Silent Voices (Vera Stanhope 4)

by Ann Cleeves

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The gate officer handed him back his phone and he switched it on, running back from the prison to his car in the rain. It rang immediately. Not the answering service with a message from Connie, but Vera. He thought either she’d been phoning him every five minutes or she had an instinct for how long these prison visits took. It occurred to him in a moment of whimsy that she could have a sort of telepathic link to him, but that idea was so scary that he forced it out of his head.

  ‘How did it go?’ Her voice was cheerful, but he wasn’t deceived. She was crap at delegating. It would have been a nightmare for her to be sitting in the office while he was doing the real work.

  He sat in the car with the rain battering the roof and she made him take her through the entire interview almost word for word.

  ‘Good,’ she said in the end. ‘In fact, bloody brilliant. I could have talked to her, but I knew what I was looking for and I’d have asked leading questions. She was always going to be a suggestible witness.’

  He knew better than to ask what was so significant. Vera would tell him without the question, if she’d wanted him to know. ‘Any news on Connie?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ashworth demanded. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know that.’ She sounded impatient. ‘But I have some ideas about who might be hiding her.’ This was Vera at her most infuriating.

  ‘What do you want me to do now?’

  ‘Come back to the Tyne valley,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way there now.’

  They sat in the lounge at the Willows looking out at the river. It had spilled over its banks and the raised driveway into the hotel was like a drawbridge over a moat, the only way in. A pile of sandbags stood in the car park. Ryan Taylor met Ashworth in reception and pointed him to the lounge where Vera was waiting. He said there’d been a flood alert. If it continued raining that night, the whole valley would be under water. There was a big tide forecast and that always made things worse, even this far inland. The hotel was on high enough land to be safe, but the last thing they wanted was guests stranded or health-club members not able to get in, so he planned to build a wall of sandbags by the side of the drive.

  After Vera’s response on the phone, Ashworth had expected her to be in high spirits. It had seemed from her words that the case was all but over, that they’d have an arrest before the day was out. But seeing her now, crouched over her coffee, a plate of shortbread on the arm of her chair, he thought she seemed tense. Almost undecided. Like a gambler unsure which call to make. Or as if she didn’t trust her judgement after all. There was a fire in the grate, but it was giving out more smoke than heat, and the room was cold. Her mobile phone was on the table in front of her. She glared at it.

  ‘Bloody social services,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on to Craig, the big boss. You’d think he’d be able to help track down where Mattie Jones was born. Apparently it’s a nightmare going back that far. Nothing computerized. He said he’d ring as soon as he had something.’

  ‘What’s going on then?’

  ‘If I knew that, pet, I’d ride in like a knight in my trusty Land Rover and rescue the fair maiden.’

  ‘Are you talking about Connie?’ Ashworth couldn’t stand it when Vera went all weird on him. It was her way of keeping her thoughts to herself. As if she didn’t trust him enough to share her ideas.

  ‘Well, her for one.’ She looked up at him. ‘Did you get any more details from Mattie about the place she grew up? Apart from the fact that it was in the country and near water? That wasn’t what I sent you in for, but it’s significant, isn’t it? It’s set me thinking . . .’ And she lapsed into silence. Joe was reminded of an old woman in a care home, rambling away to herself, losing her thread in the middle of a sentence. It came to him that if Vera did end up that way, he’d be the only person to visit her.

  She looked up at him and he saw that she was far from senile and was expecting an answer.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think there could have been more, but some woman kicked off in the ward and she lost concentration.’ He paused, added pointedly, ‘It would have helped if I’d known what you were looking for.’

  ‘No,’ Vera said, ‘that wouldn’t have helped at all.’

  ‘So what are we going to do now?’ He was starting to lose patience. He’d feel happier if he knew Connie and the child were safe. He had the feeling that it was their lives Vera was gambling.

  She didn’t answer immediately and again there was that sense of uncharacteristic indecision.

  ‘The place by the water Mattie was talking about,’ he said. The idea had come to him suddenly, looking out over the sodden parkland. There was no reason for it, apart from his instinct that the killer was linked to Barnard Bridge. ‘Could it be Connie Masters’s cottage? We know it’s a holiday let now, but someone must have lived there once. A family? Mattie’s mother?’

  ‘No point guessing, is there?’ she said, dismissing the idea without even considering it. ‘Could be anywhere. I need to make some more phone calls.’

  It seemed to him that her decision had been made. The dice had been thrown. He waited for her to elaborate, but she sat back in the deep chair, her eyes half closed. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said after a while. He wanted to shake her. He wanted her fizzing with energy again, indomitable, taking on the world. He hated to see her so frail.

  ‘Go to Barnard Bridge,’ she said, ‘and keep an eye on Hannah Lister.’

  ‘You think she might be in danger?’

  Vera didn’t answer directly. He wasn’t even convinced she’d heard the question. ‘Jenny Lister and Danny Shaw,’ she said. ‘Someone’s covering his tracks.’ She looked up at him and gave one of her old wicked grins. ‘Or her tracks. I thought I knew what had been going on here. Now I’m not so sure.’

  In Barnard Bridge there was a sense of a community under siege. There were sandbags piled outside all the doorways in the main street. The burn that had been just a trickle outside Connie’s cottage was more than a foot deep and the Tyne was brown and fierce, frothing under the bridge, covered with a cream-coloured scum. The place was deserted. Ashworth phoned Connie’s mobile again and left a message. ‘If it continues raining tonight, the river will flood. You should come and move your belongings while you can.’

  But, he thought, few of her belongings remained in the cottage. When he and Vera had checked her wardrobe, most of her clothes, and those of the child, had gone. The furniture was the property of the owner, not of Connie. After all, she had no reason to return. His message would have no effect, even if she picked it up.

  In the Lister house he found Hannah, Simon and a vicar, who was there, it seemed, to discuss Jenny’s funeral. Her body had been released to the undertaker and arrangements could now be made. The vicar was wearing jeans and had a Barbour jacket over his clerical collar. Hannah invited Ashworth in and offered him coffee, but the detective felt he couldn’t stay. Hannah would surely be safe in the company of these men, and religious people always made him slightly uncomfortable. There’d been a stern Sunday-school teacher in the Methodist Chapel where his mother had taken him as a boy. Instead, he went next door and knocked at Hilda’s house.

  She was there on her own. Maurice had been banished despite the weather.

  ‘Don’t worry about the boys,’ Hilda said, when Ashworth made a comment. He smiled to think of her husband and his friend as boys. ‘There’s a shed like a palace on that allotment of theirs. They were in the house all morning, but it’s cleared a bit now and they could do with some fresh air.’

  She was in the middle of cooking tea, but she invited him in anyway and he sat in the kitchen on a tall stool by the workbench while she rubbed fat into flour to make pastry.

  ‘That cottage by the burn where Connie Masters lives,’ he said. ‘Who lived there before it became a holiday let?’

  He’d been going over this in his head since his meeting with Vera in the hotel, try
ing to picture it. He wanted to prove to Vera that he had ideas too. Veronica Eliot would have been visiting the cottage when her son Patrick was drowned. Must have been, because the only access to the burn was through the cottage garden. So surely a woman of about Veronica’s age would have been staying there then, if they were friends, on visiting terms. A woman perhaps with young children. It could have been the mother of Mattie Jones, the mother who had given her up to care. Mattie would have been older than Veronica’s children, but not so much older. If she’d seen Patrick die in the water, had the image stuck with her? It would perhaps explain why Mattie had disciplined her own son in that way, why eventually she’d killed him.

  It occurred to him that this link was just what Jenny Lister had been looking for when she’d questioned Mattie for her book. It would make a good story after all, and social workers liked neat and tidy motives, just as some detectives did. Vera would say he was back in Jackanory land and fairy tales were just for bairns, but she was always taking leaps into the dark and it seemed to work for her.

  He waited now for Hilda to answer. She finished rubbing the fat into the flour, washed her hands under the tap and wiped them on a towel.

  ‘Mallow Cottage,’ she said at last. ‘It was never a happy house. Folk never seemed to stay there. They’d move in full of plans to do it up, but they all seemed to sell up before the work was done.’

  ‘I’d never have had you down as a superstitious type,’ Ashworth said.

  ‘Nothing to do with superstition!’ She fired the words back at him. ‘Damp and dark and too expensive to renovate – that was it, more like.’

  ‘But there was a tragedy there,’ Ashworth said. ‘A little boy died.’

  ‘Aye, Patrick Eliot. That would have been twenty years ago, almost to the day. We all turned out for the funeral. The whole village, though we didn’t know the family really then. And after that Veronica refused to speak about the boy.’ She shrugged. ‘People thought it was odd, but everyone has their own way of coping, I suppose.’ She paused again. ‘There’s another funeral for us to go to now. I saw the vicar in next door.’

  ‘Who was living at the cottage at the time of the accident?’ Ashworth found he was holding his breath as he waited for the answer.

  She was standing at the sink, dribbling water from the cold tap into the bowl, mixing it into the pastry with a knife. She turned to speak to him.

  ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘The place was empty. There was a For Sale board outside; I remember it. It was in all the newspaper pictures. That’s why Veronica could take the boys into the garden to poke around in the stream. The White House didn’t have much of a garden then. It was more like a builders’ site. The Eliots had only just moved in.’

  When Ashworth went back next door and knocked at the Listers’, that house was empty too. Perhaps the vicar had taken the couple to the chapel of rest, or to the rectory to continue the conversation about hymns and eulogies there. Ashworth phoned Vera to bring her up to date, but he could tell she was preoccupied. She gave him a list of instructions without explaining the reason for them.

  The rain stopped by mid-afternoon and people meeting each other in the street laughed at the sandbags and said that the Environment Agency had over-reacted this time. But as it got dark it started raining again, this time a soft drizzle that folk still didn’t take seriously.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Vera spent all day in the hotel lounge at the Willows. Most of the guests had left, despite Ryan Taylor’s reassurance that the sandbags would keep out the flood. The place was silent and gloomy; there was little natural light from outside despite the long windows. She’d shouted at him to switch off the background music after ‘Walking Back to Happiness’ had come round for the third time on the taped loop; she felt as if the tune were mocking her for her inability to get the case right.

  She’d decided on inaction, at least for today. Waiting was always torture to her and she understood it was a risk. If he knew what was in her mind, Joe Ashworth would be horrified. He’d recommend arrests, dramatic chases through the countryside. And of course she could be wrong. The idea had come to her sitting here, listening to the young waiter describe how Jenny Lister had waited here on the morning of her death for someone who never turned up. It wasn’t much to build a case on. And even if she were right, Vera thought, there’d be no guarantee of a conviction. A guilty plea would be better for everyone. The decision to wait having been made, it was better that she stay here where she would do no harm. If she went out, she might put in her huge, wellie-clad foot and upset the delicate balance that she sensed now existed. There was always a danger of further violence.

  So she sat in the big floral armchair by the window and occasionally summoned her team members to her. More often she spoke on the phone, sometimes persuading and sometimes swearing. Once she threw it across the room, and she had to retrieve it from the silk chaise longue where it had landed. Doreen, the elderly waitress, brought her cups of coffee, cheese sandwiches, hard scones and butter. Every hour or so Vera would pull herself to her feet and stamp around the room to bring the feeling back into her limbs. She’d stand in front of the fire, which at last seemed to throw out some warmth, or waddle to the toilet, then return to her seat and continue to scribble notes that charted the progress of the case.

  Once she stopped for ten minutes to stare outside at a rainbow that spanned the valley. But the sun, which had come out briefly, was soon covered again by cloud and the rainbow faded and then disappeared.

  Holly was her first visitor. She arrived in the early afternoon, starving. Vera fed her crisps and cake and listened to what she had to say about Hannah and Danny. Holly had been to the high school and talked to a couple of teachers, and through them she’d managed to meet up with some of the kids who’d been friends with Danny and Hannah. They’d met in the bar in Hexham, where one of them was working to save up to go travelling. He’d called up another couple of cronies. ‘Not that Danny had many close friends,’ Holly said, her mouth still full of cake. ‘Apparently he was a bright lad, but cocky. A tad arrogant. The teachers wouldn’t say, but you could tell they couldn’t stand him. The kids were a bit more forgiving. He was like leader of the gang. The show-off. But they admired him more than they liked him. I had the impression he was considered very cool, but a bit self-centred. Good for a fun night out, but not for a long-term friendship.’

  That word again.

  ‘What about the relationship with Hannah?’ Vera was still taking notes. She wanted this clear in her head.

  ‘She wasn’t his first girlfriend, they were all clear about that. But she was the first girl he really cared for. And the first time he’d been dumped, apparently. It came as a shock to the system. Not what he’d been expecting at all.’

  ‘Did he blame Simon Eliot?’ Vera thought this could be important. She looked at Holly and hoped she was taking the question seriously. ‘It does look as if Hannah dumped him for Simon.’

  ‘Danny was probably pissed off at the time, but more recently they seem to have got on OK. People have seen them knocking around together in the university holidays. It’s not really a big deal at that age, is it?’

  Which was what Hannah had said too.

  ‘So nobody thought Danny had a grudge against the Eliot boy? He could be one to harbour a grudge.’

  ‘Nah,’ Holly said. ‘I didn’t get the impression there was anything like that.’

  Vera gave a little sigh, which reminded Holly of her nana playing patience. Sometimes, when she played out all the cards, she made a noise that was exactly the same as the one Vera made now.

  ‘Any of them heard of Michael Morgan?’ Vera asked after a brief pause. ‘Do we know if Danny had contact with him before he started working in the hotel?’

  ‘They didn’t recognize the name.’ Holly set her plate on the floor beside her. ‘But that doesn’t mean anything. They said that Danny liked to be mysterious about what he got up to. Part of his image. Sometimes he disapp
eared off the radar for days and nobody knew what he’d been up to.’ She looked at Vera. ‘Sorry, it’s not much, is it? I can carry on asking around if you think it’s important.’

  ‘Why don’t you get home early?’ Vera said. ‘It’ll be bloody nightmare on the roads with all this standing water, and you’ll have a long day tomorrow.’

  She had the satisfaction of seeing Holly lost for words. For once.

  Vera hadn’t heard from Charlie all morning and she summoned him in to the Willows after Holly had gone. She saw him walk from his car and up the steps, with that stooped posture he always had, as if he were looking out for dog shit on the pavement before he put down his feet. By now the sunshine and the rainbow had gone and it was almost dark, though it was still only the middle of the afternoon. Doreen had padded round the lounge switching on small table lamps. Charlie stood at the entrance to the room, peering into the gloom, and Vera called him over. She’d always had a bit of a soft spot for him. Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that his private life was even more of a failure than hers. He made her feel good.

  ‘Tea?’ she said. ‘Or could you use something a bit stronger?’

  ‘What are you having?’ Charlie had never really mastered the art of being gracious and the words came out as an aggressive grunt.

  ‘Oh, it’s a bit early for me,’ she said virtuously, ‘and I’m drowning with tea, but I’ll get you something.’

  ‘Tea then.’ He looked at her suspiciously.

  ‘Have you found Connie, that social worker, yet?’

  ‘I found her car. Or at least I saw it a couple of times on CCTV. There’s a camera in Effingham, the village east of Barnard Bridge. A little lass was killed on the zebra crossing and the parish council paid to have one installed.’ Doreen had brought him a plate of biscuits with his tea and he dipped one in the cup before eating it whole.