The Glass Room

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.

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.

As she returned to the house she was amused to see the relief in the young policeman’s eyes when he glimpsed her approaching through the garden. Perhaps he’d been reprimanded for letting her out, warned he’d be in big trouble if she escaped. There was still no sign of Vera Stanhope or her colleague. Perhaps it’s all over, she thought. Perhaps they’ve arrested Joanna Tobin and need nothing more from us. That made her think of the short story Joanna had submitted the day before, and how she’d have been proud to have written it. But just as she was turning into the door, a minibus arrived and a group of uniformed men and women spilled out, chatting and laughing. She hesitated long enough to discover that they were there to search the gardens. All day she would catch glimpses of them, walking in lines across the lawns and through the trees.

Alex had moved inside and was clearing the grate in the drawing room. He was bending over the fireplace sweeping the last of the ash into a big, flat rusty dustpan. He was wearing jeans and a tight black T-shirt. Nina had noticed before that he never seemed to be affected by the cold.

He heard her come in and turned round. ‘Sorry. I should have done this last night. But after all that happened…’

‘How’s Miranda this morning?’ Really, Nina didn’t care how Miranda was feeling. She’d taken a dislike to the woman from the minute she’d arrived here. From before that, even. But it seemed the right thing to say.

He straightened. He’d tipped the ash into a metal bucket. ‘She’s okay. It’s not as if she was particularly close to Tony. Not recently. I don’t think they’d had much to do with each other professionally for years. It was the shock, I suppose, that made her so hysterical.’

‘Oh, I thought they were great friends.’ That, certainly, was the impression Ferdinand had given all those years ago.

Alex looked up sharply. ‘Once perhaps. Not now.’

Nina brought out her notes. This was her standard lecture on the structure of the short story. She’d given it so many times that she could deliver it standing on her head. She looked at her watch. Ten minutes to go. Soon the keen ones would be dribbling in.

An hour later they stopped for coffee. The lecture had gone well enough. The students had laughed in the right places, had seemed focused, had taken notes. Nina enjoyed teaching mature students more than she did lecturing to undergraduates, who were usually super-cool and unengaged. And yet this morning she had the sense that they were all just going through the motions. Wasn’t everyone actually thinking about a real crime while she’d been speaking of fiction?

‘Storytelling is all about what if?’ she’d said. ‘What if this character acts in this particular way? What if things aren’t quite what they seem?’

Now, drinking her black decaff coffee, listening to the murmured conversation all around her, she thought she had her own questions, which could affect the narrative of these particular events: What if Joanna Tobin didn’t kill Tony after all? What if I tell the detective everything I know about Tony Ferdinand?

After the break she set the group an exercise. The room was quiet and warm, from the background heat of the radiators, but also from the sun that flooded in through the big windows. Nina found that she was drifting into a daydream, part memory and part fantasy. This is what writers do, she thought. We create fictions even from our own experience. None of our recollections are entirely reliable. For she considered herself a writer, even though her work was only published by a small independent press based in the wilds of Northumberland.

In her story (or her memory) she was twenty-one, a bright young woman, newly graduated with a First in English literature from Bristol University. She spent the summer in her grandparents’ home in Northumberland, working in the local pub every evening and writing during the day. A novel, of course. A great young woman’s novel about growing up and love. It had been a joyous book, Nina thought now – the writing as glittering as the water had been that wonderful summer, when she sat in the garden of her grandparents’ house, with her laptop on the rickety wooden table, tapping out her 2,000 words a day. She would be far too cynical to write a novel like that now. And her grandparents had watched admiringly, interrupting only to bring her cold drinks, bowls of raspberries from the garden, slices of home-made cake.

Nina stirred in her chair and glanced at the clock. The time she’d allowed her students for the exercise was over. Now they would read their work aloud and she would find something intelligent, helpful and kind to say about it. Her own story would have to wait for another occasion.

The fat detective appeared suddenly at lunchtime. She was there with the good-looking sidekick, ladling soup into her bowl, as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks, chopping off thick slices of newly baked bread and spreading it with butter.

Nina watched her from the other side of the table. She tried to listen in to the conversation between the detectives, but beside her Lenny Thomas was demanding her attention, needing her reassurance.

‘So you think, like, that I have a chance of getting onto the course at St Ursula’s? Even now Tony Ferdinand’s dead?’

‘I think you could find a publisher now, Lenny. I’m not sure the St Ursula’s course is what you need at this point in your writing career. You have a fresh and original voice. A publisher will see that. He wouldn’t need Tony Ferdinand to point it out to him.’ And you’d be any publicist’s dream. Ex-offender from a former pit village. Much easier to promote you than a middle-class female academic in a provincial university, already approaching middle age. In fact everything mid, everything mediocre.

She realized how bitter she had become. And how jealous she was of this enthusiastic man with his newly found passion for writing, his ability to hook the reader in with the simplicity of his prose and the authenticity of his characterization. She turned to the neighbour on her left. Mark Winterton might be boring, but at least he wouldn’t make her feel inadequate. His writing was well crafted, but pedestrian, lacking any spark or humour, and his value to this particular class was that he was a retired police inspector. He was tall, grey-haired and polite and answered the group’s questions about procedure, forensics and the judicial system with consistent good humour.

‘This must seem very strange to you, Mark,’ Nina said. ‘To be at the receiving end of an investigation, I mean.’

‘It is rather.’ He wasn’t local and had a northern accent that she didn’t quite recognize.

‘Does it make you regret leaving the job?’ She was genuinely interested. After having such responsible and demanding work, wouldn’t life seem a little tame afterwards? ‘Is that why you decided to start writing about it instead, so you can recapture some of the excitement?’

He shook his head gently. ‘You can’t know,’ he said, ‘how glad I was to leave the stress behind. I’m more than happy to be an observer on this one.’

‘Why choose crime then, when you decided to write?’

‘I read all the text books,’ he said, as if the explanation was obvious. ‘The ones on how to be an author. They all tell you to write about what you know. I joined the force when I was sixteen. I don’t know about anything else.’

‘There’s more to life than work!’ Nina wondered in her own case if that was true. She used her work as an escape, an excuse to avoid relationships. ‘Are you married?’

He smiled. ‘Divorced,’ he said. ‘The stress of the job took its toll early on. Two sons and five grandkids.’ He paused. ‘There was a daughter too, but she died when she was young.’

‘Then you could write children’s fiction. Or about what it is to lose a child. You know about those things.’

‘Is it possible to make a story out of something so personal?’

‘It’s not always easy,’ Nina said. ‘But it’s certainly possible. If you want to try, I’d be happy to look at it.’

‘Thank you. I might take you up on that!’ And his face suddenly lit up, so Nina thought she had probably earned her fee, just in that conversation.

On the other side of the room Inspector Stanhope had already finished eating. She hoisted herself to her feet. Nina noticed that there was a splash of soup on her jersey and felt the urge to pick up her napkin and wipe it off.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry that we’re obliged to disturb you again.’

No you’re not, Nina thought. You love all this. You’re not like Mark Winterton. You thrive on the stress. You probably think that we’re a load of pretentious morons anyway, and that we deserve to be inconvenienced.

The inspector was continuing: ‘This afternoon we’ll take individual witness statements. Sergeant Ashworth and I will set up in the chapel and call you in when we’re ready for you. We’d be grateful if you don’t leave the Writers’ House while the process is under way.’ Nina wondered if that was a dig at her, for her comment about being imprisoned yesterday and for daring to go for a walk this morning.

That impression intensified when the inspector paused for a moment and looked around her.

‘We’ll start, shall we, with Ms Backworth?’