by Ann Cleeves
The lower floor of the barn was open-plan, a big wood-burning stove at one end and the kitchen at the other, all shiny black granite and stainless steel.
‘What does he do for a living?’ This place wasn’t bought on a teacher’s wage.
‘He’s an architect. This was his project.’ She smiled again, waited for the anticipated compliment.
‘Lovely,’ Vera said, with no attempt to pretend that she meant it. ‘Now, what can you tell me about Jenny Lister? I understand that you were close friends.’
‘Very. We met about ten years ago. I was teaching in Hannah’s primary school – I’m still there, for my sins. Jenny joined the PTA. We’d share lifts back to the village after meetings, took to calling into the pub for a drink afterwards, and found we had lots of interests in common: film, theatre, books. The friendship developed from there.’
‘How often did you meet?’
‘At least once a week. Wednesday was our night. We were both so busy that it was easier to keep one evening free. Sometimes we’d go out – we’d always do the RSC, for example, when they came to Newcastle; occasionally there’d be something we’d fancy at the Sage. Recently we took a six-week basic flamenco course, great fun, though Jenny was much better at it than I was. Usually we’d just stay in the village. Supper here or at her house. A walk in the summer, if the weather was good.’ Anne suddenly looked stricken, and Vera saw that she was thinking there’d be no more companionable Wednesday evenings. Nothing to look forward to, to break up the week. Then no doubt she’d felt guilty for being so selfish. Vera had always thought guilt an overrated emotion.
‘Did she talk to you about the Elias Jones murder?’
‘Not in any detail. She was very professional about her work. When there was all the publicity – the stuff in the papers laying into social workers – I could tell she was having a bad time. I asked her once why she did it. I mean, teaching isn’t the easiest job in the world, but you’d have to be mad to go into social work, wouldn’t you? You get all the blame and none of the credit.’ Anne paused, and looked out of the huge glass window towards the village. ‘Jenny just said she loved it. It was the one thing she was good at. Not true, of course: she was good at lots of things. She was a brilliant mother.’ Another pause. ‘And a wonderful friend.’
‘What did you talk about then?’ Vera was struggling to imagine it. These two middle-aged, middle-class women spending all that time together. Wouldn’t they just run out of things to say? She’d never had that sort of friendship. She was growing quite close to the hippy-dippy neighbours who had the smallholding next to her house in the hills. Some evenings they got pissed together on her whisky and their dreadful home-made wine. She’d help them when the sheep needed clipping or the hens had escaped. But to spend hours, just talking . . .
‘Recently, I suppose, it was me talking and her listening.’ Anne seemed strained suddenly, and Vera thought now that she’d been tense throughout the conversation. It wasn’t just that her best friend had been murdered. Perhaps she was that sort of woman – nervous, anxious. Perhaps that was why she’d chosen to spend her professional career teaching well-brought-up bairns in a pleasant rural school. She wouldn’t manage stress of any kind.
Anne took a deep breath and continued, ‘Recently my marriage has been going through a bad patch. Sort of mid-life crisis, I suppose. I was attracted to a new member of staff at school. Nothing happened, not really, but feeling like a besotted teenager unsettled me. Jenny made me see how ridiculous I was being. She said that John and I had just built this place, spent years getting it perfect and, having achieved it, everything seemed like an anticlimax. I was just looking for something exciting. I’m sure she was right.’
God, Vera thought, what self-indulgent drivel. I’d rather spend time with an honest criminal any day than with this introspective woman.
‘She was going to come to France with us this time, but she decided not to. She said John and I needed some time to ourselves. She was that sort of friend.’
‘What about her?’ Vera said briskly. ‘Did she have any men friends?’
‘I’m not sure.’
So, it seemed the confidences had all gone one way. Jenny had been happy to listen to her friend talking about her adolescent crush, but had given nothing in return. Discretion, it seemed, was a part of her personal as well as her professional life. What secrets did she have to hide?
‘Recently I thought there might have been someone,’ Anne said suddenly. ‘She cancelled one of our Wednesday nights at the last minute, without a proper excuse. And she seemed very happy. Glowing.’
‘Didn’t you ask her what was going on?’ Now Vera was really starting to lose patience. This woman was sounding like a soppy story from a magazine.
‘She said she was in a relationship, but she couldn’t talk about it,’ Anne said.
‘Where did she meet her mystery lover?’ Vera couldn’t help herself. ‘The flamenco class?’
‘No!’ Anne seemed shocked by the thought. ‘No, really, I don’t think so. And if she had, why wouldn’t she tell me?’
‘Why all the secrecy then?’
‘I thought maybe she’d started seeing a colleague.’ Anne looked awkward. ‘Or a married man.’
So, not such a saint after all.
Driving down the narrow track towards the village, Vera was pleased. It was as if she was rediscovering the Jenny Lister of the welcoming little house and the charming daughter. Vera had always been more comfortable with sinners.
Lost in her thoughts, she had to stop suddenly to let a tractor past. She pulled off the road and saw the gateposts with the carved cormorants’ heads that she’d first noticed in the painting on Veronica’s wall. The vegetation had grown up around them and they wouldn’t have been visible from the road. On impulse Vera switched off the engine and got out of the car. She walked down the grass track between the pillars, through a spinney of alder and birch. There were wood anemones and violets, the colours very bright in the shaft of sunlight that shot through the trees. Then the woodland stopped and she saw where the house must once have stood.
There were still the remains of a formal garden, wide terraces and a walled patch where vegetables had been grown, where the skeleton of a greenhouse still leaned against the wall, but the brick and stone of the house had all been removed. Old dressed stone would be worth a fortune here in the Tyne valley. Why had the land never been sold? Did Veronica own it, or some other branch of the family? This would be a developer’s dream location. Perhaps it was in a conservation area and building was prohibited.
Grand stone steps led through the middle of the grass terraces. She walked down them, feeling as if she’d walked onto a film set. There was a series of statues on either side. Chipped and covered in lichen, they were mostly of strange mythical creatures. Some were hidden by ivy and a few had disappeared under a tangle of bramble. On one of the terraces there was the huge empty bowl of a fountain.
Looking down towards the river, she saw a pool. Trying to remember far-off geography lessons, Vera thought that perhaps the course of the river had changed over time and this lake had been left. Beside it, quite intact, was the boathouse, about which Veronica had spoken. It was made of wood that had recently been varnished; a deck on stilts was built out over the water. No boats were kept inside it now; the window was glazed and there were red-and-white curtains. A couple of dinghies, upended, lay beside it. Vera imagined it would be the perfect spot for grand family picnics, pictured Veronica presiding over a wicker hamper, trying to recapture the glory of her grandfather’s home.
Walking back to the car, she felt almost sorry for the woman.
Chapter Thirteen
Outside Connie Masters’s cottage, Ashworth hesitated for a moment to look at her car; it was pulled into the verge, so the cow parsley and the long grass had been flattened. A silver Micra seven years old, with a distinctive bump on the offside wing. He wrote down the registration number. If there was CCTV at the car park wher
e she’d claimed to have left it in Hexham the previous day, it might be possible to rule her out of the inquiry altogether.
He checked his voicemail. Vera had left a message saying she was meeting Jenny Lister’s boss for lunch. No orders or requests. Maybe she was mellowing with age. Then he rang back to the station to ask for the CCTV tapes of the Hexham car park to be picked up. Giving his own orders. God, am I turning into Vera Stanhope? The idea made him smile. Nobody else on Earth was anything like Vera.
At the Willows he met Charlie, who was on his way out, saw him from a distance leaving the hotel, his back bent and his hands in his jacket pocket. A posture like that, Ashworth thought, he’d have chronic back pain by the time he was sixty. Standing by Charlie’s car, chatting, Ashworth was aware that they were visible from the public areas in the hotel. Even though they couldn’t be overheard he felt awkward, as if he were on a stage and being stared at by a hostile audience, and he kept the conversation brief.
‘Any joy?’
Charlie shrugged. ‘I showed Lister’s photo to the workers who came on duty this morning. A couple vaguely recognized her as someone who used the swimming pool, but nothing more than that. You’d have thought one of them would have had some contact with her, had a bit of a chat. The records showed she came swimming at least once a week.’
‘I don’t know. These places are all very impersonal.’ Joe Ashworth had joined a gym the year before, in his local-authority leisure centre, though, not a smart place like this. He’d been there for an hour each session, but plugged into his Walkman, he’d hardly spoken to the other people. Unconsciously he ran a hand over his belly. Definitely running to flab. Since the new baby he hadn’t had much time for getting fit.
‘I reckon she must have been killed more than an hour before the body was found,’ Charlie said. ‘After nine-thirty, there’s an off-peak membership deal and that’s when all the older people turn up. Before then it’s the serious swimmers. They do lengths up and down the pool before work. Concentrated stuff. You get the impression they wouldn’t notice anything happening outside the water, and they don’t usually have time for the sauna or steam room.’
‘And before nine-thirty there isn’t the same staff supervision.’ Ashworth remembered his conversation with Lisa.
Charlie got into his car and wound down the window to have a fag before driving away.
Inside, Ashworth went straight to Ryan Taylor’s office. Both the hotel and the leisure club were open again now, though the place seemed quieter than Ashworth might have expected. Perhaps murder wasn’t good for business after all. A young woman was vacuuming the carpet in the lobby. No sign of Danny, but then he didn’t start until the afternoons. Ashworth wondered how the student spent his days. At home catching up on work for university, or out with his friends?
He thought again how cool the murderer must have been to have killed Jenny while all the other people were just feet away, even if they were ploughing up and down the pool. Or was the killing opportunistic? A madman after all, just wanting to feel the exhilaration of taking another life.
Taylor was on the phone, his office door ajar, and Ashworth waited for him to complete the call before tapping on the glass and walking in. The manager was frowning.
‘That was another cancellation,’ he said. ‘A conference booked in for next week. They said they couldn’t take the risk of bringing clients here. What’s wrong with them all? Do they think the murderer’s still here, prowling the corridors and waiting to get them?’
‘Maybe not.’ Ashworth took a seat. ‘But they ought to know you’ve got a petty thief causing problems. Why didn’t you tell me about the stealing?’
‘You can’t think that’s relevant to the killing.’ Taylor fiddled with the knot of his tie, looked out of the window, refused to catch Ashworth’s eye.
‘That’s not for you to judge. I need to know what’s been going on here.’
‘A few things had gone missing.’ Today Taylor seemed to have lost his boyish energy. He was tired, washed-out. Were the cares of management finally getting to him? ‘Mostly from the staffroom. It happens. I’m on top of it.’
‘What are you doing to stop it?’ Taylor didn’t answer and Ashworth continued: ‘So you were just hoping the problem would go away?’
‘Look, another few days and Louise, the manager, will be back from leave. She’s paid to deal with staff problems. Let her sort it out. I don’t have the authority to hire and fire.’
‘That’s not quite true, is it?’ Ashworth tried to sound sympathetic. ‘You hired Danny Shaw, and the thieving started with his arrival. Tricky for you when you don’t have any proof either way.’
‘That was a temporary appointment in an emergency.’ Taylor was starting to get rattled – not, Ashworth thought, because of these questions, but because he knew he’d have to justify himself to his boss when she returned. ‘Danny goes back to university in less than a week.’
‘And you don’t want to upset his mum,’ Ashworth said. ‘Seemed like a strong woman. I wouldn’t want to cross her.’ And that was true enough, he thought, remembering dark-haired Karen with the quick tongue and the angry eyes.
They sat for a moment in silence.
‘You do see how important it could be?’ Ashworth said at last. ‘If Jenny caught someone stealing, they could have killed her to shut her up.’
‘You wouldn’t kill someone over something as small as that?’ Taylor was defensive now, flushed, a schoolboy being reprimanded for some foolishness, not having the sense just to sit and take it.
‘Oh, believe me,’ Ashworth said, ‘it happens.’ And into his mind came pathetic acts of violence: a broken glass slashing through a face to the bone because of an imagined insult, a woman beaten to death because her ironing hadn’t come up to scratch, a small boy drowned in a bath because his mother fancied herself in love. ‘So I need to know exactly what’s been going on here: what items have been taken and when. And I need you to tell me who you think is behind it.’
In the end Taylor was more helpful than Ashworth had expected. At least he’d recorded every incident, every complaint brought to him, entered it in a rolling report on his PC.
‘So who’s the culprit?’ Ashworth asked after he’d read through the printout, seen the list of stolen cash, the watches, the earrings and beads. There was no individual item of great value, but it added up. ‘You must have your suspicions. Do you think Danny’s behind it?’
‘I don’t see that. He’s a bit of a lad and not a brilliant cleaner, but he’s not stupid. He’s got too much to lose for the sake of a couple of bits of tat that would make a few quid sold on. No, I don’t see him as a thief.’
‘Who then?’
Taylor looked awkward. ‘The other staff think Lisa’s the culprit.’
‘Because she lives in the west end and her dad has a criminal record.’ Ashworth hoped Lisa hadn’t been sneaking into the staffroom, slipping her hand into pockets and handbags. He’d liked her, and he believed his judgement about people was OK. Vera always laughed at that and called him naive. We’re all capable of violence, Joey, if we’re pushed to it. Even you.
‘Not just that,’ Taylor said. ‘She keeps herself to herself. She’s a bit prim. The others meet up outside work, drinking, partying. She never does. They’d rather blame her for the thefts. Easier than thinking it might be one of their mates.’ He paused. ‘I did wonder . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘If it was all a set-up to get rid of her. It’s weird how sometimes they take against people. They make her life hell, actually. Petty digs. Insults. I can’t think of any one thing that she might have done to offend them. It’s just like they want someone to hate. The women are the worst. Like they blame Lisa for anything that goes wrong in the place. Like Lisa doesn’t have any feelings. I think she’s amazing for sticking it out.’
‘Is that why you didn’t tell me about this yesterday? Because you thought it was the staff making trouble for Lisa? That it was just a trick t
o get her the sack?’ Ashworth wondered if maybe Taylor fancied the girl, if she brought out the protective male in him. Or was he embarrassed by the petty cruelties of his colleagues?
‘The thing with Lisa has been horrible. I don’t think there’s a ringleader. No one person stirring up bother; it’s more a strange sort of herd mentality. It’s kept me awake at nights. Louise, my boss, won’t do anything about it. She wants to be part of the gang too. Pathetic! I was hoping I might deal with the problem while she was on holiday, but I only seemed to make things worse.’ He looked up at Ashworth, relieved at last to be able to confide about the problem that had obviously been haunting him. ‘When that woman was killed yesterday I was pleased. Dreadful, isn’t it? But I thought it would give them all something else to gossip about. Take the heat off Lisa for a while.’
‘When did all this nastiness against Lisa start? Since Danny began working here?’
‘God no! Long before that. On her first day at work. Something she said, or something in her attitude, just turned them against her.’
‘And you really think they might have orchestrated the thefts to force her out?’ It seemed to Ashworth to be ridiculously far-fetched. But if you had a load of people cooped up in a place like this, bored by their work and by each other, perhaps they would create a drama just to bring some excitement to their working lives. A conspiracy to make them feel they belonged.
Taylor shrugged. ‘Or to get rid of me. I’m not their most popular person either.’
‘Why are you so interested in Lisa?’ Ashworth asked. ‘Are you going out with her?’ He still wondered if the man was exaggerating the problem, his judgement clouded because of a romantic attachment.
Taylor laughed, glad to relieve the tension. ‘Hardly! I’m already spoken for. My partner’s called Paul and we share a flat in Jesmond. I don’t fancy Lisa, but I like her. She’s a bloody good worker. And brave. She needs somebody on her side.’