Silent Voices (Vera Stanhope 4)

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Michael Morgan and Freya Adams.’ She took the mug he handed to her, sniffed it appreciatively. ‘What was going on there?’

  Ryan shrugged. ‘They’re both adults. I know some of the staff were a bit concerned. Karen, from health-club reception, had a motherly word with her. “Do you really know what you’re playing with?” That sort of thing. But there was nothing I could do to stop it.’

  ‘Had Morgan been sniffing around younger women before?’

  Ryan took time to consider. ‘There was nothing that came to my notice, but I’ll ask around.’

  ‘Do that. And I need to know if he was here the morning of the murder. It wasn’t a usual clinic day, but I understand he came in sometimes to use the gym. He’s not on the list of members who went through the turnstile we got from your IT people, but he’d find a way through that. He’s not a stupid man.’

  ‘You think he’s a killer?’

  Vera could tell his first thought was for the hotel, the publicity and the implications of the arrest of a man who was almost an employee. Ryan didn’t consider Michael Morgan a friend. There was no personal concern. ‘No, nothing like that. I’m talking out loud, telling stories to myself. That’s what my job’s all about. Mostly that’s all they are: stories.’

  ‘We nearly asked him to leave last year, when there was all that publicity about the little boy.’ Ryan was staring out of the window. ‘But in the end he talked Louise round.’

  ‘He’s got a way with women, has he?’ Vera gave a little laugh to show there was no real significance to the question.

  ‘Must have. Louise is as tough as old boots when it comes to the business.’

  ‘Did he ever bring Mattie Jones, the boy’s mother, here?’ Vera asked.

  Ryan shook his head. ‘Not as far as I know. And once he and Freya set up home together, Freya kept away too. The girls she used to work with invited her back for lunch one day, but she didn’t come.’

  ‘Have you got a key to the room he uses as a clinic?’

  ‘Of course. But Michael doesn’t keep any equipment there. He brings it with him each time.’

  ‘Does he make his own appointments, or do the girls on reception here do it for him?’

  ‘He sees to all that himself,’ Ryan said. ‘If anyone expresses an interest in consulting him, we pass on his mobile number.’

  ‘So no appointment book.’ Vera should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. ‘No way of getting hold of his client list.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She gestured towards the closed door, the way from Ryan’s private room to the outside world of the hotel. ‘Tell you what, pet, while you’re out there doing my job for me, asking your people about Michael Morgan, find out if anyone ever saw him with Jenny Lister.’

  Ryan nodded his head, another young man eager to please her.

  ‘I thought I’d just have a bit of a wander round myself, chat to folk. That’s all right with you?’

  ‘Of course.’ But Vera could tell that he’d be very pleased when he’d got rid of her, when she was finally off the premises.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  She wandered through the hotel, going through doors that said Staff Only, looking into cupboards and a laundry, hitting at last on the staffroom. A small square box with hardly any natural light, one bright electric bulb in the middle of the room, furniture discarded from the rest of the building. A stack of lockers against one wall.

  Lisa from the pool was there on her lunch break, eating chopped-up fruit from a Tupperware box, reading a paperback novel. Vera nodded towards the book. ‘Any good?’

  A couple of middle-aged women were gossiping in a corner. They looked up briefly and went back to their chat. Ears flapping.

  Lisa set down the book and ate the last piece of melon. ‘It’s OK. Escapist, you know.’

  ‘Aye, well, we all need a bit of that. Have you got a few minutes? I wondered if you’d give me a behind-the-scenes tour of the place.’ By now Vera thought she had it pretty well sussed, but she didn’t want the old bats in the corner listening in.

  ‘Sure.’ Lisa pushed the lid onto the box and put it into her bag. She’d always been pale, but it seemed to Vera today that all the colour had drained from her face.

  ‘Do the staff have passes?’ They’d left the staffroom, but were still backstage. Grey walls and dust, occasional piles of unidentifiable equipment.

  ‘Yeah. Electronic fobs that let you in from the public areas. Very high-tech.’

  ‘God,’ Vera said, ‘what a nightmare! I’d lose mine in a week.’

  Lisa smiled indulgently. She was the sort of woman who never lost anything.

  ‘And once you’re into the staff areas you have free access everywhere?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What about to the pool?’ Vera was developing the germ of an idea. They’d assumed that the murderer had got to the pool through the public changing rooms, but if there was staff access, that wasn’t necessarily the case. Again she thought she’d cocked up here, hadn’t concentrated on the basics. She should have demanded a floor plan right from the start. No, she thought. Charlie should have sorted the floor plan. It occurred to her that all the stuff about Elias Jones could be a distraction.

  ‘Yes, that’s this way.’ Lisa led her down a small corridor and into a space that was half storeroom and half office. In one corner there was a half-sized desk with a computer and phone. The rest of the room was taken up with floats and the bendy rubber strips used by the members of the aqua-aerobics classes. She opened another door and they looked out onto the poolside, only yards from the sauna and steam room.

  Lisa pulled a packet of blue plastic overshoes from a drawer. ‘If you want to go out, you’ll have to wear these.’

  Vera pulled them on and walked out onto the tiles. The bootees were exactly the same as the ones she wore at a crime scene. The pool was quiet. There was that strange echo that reminded her of aching limbs and a pounding heart. A few determined swimmers ploughed through the water and a couple of women sprawled on the deckchairs. From outside, when it was closed, the office door looked like another wall panel. It wasn’t surprising that they’d missed it. Lisa must have been following her thoughts. ‘The architect wanted clean lines,’ she said. ‘There are a couple of other storerooms, but they’re hidden too. This is the only one you can access from both sides.’

  Vera joined her back in the office. She leaned her backside against the desk. ‘Do you know a guy called Michael Morgan?’

  ‘He does the complementary therapies?’ The question was innocent enough, but Vera wasn’t deceived. Lisa knew him all right. She was suddenly more alert.

  ‘Works here once a week. Got one of the young waitresses pregnant. That’s the one.’ Vera looked directly at Lisa. ‘Did he ever try it on with you?’

  ‘No! Nothing like that. He wouldn’t.’ Lisa seemed horrified by the idea.

  ‘Why wouldn’t he? He has a history of it.’

  ‘I was his client,’ Lisa said. ‘Our relationship was professional.’ A wash of colour was spreading from her neck into her cheeks.

  Maybe it was professional, but you’d have liked it to be more than that. What is it about Michael Morgan and women who should know better?

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘It was hard, working here. I mean, I’m good at the job and I love it, but I’ve never really fitted in.’

  ‘You were bullied,’ Vera said.

  ‘That sounds a bit harsh, but it’s what it felt like. I didn’t go into town clubbing with the other girls and I’m not interested in the same stuff. They could be dead cruel. It got that I dreaded coming into work, started having these panic attacks. My GP couldn’t help, so I tried Michael.’

  ‘And he could help?’

  Lisa nodded. ‘I don’t know how it works, but it made me feel really calm. Like I really stopped caring about what the rest of them thought about me. I looked forward to coming into work again
.’

  ‘Did you ever see him away from here?’ Vera asked.

  ‘No.’ Lisa was playing with one of the soft rubber floats, twisting it in her hands. ‘Look, none of the other staff know I consulted him. There’s always been a lot of gossip, first when the little boy was killed and then when he took up with Freya. It’s as if he’s some sort of freak. If they knew I’d seen Michael, they’d love that. It’d just give them more ammunition to have a go at me. But he was kind to me, gentle, and I’m grateful to him.’

  ‘Did you ever catch him in the places where the public has no access?’

  Lisa frowned. ‘No. Only in the office he used as a consulting room.’

  ‘But he would have had one of those magic fobs that would let him back here?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Lisa looked at her watch. ‘Look, I’ll have to go. My shift started ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Did any of the other staff consult him?’ Lisa was already halfway through the door, but turned back to answer the question.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said, ‘would I? They wouldn’t admit to it any more than me.’

  Vera drove along the narrow back roads from the Willows to Barnard Bridge, timing the journey, for no reason other than it seemed a sensible thing to do and she wasn’t ready yet to go back to the police station in Kimmerston. She had no specific village resident in mind for the murder. Connie Masters wouldn’t have left her child alone in the cottage to drive ten miles to kill her previous colleague, and though Vera still loved the idea of Veronica Eliot in the dock, she could see no reason for it. It was more likely, given her new knowledge of the layout of the health club, that they were looking for a staff member. She thought she should pin down the student cleaner whose employment had coincided with the thefts at the Willows. Maybe she’d call into his house that afternoon, catch him by surprise. Once she’d had some lunch.

  The fog of the previous day had cleared and it was sunny, unusually warm for so early in the spring. Turning a corner, she saw a couple in the middle of the road. Hannah Lister and Simon Eliot walking hand in hand. Hannah wore jeans and a white muslin top; Simon seemed large and clumsy in comparison. Beauty and the Beast, Vera thought. Even from the back and from this distance she could sense the connection between them, like some sort of electric charge, and felt the old stab of envy. Was she a miserable cow, that lovers always made her feel that way? Did she want everyone in the world to be as lonely as she was?

  The young people stepped onto the verge to allow her to pass, but she slowed down. ‘Do you want a lift?’ Immediately she saw she should have continued driving without acknowledging them. This had been a brief moment of happiness for Hannah, a time of escape. Opening the car window, Vera was aware of the birdsong from the woods by the side of the road, found herself unpicking the tangle of sound for individual species. Her father had tested her on her knowledge whenever they were out together: ‘Come on, Vee, don’t be such a duffer, you must recognize that!’

  She’d expected an immediate rebuttal from the young people and was surprised when after some hesitation they got in, Simon in the back seat, although he was so tall that his knees almost touched his chin, and Hannah in the front.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ Vera asked. ‘Are you on your way home?’

  ‘Where shall we go, Simon?’ The girl turned in the seat to speak to him. Her voice was brittle, almost manic. ‘Rome? Zanzibar? The moon?’

  He reached out and took her hand in his. ‘We’ll do Rome in the summer,’ he said easily. ‘Or Zanzibar, if you prefer. But now, Inspector, yes, we’d better go home. To my place please. It was such a lovely day that we got up very early and we’ve been walking all morning, but now I think Hannah is very tired. Just as well you appeared to save us. Mother has offered to make us lunch.’

  ‘You must be feeling better if you’re up to facing the mother-in-law,’ Vera said with a smile.

  ‘The doctor gave me some pills and now I don’t feel very much at all.’ Hannah had drooped after the flicker of her exchange with Simon. She lay back in the seat with her eyes half closed.

  ‘But you do have to eat, and neither of us can face the supermarket.’ He was still leaning forward, the seat belt stretched to its limit, rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb.

  ‘I never did ask you,’ Vera said, talking to Simon’s reflection in the mirror, ‘where were you the morning Jenny died?’ She had a sudden horrible thought that he might be implicated in some way. She hadn’t checked, after all, that he had an alibi. But she hated the idea of it, of Hannah’s saviour as killer.

  ‘At home,’ he said. ‘Hannah wanted to revise, so we hadn’t planned to meet up until the evening.’ He must have realized why she was asking, but he didn’t seem at all offended.

  ‘Was your mother in?’

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘I’d been out on the piss the night before, catching up with some of the lads I was at school with. I didn’t surface until midday. Mum was out then, but she came back soon after.’

  By now they were approaching the crossroads, the turn-off to the village. Connie Masters’s cottage was on one side and the big white house was on the other. ‘Do you know the woman who lives there?’ Vera nodded towards the cottage.

  ‘No, I’ve seen people in there. A mother and a child. Are they permanent tenants? It always used to be a holiday place.’

  ‘Her name’s Masters,’ Vera said. ‘Connie Masters.’ Hannah stirred. ‘Wasn’t she the social worker supervising Mattie Jones?’

  ‘That’s right. Did your mother talk about her?’ ‘I didn’t realize she lived here. Mum felt sorry for her. About the way she’d been treated in the press. Because she screwed up over Elias Jones.’

  As she watched the young people walk away, Vera wondered what she’d have made of Hannah’s mother if they’d met. Vera disliked good-looking women as a matter of course, and Jenny’s competence, her certainty that she was right in every situation, would have irritated her too. It seemed to Vera that Jenny, apparently so admired and respected, could have had many secret enemies. A book that would have exposed her clients’ and colleagues’ frailties would surely have added to the list. Connie, for example, would almost certainly have appeared in it. She definitely had an interest in ensuring that Jenny’s work was never published.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Vera parked in the main street of the village and went in search of food. The pub was open and she was tempted, but she knew how word got around in small places: that big boss policewoman was drinking at lunchtime. And besides, she wanted more than a bag of crisps and it seemed there was nothing else on offer. Walking down the street, she got on the phone to Ashworth. ‘Lister’s handbag. It still hasn’t turned up. A big red leather affair that she used as a briefcase.’ Knowing that shouting at him would serve no real purpose, because the team already had it as a priority and most of Northumbria Police were already looking for it. She had low blood sugar and it always made her radgy. ‘Any chance you can meet me at Danny Shaw’s place? I thought it was about time I met him.’

  She found the Tyne Teashop and decided that would do. All the windows looked out on the river, and the place had a calm green light from the trees and the reflections of water that had seeped out onto the flood meadow. Most of the tables were occupied. Older couples: big bossy women and slight subdued men for the most part. You should have carried on working, pet, she thought, directing her sympathy to the men. Bet you never thought early retirement would be like this, acting as chauffeur to the wife, and endless cups of tea.

  Then she turned her attention to home-made corned-beef pie and the whereabouts of Jenny Lister’s handbag. Had the murderer taken it from her locker? Did that mean she was murdered for what it contained: notes for the book she planned to write. And what had happened to it since? It would be hard to destroy a substantial bag, though of course the paper inside could have been burned. She shook her head and moved on to a meringue filled with cream and covered with grated chocolate.
The meringue was crisp on the outside and slightly squelchy in the middle, as near perfect as was possible for an object that was a work of art, not science. The bag – along with the notebook – was probably in a landfill somewhere and would never be seen again.

  Joe Ashworth was already waiting for her outside Danny Shaw’s house and she got into his car to talk before they went in. The house was grander than she’d expected, an extended detached cottage with a bit of an orchard at the back. Move it halfway up a mountain and she’d have been prepared to live there herself. It stood in a valley on the edge of a hamlet halfway between Barnard Bridge and the Willows, surrounded by established trees.

  She nodded towards it. ‘I thought you said they’d fallen on hard times since the recession.’

  ‘Probably mortgaged to the hilt,’ he said. ‘Maybe they see it as an asset to hold on to. But that’s why the mother got the job at the Willows.’

  ‘She’ll be at work now?’

  ‘I assume so.’

  Out of the car, there was that cacophony of woodland birdsong that seemed to be a soundtrack to this case. She tried not to hear it, refusing to take her father’s test. The garden was wild; the lawn hadn’t had its first cut of the spring and there were weeds poking through the paving stones of the path that led from the front gate. There was the remnant of an untidy bonfire in one corner. Maybe once they’d had a weekly gardener, but that had probably been one of the expenses to go. Nearer the house they heard music.

  ‘Bingo!’ she said. ‘Not a wasted trip then.’

  Danny was sitting outside on a paved terrace, a portable CD player on the table beside him. His legs were stretched so that his feet rested on another wooden garden chair and there was an open book on his knee. But that was lying page-down. And although his face was turned away from her, she sensed that he was sleeping. There wasn’t much warmth in the sun and he was wearing a big grey jersey, his chin buried in the collar.

  ‘You’ve got to make the most of it this time of year, haven’t you?’ Vera perched on the table. It rocked under her weight. The boy didn’t reply.