The Glass Room

Chapter Twenty-Three

Vera climbed the narrow stairs in the Bartons’ cottage and dipped her head under a low beam to reach a landing. A narrow passage with three doors off. It was almost dark; the only light slanted up from the kitchen below. She presumed Alex Barton was still there, sitting in the rocking chair, still not communicating with the uniformed officer she’d called back to mind him. Vera pulled on gloves before opening each of the doors and looking inside. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom.

She checked out the bathroom first. It was tiny, with a small corner bath and a shower built over it, a basin and lavatory. No room for a chair or a cupboard, except for a small unit fixed to the wall above the sink. Mirrored doors. Inside a wrapped bar of soap and some toothpaste. Over-the-counter medicines, remedies for colds and flu, indigestion. No sleeping tablets. Had Alex Barton come here last night and showered? Had he stood in the bath and washed his mother’s blood from his skin? If so, they’d find traces of it perhaps, in the outflow pipe. But the room seemed spotless to Vera. There was a smell of bleach. Not in itself suspicious. Perhaps the Bartons were naturally very clean. She wasn’t that way inclined herself, but it was known.

Alex had the smaller bedroom. It was built into the roof at the front, with a view over the yard. There was no double-glazing and Vera could hear the talk from below, could sense the anticipation even from here. There’d been a discovery. She knew she’d be excited later, but at the moment the chatter was just background noise in her head and she tried to filter it out. Now she wanted to focus on these people and the strange relationship that there’d been between them. A single parent and an only child. It could make for the closest relationship in the world. But it could be a deadly combination.

The young man’s bedroom was functional and so tidy that it made Vera uncomfortable. A psychologist might say it indicated a need to control. There was a three-quarter-sized bed against one wall, the duvet folded back at exactly halfway of its length to air the bottom sheet. Under the window, in the part of the room where the ceiling was most low, a small desk held a PC. There was no printer. Probably no need. All young people communicated electronically these days. Did Alex Barton have friends of his own age? People he texted and shared jokes with on Facebook? She couldn’t see it. He’d grown up here, would have been to school with everyone of the same age in this part of the county, but it was hard to imagine him getting pissed on a Friday night on Newcastle’s Quayside. It was as if this place had sucked the life and the youth from him and turned him into a loner. Yet when she’d first met him, she’d thought him confident, competent. Perhaps he was only comfortable in this house, on home territory. Perhaps work had been his saviour too.

Vera sat on the swivel chair in front of the desk. From here, Alex would see everyone who came down the track to the house, but there was no view of the terrace or the beach. Next to the bed was a chest of drawers. Not old like the furniture in the big house, but flat-pack from a major chain and self-constructed. Was that Alex’s choice or had his mother needed to save money? On top of the chest stood a small, flat-screen television.

What did he watch? Vera wished there was some way of finding out. Maybe that macho survival stuff. Living in the forest with only a knife and a water bottle. She couldn’t imagine him chilling out in front of soap operas or escapist drama. Comedy? He hadn’t displayed a sense of humour in any of the interviews, even before his mother’s death, but then not everyone thought it fitting to laugh about murder.

In the drawers, the clothes were ironed and neatly folded. Two sets of chef’s whites and underwear in the top drawer. Casual T-shirts and jeans in the rest. A wardrobe in the same style held one suit, a formal jacket and two pairs of grey trousers. Four shirts, again immaculately ironed. Vera knew that a couple of women came in from the next village to clean the big house each day, and that the bed linen and towels went to a laundry at the end of each course. But Vera thought this was Alex’s work. The control thing again. He’d want to look after his own possessions. Maybe she shouldn’t make too much of the spotless bathroom. If this was how Alex kept his bedroom, it would be in character for him to clean the bath and sink every day. It didn’t necessarily mean that he’d been awake all night washing away his mother’s blood.

She looked under the bed and felt behind the wardrobe. No porn. No girlie posters on the walls. In fact there were no pictures on the walls at all, only a framed certificate from his catering course. What did he do for sex? Probably used the Internet, like most of the UK’s male population. It came to Vera that more than likely he was a virgin.

In contrast, Miranda’s room was surprisingly big. Opulent and glamorous in an old-fashioned way. It held a double bed, piled with pillows and silk-covered cushions, in various shades of purple. These seemed to have been artfully arranged – another sign, Vera thought, that Miranda hadn’t been to bed the night before. There was a small wrought-iron grate, just for decoration now. Where the fire would once have been laid stood a candle in a big blue candle-holder, identical to the one on the table on the terrace. Was that significant? Vera tried to remember if she’d seen one like it in the main house. On one side of the chimneybreast, bookshelves had been built into the alcove, and on the other stood a big Victorian wardrobe. There was a dressing table with an ornate framed mirror under the window, and an upholstered stool in front of it. No PC.

So what did Miranda do for sex? The question came, unbidden, into her head. Vera sat on the stool and gave a wry smile into the mirror. She knew her team had sometimes asked the same question about her. But not recently. As you got older, folk seemed to think you could do without.

This is where Miranda would have sat to prepare herself to meet the residents. Again Vera was reminded of an ageing actress. Her dressing table was scattered with make-up. The woman hadn’t shared her son’s obsession with order and cleanliness. And beyond the mirror there was a view to the coast. It wasn’t possible to see the terrace from here – it was in the shadow of the big house. But the beach was visible. What had Miranda been thinking as she put on her face, as she brushed her hair and held it in place with spray? That her life as a writer was over? Or did she still hope for the big break, the posters on the Underground and the reviews in the Sunday papers? Was she still writing?

It seemed to Vera that this question was so important, so fundamental, that she’d been a fool not to consider it before. If Miranda had written a new book, and Tony Ferdinand had offered to help her find a home for it, of course Miranda would be shattered to find him dead. The stabbed body would symbolize her shattered dreams. It wouldn’t be easy for a middle-aged woman, considered a has-been, to find success again. If the police service was beginning to put its faith in bright new things, wouldn’t the publishing industry be even more that way inclined? It would want beauty, as well as talent, to promote. The scream of anguish Vera had heard on the afternoon of Ferdinand’s death was an expression of Miranda’s desperation about her own future. She would see nothing left for her now but to provide bed and board for younger, talented writers. She hadn’t cared for Tony Ferdinand in a personal way at all.

That, at least, was how it seemed to Vera. But she did have a tendency to get carried away by her own theories. Best not get too excited. Best to find out if Miranda had written a new book first.

She turned her attention to the bookshelves. One row was devoted to Miranda’s own work and most of the rest to paperback fiction. Some crime. There seemed to be a complete set of Giles Rickard’s novels. Had Miranda felt the need to read them, once the author had agreed to be a tutor on the course? Vera picked one up and looked at it. No dog-eared pages or coffee stains. A small square of paper slid onto the carpet. A comp slip from Rickard’s publicist. So Miranda hadn’t paid for the books or even, it seemed, read them; they’d been sent to her in the hope that she’d promote Rickard’s work on the course. Vera supposed that was how the thing worked.

Vera turned away from the shelves to consider the matter. Her head was still full of the notion that Miranda had started writing again. The first afternoon Vera had arrived here, looking for Joanna, she’d seen Miranda in the kitchen reading a manuscript. Her own book? Ideas chased each other in a crazy jig, and she could make no sense of them. Looking down at the beach, she was distracted for a moment by the sight of Nina Backworth almost at the water’s edge. Joe Ashworth came into view. They looked like a pair of lovers having a row. Vera smiled at the notion and turned back to the books.

She took Miranda’s novels out and laid them on the bed. A couple had been translated into foreign languages – one might have been in Polish and one was in German. There was a small pink version that must be Japanese. Vera set these aside. The rest she arranged in date of publication. There were four. Cruel Women, the book that had been adapted for television, was the third. She slipped it into her bag and put the others back on the shelf.

If there was no computer in the room, where would Miranda have done her writing? There was an office in the main house. When there were no students present, that would be a reasonably quiet place to work. But Miranda had been a romantic. The swept-up hair and the long skirts, the velvet and the silk, the rich colours in her bedroom, all were calculated to give a certain image, to portray a style. Vera could picture the woman sitting with a notebook and fountain pen in the grand drawing room of the big house, looking out to the coast, concentrating on the words perhaps, but also pleased to present herself as a writer. The inspector opened drawers and began her search for a manuscript or paper.

Half an hour later she gave up. There was lots of frilly underwear. The sort you might expect in a Paris whorehouse in the 1950s. An octopus of tangled coloured tights. But no notepad or exercise book. And no handkerchiefs with red hearts embroidered in the corner.

When she returned to the kitchen Alex seemed startled. It was as if he’d forgotten she was in the house. Vera sat at the table and turned towards him. ‘Was your mother still writing? She read the beginning of a story the evening she died. Was it from a new piece of work?’

‘I’m sorry?’ He looked at her with those soft, little boy’s eyes.

‘It’s ten years since she had a book published. Had she given up writing? Retired, like? I saw her reading something at the kitchen table once. Would that have been her own work? Or had she given up?’ The time spent rifling through Miranda’s belongings had made Vera impatient. She wanted to shake Alex Barton and scream at him.

He seemed not to give her question any importance. He shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. She always thought of herself as a writer. She wouldn’t ever stop. But I don’t have any details of what she might have worked on recently. Really she didn’t discuss that sort of thing with me.’

Why did you stay? Vera wondered. You had nothing in common with your mother, so why didn’t you move out? But she’d stayed with Hector. Perhaps things were never quite that easy.