Silent Voices

Chapter Thirty

Joe Ashworth spent most of the day trying to track down Connie and Alice. First he went into town and found Frank, Connie’s ex, at work in the theatre close to the Quayside. Sarah had dragged Joe there to see a couple of plays before the arrival of the kids and he’d usually had a good time despite himself. And despite the arty clientele hanging around in the bar, posing before the show.

Frank was sitting outside with a group of other people smoking. He was dark and thin, with the sort of brooding good looks that Sarah went for. When Joe asked for a word in private, he stubbed out his cigarette and took Joe inside. They sat in the back row of the theatre itself. The stage was being dressed for a play and occasionally someone would wander on to shift a bit of furniture, but the stagehands took no notice of the two men in the audience.

‘So you haven’t heard from her?’ Ashworth couldn’t tell what the man beside him was thinking. He seemed to be preoccupied and Ashworth wondered if his mind was more on the production than on his ex-wife and daughter. Certainly his attention was fixed on the stage.

‘Not since I phoned her to tell her about Jenny Lister. Alice was going to come to stay with me and Mel this weekend.’

‘And you have no idea where she might be?’ Ashworth thought if his wife and kids had disappeared, he’d be a bit more concerned than Frank seemed to be.

‘She’s only been gone for a couple of hours, hasn’t she? She could be anywhere. Shopping. Coffee with a mate.’

And Ashworth realized that he was the one behaving strangely. It was true after all. He was over-reacting. ‘Could you let me have Connie’s mobile number? We didn’t get it from her.’

Now Frank did turn towards him to stare. Ashworth felt uncomfortable under the gaze, almost as if he’d been caught propositioning Connie. Perhaps he should explain that his interest was purely professional, but that would make the situation even more embarrassing. He would be seen to be protesting too much. Frank jotted a number on the corner of a sheet of paper torn from his notebook. ‘The press made her life torture,’ he said. ‘And now the media circus is back again. You can hardly blame her for wanting to escape for a while.’

‘Could you give me the names and numbers of people who might be putting her up,’ Ashworth said. ‘We need her to identify a suspect. If she gets in touch, tell her we’ll be discreet.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Frank obviously had little faith in the discretion of the police. ‘Just like last time, when you threw her to the wolves and then did nothing to protect her.’

For the rest of the day Joe tried calling Connie whenever he had a moment free. Her landline at the cottage and her mobile. Knowing, after the first few attempts, that it was a waste of time, but still giving it a go in a way that was almost superstitious. The mobile was either switched off or the battery had run down. The first few times he left a message. After that he didn’t bother. He didn’t want her to feel cornered by him too. There was no answering service on the landline. He let it ring for ten seconds each time, then replaced the receiver.

After the meeting with Frank, he left Newcastle and drove inland. He thought he needed to stay close to Barnard Bridge while Vera went chasing all round the county following her instincts and her need for perpetual movement. His instinct told him that the answer to both murders was here in the lush green fields of the Tyne valley.

Karen Shaw had been allowed back to her house. Joe found her there with her husband. They welcomed him with a warmth he hadn’t expected. It was as if they saw him as some sort of medium or magician, as if he provided a means of communicating with the boy they’d lost. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. The young detective was a distraction. They’d been blaming themselves and each other for the loss of their son, and now they had someone else to talk to. There was the guilt that always lingers with survivors. He listened to their confessions, knowing there was nothing he could do to make them feel better.

‘He wanted to go back to Bristol a few days ago,’ Karen said, the words spilling out like tears. ‘His girlfriend had gone early. She does drama and there was a film they were making. She asked him to act in it, just a small part. Her family’s got money and she doesn’t need to do paid work in the holidays. They’d been skiing in Colorado over Easter; they’d invited him too and he could have gone with them, if he’d been able to find the fare. A couple of years ago we’d have been able to give it to him, no problem. Now it was impossible.’

She paused for breath and Joe tried to take her back to her first sentence. ‘That was the only reason he wanted to go back before the start of term? The film, I mean. Jenny Lister’s death hadn’t upset him?’

‘No.’ She stared up at him. He’d never seen her without make-up before. ‘Why would it?’

‘Well, he knew her, didn’t he?’ Joe gave an encouraging little smile. ‘Met her once at least. He’d been out with her daughter, Hannah.’

‘Hannah. I remember her. Bonny little thing. I never knew her surname, didn’t make the connection. You know her, don’t you, Derek? She was the little redhead. He was very keen on her for a while. His first real love.’ She gave a gasp of anguish, grieving perhaps because there would be no last love, no wedding, no grandchild.

Derek nodded, though Joe wouldn’t have bet that he really remembered Hannah Lister. He didn’t want to admit to a gap in the shared experience of bringing up their only son.

‘Why did Danny stick around in the end?’ Joe asked. ‘Why didn’t he go down to Bristol to be in the film?’

‘That was about money too, wasn’t it, Derek? He’d have lost a week’s pay if he hadn’t worked out his notice. And I told him he couldn’t let them down. I’d got him the job, and I’d have looked bad if he’d just quit.’ Her own confession. ‘If I hadn’t been so bothered about what they’d think about me at the Willows, he’d still be alive.’

The couple sat looking at each other.

‘It was just as much my fault.’ The husband was determined to shoulder his share of responsibility. ‘I told him he had to pay his way now. We spoilt him when he was a boy, Sergeant. Our only son. Money no object. We gave him whatever he wanted. It came hard to him when that had to stop. Especially when he hooked up with all those rich southern kids in uni. I could tell he blamed me. He was bored silly in that job in the health club. Sometimes I could see him looking at me and I knew he thought I’d let him down.’

‘Is that why he started stealing?’ Joe knew all about that now. Vera had called him as soon as she’d left Lisa’s house. Find out from the parents what was going on there. Did Jenny Lister catch him thieving? ‘Because it wasn’t for the cash, was it? He’d have hardly made enough to buy a couple of pints in the uni bar. Was it because he was bored?’

Now both parents turned on Ashworth. Fierce looks. A stony silence broken by Derek. ‘You can’t accuse the boy. He’s dead. He can’t fight back.’

‘If you want us to find his killer,’ Ashworth said, ‘you have to help me here. We have a witness who saw him take money from the staffroom. Did he know he’d been seen?’

Another silence.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ Joe said gently. ‘If it’s not relevant, his stealing will never be made public. The witness won’t talk. But you must tell me what you know.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Karen said.

‘But you guessed? Suspected?’

‘He’d been moaning about being skint one morning and then suddenly there was a ten-pound note in his pocket and he was buying coffee in the hotel lounge before his shift started. I wondered.’

‘That must have been terrible,’ Joe said. He imagined finding out that one of his own kids was a thief. ‘It must have eaten away at you. Did you discuss it with anyone at work?’

‘No!’ The thought appalled her. ‘He was going to be a lawyer. If anyone found out, he could ruin the whole of his life for the sake of a cup of coffee. A few more days and he’d be in Bristol and we could forget the whole thing.’

It occurred to Joe that this woman had spent her life protecting her son and had created a monster. Would she kill to protect him? Perhaps, but there was no possibility that she would have stood behind him in the garden and strangled the boy, who had been, he saw now, her passion.

‘Did you discuss it with Danny?’

This time there was a hesitation. ‘No. I know I should have done. But I didn’t want the last few days of his holiday spoiled. I wanted us to be happy, the family we’d once been. I pushed the idea out of my head. I told myself Danny wouldn’t behave like that.’

Ashworth turned to her husband. ‘Did you know anything about this, Mr Shaw?’

The man shook his head, apparently baffled by the events that had run up to his son’s death.

‘Where was Danny the morning Mrs Lister died?’ Ashworth kept his voice gentle. Not a hint of accusation there. ‘I know his shift at the Willows didn’t start until late afternoon, but is there any chance he was in the hotel that morning?’ No reply. ‘Mrs Shaw?’

She didn’t speak for a long time, but this time he didn’t prompt her. ‘He didn’t come home the night before,’ she said at last. ‘Often when he was working late Derek would go and pick him up at the end of his shift. There are no buses in the evening and he didn’t have his own car.’ Something else for the boy to complain about. ‘But occasionally he’d stay over. There was one of the staff bedrooms he was allowed to use. If he’d swapped to work an early shift the following day, or if he’d started drinking with some of the lasses working there.’ She looked up. ‘Usually it was the lasses he stayed up chatting to. They all fell for him.’

‘And that was what had happened the evening before Mrs Lister was murdered?’

She nodded. ‘Derek would have gone to get him, but Danny phoned and said not to bother. He’d stay at the hotel.’

‘Did you see him the next day? The day of the murder?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t around when I turned up for my shift, so I thought he’d got the first bus home, that we’d missed each other.’ She looked fiercely at Ashworth. ‘He probably wasn’t even in the hotel when the woman died.’

‘You didn’t ask him? Later, after the woman’s body was found, you didn’t ask if he’d been there?’

‘No!’ she said. ‘How could I? That would have been like accusing him of murder!’

After her outburst, they sat again in silence. In the garden a red squirrel balanced on a branch of one of the mature trees that lined the road. A clock in another room chimed the half hour. Time was moving on, and Connie and Alice still hadn’t been found. Ashworth found himself distracted, realized he’d lost the focus of the interview.

‘Greenhough,’ he said. ‘That estate not far from here. Land ripe for development, I’d have thought. Did you never try to get hold of that, Mr Shaw?’

Shaw looked at him as if he were mad. ‘What’s that got to do with this?’

‘Probably nothing.’ Another bee in Vera Stanhope’s bonnet. ‘But just humour me, eh?’

‘I nearly bought it at one time,’ Shaw said. ‘Christopher Eliot seemed close to settling. But in the end the rest of the family wouldn’t agree.’ He stared out of the window. ‘If I’d got that, we’d have been set up for life. Fifty executive homes. Danny would have had everything he’d wanted then.’

‘I’d like to see Danny’s room,’ Ashworth said. ‘Would you mind?’

‘The police have already been in,’ Karen said angrily. ‘They were there for hours, going through his things. He’d have hated that. I was never allowed in there, not even to change his sheets.’

‘I know. And I won’t disturb anything.’

She stood up and he followed her, expecting to be led upstairs. Instead they went along the corridor and into the ground-floor extension. Danny’s space was almost like a self-contained flat, its own shower room, its own outside door.

‘We built this when he was thirteen,’ Karen said. ‘When we still had the cash. Derek’s idea. A place he could have his friends to stay without disturbing us.’

Spoilt brat, Joe thought. Most kids would give their eye-teeth for a place like this, and he still wasn’t happy.

The room was long and low. It had the feel of a rather grand student bedsit. A guitar lay on the floor next to a pile of CDs. There was a television and PC. At one end a workbench with a kettle and microwave, a small fridge. Flat-pack bookshelves. The posters on the walls seemed to date back to school days. Rock musicians and weird prints that meant nothing to Joe. On one wall a huge collage made of scraps of fabric and shiny paper in vivid colours, arresting and vital. At first it seemed to have no apparent form, but staring, Joe made out a huge, smiling face. Karen saw him looking at it.

‘Hannah did that,’ she said. ‘She made it for her GCSE exam. Danny said he liked it and she gave it to him for a birthday present.’ There was a pause. ‘Sometimes I think things would have been different if he’d stayed with Hannah. That’s when we started to lose him: when she told him she didn’t want to see him any more. It was as if he gave up on us then.’

‘But he had a new girlfriend in Bristol?’ Joe wanted to believe that Danny had been happy at university.

‘Oh, yes.’ Karen walked around the room, picking up small objects. ‘And she was lovely too. But more like a trophy. Something else for him to possess. He’d never have been able to possess Hannah.’