Silent Voices (Vera Stanhope 4)

by Ann Cleeves

  and the importance of learning to build relationships early i

  The patterns of behaviour developed in childhood can oft

  no reason why another adult shouldn’t play this role. The child can then

  to sustain a normal and healthy relationship with his or her own children. However, in the case study described, we see deep problems that were never properly addressed and which would be impossible at this point to solve.

  Social-work bollocks, Vera thought. If Jenny had been hoping to write a popular book to explain her job to the layperson, she wouldn’t achieve it with stuff like this. Was she talking about Mattie in this piece? Vera assumed so. In that case, Vera had learned nothing from the notes on this page. Still, assumptions were always dangerous. There was no indication here about the gender of the subject of the case study, and Jenny could have been writing about somebody quite different. Besides, she’d been working with Mattie since she was a child. Would the model social worker really admit that she hadn’t ‘properly addressed’ Mattie’s problems during all those years of intervention?

  Vera moved away from the computer and stretched. In the lean-to at the back of the house she could hear rain dripping. The flat roof there leaked when the wind blew from the west. Usually it did blow from the west. She fetched a bucket and a bowl to catch the drips and went back to the office. Outside it was raining more heavily than ever.

  The second piece was certainly about Mattie, at least to some extent, because she was named. If the piece had finally achieved publication, Vera assumed that Jenny would have chosen a pseudonym for her, but at this early point of the process she clearly hadn’t seen the need. There was one complete sentence, then a number of gaps. It seemed that sparks had burned isolated little holes in the paper, without setting the whole sheet alight. That at least was how it looked from the scanned image that the lab had attached, along with the words within the body of the email on the screen.

  The complete sentence still read like an official report or undergraduate textbook: It is sometimes a mistake to blame an outsider for disrupting the balance of a family, when other factors could be in force. Did this mean that Jenny was making an excuse for Michael Morgan? Was she implying that Mattie was solely responsible for the death of her son? The rest of the words were scattered apparently at random as short phrases, separated by the burn marks.

  Death by drowning is never t stice system substitute mother can someti

  happiness s then the trigger n alternative way of Sometimes it’s best not to intervene. illness tie Jone

  Vera stared at the screen. She felt suddenly cold and realized that the timer had switched off the heating. It was already late. She fetched her outdoor coat and sat in that, would have fancied a whisky, but couldn’t be arsed to get up again and fetch it. Still there was the background sound of rain, like shingle hurled against glass. The snatches of text tantalized her. Death by drowning surely meant Elias. But Veronica’s son was drowned too. What was the word that Jenny had written after ‘never’ in the first phrase? Vera printed off the scanned image of the charred and blasted paper, held a ruler across it so that she could see which words were written on the same line, but still it made no sense.

  In frustration she turned to the third sheet of paper. This was the most damaged. In the email, the technician had said she thought it might have been torn in half before it was burned: there was one ragged edge. It seemed clear to Vera, even from the brief fragments that the tone was different, less formal. This wasn’t a note from an official report, but more like a personal diary entry.

  What the hell

  ing friendship

  That word ‘friendship’ again. Vera had heard it that evening as Morgan had tried to scrabble his way out of the hole he’d dug by not telling them earlier about his meeting with Danny Shaw. It seemed to Vera that Jenny had had few real friends. There was the teacher, Anne, but that was more an arrangement of convenience. Two women of a similar age who enjoyed each other’s company. The relationship satisfied Anne’s need to admire, and Jenny’s to be admired. Friendship surely implied something stronger than that. Friendship was what Vera had with Joe Ashworth, but not yet with the hippy neighbours. And had Michael Morgan and Danny Shaw really been friends? The idea was improbable. They fed each other’s egos, nothing more, so why the sentimental drivel from Danny in his last conversation with Morgan?

  Vera looked at her watch. Past midnight. The questions were too difficult for this time of night, and tomorrow would be an important day. She felt that she was grappling towards some sort of solution. Ashworth was right; they needed to find Connie. She shut down the computer and sat for a moment listening to it grind and chug to a close. When this case was over, she’d treat herself to a new machine. Perhaps Joe would come with her to buy one.

  Lying in the bed she’d slept in as a child, between the sheets grey with washing, which had probably been in use since then too, images and ideas floated into her head and then fluttered away from her, like the charred tatters of paper blowing from a bonfire. Outside, it was still raining.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Joe Ashworth hated the rain. It meant his kids were trapped indoors and his wife moaned about mud and mess. He thought she had that illness, SAD – seasonal affective disorder. She seemed to wilt without the sun, to become crabby and ungenerous. Mornings like this, he envied Vera’s solitary life. It would be great to be selfish without the guilt. He drove away from the house, from the damp children’s clothes stretched over radiators, the toy-strewn living room, the whining baby, and told himself he was the breadwinner, that he couldn’t be expected to do it all.

  Travelling towards the police station for the morning briefing, he hit a traffic jam. It was still raining and the standing water had caused a minor accident on the way into town. His windscreen-wiper blades were faulty and squeaked at the same pitch as the baby’s cries. He switched them off and couldn’t see, put them back on and got the noise that set his teeth on edge and made him feel like putting his fist through the glass.

  It didn’t help that, when he reached the incident room, Vera was at her most jaunty. She’d blagged a proper filter machine from somewhere and the smell of the coffee hit him as soon as he walked in.

  ‘Where are the others?’ His question. Usually Vera hated people to be late, one of the reasons why he’d been so tense when his way had been blocked by the crawling traffic. Now he hoped to hear her slag off the rest of the team. After all, he’d made the effort to be there.

  But she only shrugged. ‘This weather’s a nightmare, isn’t it?’ She poured him coffee. ‘Have you tried Connie this morning?’

  He looked at her, suspecting she was mocking him, but she seemed serious enough. ‘Yes, it went straight to voicemail again. I left a message asking her to get in touch.’

  ‘I’d like her opinion on these.’ Vera pinned a series of sheets onto the board. Copies of the charred paper rescued from the bonfire in Danny Shaw’s garden. ‘More than anyone, she’d know the way Jenny thought about her work.’

  ‘You’ve dismissed Connie altogether as a suspect then?’

  ‘Eh, pet, I didn’t say that. That’s another thing entirely.’ She gave the smile that was supposed to be enigmatic, but only made her look constipated.

  He carried his coffee to look at the burnt paper more closely, but found it hard to make any sense from the words, even to concentrate on them. He couldn’t understand why Vera was so happy. Holly and Charlie came in together, laughing at a shared joke, and again he felt isolated, an outsider, trapped in the gap between Vera and her troops. I need to move on, he thought. I’ll always be in her shadow.

  Vera regarded the latecomers indulgently, waited until they’d fetched coffee and then swung into her performance. It occurred to Ashworth that from these scraps of text she’d deduced some meaning or motive for the murders. That would explain her good humour. In that moment his envy was so intense that he almost hated her.

  Vera set out the eve
nts of the previous day: the interviews with Veronica Eliot, Lisa, the Shaw family, Freya and Morgan. Joe had to admit that she was bloody good at this summing up, at pulling out links and meanings that would probably have passed him by, at laying out the facts in a way that was easy to follow.

  ‘It seems to me that the only intended victim was Jenny Lister,’ she said. ‘At first, at least. Danny Shaw was killed because he knew something or found out something about the first killing. The fact that the bonfire in his garden contained documents belonging to Lister suggests that he’d found her notebook.’

  She paused for breath and Holly took the opportunity to stick up her hand. ‘Could Shaw have killed Jenny then? How else would he have her notebook?’

  ‘How else indeed? It seems that Danny and Hannah had a bit of a fling before he went away to university. By all accounts it meant a lot more to him than to her, but of course we can’t get his take on that. We might assume that the fragments in the fire were stolen at the same time as Jenny’s handbag, after the murder, but I think we have to keep an open mind.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Charlie, hunched over his coffee, seemed almost alert.

  ‘Maybe Hannah’s not telling us the truth, and Danny visited her when he was home from uni.’ Vera looked at her audience. ‘Maybe she thinks she’s too young to be settling down after all.’

  ‘No!’ Holly was horrified. ‘She’s devoted to Simon. No way would she cheat on him.’

  ‘We know Danny was in the Lister house a couple of years ago when he and Hannah were going out together,’ Vera went on. ‘But it’s unlikely he stole any material from Jenny then. What would be the point? It would have been before Elias’s death, so there’d have been no press interest.’

  Ashworth lifted his hand from the desk in front of him. ‘It’d be interesting to find out if Morgan and Danny knew each other before they met at the Willows?’

  ‘It would, wouldn’t it?’ Vera gave no sign whether or not this idea had occurred to her. ‘I’d have thought Karen would have mentioned a previous connection with Morgan when we talked to her about him, but she was all over the place. Could you follow that up, Holly? With the mother and with any of Danny’s mates we can track down.’

  Holly nodded and scribbled a couple of lines in her notebook.

  Vera turned to Charlie. ‘Any joy in tracking down witnesses around the Shaw house the day Danny died?’

  ‘Nah. That place is like a dormitory village. Most people work in Hexham or Newcastle. During the day it’s quiet as the grave. I found an elderly gent who was taking his dog for a walk at about the right time. He was passed by a small car he didn’t recognize, but it could have belonged to anybody and he can’t even remember the colour of the vehicle.’

  ‘Anyone else got any bright ideas?’ Vera looked around the room. There was silence apart from the rain still gushing from a blocked gutter outside. ‘Actions then.’ She paused for effect, but Ashworth thought she’d had these worked out from the moment she stood up. Before that even. Who knew what she dreamed about at night?

  ‘Holly’s to follow up on Danny Shaw and Michael Morgan. Check out possible previous points of contact. Joe, I’d like you to go to Durham nick. Have another chat with Mattie. She’s back there now, recovering in the hospital wing. You’re good with helpless females. I need more details of the visits Jenny Lister made to her. What exactly did they talk about? Charlie, see if you can track down Connie Masters. Her car must be somewhere, and it’s not easy to hide a four-year-old girl. They haven’t been in the cottage in Barnard Bridge since yesterday morning. She left a message on Joe’s phone saying she was fine and needed a bit of space, but he thinks there’s more to it than that.’ Another pause, even longer than the first. ‘And so do I. I want to speak to her.’ Ashworth wasn’t sure what to make of that. Did she think Connie was in danger? If so, why would she leave her in Charlie’s unreliable hands?

  Vera stopped speaking, made a sort of shooing gesture with her hands. ‘Go on then. This is a murder inquiry, not a mothers’ union meeting. You haven’t got all day.’

  ‘What about you?’ Charlie said, verging on the rude.

  ‘Me?’ She gave another of her self-satisfied grins. ‘I’m management and I don’t go out in the rain. I’m doing some strategic thinking.’

  Joe Ashworth liked Durham city. Only twenty minutes down the A1, he thought you could have been in a different world from the centre of Newcastle. This was an old town, classy, with its huge red sandstone cathedral and the castle, the smart shops and the fancy restaurants, the university colleges and the students with their posh voices. Like a southern city, he always thought, lifted up and stuck on the Wear. The prison was quite a different matter. Joe hated most prisons, but this was one of the worst. It was grim and old and made him think of dungeons and rats. It didn’t belong in Durham. It had a unit for long-term and dangerous female prisoners.

  Seeing Mattie now, it was hard to think of her as dangerous. He talked to her in a small office, reluctantly relinquished by staff, on the hospital wing. She was already there when he arrived, escorted by a male officer who’d brought him from the gate. She was dressed in a prison-issue tracksuit, but there were slippers on her feet and she seemed very young, reminded Joe of his daughter when she was ready for bed. He’d wanted to bring Mattie something. He always came with a small sweetener on his prison visits – cigarettes usually, especially if he was coming to see a man, cigarettes that were chain-smoked throughout the interview because prisoners weren’t allowed to take anything away with them. Most of the men smoked. Cigarettes hadn’t seemed appropriate on a hospital visit, so he handed over a small box of chocolates, not sure about the rules.

  Mattie seemed disproportionately grateful and held the gift-wrapped box on her lap.

  ‘Did that fat cop send you?’

  She could only be talking about Vera. ‘Aye, she thought you could do with the company.’

  ‘She was canny, like.’

  Not when you really know her.

  Mattie looked at him. Huge blue eyes in a wide, smooth forehead. ‘But what do you really want?’

  ‘A chat,’ he said. ‘About Jenny Lister.’

  She nodded. ‘But I told the lady everything I know.’

  Vera would like that, being called a lady!

  ‘You were ill,’ Joe said. ‘You had a fever. We thought you might remember a bit more now.’

  ‘It still knacks,’ she said and lifted her tracksuit top, quite unselfconsciously, to show him the wound on her abdomen covered with a dressing. Again he was reminded of his daughter showing off a scab on her knee.

  ‘It must be very painful,’ he said gently. He could understand why Jenny had been so taken with Mattie, why she’d come each week to visit, even though really she’d no longer had any formal responsibility for her. ‘Tell me about Jenny’s visits,’ he went on. ‘Was it the same every week?’

  ‘Yes. Every week. Not in the main visits room – you know, where you see your family and they have toys for the bairns. She said it was too noisy there and we wouldn’t be able to talk properly. Though if you’re there, they bring you a cup of tea and there are biscuits – chocolate if you get in early.’ She looked at the chocolates he’d brought her.

  ‘Why don’t you open them?’ Joe smiled. ‘I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but you could have a couple.’

  She ripped the wrapping off and took one out.

  ‘So where did Jenny see you?’

  ‘In those little cubicles where you talk to your lawyer or the cops.’ Her mouth was already full of strawberry cream.

  Did that mean that Jenny hadn’t wanted to be overheard? ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Like I told the lady, it was about me. Jenny was going to write a book.’

  ‘Did she make notes?’

  ‘Yeah, mostly. Sometimes we just chatted.’

  ‘Where did she write the notes?’

  ‘In a big black book.’ Mattie was already getting bored. Maybe s
he was missing something she liked on the television in the ward.

  ‘Did she talk to you about Michael?’

  ‘She said I had to forget about him.’ Mattie reached out and took another chocolate, unwrapped the silver paper carefully and put the sweet into her mouth. ‘She wanted me to talk about when I was little, what I could remember about growing up.’

  ‘Where did you grow up?’ he asked.

  ‘In the country,’ she said. ‘That’s what I remember. When I was very little, before I went into care. At least I think it was before I went into care. Or maybe I went there for a visit. It was a little house by the water. That’s what Jenny wanted from me, my memories. I wanted to talk about Michael, but she said I wasn’t to speak of him.’ Mattie paused, reached out greedily for another chocolate. ‘I didn’t think that was fair. Jenny never even stayed for very long. She was in a rush to get back to her real work, the other kids she was looking after now. Sometimes it was like she didn’t even care about me. All she wanted to know about was that house in the country, and she’d make me close my eyes and picture it and tell her what I could see.’

  They sat for a moment in silence and again Mattie closed her eyes. Ashworth was going to ask her to tell him what she saw, ask her perhaps to sketch it, but in the ward a woman started screaming and the spell was broken. Mattie opened her eyes. ‘Stupid cow,’ she said. ‘She’s always doing that. Makes you want to slap her.’

  ‘Why did you go into care?’ Joe asked.

  ‘I dunno.’ Mattie stared into space. He thought she was about to cry, but she turned back to him, dry-eyed, and said in a matter-of-fact way, ‘I think my mam died. Or maybe that was just what I wanted to think. I asked a bit when I was growing up, but I kept getting different stories. In the end you don’t know who to believe.’