The Glass Room

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘Didn’t you ask him?’ Ashworth demanded. ‘I mean, he’s a famous writer and you’re trying to get published, so surely you’d use any contact you had in that world.’

  Again Joanna took time before replying. ‘It wasn’t a happy time for me,’ she said at last. ‘The marriage was a disaster almost from the beginning. I was young. The separation was brutal. My husband was so convinced of his brilliance that he believed I must be mad to want to leave him. Literally mad. And by the end of the experience I probably was. Giles knew me from that time.’

  ‘So it would have been embarrassing to introduce yourself to him?’ Ashworth said. ‘Because the last time you met, you were…’ he paused to find an acceptable term. Vera saw that mad would be too stark for him. Too unkind. ‘… mentally ill.’

  ‘No!’ This time Joanna’s response was immediate. ‘I’ve never been embarrassed in my life. People can take me or leave me.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand.’ And Vera saw that Ashworth really didn’t understand. His experience of domestic life was limited and suburban. People married. If they separated, usually it was because one party had an affair. And Joe disapproved of affairs.

  ‘Paul, my husband, was an unpleasant man. Controlling and violent. Also rich, which was a complicating factor. Giles was his closest friend, despite the difference in their ages. Like a surrogate father. I thought that if Giles recognized me, he might tell Paul where I was.’ She looked up and stared first at Ashworth and then at Vera. ‘I was scared,’ she said. ‘It all happened nearly twenty years ago, but still I was scared.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Vera watched Joe drive down the lane. She waited until his lights had disappeared and then she went back to Myers Farm. Through the kitchen window she saw Jack standing behind Joanna, his arms around her shoulders. Was Joanna telling him about Rickard? Sharing her anxiety. This time when Vera knocked she waited for them to call her in.

  ‘What is it now?’ Jack was reproachful. ‘Don’t you think Joanna needs to be left alone? It’s late. We were thinking of going to bed.’

  ‘I’m here as a friend,’ Vera said. ‘Not as a cop. I should have nothing to do with this investigation. Conflict of interests. When we come to courts the defence could use that. You do see?’

  ‘So you’ll have a beer then?’ Jack stood away from Joanna. ‘If you’re here as a friend. If it’s not a professional visit.’

  ‘Aye, why not?’ Vera leaned across the table towards Joanna. For the first time she saw how tense and strained the woman was. The performance for Joe had been a brilliant effort. ‘You submitted a piece of writing to get the bursary for the writing course.’ Her voice was low, and Jack, in the pantry, wouldn’t have been able to hear.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was about your marriage,’ Vera said. ‘Your marriage turned into fiction. You told me that and so did Nina Backworth. Very personal, she said. It must have been hard to write.’

  ‘No.’ Joanna was drinking wine from the Bristol Blue glass. Jack had obviously poured it for her as soon as Ashworth and Vera had left. ‘It wasn’t hard at all. I’d been bottling up the hatred for years and when I saw the advertisement for the Writers’ House, I sat here one afternoon and spewed it all out. Then I sent the story off, before I had a chance to change my mind.’

  ‘Did the writing come easily because you’d stopped taking the medication?’ Vera asked. ‘Is that why you came off it?’

  ‘To make me more creative, you mean?’ Joanna was self-mocking. ‘No, it wasn’t that. Not in that sense, at least.’

  ‘In what sense then?’ Vera thought of Jack’s words before all this had started, his fear that Joanna had found a new lover.

  But he came back into the room then and Joanna just shook her head and refused to answer.

  ‘Can I read the story?’ Vera was leaning back in her chair, the bottle raised towards her mouth. She could tell the question came as a surprise. ‘Ashworth should have asked to see it, but I didn’t want to make a deal of it while he was here.’

  ‘I can’t see what that could have to do with Tony Ferdinand’s death.’

  ‘Ferdinand had read it, hadn’t he? And he was known as something of a sexual predator.’

  ‘You think it might have turned him on?’ Joanna threw back her head and laughed. ‘Nah, he was just an ordinary perv.’

  ‘Rickard had seen it too?’ Vera was trying to grope her way through the complexities of the situation. She didn’t care if her ideas seemed ridiculous.

  ‘A copy of all submitted work was shown to every tutor,’ Joanna said.

  ‘Did Rickard recognize you?’

  ‘If he did,’ Joanna said, ‘he didn’t say anything.’

  ‘What did he make of your story?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was due to have a tutorial with him the afternoon Tony Ferdinand died.’

  There was a silence while they considered the implication of that fact. ‘So it might be important,’ Vera said. ‘Probably not, but you see how it could be?’

  When Joanna didn’t answer, Vera went on:

  ‘I could get a copy from Miranda Barton, you know. But I wanted to ask you first.’

  Joanna nodded. She went to a drawer in the dresser and took out an A4 envelope. ‘This is all I have left,’ she said. ‘I deleted it from the computer.’

  ‘Because you didn’t want Jack to read it?’ Vera kept her voice light. On the other side of the table Jack seemed about to speak, but said nothing. Not like him to keep quiet, Vera thought. Maybe he’s growing up at last.

  ‘Not because there’s anything secret,’ Joanna said. ‘And nothing really I’m ashamed of. Except being taken in by a bastard. But you know what Jack’s like.’ She turned towards her partner and gave him a smile that was almost maternal. ‘I thought it would make him angry. I thought he’d decide to go off and play the hero.’

  ‘Eh,’ Jack said, trying to keep it light. ‘Stop talking about me as if I’m not here.’

  Vera ignored the interruption. ‘You thought he’d confront your ex, you mean?’

  ‘Something like that. He’d have had a go at Paul, if he’d been able to find him.’

  ‘And would you have done that?’ Now Vera did look at Jack. The knuckles were white on the hand that clasped the bottle. If he squeezed it much harder it’d smash into pieces.

  ‘Yeah I would,’ Jack said. ‘If I’d found him I’d have killed him.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t have wanted that,’ Joanna said, suddenly serious. ‘I don’t blame Paul Rutherford or Giles Rickard any more. They didn’t turn me into a victim, Vera. I did that all by myself. Sometimes you just have to take responsibility.’

  * * *

  Vera sat up in bed and read the manuscript Joanna had given to her. The bedroom was cold. The fire she’d lit for Joe had long gone out and she hadn’t bothered switching on the central heating. She had two pillows at her back and a spare duvet wrapped around her shoulders. On the bedside table some hot milk with a good splash of whisky in it. Outside it was still; there was no sound at all. In her head she heard the voices of the people in the story.

  This was fiction, but the central character, Maggie, was a barely disguised version of Joanna, and when Vera read the piece, she found Joanna there, speaking in her aristocratic tone, confused and angry.

  Maggie grew up in a house in Somerset governed by unspoken and unwritten rules. Everything from the correct folding of napkins to her inadequate schooling was prescribed in advance. Then she met Paul and every rule was broken or irrelevant. He was her saviour and her devil. He walked into her life one evening, rangy and spare, a hungry lion looking for food. For a woman and admiration. For money and a woman to worship him. In his life there were no rules, except one: take what you want. And she was seduced by his wickedness, by the absence of rules. It liberated her from the tedious life of duty. That evening, a guest in her father’s house, he made love to her while the other guests were at dinner. The next morning she ran away with him.
>
  That was the start. Very melodramatic, Vera thought. She remembered snatches of a book programme on Radio 4 and came up with a different word. Very gothic. She wondered if it had really happened that way, or if Joanna had re-created a story to suit her heightened mood. Perhaps her relationship with Paul had been more mundane, almost sleazy. She was a schoolgirl who wanted to escape from strict parents and a boring home life. And he was an older man who wasn’t going to turn away a bonny lass when she’d thrown herself at him. Was the overblown language of the story the result of Joanna’s lack of medication at the time of writing? Or had she first seen her husband as the romantic figure described in the story? And as the theatrical villain he later became in the work?

  As she read on, the lack of factual detail in the piece irritated Vera. She’d hoped there would be something here to help her in the investigation. But while the scenes of the couple’s life in Paris, especially those describing Maggie’s unravelling into depression, were vivid, little was specific. Paul left the apartment every day to go to work, but there was no mention of the address of their home or of exactly what he did to earn a living. Of course Vera could ask Joanna about her life in France, but Joanna was still a major suspect.

  Besides, how could this be relevant to the murder? Did Vera really think Joanna’s ex-husband had manipulated events at the Writers’ House? The notion that a stranger had been murdered just to implicate Joanna, to torment her further, seemed fanciful even at this time of night. Why bother now after all these years? Perhaps Joe Ashworth had been right not to pursue the idea. After reading the pages through for a second time, Vera put them on the floor beside the bed. After all, she could hardly justify spending more time and energy on this line of enquiry. She fancied another whisky as a nightcap – she deserved it after reading all that stuff – but by now the room was freezing and she couldn’t face her cold feet on the bare kitchen floor. Her last thought was that she should have brought the bottle to bed with her.

  * * *

  At the team briefing the next morning the question of Joanna’s past came up. Joe Ashworth was leading the session. Vera sat at the back, determined to keep her mouth shut and let him get on with it. She didn’t want to compromise the investigation by taking a leading role. Nor was she keen to let slip that she’d been back to visit Joanna the night before. He began with a recap.

  ‘Of all the folk staying at the Writers’ House, only seven had the opportunity to kill Tony Ferdinand. The rest were together between lunch and the discovery of the body. There’s no news yet from the search team on the murder weapon.’

  Holly stuck up her hand. Vera thought she would have been the sort of child to sit in the front row of the classroom and tell the teacher if he’d got something wrong.

  ‘Yeah?’ Joe reacted just as the teacher would have done.

  ‘There’s Chrissie Kerr, the publisher, too. She was at the Writers’ House in the morning to give a guest lecture. She stayed for lunch.’

  ‘And drove away before Ferdinand died.’ Joe glared at her.

  ‘Nothing to stop her pulling in at the top of the bank and coming back on foot.’

  Vera thought they were like squabbling kids and decided it was time to step in or they’d be there all day. ‘Any connection between Kerr and Ferdinand?’ she asked. ‘Any possible motive?’

  ‘Not that I can find,’ Holly said.

  ‘Let’s put her down as an outsider and carry on, then.’ Vera sat back in her chair and waited for Joe to continue.

  He pointed to the photos of the Bartons, stuck on the whiteboard. ‘So we have mother and son, Miranda Barton and her son Alex. They run the place.’ He turned to Holly, icily polite: ‘You were going to dig around into the business’s finances. What have you come up with?’

  ‘Well, it’s hardly making them a fortune,’ Holly said. ‘But they’re not on the verge of bankruptcy, either. Miranda bought the house years ago when she was making a decent living out of her writing. There’s hardly any mortgage. She must have got the idea of setting it up as a writers’ retreat when her books stopped selling. It makes sense really. A sort of valueadded B&B. And New Writing North covers the cost of the bursaries, so it’s all profit.’

  She looked at Ashworth over her specs. ‘I don’t see any motive for either of them. If anything, they have something to lose if the murder has an impact on bookings.’

  Vera thought there was an edge of competition in every conversation between these two. Holly was waiting for Joe to contradict her and was looking forward to another argument, but he didn’t give her the satisfaction.

  Vera raised a finger. ‘They seem an odd pair to me,’ she said. ‘The woman’s all showy emotion, and you’d think the lad was made of ice. Chalk and cheese.’

  Joe looked at her expecting more, but she shook her head. ‘Just making the point.’

  He turned back to the whiteboard and pointed to another photo. ‘Next, Lenny Thomas. Worked for Banks Open-cast until he developed back problems two years ago. Since then he’s lived off invalidity benefit. He’s got a council house in Red Row. Divorced with one kid. A bit of a history when he was a kid – car theft, burglary. One period of probation and six months’ imprisonment. Nothing recent. Not since he started with Banks.’

  ‘How does he fit in with the arty set?’ This from Charlie, bags under his eyes you could carry golf clubs in, last night’s takeaway curry on his jersey.

  Vera was tempted to jump in again at this point, but she allowed Ashworth to speak first. ‘They’ve adopted him as their own working-class pet,’ Ashworth said. ‘They’re kind, but patronizing. They wouldn’t want to be thought snobby.’

  Well done, lad!

  ‘Motive?’ Holly asked. She was still sulking because Joe was getting all the attention.

  ‘According to Lenny Thomas, Tony Ferdinand had said he could find him a publisher and turn him into a star. Maybe it was all talk, and Lenny got resentful and lost it.’

  ‘The trick with the knife, and the forged note to Joanna, would hardly be his style, would it?’ This was Holly betraying her own prejudices.

  ‘You mean he’s not bright enough to think of it, because he once drove a truck on an open-cast for a living?’

  Don’t let her bug you, Joey-boy, Vera thought.

  ‘Besides,’ Joe went on, ‘we don’t know the note to Joanna was forged. And we’re not going to find out. She claims it was burned. She’s still got to be our prime suspect.’ He pointed to the photo of Joanna. It had been taken recently, and Vera wondered where they’d got hold of it. She was wearing a red sweater and her hair was blowing away from her face. ‘Joanna Tobin. Living the good life with her partner, Jack Devanney, in the hills above Clachan Lough. Like Thomas, she was one of the students who’d been awarded a free place on the writers’ course. She was found close to the body with a knife in her hand. Problem is, the knife doesn’t fit the wound. So was she set up? Or was she playing some sort of elaborate game with us? A sort of double bluff.’

  He paused and turned towards Vera. ‘She spent ten years of her married life in France, and records of that time only came through this morning. She assaulted her husband, attacked him with a knife, then attempted suicide. The doctors diagnosed some sort of psychotic episode and she was never charged. She escaped from a French psychiatric hospital and made her way back here, with the help of Devanney. It seems she’s been on medication ever since.’

  Except she stopped taking it for a few weeks before going to the Writers’ House. Because she fancied herself in love, as Jack had feared?

  ‘Case over, then!’ Charlie looked up from the paper cup he’d been staring into since he’d sat down.

  ‘That’s dangerous talk, Charlie, and you know it.’ Joe’s voice was sharp. Vera wasn’t sure if he was really angry or if this was a show for her benefit. ‘There’s no evidence to connect her to the victim. If you start looking for proof to nail an individual, you’ll likely try too hard and find it. Doesn’t mean it’s real. Now’s the t
ime to keep an open mind. So let’s move on.’

  Joe pointed to the next photo on the board. The photo was old and looked as if it had been dug out of an old HR file. ‘Mark Winterton. Former inspector with Cumbria Police. Not much use as a writer, according to the staff at the place. So what was he doing there? It would be good to establish some link between him and the victim. Or with Joanna Tobin. Charlie, can you do that? There’s an address near Carlisle for him. Not so far from where Tobin lives, as the crow flies.’ Charlie nodded. He was used to being shouted at and didn’t bear resentment for long.

  ‘The last two are tutors. Nina Backworth, academic and writer. She admits to hating Ferdinand and blames him for screwing up her writing career. So she has the most plausible motive, but again there’s no forensic evidence to link her to the victim.’ Ashworth paused and looked round the room to check he had their full attention. ‘Then there’s Giles Rickard. He’s done very nicely from his writing recently. A house in Normandy and a flat in Highgate.’ He looked at Charlie ‘That’s a flash part of London. And he’s got a holiday cottage up the coast in Northumberland. Which is how he came to be invited as a tutor on the course. He claims that he had no professional contact with Ferdinand, and they seem only to have met at the occasional publishers’ party. According to Rickard, who seems a nice old chap. But maybe we can’t entirely trust him. Because he forgot to tell us that he was best mates with Joanna Tobin’s ex-husband, Paul. And when I googled him I found a scathing review of one of his books in the Times Literary Supplement. Written by our victim.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nina Backworth woke with a start and she didn’t know where she was. It was still dark. At home, in her flat in Newcastle, there would be enough light from the street lamps for her to make out the shadow of the wardrobe, and she’d hear the background buzz of distant traffic. Here, briefly everything was strange. She heard footsteps in the corridor outside her door and there was a moment of panic. Her body was rigid with fear and her pulse raced. Someone had broken into her flat. The image of a bloody body crouching in a dark corner flashed into her mind, half-nightmare, half-daydream. Her body? Her flat? A premonition of her own death? Then a beat later she remembered where she was and began to breathe again. Tony Ferdinand was dead, but she was still alive. She turned on her bedside light and saw that it was six-thirty. After all she hadn’t slept badly. The footsteps outside her door would be one of the other residents.