The Glass Room

Chapter Eleven

Later that afternoon Nina felt a compulsion to write. The hours before tea had been marked as free for students to concentrate on their own work: on the exercises set by tutors or on suggested edits to submitted manuscripts. Downstairs the house was empty and quiet. The residents must be writing in their rooms or searching for inspiration outside. The police had taken up residence in the chapel, so that was now out of bounds.

At the introductory meeting on their arrival at the Writers’ House, Nina had said, only partly joking, that she was there under false pretences. Certainly she could talk about short fiction – the form had been her area of study since she was an undergraduate – but she’d never written crime. Now, with the tension and drama of a real murder investigation in the background, she began to understand the attraction of the genre. Nothing was more shocking than murder, yet the traditional structure of crime fiction provided a way of examining the subject with distance and grace. The idea that she might create her own detective story had grown slowly and insidiously all day, but by mid-afternoon she could think of nothing else. She felt as excited as she had as a new graduate, the ideas buzzing in her head, the fingers twitching to hold a pen. The exercise she’d set for the students was that they should choose a place in the house or garden as a setting for a crime scene. They should describe it, and use the description as a jumping-off point for their story. A good discipline: to make the scene real for the author and for the reader. Nina thought now that it would be a sensible way for her to get started too.

She prowled through the house looking for a setting for her piece. Nothing indoors sparked her imagination. The house was quiet. From the kitchen she heard the sound of cooking and the door banged as Mark Winterton returned from his interview with the good-looking sergeant in the chapel, but nobody else was about.

She fetched her coat from upstairs and went outside. The police officers on the doors had gone and she slipped through the back door and into the car park. The light had almost disappeared and the mist had returned like a fine drizzle on her skin. On the terrace the wrought-iron furniture appeared ghostly and insubstantial, a distorted memory of warm summer days. Water dripped through the ornate holes cut into the tables, and the chairs were tipped forward to allow rain to drain away. A lamp had been switched on in the drawing room beyond the glass, but nobody was inside. A fire had been lit in the big grate.

Nina imagined this as her crime scene. The terrace designed for use in sunshine, now gloomy on a grey October afternoon. One of the white chairs set upright and occupied by her victim, the moisture like pearls on her hair and skin. Nina dried a chair with a tissue and sat down, taking the place of the victim. Who would it be? Important, surely, to get inside the head of the person who’d been murdered, even if he or she were already dead when the story started. She, Nina decided. Her victim would be a woman, but someone quite different from herself.

Her concentration was broken by a sound from inside the drawing room. Raised voices. She turned to look, but from where she was sitting she couldn’t see them. Nor could they see her.

‘Really, Mother, you have to be careful.’ That was Alex Barton. Alex the son, who must have left the dinner preparations for a while. Nina supposed she should make herself known. There was something shabby about sitting here in the fading light eavesdropping on the conversation inside. But she didn’t move. Writers were like parasites, preying on other people’s stress and misery. Objective observers like spies or detectives.

Except I’m not objective, Nina thought. I don’t like Miranda. I don’t know about her son. He seems harmless enough, but I certainly don’t like her.

The boy continued to speak, sounding concerned and exasperated at the same time. ‘Why don’t we just cancel the rest of the course?’

‘We can’t do that!’ His mother’s voice was sharp. ‘We’d have to give them a refund, and we can’t afford to throw money away. You know how tough things are at the moment. Besides…’

‘Besides, what?’

‘I’d rather have the investigation taking place here, where we can keep an eye on what’s going on. If we send everyone home we won’t know what’s happening.’

‘I don’t want to know!’ Alex said. ‘I want to forget all about Tony Ferdinand. You don’t know how pleased I am that he won’t be part of our lives from now on.’

‘You should be careful.’ The mother repeated her son’s words, so that it sounded like a mantra. ‘You don’t want people to think you’re pleased he’s dead.’

‘Of course I’m pleased!’ The words were high-pitched and childish. ‘Given the chance, I’d dance on his grave.’

The spite in his voice took Nina back to St Ursula’s, to one of the dreaded seminars. She’d heard the same note in her own voice that afternoon in London. The afternoon she’d described to Inspector Stanhope, when for once she hadn’t been the object of the group’s criticism. When the relief of someone else bearing the brunt of the bullying had caused Nina to join in, to be almost as cruel as the rest of them. Throwing insults as if they were rocks.

A sudden noise brought her back to the present: wood splitting in the fire, sounding loud as a gunshot in the silence.

‘Ssh,’ Miranda said. ‘You don’t know who might be listening.’

I’m listening, Nina thought, relishing her role as observer. Oh yes, I’m certainly listening. It occurred to her that Vera Stanhope would be proud of her. Then she heard the door shutting and assumed that both people had left the room. She got up quietly and looked inside. The space was lit by a single standard lamp and Miranda was sitting in a chair by the fire. Her eyes were closed and tears ran down her cheeks.

By the time Nina had replaced her coat, scribbled some ideas for her story in a notebook and returned to the drawing room, it was filled with people. Miranda was talking to Giles Rickard, one of the tutors. He was an elderly novelist with a red nose, a large shambling body and arthritis. His crime fiction was superficially gentle and rather old-fashioned, though it contained moments of malicious wit. His detective was a Cambridge don, a mathematician. Rickard had had a late burst of success when a television readers’ group had picked one of his books for discussion, and now he regularly appeared in the best-seller lists. Nina thought it was rather a coup for Miranda to have attracted him to teach on the course. He wore a perpetual air of surprise as if he couldn’t quite believe that fame had come to him at last. With the students he could be occasionally waspish and demanding, but he’d taken to Nina.

‘You write well,’ he’d said when they’d first met in the house, so she’d assumed that he must have got hold of one of her recent books, and that in itself had endeared him to her. And perhaps Chrissie would persuade him to give a blurb for the next title. ‘You’ll see, my dear, it could happen for you too. But success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. You give up a good deal.’ She’d wondered what a man like him could have to give up. He’d never married, had no family. Privacy perhaps. Or leisure. But surely he could turn down the speaking engagements and the book tours. Why, for instance, had he agreed to spend this week at the Writers’ House? It couldn’t be that he needed the money.

Now he waved at her across the room. Miranda, still speaking to him, seemed not to notice. Nina made herself camomile tea and went to join them.

‘What are your plans for the rest of the evening?’ Nina’s question was directed at Miranda. In her room she’d looked at the programme. Ferdinand had been scheduled to lecture on the editorial process in the time before dinner.

Miranda showed no sign of her earlier distress. The tears had been wiped away and fresh make-up applied. ‘We had a good idea about that. I’ve asked Mark if he’d give us a talk on the crime scene and the role of the CSIs. It would fit in nicely with the writing exercise you set today. What do you think?’

Nina paused. ‘I do wonder if a lecture on true crime might be a bit close to home. Rather lacking in taste?’

‘We’re all thinking about poor Tony’s murder,’ Miranda said, ‘even if we’re too tactful to discuss it. I don’t suppose a lecture on the subject will upset anyone, especially as poor Joanna was something of a stranger in our midst. We seem to have very thick skins here.’

Nina saw that was true. The only person who’d shown genuine emotion at Ferdinand’s death had been Miranda herself, and it seemed she could switch that on and off at will. She was astonished that Mark Winterton had agreed to speak to them. Perhaps Miranda had bullied him into it, because he’d always seemed a shy and retiring man.

His lecture, however, was surprisingly entertaining, and he seemed to come to life talking about his work. He began by explaining the process of securing a crime scene. The students were more attentive than Nina had seen them – certainly more focused than when she’d been speaking on literary matters – and she found herself fascinated too. What was it about the ex-policeman’s talk that intrigued and even titillated? Why this bizarre interest in the process of managing the crime scene? Because, like crime fiction, it gave violent death a shape and a narrative? It turned an inexplicable horror into a process, into people’s work.

Winterton’s voice was pleasant and light. ‘The first officer called to a crime is responsible for securing the scene,’ he said. ‘Even if he’s a new constable and a senior officer turns up, his duty is to restrict access until the CSIs give permission. It wasn’t always like that! One of the first murders I investigated, the chief constable turned up with half a dozen friends – all in evening jackets and dicky-bow ties. They’d been at some smart do, and gawping at a poor woman who’d been battered to death by her husband provided the after-dinner entertainment.’ He paused. ‘And some officers call those the good old days.’

Lenny Thomas stuck up his hand. ‘What do you think of the way the police are handling Tony Ferdinand’s murder?’

Winterton gave a little laugh. ‘Oh, I’m not prepared to comment on a colleague’s work. If you’re personally involved, even as a witness, you have a very different perspective on an investigation.’ He glanced to the back of the room.

Turning, Nina saw that Vera Stanhope had returned and was standing there next to her good-looking young sergeant. Ashworth gave the inspector a wry grin and she flapped her hand at him, a gesture that said: Don’t you have a go at me too. So perhaps Inspector Stanhope had a tendency to become personally involved in her cases. Perhaps her perspective on the investigation was flawed. The rest of the audience realized the detectives were there and fell silent as if they were expecting an announcement from Vera – news perhaps that Joanna had been charged and that the investigation was officially over. But Vera only said, ‘Don’t mind us, folks! We’re just here to pick up a few tips.’

The interruption and the arrival of Vera Stanhope and Joe Ashworth seemed to put Winterton off his stride. He continued to lecture, but in a dry and formal way as if he were talking to a group of young trainees, emphasizing the need to follow procedure. It was about bagging evidence and taking photographs. All interesting enough, but without the human element that had captured their interest previously. It seemed to Nina that the appearance of the detectives had reminded him of a real death – the death of someone they’d all known – and, even if the victim hadn’t been particularly well liked, he no longer considered murder a fit subject for entertainment.

Yet it was fictional murder that had captured her imagination. She now had her central character and the germ of an idea, which was both simple and audacious. What fun if I can pull this off!

While all around her the residents were asking Mark Winterton questions about fingerprints and DNA, in her mind Nina was out on the terrace in an October dusk, watching a murderer kill a woman who was sitting on a white wrought-iron chair.