The Glass Room

Chapter Six

It seemed to Joe that Vera’s bad-tempered instructions, issued from Joanna’s room, had already been carried out. He’d found Ferdinand’s room. It had the same layout as Joanna’s, but was bigger and rather more grand. He’d stood at the door and looked in, tempted to look in drawers and pockets, but knowing the CSIs would want to be there first. The residents of the Writers’ House were all in one place. He’d give them time to eat, then he could start taking their contact details. Or perhaps Vera would be free by then. She loved being the centre of attention, and it would be like all her Christmases had come at once, to walk into that fancy dining room and lay down the law. He didn’t really do public speaking and still got nervous at the team briefings, if someone from outside was there.

He continued down the stairs. The dining-room door had been shut. He called over to the officer standing by the main entrance, ‘Keep an eye on things in there and give me a shout if it looks as if they’re coming to a close. I should be back in plenty of time, but just in case.’ He passed over a card so that the man had his mobile-phone number.

While it was quiet he wanted to get a feel for the space. Especially in the dark, with no views from the windows, he’d lost all sense of direction, of the way the house was laid out. He presumed the big double doors faced east towards the sea. He wandered around the ground floor, peering into empty rooms. It was a large house with the feel of a country hotel, and too plush for a college. There were dark wooden floors and the furniture was large and looked comfortable. The smell of flowers and furniture polish. In one room the chairs had been pulled into a semicircle facing a whiteboard, which still contained a list of underlined headings: Crime scene? Weapon? Suspects? A strange parody of the board they’d soon be looking at in the incident room back at the station. On the lecturer’s table there was a pile of handouts. He glanced down briefly. They seemed to contain a book list. The sheet was headed North Farm Press.

He realized that there were books everywhere. They were piled on coffee tables and on the arms of chairs in the room with the whiteboard. One large room looked just like the public library in his village. There were even books in the small bar and the public lavatories. Joe wondered what his wife would make of it. She’d recently joined a book group, but he thought the attraction was more about a night out with her mates, giggling over the Pinot Grigio and nosing into someone else’s home, than a serious study of literature.

He opened the door into a large and well-equipped kitchen. A mix of industrial catering and farmhouse traditional. An Aga and a stainless-steel range cooker. A big scrubbed pine table and gleaming worktops. On one of the benches desserts had already been placed in fancy glass bowls on two big trays and covered with tea towels. Some sort of mousse, he thought, lifting the corner of the cloth. Lemon or orange with a raspberry sauce. He felt hungry and wished he’d stopped to eat his birthday cake. A big pan was still bubbling on the slow plate of the Aga. It smelled of beef and wine, herbs and garlic.

A swing door on the opposite wall opened, letting in the murmur of voices from the dining room beyond and a skinny dark man.

‘Who are you?’ The man stopped in his tracks – startled, it seemed, by the intruder into his territory.

‘DS Ashworth. And you?’

‘Alex Barton. Director, cook and bottle-washer. Murder doesn’t seem to have dulled their appetites. They want more casserole.’ He took a set of oven gloves and lifted the pan onto the table, before shutting the lid of the Aga. His face was flushed and Ashworth thought he’d been drinking. ‘Can I help you?’

Make sure there’s some of that stew left by the end of the evening. ‘Not at the moment. Just getting a feel for the lie of the land. That okay with you?’

Alex shrugged. ‘Sure. Make yourself at home.’

‘We’ll need to talk to your guests when they’ve finished dinner. And to you, of course. Can you make sure nobody leaves?’

‘Of course. Why don’t you join us for coffee? In about half an hour.’

He gave a sardonic little wave, before picking up the pan and disappearing again through the swing door. Ashworth was left with a tantalizing glimpse of the room beyond, candlelight throwing shadows on the faces of the diners.

He left the kitchen and found himself back at the place where he’d first come into the house, the back door that led into the car park. Vera was there with Joanna. They were waiting for one of the local cops to bring a police car to the door. Joanna was now dressed in clothes that Vera had retrieved from her room – jeans and hand-knitted sweater – and seemed unusually quiet and passive. Vera helped her carefully into the vehicle and gave her shoulder a little pat. They watched the lights disappear up the lane.

‘What do you think?’ Joe said. ‘Did she do it?’

‘I don’t see that she had any motive. She claims Ferdinand was a lechy old goat. But she’ll have dealt with a few of those in her time, without resorting to stabbing them in the belly.’ But really, Vera thought, how well do I know her?

Joe nodded in the direction of the dining room. ‘They say Joanna was unbalanced.’

‘Eh, pet, they all seem like a bunch of loonies to me, but I’m not accusing them of murder.’ She paused. ‘Billy Wainwright’s taking a look at the scene now. Let’s see what he comes up with before we come to a decision, eh? As it stands, I don’t see we have enough to charge her with anyway. The CPS would laugh at us.’

‘Billy will place her at the scene. She’s admitted to that. And her fingerprints will be all over the knife.’ Joe was wondering how he could tactfully tell Vera that she’d have to step back from this one. ‘Most cases, that would be enough.’

She stopped in her tracks and threw him a vicious look. ‘Are you telling me how to do my job, Sergeant Ashworth? Think you could do it better, do you? Looking to move a couple of rungs up the ladder, at my expense?’

‘I think you should just be aware that you’re taking this personally. Your judgement could be clouded.’

Then he found Vera’s face right in his. So close he could only see her eyes, bloodshot and furious. ‘I take every killing on my patch personally, Sergeant Ashworth. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be doing my job right.’

Joe took a pace backwards and said nothing. He wasn’t paid enough to stand up to Vera Stanhope when she was in one of her strops. Let one of the suits in HQ sort her out.

Instead, he nodded again towards the dining room. ‘They haven’t started the pudding yet. We’ve got time to check with Billy before we talk to them. We’ve been invited to have coffee with them there when they’ve finished eating.’

‘Have we now! How civilized.’

When they arrived at the glass room, the crime-scene manager Billy Wainwright was on the balcony with Keating, the pathologist. They’d rigged up powerful lights, so that Ferdinand was floodlit. His skin looked white and the blood looked black. It was hard to see the good-looking charmer Joanna had described. Vera called Billy out into the corridor.

‘How’s the wife, Billy?’ A standing joke. Well, more a routine greeting now, and perhaps not so much of a joke. Billy was a serial adulterer and seemed proud of the reputation. He ignored her. ‘What happened here, Billy?’ Vera went on. ‘Did he sit on the balcony and wait to be stabbed to death? Or was he moved afterwards? I mean, this all seems madness to me.’

‘Could he have been hiding out there?’ Billy asked. ‘You wouldn’t see him from just inside the door, despite all the glass.’

‘Who’d he be hiding from?’ It was Vera at her most sceptical. ‘He asked Joanna to meet him. He wasn’t a bairn playing hide-and-seek.’

‘Mr Keating thinks Ferdinand was killed where he was found,’ Billy said. ‘But he won’t commit himself until the post-mortem.’

‘Is there anything either of you will commit yourselves to?’

‘Aye. That knife they retrieved from the woman you’ve sent off to Kimmerston for questioning…’

‘What about it? Don’t stand there grinning and playing games with me, Billy Wainwright. Just spit it out.’

‘It wasn’t the murder weapon. Nothing like. We’re looking for something about the same length and width, but the murder weapon had a serrated blade.’