by Ann Cleeves
‘He deigned to grace us with his presence.’ He must have seen that Vera still needed an explanation. ‘He came to the Writers’ House once every couple of years to act as tutor. Making it clear that he was doing my mother an enormous favour. They go back a long way. But his support made a big difference when we set up the writing courses.’ He paused, seeming to realize that he sounded callous. ‘I’m sorry. It’s hard to believe that he’s dead.’
‘How long have you known him?’ Vera found herself amused. This young man was hardly more than a child to her and surely couldn’t have been involved in this business for more than a few years.
‘Pretty well as long as I can remember. Since I was a child. Tony worked with my mother at St Ursula’s, and when she was first published his positive reviews made a big difference to her career.’
Vera wasn’t sure how any of this worked. St Ursula’s? This was a world about which she knew nothing.
‘She’s a writer too, is she?’
‘Of course. Miranda Barton!’ He paused. ‘I suppose she’s not that well known now. But don’t let on you’ve never heard of her. She’d be mortified.’
‘Sorry, pet. I don’t get much time for reading in my line of business. Not stories, at any rate.’ Through the thick walls she heard the muffled sound of a police siren in the distance. The local cavalry arriving, showing off for all they were worth. What did they need a siren for? To scare one tractor and a bunch of sheep from the lane?
‘What was Mr Ferdinand doing here?’ Vera went on. ‘Was he lecturing on this course, “Short Cuts”?’
‘In theory.’ Again she thought she sensed bitterness in the young man’s voice. It seemed there were lots of complications in this case. At least she hoped there were. She liked something she could get her teeth into, something to prove what a brilliant detective she was.
‘And in practice?’
‘He was here to massage his ego, to convince himself that he was still as influential as he’d always been. In 1990 The Observer called him a star-maker. I think he’s always on the lookout for more stars, to prove his importance in the literary firmament.’
Again Vera wasn’t sure what this meant, and now wasn’t the time for another show of her ignorance.
‘Who found the body?’ she asked.
Alex leaned back against the end of the chaise longue as if he was suddenly exhausted. ‘My mother. Tony was scheduled to run an informal session before supper. Questions and answers. All about how to find an agent or a publisher, how to submit work. It was often the most popular workshop of the week, the practical side of getting work into print. It was what a lot of the students came for. Of course they all hoped Tony would recognize their genius and recommend them to an agent or publisher. He was charismatic, you know. One word of praise from him and they’d believe in themselves as writers. Tony hadn’t appeared for tea, so Mother went to find him. The glass room was one of his favourite places.’
‘That’s what you call it? The glass room?’
‘Yes.’ Again he regarded Vera with suspicion.
‘Was that unusual? Mr Ferdinand not arriving to work on time?’
‘It was, rather. Tony wasn’t the easiest person to work with, but he was professional.’
‘Your mother came up here and saw him on the balcony?’ Vera wasn’t sure that made sense. If you were looking for someone, wouldn’t you just poke your head round the door to see if they were inside? How could she know that Ferdinand would be crouched in a heap in the corner?
‘Yes,’ Alex said. ‘Then all hell broke loose.’ Despite his expression of shock at the professor’s murder, it seemed to Vera that the young man was devoid of emotion. He was going through the motions. Which couldn’t be said of his mother. Vera could still hear the sound of Miranda Barton’s screaming in her ears, feel it reverberating through her body. The sight of the man on the balcony – the fixed and angry glare on his face, the blood – would be shocking of course. But she thought that there had been more than shock in that noise. It was more personal. Like a mother keening for a child. Or a woman grieving for her lover.
‘This room is just above the drawing room,’ Alex went on, ‘so everyone who was having tea could hear her. They all ran out to see what was going on. The last thing I wanted was some sort of circus, so I told them to wait downstairs. It didn’t take much to wind my mother up. If anything, I was embarrassed. I thought she was just causing a scene. When I saw Tony, I brought Mother downstairs and asked another tutor, Giles Rickard, to take her into our cottage. I went back to the office to phone the police.’
‘And the ambulance,’ Vera said.
For the first time he gave a wry little smile. ‘I know, that was ridiculous. But I’d never seen anybody dead before. I suppose I needed confirmation, someone medical to tell me I wasn’t making it all up. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.’
The front doorbell started to ring. ‘That’ll be the local police,’ Vera said. ‘You’d best go and let them in. Tell them I’m here and bring them up. They can secure the scene for us, and I can start my investigation.’
Alex stood up and gave her a strange look. ‘What investigation?’
‘Why, that’s what I do for a living. I catch criminals.’ Again, trapped in this small space, with the low red light throwing odd shadows on the white walls, she felt as if she’d wandered into someone’s weird dream. She needed her sergeant, Joe Ashworth, to turn up full of youthful energy and common sense.
‘But I told them on the phone!’ Now the man seemed to be losing patience with her altogether. ‘We know who killed Tony Ferdinand.’
‘Your mother saw the murderer?’
‘No! I did. As I’ve just said. And as I told your colleagues. On my way to the glass room, while Mother was still screaming, I bumped into the woman here in the corridor. She had a knife in her hand.’
‘Very convenient.’ Bugger, Vera thought. So it was back to working the boring stuff, the pathetic druggies and the pub brawls, just when she’d thought there might be something more exciting to sustain her interest. Then she had another thought, which was even more disturbing. ‘I suppose your murderer has a name?’
‘It’s one of the students. We’ve shut her in her bedroom. She’s called Joanna Tobin.’
Chapter Four
Joanna’s room was small. A single bed set against one wall, and against another a desk, with an anglepoise lamp and a chair. A narrow wardrobe. There was a red carpet on the floor and the duvet cover and the curtains were a deeper red. A door led to a tiny shower room. This was slightly more comfortable than the cell in Low Newton prison where she’d more than likely end up, but not much bigger. Of course, Vera thought, the court might decide Joanna was mad, and then she’d go to a secure psychiatric hospital instead. Vera wasn’t sure which would be worse. If she had a choice in a similar situation, she would probably opt for the prison. It would still be full of psychos, but at least you’d have a date for getting out. Places like Broadmoor, you were dependent for a release date on the whim of a team of psychiatrists and politicians.
There’d been a man standing outside the closed door of the room. He was tall and heavily built. She thought he’d been fit once, but had slightly run to flab. Dressed in cheap jeans and sweatshirt, he stood with his legs apart and his hands on his hips. Classic bouncer posture. You couldn’t tell from his face, but Vera thought he was probably enjoying himself. Deep down, everyone loved a murder almost as much as she did. They loved the drama of it, the frisson of fear, the exhilaration of still being alive. People had been putting together stories of death and the motives for killing since the beginning of time, to thrill and to entertain. It was different of course if you were close to the victim. Or to the killer. Vera hadn’t begun to think yet how she would tell Jack what had gone on here.
‘Who are you?’ Vera had demanded of Joanna’s warder before he opened the door.
‘Lenny Thomas.’ In those four syllables she could tell this was a voice that cam
e from Ashington or one of the other ex-pit villages in the south-east of the county, not from rural Northumberland.
‘Work here, do you? Or are you one of the writers?’ Vera saw him as a handyman or gardener, but she’d met more scruffy academics.
‘I’m a writer.’ He looked suddenly astonished, as if he’d never said the words before.
‘Student or tutor?’
‘Student, but that Professor Ferdinand had said I had the potential to be published. He said he might take me on as one of his postgraduate students. Imagine that! Me doing an MA in creative writing, and I only scraped five GCSEs. He said that wouldn’t matter. He was going to put in a word. And a word from him would make a difference. Everyone knew that.’ Lenny gave a little laugh that had no resentment in it. ‘But that’ll never work out now, eh? I knew deep down it was too good to be true. People like me never get that sort of luck. But it was nice to believe it, like, while it was happening.’
‘If he thought you were good enough, other people will too,’ Vera said.
‘Aye, maybe.’ And Vera saw that Lenny probably didn’t want success enough, or wasn’t confident enough to push his work. She nodded to the door. ‘How is she?’
‘No bother,’ Lenny said. ‘Calm as owt.’ And he moved away to let Vera in. ‘Do you want me there with you, like?’
‘Nah,’ Vera said. ‘We’ll be fine. Go off and get yourself a cup of tea.’
She could tell the man was disappointed, but he wandered off without comment.
Joanna was sitting on a window seat, looking out into the garden. It was quite dark by now, so there was nothing for her to see. She must have heard the door opening, but she didn’t turn her head and seemed lost in a world of her own.
‘Why, lass, you’ve got yourself into a bit of a pickle.’
Vera sat on the edge of the bed. She could have chosen the chair by the desk, but the bed was more comfortable and closer to Joanna. If Joanna shifted her head just a bit, Vera would be within her line of vision.
‘One question,’ Vera went on. ‘Did you make him sit out on the balcony before you stabbed him, or did you do it in the room, then stick him outside? It doesn’t quite make sense. We’ll know, of course, once the pathologist gets here, but it’d save us a bit of time if you explain how he ended up there. I couldn’t see any blood in the room itself, so I guess you got him outside.’
Now Joanna did twist her body so that she was looking into the room. It was as if she noticed Vera for the first time. Her posture, sitting on the window seat, her back to the glass, was almost regal.
‘I didn’t kill him at all.’ She was, as Lenny had said, quite calm.
‘Come on, pet. You were wandering around the corridor outside the glass room with a knife in your hand!’
‘So I was,’ Joanna agreed, in the posh southern accent that made Vera think of a lady of the manor opening a village fete. Or the wife of a colonial governor. ‘How very Lady Macbeth!’
‘I’ll need to take your clothes for forensic examination.’ Vera decided the woman must be quite insane, and that it was best to get the clothes away from her while she was being cooperative.
‘I was there in the room,’ Joanna said. ‘But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even see him. I suppose he must have been dead already.’ Despite the denial, she slid off the window seat and began to strip. She’d never been embarrassed by nudity. One very hot July day, Vera had caught her swimming naked in the tarn close to the farm. She’d laughed out loud at Vera’s surprise: Why don’t you come in. It’s lovely!
Her body was still brown from working in the fields all summer. She was soft and supple. Vera saw a dressing gown on a hook on the door and threw it to her. She thought it might be better to start this story from the beginning. ‘What are you doing in this place, anyway?’
Joanna pulled the dressing gown around her and tied the cord. It was made of silk and looked like a kimono. She’d have picked it up for a few pence at a charity shop and brought it home in triumph to show off to Jack.
‘Should you be talking to me, without a lawyer?’ This was Joanna at her most imperious, and Vera was surprised.
‘Probably not,’ Vera said. ‘If you like, we can wait until we’re in the station and I can talk to you there. Lawyers, tape recordings. The works. Probably for the best. I haven’t cautioned you yet, and I’ll only get into bother when we get to court.’
A shadow seemed to pass over Joanna’s face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I always get arsey when I’m scared.’
‘Jack said you’d stopped taking your pills.’
The mention of Jack threw her and, for a moment, Vera thought she might cry. ‘I did for a couple of weeks, but I’m back on them now. I saw it wasn’t the right time to stop. Maybe it never will be.’ She looked into Vera’s face and gave a wide smile. ‘You don’t need to worry. I’m not mad.’
And Vera thought now that was probably true. This was the Joanna she knew: loud and quirky, but rational enough. In which case, why had the woman stabbed a professor of English literature to death?
‘Tell me,’ she said again. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I thought I could write.’ Joanna seemed to be struggling to choose the right words. ‘At least, I thought I had something to say. I read an article about the Writers’ House in the Newcastle Journal. They were running a sort of competition. I sent in a piece. It was about France, about my life there. Bits of details that had stuck in my head. Anyway, I won and they awarded me a bursary. A week’s tuition. All free.’
‘Why didn’t you tell Jack you were coming to stay here? He wouldn’t have minded. He’d have been proud of you!’
‘He thinks it’s wrong to rake over the old days.’ Joanna turned briefly again to look out into the dark. All she would have seen was her own reflection in the glass. ‘He takes it personally. He thinks he should be enough for me.’
‘Because you’re enough for him?’ Vera said.
‘He adores me,’ Joanna said. ‘I should be grateful. I am grateful.’
Vera thought this was an odd sort of conversation to be having with a woman who’d been accused of sticking a knife into a man’s heart, but at least Joanna was now talking freely to her.
‘It’s a tricky sort of emotion, gratitude,’ Vera said. ‘It’s never come easily to me. I’d rather have people owing me a favour than the other way round.’
‘Yes,’ Joanna smiled again. ‘I’ve always felt that too.’
‘So winning this competition was a way for you to take off for a few days? Have a bit of time to yourself? Get away from Jack and the farm?’
Joanna leaned forward so that the long plait fell over her shoulder. ‘It wasn’t just that. It was a way of exploring my past, making sense of it. Of taking the time to go back and look at the events of my first marriage with fresh eyes.’
‘Eh, pet, that sounds more like therapy than stories to me!’
Joanna threw back her head and gave the rich, deep laugh that Vera remembered from parties and dinners at the farm, which took her away from this strange house with its piles of books and paper, back to a real world of lambing and freshly turned soil and rain. ‘You should have been here,’ Joanna said. ‘They should employ you to sit in on the workshops to stop students writing pretentious crap.’
‘I’m here,’ Vera said, serious again, ‘because a man’s dead.’
They sat for a moment, looking at each other in silence.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ Joanna said. ‘I didn’t like him very much, but I didn’t kill him.’
Vera was aware that if she continued to question Joanna she’d be crossing a line. In fact the line had already been crossed when she’d decided to come into this room on her own. The prime suspect in the case was Vera’s neighbour, could even be considered a friend, so there was a conflict of interest. She was on her own with the woman. No witness and no tape recorder, as she’d said before. She should call immediately for one of the local bobbies to escort Joanna to a waiting police
car and drive her back to the station. They’d find her a duty solicitor and another member of the team should interview her. But Vera stayed where she was and said nothing. She was a detective, and listening was what she did best.
‘Tony wanted sex with me,’ Joanna went on. ‘In a way, it was quite flattering and for a moment I was tempted. He was good-looking in a smooth, boring kind of way, and it’s a long time since I’ve been propositioned. Completely out of the question of course.’
‘Why out of the question?’ Vera asked. She had imagined that the hippies went in for free sex. They seemed so relaxed with their bodies, and wasn’t that what hippies were famous for?
Joanna looked up sharply. ‘I didn’t fancy him,’ she said, as if the answer was obvious. ‘He wasn’t my type. And he was rather a horrid man.’
‘In what way horrid?’ Again Vera had intended not to ask any further questions. Soon Joe Ashworth would be here. She’d phoned him before coming to talk to Joanna. Then they could progress the interview in a more orthodox way. He could take the lead. But Vera wanted to know what had happened to provoke such grotesque violence, and at the moment Joanna was her best source of information, whether she was a suspect or witness.
‘He was greedy,’ Joanna said after a moment’s consideration. ‘I hate greed, don’t you? It’s such a mean, small-minded vice. As if money matters at all!’
‘It matters to lots of people,’ Vera said.
‘Only to people who have nothing of real value in their lives!’ There was the imperious tone again. ‘But I shouldn’t be rude about him, should I? He didn’t deserve to die. Nobody deserves to die before their time.’
‘Why did you go into the glass room?’ Vera asked. ‘Everyone knew it was his favourite place, apparently. If you disliked him so much, what were you doing there?’
‘I went because he asked me to. Obviously it was a foolish thing to do. But wisdom has never really been my bag.’
‘Perhaps you should explain.’ Again Vera felt that the conversation was spinning away from her. She needed facts. Time of death. Cause of death. A list of the people in the house. Something to anchor her to reality. She looked at her watch. Joe Ashworth could drive like a cautious sixty-year-old without Vera to urge him on. And she wouldn’t have put it past him to call in on his wife and bairns on the way through from Kimmerston. But even allowing for all that, he should be here soon. Joe had as much imagination as a louse and, when he arrived, she’d let him look after Joanna. The woman would be safe with him, mad or not, and he wouldn’t let himself be distracted by her ramblings on morality.