream. Her body? Her flat? A premonition of her own death? Then a beat later she remembered where she was and began to breathe again. Tony Ferdinand was dead, but she was still alive. She turned on her bedside light and saw that it was six-thirty. After all she hadn’t slept badly. The footsteps outside her door would be one of the other residents.

She tried to settle back under the sheets, but could tell immediately it would be impossible to rest. The shock of waking suddenly had made her muscles tense and she’d never been any good at relaxing. She got out of bed and opened the curtains. Her room looked over the sea and in the distance a light-buoy flashed. There was no wind; it would be another quiet day. She pulled a jersey over her pyjamas and made tea. Then, sitting in the easy chair by the window, her notepad on her knee, she continued to work on her short story. The words came easily and she thought that this was what she was made for.

At breakfast she found herself sitting next to Giles Rickard. Still exhilarated by the hour’s writing, she was tempted by the smell of coffee. Usually she never drank caffeine, and now, sipping from the mug, enjoying the smell and the taste, she found her body responding immediately to it. She felt alert, more awake than she had for months. She saw the arthritic hands of her companion and wondered how she would describe them if she were writing about them. It occurred to her that hands like that could never hold a knife with the firmness needed to push the blade through skin and muscle. This man at least could be no suspect. She said as much to Rickard.

‘You’ll have to tell the inspector that, my dear. I’ve already had a message from her asking if I could make myself available for a chat in the chapel this morning. That was her word.
Chat.
Of course she hopes that we’ll underestimate her – we’ll see her size and her clothes, and discount her obvious intellect.’

‘What are you working on at the moment?’ Nina didn’t want to discuss Ferdinand’s murder or Vera Stanhope’s investigation. She had noticed in the few days that she’d known him that Rickard enjoyed gossip. He revelled in it like a lonely old woman, could be spiteful and bitchy, though he was always charming to one’s face. She suspected that she might have been the object of his venom herself on occasions and didn’t want to give him further ammunition.

Besides, this was an opportunity to pick the brains of one of the most successful crime writers of his generation. Did he plan his work in detail in advance? And what were the commercial pressures? Did he feel the need to turn out the same kind of book each time?

‘I’ve more or less given up writing altogether,’ Rickard said. ‘It became rather a chore, you know. A means to an end. I considered the last six books as my retirement fund.’

‘Then why did you agree to come here?’ Recklessly Nina reached out to pour more coffee. She saw that her hands were trembling very slightly, the effect already of the caffeine. ‘If you don’t even enjoy writing, it must be tedious for you, discussing your work with the students.’

For a moment there was no answer, and Nina wondered if the old man had considered her question impertinent.

‘It was a matter of unfinished business,’ Rickard said at last. ‘Yes, I think that’s how you might describe it.’

She was going to follow up with another question when she heard a loud voice in the reception hall outside the dining room. Around her the other residents fell silent and Joanna Tobin walked through the door. She stood just inside the room, making an entrance.

‘I hope you’ve all saved some bacon for me,’ Joanna said. ‘I’m starving.’

She was dressed even more flamboyantly than she had been at the beginning of the writers’ course, in black canvas trousers and a silk top of clashing oranges and pinks. The equivalent of war paint. But Nina thought she looked white and strained.

There was a moment of awkward silence while the other residents stared at the newcomer. ‘Come and sit next to me,’ Nina said. Her voice sounded forced, overly jolly. ‘I’ll get you something.’ She found the hostility embarrassing, and was glad to turn her back on the group to fetch Joanna’s breakfast.