The Glass Room

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘I’d heard him on the radio, read his reviews and I admired him. He seemed passionate about literature and about championing new, young writers. He’d just set up the new creative-writing MA at St Ursula’s. I suppose he was some sort of hero. Then I met him, quite by chance, at a party. Friends of my grandparents, not very far from here, were celebrating a wedding anniversary. I’m not sure how he came to be there. I think he happened to be in the area. On holiday perhaps. Later I found he was very good at getting himself invited to parties, fancy restaurants.’ Nina stopped speaking for a moment. ‘He’d been a freelance journalist. I don’t suppose he was paid much. And he had very expensive tastes.’

  Vera nodded, remembering the clothes in his wardrobe. ‘Must have seemed like a stroke of luck,’ she said. ‘Just bumping into him like that.’

  ‘I could hardly believe it. I’d only gone to the party to keep my grandparents happy and as soon as I walked into the room I heard his voice. I’d have known it anywhere.’ Nina paused again. ‘You must understand that I was very young, very naive. Easily flattered. Tony encouraged me to talk about my novel. Later I realized I was the only female under fifty there and that he was flattered by my admiration. I entertained him for an hour or so while he drank a bottle of our hosts’ champagne. “Why don’t you apply to St Ursula’s?” he said when we left. “And let me see a copy of your novel.” And he gave me his card.’

  ‘That must have been exciting,’ Vera said. ‘To have someone that famous asking to look at your work.’

  ‘Unbelievably exciting!’ Nina faced Vera to make sure she understood the importance of what she was saying. ‘Like being six and waking up on Christmas morning and getting just the present you’d been dreaming about secretly all year.’

  ‘So you sent the book to him?’ Vera didn’t want to give Nina the impression she was rushing her, but neither did she want to be here for hours. She had that appointment with the superintendent, and if she was going to be grovelling, she’d better not be late.

  ‘I phoned him as soon as I got back to my parents’ house in London, and went to see him. His office in St Ursula’s was so full of books there was hardly room for a desk. I thought anyone who owned that many books must be honest and true. How could you read so widely and not be a good person? And he said he loved my novel, that I should join his course.’ She paused. ‘After that interview I was happier than I’ve ever been in my life. It was as if I was flying home.’

  ‘But it didn’t work out?’

  ‘No,’ Nina said. ‘It didn’t work out.’

  ‘Tell me.’ Still Vera was aware of time passing, but this was the first time she had a sense of Tony Ferdinand as a real person. He’d been a con man, she thought. A bit of a chancer. But bright enough to make people think he had influence. And in the end so many folk believed he could pull strings, and make things happen, that the perception became truth. ‘Tried it on, did he?’ Nina had been a bonny young woman after all. And it seemed he’d tried it on with Joanna.

  ‘No not that. He was unpleasant in an oldfashioned sexist way. Touching as if by chance. The occasional invitation that could have been taken as a proposition. But I could have coped with that.’

  ‘So what did he do?’ Vera asked. ‘What did he do that was so terrible?’

  ‘He ruined my novel. Him and the rest of the group.’

  ‘How did they do that?’

  Nina struggled to find the words to explain. ‘The teaching sessions were brutal. I’d had to take criticism as an undergraduate, but this was horrible. A form of intellectual combat. We’d sit in a circle, discussing an individual’s work, but there was nothing constructive in the comments. It was more like a competition to see how hard and unpleasant each student could be. Tony told us things were like that in the publishing world: tough, uncompromising. We should get used to it. But it wasn’t done for our benefit. He enjoyed moderating all that bile and aggression. He was entertained, and it made him feel powerful. It wasn’t just me he had a go at. He picked on anyone vulnerable. I remember him and a visiting tutor tearing apart one student, who fell to pieces in front of us. I found myself joining in. It was horrible.’ Nina looked up at Vera. ‘I tried to edit the text to meet the group’s comments. Most of the other students seemed so much more confidant and articulate than I was. And Tony seemed to agree with them. But of course that was a mistake. In the end my original vision was quite lost.’

  ‘So you left?’ Vera still couldn’t quite make sense of this. Usually she enjoyed dipping into worlds that were quite different from her own, but this seemed so far from her own experience that it was unfathomable. She’d never understood before that words could be a profession, a matter of pride, an income.

  ‘Eventually. It felt like a failure, but I was making myself ill. I found a more conventional postgraduate course and became an academic. I dumped the first novel. There was no way I could recapture the excitement. Recently I’ve started writing again.’

  ‘Published, are you?’

  ‘Not by anyone you’d have heard of.’ Nina managed a grin. ‘I’m with a small press, North Farm, based in rural Northumberland. I’ve got a passionate and intelligent young editor. It’s almost impossible to get my novels into mainstream bookshops, but Chrissie has a number of imaginative marketing strategies, and at least I don’t feel that I’ve sold my soul.’

  ‘What I don’t understand…’ Vera leaned forward across the table ‘… is why you agreed to run this workshop. You must have known in advance that Professor Ferdinand would be one of the tutors.’

  For a moment the woman sat in silence. Nina Backworth, usually so good at words that she made a living from them, said nothing. Her attention seemed held by the dust floating in the shaft of light that came through the narrow window above her head.

  ‘At first I didn’t know Tony would be here,’ Nina said at last. ‘The Writers’ House has an international reputation and it’s considered an honour to be invited to lecture here. I was interested to see how it works. A number of my friends have attended workshops and came back raving about the place. My managers at the university thought it would be a good thing to do – my being chosen as tutor reflects well on our courses – and so did my editor. The fee is generous, and that always helps.’

  She paused for breath and Vera thought there were already too many explanations. She wasn’t sure she believed any of them. She said nothing and allowed Nina to continue.

  ‘When Miranda sent me the list of tutors, it was too late to back out. Besides…’ The woman gave the same strained smile. ‘Sometimes it’s important to face one’s demons, don’t you think? I hoped I’d give my students here a more positive experience than Tony had given me. And I decided it would be good for me to meet the man again.’

  ‘And was it?’ Vera knew all about demons. She was living in the house where her dead father had kept bird skulls and skins in the basement. He regularly came to haunt her. She heard him muttering in her head late at night.

  ‘It was quite scary the first time we sat down to dinner together. I felt like an anxious young woman all over again. Then he started to patronize me and, instead of being frightened, I found myself hating him.’

  Vera paused for a second. ‘Hate’s a very strong word.’

  The answer came back immediately. ‘I’m a writer, Inspector. I choose my words carefully.’

  ‘What was going on between him and Joanna Tobin?’ Vera was remembering Nina’s intervention the night before. The other guests had assumed that Joanna was the killer, but Nina had stood up to defend her.

  ‘Joanna was a talented writer, Inspector, with an interesting story to tell. It doesn’t always work when real experiences are turned into fiction, but she managed a witty and sardonic voice, combined with real menace, that I found very fresh.’

  ‘And Ferdinand was grooming Joanna for stardom, was he? Offering to put a word in for her with his publisher mates?’ Vera wondered if Joanna’s writing had been good enough to turn her into a st
ar. What would Jack make of that?

  ‘He was trying,’ Nina said. ‘Joanna wasn’t as naive as some of the other students. She wasn’t taken in by the flattery.’

  ‘So how were things between them?’ Vera kept her voice casual.

  ‘Tense. Tony could be unpleasant here if he didn’t get his way, given to snide and sarcastic remarks. Not quite as brutal as his St Ursula seminars, but getting that way.’ Nina hesitated.

  ‘You might as well tell me the whole story, pet,’ Vera said. ‘If you don’t, some other bugger will.’

  ‘Once she fought back. With words, I mean, not literally. Get off my fucking back, Tony. This is my story and I’ll tell it in my own way. Sometimes you remind me of my ex-husband. It was in front of the whole group. The animosity seemed almost personal. I even wondered…’

  ‘Spit it out!’

  Nina looked up sharply, shocked by the barked order. ‘I wondered if they’d met before. If there was a history between them, as there was between Ferdinand and me. But that was ridiculous. How would a small farmer from Northumberland meet an academic from London?’

  But Joanna hadn’t always been a farmer, Vera thought. She caught Joe’s eye to check that he’d understood the significance of the remark and watched him write a note in his book.

  ‘When did you last see the professor?’ Vera sneaked a look at her watch. Soon she’d have to leave for Kimmerston and her meeting with the boss.

  ‘At lunch yesterday.’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  Nina hesitated. ‘Really much as usual. In fact he was rather mellow. He’d had several glasses of wine. He started to reminisce – the highlights of his intellectual career. His favourite topic of conversation.’

  ‘Do you remember who was sitting next to him?’ Vera felt that she was pushing the conversation on too quickly. If she were allowed time, Nina might provide answers to questions Vera hadn’t yet thought to ask. The woman was an observer, with an insight as sharp as Vera’s own.

  ‘Lenny Thomas was on one side and Miranda Barton on the other.’

  ‘Tell me about the relationship between Miranda and Tony Ferdinand.’ Sod the superintendent, Vera thought. If she were late for their meeting he’d have to understand that she was in the middle of a murder investigation. This was more important.

  ‘They worked together for a while at St Ursula’s. Miranda was assistant librarian in the college’s library. And of course Tony discovered her. She’d been published, but to very little notice. Then Tony wrote a glowing review in one of the broadsheets. Called her one of the best writers of her generation. It made a huge difference to her. For a couple of years she was in the best-seller lists here and in the US.’ Nina’s tone was measured and Vera could only guess what she’d made of Miranda’s success. She’d be jealous, wouldn’t she? Only a saint could watch a rival outperform and not feel bitter. And Miranda must have been a rival, mustn’t she?

  ‘Was that at the same time as you were at St Ursula’s?’

  ‘She topped the best-seller lists the year I was there,’ Nina said. ‘Tony held Miranda up as a role model. This is what you might achieve if you play things my way. There was a television adaptation of one of her novels. It was called Cruel Women. I suppose the money she made then helped to pay for this place. She was never so successful again.’

  Vera saw Ashworth pointing at his watch and saw she really would have to go now. All the same, she couldn’t help asking, ‘What was Miranda’s book about?’

  Nina blinked as if startled by the question, then gave another of her rare smiles. ‘I really don’t know. I didn’t get beyond the second page. In my opinion the writing was pretentious crap.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Later that afternoon Nina felt a compulsion to write. The hours before tea had been marked as free for students to concentrate on their own work: on the exercises set by tutors or on suggested edits to submitted manuscripts. Downstairs the house was empty and quiet. The residents must be writing in their rooms or searching for inspiration outside. The police had taken up residence in the chapel, so that was now out of bounds.

  At the introductory meeting on their arrival at the Writers’ House, Nina had said, only partly joking, that she was there under false pretences. Certainly she could talk about short fiction – the form had been her area of study since she was an undergraduate – but she’d never written crime. Now, with the tension and drama of a real murder investigation in the background, she began to understand the attraction of the genre. Nothing was more shocking than murder, yet the traditional structure of crime fiction provided a way of examining the subject with distance and grace. The idea that she might create her own detective story had grown slowly and insidiously all day, but by midafternoon she could think of nothing else. She felt as excited as she had as a new graduate, the ideas buzzing in her head, the fingers twitching to hold a pen. The exercise she’d set for the students was that they should choose a place in the house or garden as a setting for a crime scene. They should describe it, and use the description as a jumping-off point for their story. A good discipline: to make the scene real for the author and for the reader. Nina thought now that it would be a sensible way for her to get started too.

  She prowled through the house looking for a setting for her piece. Nothing indoors sparked her imagination. The house was quiet. From the kitchen she heard the sound of cooking and the door banged as Mark Winterton returned from his interview with the good-looking sergeant in the chapel, but nobody else was about.

  She fetched her coat from upstairs and went outside. The police officers on the doors had gone and she slipped through the back door and into the car park. The light had almost disappeared and the mist had returned like a fine drizzle on her skin. On the terrace the wrought-iron furniture appeared ghostly and insubstantial, a distorted memory of warm summer days. Water dripped through the ornate holes cut into the tables, and the chairs were tipped forward to allow rain to drain away. A lamp had been switched on in the drawing room beyond the glass, but nobody was inside. A fire had been lit in the big grate.

  Nina imagined this as her crime scene. The terrace designed for use in sunshine, now gloomy on a grey October afternoon. One of the white chairs set upright and occupied by her victim, the moisture like pearls on her hair and skin. Nina dried a chair with a tissue and sat down, taking the place of the victim. Who would it be? Important, surely, to get inside the head of the person who’d been murdered, even if he or she were already dead when the story started. She, Nina decided. Her victim would be a woman, but someone quite different from herself.

  Her concentration was broken by a sound from inside the drawing room. Raised voices. She turned to look, but from where she was sitting she couldn’t see them. Nor could they see her.

  ‘Really, Mother, you have to be careful.’ That was Alex Barton. Alex the son, who must have left the dinner preparations for a while. Nina supposed she should make herself known. There was something shabby about sitting here in the fading light eavesdropping on the conversation inside. But she didn’t move. Writers were like parasites, preying on other people’s stress and misery. Objective observers like spies or detectives.

  Except I’m not objective, Nina thought. I don’t like Miranda. I don’t know about her son. He seems harmless enough, but I certainly don’t like her.

  The boy continued to speak, sounding concerned and exasperated at the same time. ‘Why don’t we just cancel the rest of the course?’

  ‘We can’t do that!’ His mother’s voice was sharp. ‘We’d have to give them a refund, and we can’t afford to throw money away. You know how tough things are at the moment. Besides…’

  ‘Besides, what?’

  ‘I’d rather have the investigation taking place here, where we can keep an eye on what’s going on. If we send everyone home we won’t know what’s happening.’

  ‘I don’t want to know!’ Alex said. ‘I want to forget all about Tony Ferdinand. You don’t know how pleased I am t
hat he won’t be part of our lives from now on.’

  ‘You should be careful.’ The mother repeated her son’s words, so that it sounded like a mantra. ‘You don’t want people to think you’re pleased he’s dead.’

  ‘Of course I’m pleased!’ The words were highpitched and childish. ‘Given the chance, I’d dance on his grave.’

  The spite in his voice took Nina back to St Ursula’s, to one of the dreaded seminars. She’d heard the same note in her own voice that afternoon in London. The afternoon she’d described to Inspector Stanhope, when for once she hadn’t been the object of the group’s criticism. When the relief of someone else bearing the brunt of the bullying had caused Nina to join in, to be almost as cruel as the rest of them. Throwing insults as if they were rocks.

  A sudden noise brought her back to the present: wood splitting in the fire, sounding loud as a gunshot in the silence.

  ‘Ssh,’ Miranda said. ‘You don’t know who might be listening.’

  I’m listening, Nina thought, relishing her role as observer. Oh yes, I’m certainly listening. It occurred to her that Vera Stanhope would be proud of her. Then she heard the door shutting and assumed that both people had left the room. She got up quietly and looked inside. The space was lit by a single standard lamp and Miranda was sitting in a chair by the fire. Her eyes were closed and tears ran down her cheeks.

  * * *

  By the time Nina had replaced her coat, scribbled some ideas for her story in a notebook and returned to the drawing room, it was filled with people. Miranda was talking to Giles Rickard, one of the tutors. He was an elderly novelist with a red nose, a large shambling body and arthritis. His crime fiction was superficially gentle and rather old-fashioned, though it contained moments of malicious wit. His detective was a Cambridge don, a mathematician. Rickard had had a late burst of success when a television readers’ group had picked one of his books for discussion, and now he regularly appeared in the best-seller lists. Nina thought it was rather a coup for Miranda to have attracted him to teach on the course. He wore a perpetual air of surprise as if he couldn’t quite believe that fame had come to him at last. With the students he could be occasionally waspish and demanding, but he’d taken to Nina.