The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

by Ann Cleeves

  When the timeline was complete she looked at the clock. Gone eleven. Not the time to begin individual interviews; Nina Backworth would be on her feet again, talking about police harassment. Vera needed to get in touch with Holly and Charlie and she supposed she should get some sleep herself. She stood up and stretched and caught Joe’s eye.

  ‘Thanks for your cooperation, ladies and gentlemen. That’s all we need for tonight. No doubt I’ll see you at some point tomorrow.’

  Outside, the hearse had arrived to take Ferdinand to the mortuary. The cold air hit her and made her feel suddenly awake and alive. At this point she felt she could go on all night, and for most of the next day.

  ‘Do we know when Keating plans to do the postmortem?’

  ‘Not until the morning. Around ten.’ Joe Ashworth did look tired. Nearly half her age, but he couldn’t match her for energy. Don’t be smug, Vera pet. That’s all down to genetics. Hector was still climbing trees at seventy, stealing birds’ eggs.

  ‘Team briefing at eight-thirty then,’ she said. ‘We’ll come back here after the post-mortem. Lull the bastards into a sense of security by giving them the morning off.’ She grinned at him. ‘Get yourself home, man. It’s your birthday. Your lass will be waiting for you, all frilly knickers and fishnet stockings. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Back inside, the house seemed quiet. In Ferdinand’s room she found Billy Wainwright; she pulled on the paper suit and boots that he threw to her, and joined him.

  ‘No signs of violence or disturbance in here,’ he said. ‘I was just off home.’

  ‘Hang on for a few minutes, will you, Billy, while I just have a quick look at the man’s things.’

  He shrugged to show that he wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t about to make a fuss. The place smelled of cigarette smoke, despite the sign on the door saying smoking wasn’t allowed. That, and some sort of fancy aftershave. The clothes in the wardrobe felt expensive to her – the shirts were heavy cotton and the jerseys cashmere. She looked at the labels and recognized some of the designer names. She hadn’t thought university lecturers were so well paid.

  On the desk under the window there was a black ring binder and a diary. Again she turned to Wainwright. ‘Have you finished with these? Can I take them with me?’

  He nodded, and it seemed to Vera suddenly that the man was exhausted, too tired even to speak. Perhaps the effort of lying to his wife, of keeping up with his bonny young lovers, was finally catching up with him.

  She got Wainwright to drive her up the lane to her Land Rover. The internal light had never worked, but there was a torch in the glove compartment for emergencies, and she punched numbers into her phone. There was no reply from Charlie, which was only to be expected. He could be an idle bastard, Charlie, though for some jobs – the meticulous searching through a suspect’s background, for example – there was nobody to match him. Most likely now he’d be in his bed. Or a lock-in at his local pub, his phone switched off.

  Holly did answer, and Vera could have predicted that too. Holly was young and fiercely ambitious. A good detective, but not as good as she thought she was. Sometimes Vera took it upon herself to remind her DC of that fact.

  ‘How did the chat with Joanna go?’ No need to introduce herself. Holly would know who it was at this time of night.

  ‘Okay. Joanna Tobin stuck to the story she gave you. All very calm and collected. You’d have thought she’d been through a police interview a dozen times. She’d had a message from Tony Ferdinand asking to meet her, and she went to the glass room at the top of the house. She didn’t go out onto the balcony, and just assumed that he’d changed his mind about the meeting. She saw the knife on the floor and decided to take it back to the kitchen.’

  ‘If she’s the killer,’ Vera said, ‘what did she do with the murder weapon?’

  ‘Could she have chucked it over the balcony?’

  ‘She could have done.’ Vera allowed herself to sound a bit impressed. ‘But Billy Wainwright has already been down with his torch to check. Nothing. Anything else from the interview?’

  ‘Not much. Joanna says she didn’t like Ferdinand, but she had no reason to kill him.’

  ‘Nobody liked him much,’ Vera said slowly. ‘At least, that’s the impression they give.’ She paused. ‘Do you think Joanna was set up?’

  ‘You mean the murderer sent the message, not Ferdinand?’ Holly was openly sceptical. Vera thought she hadn’t yet learned the importance of suitable manners when she spoke to her superiors. The lass could do with a bit more respect. ‘In that case, why leave a knife that wasn’t the murder weapon lying around? He must have realized we wouldn’t be misled for long into thinking Joanna was the killer.’

  ‘Unless he’s an ignorant bugger.’ Vera was playing devil’s advocate. Really, she didn’t know what she thought about all this. Except that someone was playing games.

  ‘Come off it!’ Holly said. Only adding ‘Ma’am’ at the last minute. That lack of respect again. ‘They were all on a crime-writing workshop. They’d understand the basics of forensics, if they write that sort of stuff.’

  This time Vera had to concede defeat. ‘Aye. Maybe.’ In the house in the valley below it seemed that the writers were going to bed. The lights on the ground floor were being switched off. ‘Did you get Joanna home all right?’

  ‘Yes, I dropped her off myself. It wasn’t too far out of my way.’

  ‘Was Jack at home?’ Vera imagined his relief as he opened the door and saw Joanna standing there. She hoped he’d contained himself and not made too much fuss. Joanna wouldn’t like tears and hugs.

  ‘Someone opened the door. I assumed it was him. I didn’t hang around.’

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning then. Eight-thirty for a briefing. I’ve left a message on Charlie’s phone.’

  Vera clicked off her phone and sat for a moment in silence. She opened the window to clear her head and thought she could hear the waves on the rocks at the end of the valley. She started the engine, drove down to the house to turn round, then headed home. She felt an unexpected surge of relief when she’d negotiated the lanes and reached the road that would take her inland. It was as if she’d escaped from a prison.

  At home the farm was in darkness. She got out of the Land Rover in the yard, almost expecting to find Jack lurking in the barn with his questions or his gratitude, but she unlocked her house without interruption. On her kitchen table were three big bottles of their home-brew and half a dozen mucky eggs in a bowl. A card in Joanna’s writing. Thanks. Vera wondered if Joe Ashworth would consider that bribery and corruption. Then she thought she’d better get back her bloody key. The last thing she wanted was the hippies wandering in and out of her house whenever they felt like it.

  In bed she looked at Ferdinand’s diary. It had been fingerprinted and tested, but the only contact traces came from the dead man. It contained no insights into his mind, just a list of appointments. In the week before his journey to Northumberland he’d recorded an episode of The Culture Show for television and appeared live on Front Row on Radio 4. Vera occasionally listened to that when she was having her supper and wondered if she’d heard him – he’d be one of those self-satisfied prats who criticized any poor bugger who had the nerve to put his thoughts on paper. As far as she knew, Ferdinand had never been published himself. Since arriving at the Writers’ House he’d marked in the schedule of his responsibilities: tutorial 1, tutorial 2. No names. And for today: 5 p.m. lecture. Nuts and bolts of the business. Also a single initial and a question mark: J? So he had expected to meet up with Joanna. The extra scraps of information were merely tantalizing.

  Vera left home early the next morning and still there was no sign of Jack or Joanna. Holly was in the incident room before her, printing off the information she’d found on the Writers’ House on the Internet. The equivalent, Vera thought, of an over-eager pupil sharpening the teacher’s pencil. Then: My God, that shows my age. When did they last have pencils in classrooms? The others wa
ndered in afterwards, Charlie last as usual. Holly handed out the notes.

  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 a
ppointment 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.

  Chapter Nine

  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.