The Glass Room

Chapter Sixteen

When they’d finished with Giles Rickard, Charlie was waiting for them in the main house. As Ashworth had predicted, he’d blagged coffee and a slice of homemade cake from Alex Barton and was sitting in the lobby, the front of his jacket covered in crumbs, reading a copy of the Sun.

‘That Alex seems a nice enough lad,’ Charlie said, nodding in the direction of the kitchen.

‘Eh, Charlie, man, you’d like anyone who fed you.’ Sometimes Vera despaired of Charlie. It wasn’t that he was stupid. Not really. Just unobservant, with the judgement of a gnat.

Now they were back in the chapel. They’d shut the door against the cold and Vera thought if she didn’t get some fresh air soon, she’d throw a fit. In the house there had been cooking smells coming from the kitchen and she tried to remember if there was a decent pub along this part of the coast, somewhere they could get a bar meal for lunch and maybe a pint. Though perhaps it would be simpler just to stay here. Alex Barton was a skilful chef. Her mind began to wander. She thought it was an odd existence for a young man like Barton: to be locked up in this house with a load of middle-aged arty types, the only real company a mother who seemed to pine for a more glamorous past.

She thought suddenly that Alex was a bit like Giles Rickard, who had also spent much of his adult life with his mother. Until he came to his senses: Really I couldn’t continue living in the country with my mother and her incontinent dogs.

And like me. I spent my whole life in my parent’s shadow. Hector would have liked a son to create in his own image. Someone with a passion for guns and birds of prey and breaking the law. Instead, he got a daughter with a mind of her own.

Then she realized that Charlie and Joe were staring at her and she snapped her attention back to the present.

‘So what have you got for us then, Charlie? What have you and the lovely Holly conjured up between you?’

‘I don’t know what Holly’s been up to,’ Charlie said. ‘I think she was hoping to track down Lenny Thomas’s ex, see if there was any history of domestic violence. I’ve been on the phone to an old mate of mine who’s a DS in the service in Cumbria. He remembered Mark Winterton.’

‘Did he now? And what did he come up with?’

‘Not a lot,’ Charlie said. ‘My mate described him as one of the quiet ones. Regular church-goer. You know the sort. A good enough boss and a stickler for procedure. Management loved him. He was a bit tight with his money apparently. Never first in the queue when it came to getting in a round. And you had to get him in a corner and rattle him, to get him to shell out for the tea fund.’

‘So respected, but not popular.’ Vera thought it wasn’t a bad thing to have an officer like that in the team. Someone who wasn’t going to play to the gallery.

‘Aye, though there was a lot of sympathy when his daughter died.’

‘What happened?’ Vera looked up sharply.

‘She got mixed up with the wrong crowd at uni apparently, ended up taking a heroin overdose. The coroner couldn’t decide if it was suicide or an accident.’

‘But what was the word on the street?’

‘Uh?’

‘What did your DS think had happened? Winterton’s colleagues must have had an opinion.’ She thought it would have been the talk of the station for weeks. There’d be sympathy, of course, but also malicious gossip maybe. A secret satisfaction that a God-botherer who’d given them stick over their expenses had a daughter who’d gone off the rails.

‘I don’t know,’ Charlie seemed confused. ‘My mate didn’t say.’

‘Well, ask him! If he’s based in Carlisle, it’s not that far away. An hour down the A69. Go and see him and buy him a pint.’

‘Aye, okay.’ Charlie brightened.

‘Where was the lass at university?’ Vera asked suddenly.

‘I don’t know!’ Now he was feeling got at. ‘Does it matter?’

‘It might explain what Winterton’s doing here,’ she said. ‘I mean if she was at Newcastle or Northumbria when she died. The place might provide an emotional pull for him.’ Or she might have been at St Ursula’s. That would make an interesting connection between the victim and the retired cop. She looked up at two sceptical faces. ‘Otherwise, what the hell is he doing in this place? He’s not much of a writer, so he didn’t get a bursary. But Charlie said he’s tight with his money. It doesn’t hang together.’

‘Perhaps he thought writing about his daughter’s death – putting it into a story – might help.’ Ashworth spoke for the first time. He’d had a vacant look all morning and Vera hadn’t even been sure he’d been listening. She wondered if his wife had been giving him grief again. ‘I don’t know, a way of coming to terms with the loss.’

‘Do we know what he wrote about?’ Vera was remembering Joanna’s work. All these words, she thought. All I seem to be doing on this case is sit around talking. About words written by the suspects. Again she felt the need for fresh air and a longing to escape this house. She envied Charlie his excuse for a drive to Cumbria. But she was the boss after all. She could create her own excuse.

Ashworth shook his head and Charlie looked blank.

‘What now then?’ Ashworth asked.

‘Charlie’s going to take Nina Backworth’s pills back to HQ and get them off to the lab. You and me are going out for lunch. Then if Holly has found out where Lenny Thomas’s ex-wife’s living, we’ll pay her a visit.’

‘What about this place?’ Ashworth asked.

Vera thought this place could be left to its own devices for a few hours, and really she didn’t care as long as she had a break from it. Then she had an idea. ‘Let’s get Holly over and ask her to have a chat with Mark Winterton. Two cops in the same mould, I’d say. She might get more out of him than I could. And we’ve kept her in the office for too long.’

‘What about going to Carlisle to chat to my mate?’ She could tell Charlie was pissed off because he hadn’t been invited to lunch.

‘That, Charlie, you do in your own time.’

They had lunch in the pub in Craster, sitting upstairs so there was a view over a quiet sea. Crab sandwiches and smoked salmon from the smokery over the road. The day was still cold and clear and Vera felt like a truant. She’d got Joe Ashworth to drive and had spoken to Holly on the way. Lenny’s ex-wife worked in a nursery in Cramlington and she’d be expecting them at three.

‘I felt I couldn’t breathe in the Writers’ House,’ she said. She’d gone for a glass of dry white with the sandwiches. Beer at lunchtime sometimes made her sleepy. ‘And I couldn’t think straight. This is more like it.’

‘So you’ve cracked it then, have you?’ There were times when Joe could be facetious. ‘You know who killed the letchy old goat, and why?’

‘Eh, pet, I haven’t got a clue. But at least now I feel I’ve got a chance of working it all out.’

The nursery was part of a Sure Start centre, and at first they went the wrong way and ended up with a group of pregnant women who were lying on the floor, doing breathing exercises. They reminded Vera of seals, hauled onto a beach, all round and sleek, gleaming in the sunshine. Vera had had a broody phase in her late thirties. There’d been a man then – the only man she could have contemplated living with – but he hadn’t thought the same way about her and nothing had come of it. Now she wasn’t sure she’d ever have felt the need to go through all this palaver.

Helen Thomas was in the baby room. A couple of the children were so tiny that they were lying in cots, the rest were sitting with the carers on a brightly coloured rug, surrounded by plastic toys. Ashworth, always a sucker for bairns, squatted down to make silly noises at them.

‘Don’t get any ideas, Joe,’ Vera said, only partly joking. ‘Three is enough for anyone, and they get in the way of your work.’

Lenny’s ex-wife called over to a colleague, ‘Take over here, will you, Gill. I’ll be in my office if you need me.’ Vera had been expecting their interviewee would be a nursery assistant, someone who changed nappies and wiped up sick, not this confident woman who seemed to be in charge.

The office was small, but impressively tidy. Helen Thomas nodded for them to take the two chairs and perched on the edge of the desk. On the walls there were charts and rotas, and posters about healthy eating and the importance of play.

‘How can I help you? The officer who phoned didn’t say.’

‘It’s about Lenny Thomas. You were married to him?’ Vera found it hard to imagine this neat little woman in the same bed as the man she’d met at the Writers’ House.

‘Yes.’ There was a pause. ‘Is he in some sort of trouble?’

‘Probably not. You must have seen in the press that there was a murder at the Writers’ House up the coast. Lenny was one of the witnesses.’

‘Not a suspect then?’

‘Only in the same way as all the other residents are.’

‘Oh, come off it, Inspector! How many of the other residents have a criminal record and speak like Lenny does? I bet you’re not speaking to everyone else’s partner.’

Vera was about to snap back, but then she thought of the summary she’d heard of Lenny’s background at the morning briefings. ‘Sometimes the police make assumptions,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t always mean that they’re right. So why don’t you put us straight?’

Helen didn’t reply immediately. It seemed she needed time to think about her answer. ‘Would you like tea? Coffee?’

They shook their heads.

‘Lenny is a good man,’ Helen said. ‘A romantic and a dreamer, but basically a good man.’

‘Is that why you divorced? Because you couldn’t live with his dreams?’

‘That was why I had an affair, Inspector.’ The retort was immediate. ‘I needed a man who lived in the present and not in the future. When he was made redundant from Banks, Lenny was full of wild plans and I was just concerned about paying the mortgage. My lover was stable, reliable, but very boring, and I soon got rid of him. The divorce was Lenny’s idea. He’d thought I was perfect, and he couldn’t forgive me for spoiling the image.’ She paused. ‘We’re still good friends. We have a son, Daniel, and we see each other often. Sometimes I wonder…’

‘… if you’ll get back together?’ Vera completed the sentence.

‘Yeah!’ She smiled. ‘Daft, isn’t it?’

‘How long were you married?’ Joe asked. Vera thought he was genuinely interested and wondered if he’d been having dreams of his own.

‘More than fifteen years. I’d known Lenny when we were still at school, though. He was the class clown, desperate to please. I went away to college and he got into trouble. Nothing serious. One of the Blyth hard men was pulling his strings, made him believe he could make easy money. More daft dreams. I met Lenny again when he’d just come out of prison, at a wedding of an old school friend. He made me laugh.’

‘And he adored you,’ Vera said. She thought of Jack, who adored Joanna, and wondered again if somewhere there was a lover in the background in that relationship too. Someone secret and unlikely.

‘Aye, maybe he did.’ Helen gave a little laugh.

‘It’s hard to live up to, that sort of adoration.’

‘It was very good for me.’ Helen became serious. Somewhere down the corridor a baby was crying. She listened for a moment and seemed to decide that there was nothing wrong. ‘I’d been a terribly shy child. Bright enough, but not willing to stand out or give an opinion. Lenny gave me the confidence to take more exams and try for promotion. He always believed in me, but somehow I could never quite believe in him.’

‘In his dreams?’ Vera prompted.

‘Aye, in the dreams.’

‘How long had he wanted to be a writer?’ The baby had stopped crying. Just outside the office there was a conversation between two mothers.

‘Since we got together,’ Helen said. ‘He’d got some education in prison and the teacher had encouraged him. Sometimes he’d read out his stuff and I thought it was good too, but what would I know? I did know that we had a child, and I wanted more for Daniel than Lenny or I had had growing up, and Lenny didn’t seem to mind working on the open-cast. He made friends there and the money was more than he’d ever had before. He seemed happy enough.’

‘Then he got the back trouble?’

‘Aye, folk make fun of back pain, as if it’s something you make up to fool the doctors, but Lenny was in agony.’ Again Helen was distracted for a moment by a noise outside. This time it came from a group of older children singing nursery rhymes. ‘At first I encouraged his writing. I thought it would take his mind off the pain. Then his back got better, and I thought he was ready to find another real job. It wasn’t so much the money. By then I was earning enough to keep us. I didn’t want Daniel seeing a dad who sat around the house doing nothing all day. But all Lenny could talk about were the stories, how he was going to get a publisher and what he’d buy for us when he was rich and famous.’

‘The man who died at the Writers’ House,’ Vera said. ‘He was a bit of a celebrity. On the telly all the time talking about books. Apparently he’d told Lenny that his work was good enough to get published. He’d offered to put him in touch with a publisher. Told him he had a good chance of seeing his books on the shelves.’

Helen looked up, horrified. ‘And then he died, and all that hope was all taken away. Oh, poor Len.’

‘The man, Tony Ferdinand, has rather a reputation.’ Vera chose her words carefully. ‘It seems he could be ruthless in his dealings with his students. Is it possible that Lenny might lose his temper with the man, if he felt he was being criticized or mocked?’

‘No,’ Helen said. ‘Lenny’s never lost his temper all the time I’ve known him. Even when I told him about the affair he was sad, not angry. He’s just a big softie.’

They sat for a moment in silence. Vera hoped Helen might continue, but she sat on the desk, her feet swinging like a child’s, challenging them not to believe her.

‘Did Lenny phone you from the Writers’ House,’ Vera asked at last, ‘to tell you about the murder? If you’re still close…’

‘Yes, he phoned,’ Helen said. ‘He thought we might hear about the death and he wanted to let me know he was okay.’

‘So it’s not unexpected, us turning up like this. You’d have had time to prepare your story.’

‘I didn’t need to prepare a story, Inspector.’ The original hostility had returned. ‘I’m telling you the truth.’

Vera saw they’d get nothing more out of the woman and she got to her feet. Ashworth followed her lead. At the door Vera paused and turned back.

‘How did Lenny find out you were having an affair?’

‘He didn’t find out. Once it was over, I told him. I hated having a secret from him.’

‘I hope that made you feel better.’ Vera spoke so softly that the woman probably couldn’t even hear her. Joe had heard, however, and she saw that she’d shocked him again. Still she continued, ‘It certainly wouldn’t have done a lot for Lenny.’