The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5) (8 page)

Vera stood at the front and talked them through it. ‘Our victim is Tony Ferdinand, professor, reviewer and all-round media star. So there’ll be lots of press interest. He was in Northumberland to act as visiting tutor at the Writers’ House, the place up the coast where wannabe writers go to get inspiration. They run residential courses in all forms of literature, but this week they’re doing crime fiction. Is that significant? It seems a bit of a coincidence that they’ve spent three days planning a perfect murder, and then one of the lecturers dies in a very theatrical way. Is one of them playing games with us? I’ve had a quick look in Ferdinand’s diary. He made a note of the appointments he’d set up with other students, but no names are mentioned. He might have had a meeting with someone he calls J yesterday, but it all seems very vague. We need to be aware that Joanna Tobin could be lying or could have been set up.’

She paused and checked that they were all with her. ‘Then there’s this business with the knife. Another game? Or does the killer not know enough about forensics to realize we’d tell the difference between blades? Did he think getting Joanna to the scene would be enough to convict her? Again, the whole business seems very theatrical to me. In any event, the murder weapon is still out there somewhere. I’ve organized a search of the grounds and that should start this morning.

‘Holly, will you get on the phone and check out Ferdinand? Talk to his university, St Ursula’s College, London, to broadcasters, publishers, anyone else he might have worked with. Usual stuff. Any enemies? Any recent scandals or problems? You’ll have the guest list of the Writers’ House, so see if one of those names crops up.’ Vera thought that Holly, with her clipped southern voice, would go down well with the London intelligentsia. You could almost see her as a pushy publicist, with her long legs and sharp suits. ‘And have a word with a woman called Chrissie Kerr. She runs a small publishing company based not very far from here. According to the woman in charge, she left the Writers’ House before Ferdinand was killed, but she might have picked up on tensions or problems, and she’ll have background on the whole organization.

‘Charlie, I want you digging around into the background of Joanna Tobin. She’s my neighbour, and I need to keep a bit of a distance, so this is your responsibility and, anything you find, you let Joe know as well as me. Seems as if she might have been set up. Or is she the one who’s playing games? We know she has a history of psychiatric illness and, according to her partner, there was at least one serious suicide attempt. Her family comes from Bristol or somewhere in the West Country, and I think she lived for a while in France. Check for any overseas convictions.’ Vera stopped for breath and looked across the room towards her sergeant. ‘Joe, you were there last night. Anything I’ve missed?’

He’d been sitting at the back, a biro in his hand, and she hadn’t even been sure he’d been listening. Maybe the squiggles on his notepad were doodles. From this distance it was hard to tell. Maybe he was remembering the delights of the night before, his very special birthday treat. But he answered immediately.

‘The people who run the place. Mother and son. The mother’s a professional writer and apparently she was a friend of the deceased.’ He glanced up at Vera to check that the information was accurate. She nodded. ‘Something about her response to the murder seems odd. She found the body and apparently screamed the place down, yet later over dinner she appeared completely composed. Certainly she ate everything on her plate.’

‘Nothing wrong with a middle-aged woman having a healthy appetite, even in a crisis,’ Vera put in and was rewarded with a laugh from her audience.

‘It says from Holly’s notes that the place gets some Arts Council funding,’ Joe said. ‘It might be worth checking how the finances of the place work. If there were some sort of scam and Ferdinand found out, that would be a motive. I don’t know how these things work, but he
could
have suspected that something dodgy was going on. And Ferdinand was a tall man. He wasn’t going to just stand there and allow himself to be stabbed. Maybe the mother and son worked together to kill him. Or one of them kept watch.’

‘Good thinking.’ There were times, Vera thought, when Joe Ashworth was a credit to her. Maybe occasionally she should tell him so.

Paul Keating, the pathologist, was an Ulsterman. Straightforward and a little dour, he had a rugby player’s nose and a grown-up family. He conducted his post-mortems with respect and little fuss. Vera knew colleagues, even experienced colleagues, who hated being present at the post-mortem, but she’d never seen the logic in that. She was scared of people when they were alive and dangerous. At least the dead could do you no harm.

‘Why was there so much blood?’

‘The heart continued to pump and there was a gaping wound for it to escape from.’

‘Was he killed out on the balcony?’ This had troubled Vera from the beginning. There had been no sign of a struggle in the glass room. The place was like a rainforest, thick with tall plants, and none of the pots had been knocked over. Although Joanna had said the furniture had been arranged differently, it hadn’t been tipped up. Everything was orderly. But it had been a cold October afternoon, not the weather for sitting outside. Vera remembered Joanna’s description of Ferdinand’s habit of eavesdropping. Had the killer caught him on the balcony, listening in on the discussion below? Or had Ferdinand heard a previous conversation, something that might ultimately have led to his death?

‘I think he must have been. There’s no blood spatter in the room, but plenty outside.’

‘Ferdinand was a big man,’ Vera said. ‘Tall at least. You’d have thought he’d have put up a fight, but none of our witnesses have scratches or abrasions.’

‘That struck me too.’ Keating looked up from his work. ‘I looked for skin under the fingernails, but there was nothing.’

‘So why did he stand there and let someone take a knife to him, without a struggle?’

‘He’d have been sitting,’ Keating said. ‘As you said, he was a tall man. And the angle of the wounds show that he was stabbed from above.’

‘Why would he sit on a stone floor? There were chairs in the room and he could have taken one out, if he wanted to look at the view.’ Again Vera had the image of a child playing hide-and-seek. ‘Or did the killer block the door to the house and Ferdinand went onto the balcony to escape? Perhaps he hoped to attract attention from there. He was stabbed when he was cowering in the corner.’

‘It’s a possibility, I suppose.’ But Keating was always cautious and ruled little out as impossible. ‘My thoughts were running another way. I’m waiting for tox reports.’

‘You think he might have been drugged?’

Keating shrugged. ‘An unconscious man isn’t going to fight back. You could put him where you wanted and kill him there.’

In the hospital car park Vera breathed deeply to get rid of the smell of chemicals and dead body. Joe stood beside her. They’d come in his car. ‘You were very quiet in there,’ she said.

‘I had nothing to contribute.’

‘What is it, Joe? You sound like a sulky teenage girl. I can’t stand moods.’

‘I don’t think you should be working on this case. You were at the house when the body was found, and you know one of the suspects. You can’t keep your distance.’ He stood with his legs apart and his hands on the car roof, almost like a suspect told to stand in the brace position for searching, in American cop shows.

‘You’re questioning my integrity?’ She wondered why she was so angry. She’d told Joe often enough that he should stick to his guns, have the courage of his convictions. She just hadn’t expected him to take a stand against
her
.

‘No!’ It came out almost as a howl. ‘No! I’m just worried about how it looks.’

‘Eh, pet, I’ve never been one to worry much about appearances.’

He relaxed briefly and gave a little grin.

‘Would it make you feel better to know I’ve got an appointment with the Super this afternoon? I might have to leave you in charge of taking witness statements.’

He turned round so that he was facing her. ‘You’ve already talked to him about your involvement in the case?’

‘Do you really think I’d jeopardize a conviction in a murder inquiry? That’s why I’ve got Charlie digging around in Joanna’s past, and why you’ll be copied in on anything he finds.’ Vera saw that she was starting to win him round. She climbed into the passenger seat and waited for him to join her in the car – thinking that she’d better find a quiet moment as soon as they arrived at the Writers’ House to phone the Super and set up that appointment.

Nina Backworth slept badly. Even at the best of times she seldom slept through for a whole night and usually managed only four or five hours. It had come to haunt her, this need for sleep, and she searched almost obsessively for a remedy. She kept off any form of caffeine, took note of her diet. Did a particular food have an adverse effect? Or a positive one? She drank little alcohol, because that seemed to make the problem worse. She hated the idea of taking drugs, but away from home – especially when she had to work the following day – she took sleeping pills prescribed by a sympathetic GP. She’d taken a tablet the night before and had fallen asleep almost immediately, but she’d woken again in the early hours, her mind fizzing with ideas and anxieties. Now, dressing for breakfast, she felt sluggish and tense.

How had she been persuaded to take part in this venture? She was employed by the Department of English at Newcastle University, and lectured on the undergraduate course, with women writers her speciality. She didn’t do popular fiction. Not professionally. She read detective stories when she wanted to escape, when she had flu or when she needed to forget some man or other. Though these days there wasn’t often a man she needed to forget. The elderly Penguins in their green jackets, stolen from her grandparents’ house, or the Collins Crime Club hardbacks borrowed from the library had been her best weapon against insomnia when she was an undergraduate. But this wasn’t literature to be taken seriously or to be taught on a residential course. Her editor, Chrissie Kerr, had persuaded her:
You’re published by a small press with a tiny marketing budget. Even if everyone on the course buys one of your books, that’ll be a help. And the brochure goes everywhere. Miranda Barton has promised a big article in
The Journal
.

So Nina had gone along with the idea. She’d been seduced by the idea of a week in the country. And by the fee. She had to admit even now that the fee would be very useful.

And then there’d been a murder. It seemed trite, almost ridiculous. If someone had come up with such a scenario in a story presented to her for appraisal, she’d have mocked the idea.
Too
Christie for words. That Tony Ferdinand had been the victim was a complication she had yet to explore properly. She was too tired to think. Perhaps there would be time for a walk on the beach before her first workshop, and that would clear her head.

In the dining room breakfast was served from a sideboard from heated dishes. Miranda liked to preserve the atmosphere of an Edwardian country-house party, though here there were no housemaids in frilly aprons, only Miranda herself and her son. Nina saw that she was almost the last person to arrive for the meal. Again they sat round one large table, but dinner was the only formal meal. At breakfast, guests helped themselves. She gathered, as she spooned fresh fruit salad into a bowl and dipped the bag of herbal tea into a mug of hot water, that people were acting as if the murder had never taken place. Across the table from her, novelist Giles Rickard had his nose in the
Telegraph.
Among the students, the conversation was about writing and the fruitless search for agent or publisher. Was that a sign of the self-obsession of the aspiring writer? Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that the two police officers who had been posted there overnight were in the room too, tucking into a pile of bacon and egg.

Nina had expected the appearance of the fat female detective of the evening before, but there was no sign of anyone in plain clothes. The officers changed shift and two more arrived, but they just stood awkwardly, one at each of the external doors, as if they were unsure what they were doing there. She fetched her jacket from her room.

‘I’m just going for a walk on the beach,’ she said. ‘That is all right?’

The man was very young, fresh-faced and eager. She presumed it was his first murder and he was excited to be there. Had he woken up this morning thinking that life was good, and that he had chosen the best job in the world? ‘You’ll not be long?’

She promised that she would not be long. She was teaching in an hour. But she needed fresh air and exercise. She gave a little smile. ‘I’ll go mad if I’m stuck in there all day.’

He stood aside and let her out, shouting after her, ‘Have a nice stroll!’

Alex Barton was filling the bird feeders below the terrace, but was so concentrated on the task that he didn’t notice her. She watched for a moment and saw how tame the small birds had become. They sat on the table within inches of him, apparently unconcerned by his presence, and a robin perched on the wooden strut that held the narrow cage of feed. The path led straight from the garden to the beach. It was low tide, so there was sand; at high water only rock and shingle were visible. They’d woken to mist, but the sun was already burning through it and shone straight into her eyes. There was that familiar smell of salt and rotting seaweed that reminded her of childhood holidays. Gulls calling. At one point she looked back at the house. From there she could see the glass room, the windows reflecting the sunlight. A screen hid any activity that might be taking place on the balcony. After the oppressive claustrophobia of the Writers’ House, it was a pleasure to be outside. The water was calm and oily and she searched for flat pebbles to skim across it, and felt a rush of jubilation when she managed five skips. Again she thought of being young, on holiday in her grandparents’ home – Enid Blyton summers of exploration and picnics.