Silent Voices (Vera Stanhope 4) (5 page)

‘I’ll be there.’ The phone went dead. No messing. Vera was glad Hannah hadn’t taken up with a fool.

‘He’s on his way,’ she said.

While they waited for him, Vera made tea. She was desperate for a cup, and the pasty hadn’t done much to stop her hunger. This was a house where there’d be biscuits. Possibly even home-made cake.

‘What did your mam do for a living?’ She’d plugged in the kettle and turned back towards Hannah, who was still staring into space. There was no indication in the house, no clues for Vera to pick up, but she thought something arty. The things in the house – the furniture, crockery, pictures – wouldn’t have cost much, but they were put together with flair.

Hannah looked up very slowly. It was as if the question had taken hours to get through to her brain and she had only just remembered what had been asked. ‘She was a social worker. Fostering and adoption.’

Vera had to readjust her ideas. She’d never thought much of social workers. Either interfering busybodies who wouldn’t let folk get on with their own lives or ineffective wimps. A social worker had come to visit when her own mother had died, though she’d called herself something different then. Child Welfare Officer, that was it. Hector had charmed her, said of course he’d be fine to look after his daughter, and that had been the last they’d seen of the woman. And even though Hector had been hardly what anyone would call a model father, Vera wasn’t convinced having a social worker involved would have improved things. She was saved the need to answer because there was a brief knock on the front door, then Simon let himself in.
He must have his own key
. The thought flashed into her mind as she watched the young man take Hannah into his arms. Though it was hardly relevant because Jenny hadn’t been killed at home, it made him seem somehow part of the family and the idea of the couple being engaged seemed less ridiculous.

He was dark and big and towered over Hannah. Not conventionally good-looking, Vera thought. Slightly overweight, nerdy glasses, impossibly big feet. But there was a charge of attraction between them, even in this moment of the girl’s grief, that took Vera’s breath away and gave her a dark and destructive pang of jealousy.
I’ve never experienced that in my life, and now I probably never will
. He sat on one of the kitchen chairs and took Hannah onto his lap and began to stroke the hair away from her forehead, as if she were a small child. The gesture was so intimate that for a moment Vera was forced to look away.

The student dragged his attention from his girlfriend and gave a little nod to Vera. ‘I’m Simon Eliot, Hannah’s fiancé.’

‘What did Jenny make of your engagement?’ She had to pull them into conversation, and it was impossible to ignore the relationship between them. It would have been impossible too, surely, for Jenny to ignore it.

‘She thought we were too young.’ Hannah slid from Simon’s knee and took the chair beside him, though her hand still rested on his leg. ‘We wanted to get married this summer, but she asked us to wait.’

‘And did you agree?’

‘In the end. At least until Simon gets his MA. Another year. It seems like a lifetime, but in the scheme of things . . .’

‘Why marry at all?’ Vera asked. ‘Why not just live together like everyone else?’

‘That’s just it!’ For the moment Hannah seemed to have forgotten her mother’s death. Her eyes gleamed. ‘We’re not like everyone else. What we have is so special. We wanted a special gesture to reflect that. We wanted everyone to know that we intend to spend the rest of our lives together.’

Vera thought that Hannah’s parents had made similar promises when they married, but that relationship had hardly survived their daughter’s birth. They’d probably started off with ideals too. But Hannah was young and romantic, and it would have been cruel to disillusion her. Now, this student was all she had to cling on to.

‘But Jenny had nothing against Simon?’

‘Of course not! We all got on together very well. Mum was just over-protective. Since Dad left there’d only been the two of us. I suppose it was hard for her to accept that there was someone else in my life.’

Vera turned to the man. ‘And your parents. What did they make of the prospect of your marrying so soon?’

He gave a little shrug. ‘They weren’t over the moon. They’d have come round.’

‘Simon’s mother’s a snob,’ Hannah said. ‘A social worker’s daughter wasn’t quite what she had planned for him.’ She smiled to show there was no ill will.

There was a pause. It seemed to Vera that they’d all been colluding in avoiding discussing Jenny Lister’s murder. For a moment they’d wanted to pretend that nothing dreadful had happened, that the worst thing going on in their lives was a vague parental uneasiness about an early marriage.

‘When did you last see your mother?’ Vera asked, keeping the same tone – nosy neighbour.

‘This morning,’ Hannah said. ‘At breakfast. I’d got up early to have it with her. I’m on Easter holiday, but I wanted to do some serious revision for my A levels. Prove to Simon’s parents that I do have a brain, even though I’m planning to go to art school instead of a fancy uni.’

‘Did she discuss her plans for the day?’

‘Yes, she was going for a swim on the way into work. She does a lot of evenings, so she doesn’t have to start at nine.’

‘Do you know if she had anything specific at work to get in for?’ Vera thought she’d get a better idea of time of death by finding out when Jenny was in the health club than by anything the pathologist would give her.

‘A meeting at ten-thirty, I think. She was supervising a student and had scheduled a session with him.’

‘Where was Jenny based?’

‘The area social-services office in Blyth.’

Vera looked up, a little surprised. ‘That’s a long drive every day!’

‘She didn’t mind it. Said it was good to put some distance between her and work, and anyway she covered the whole of the county, so some days she was doing visits this way.’ There was a moment of silence, then Hannah looked directly at Vera. ‘How did she die?’

‘I’m not sure, pet. We’ll need to wait for the results of the post-mortem.’

‘But you must know.’

‘I think she was strangled.’

‘No one would want to kill my mother.’ The girl spoke with certainty, the same certainty with which she’d pronounced her love for the man sitting next to her. ‘It must have been a mistake. Or some psychotic. My mother was a good woman.’

Leaving the house, Vera thought goodness was a concept she didn’t entirely understand.

There were times when Joe Ashworth thought he was a saint to put up with Vera Stanhope. His wife certainly thought he was mad to tolerate the late nights and the early mornings, the abrupt summons to Vera’s house in the hills at a moment’s notice: ‘Just because she doesn’t have any family responsibilities, no life away from the job, it doesn’t mean you can just drop everything and run away to her.’ Ashworth had tried to make a joke of it, ‘At least you can’t be worried we’re having an affair!’ Because Vera was twenty years older than him, overweight and her skin was rough with eczema. His wife had frowned then and looked at him over the mug of hot chocolate she made each evening to help her sleep. There was no problem about her putting on weight. She’d only just stopped feeding the baby, and the kids kept her active. ‘Maybe you don’t fancy the inspector, but she might have designs on you!’ Ashworth had laughed at that, though the thought had made him uncomfortable. Sometimes his boss had a way of staring at him through half-closed eyes and he wondered what she was thinking. Had she ever had sex? It was hardly something he could ask her, though at times her questions to him were personal, verging on the rude.

Now she’d left him in charge at the health club and the hotel while she buggered off up the Tyne valley to nose around into the victim’s private life. Not her job at all, and something she could have left to a junior member of the team. His wife occasionally suggested that he should apply for a different post – if not promotion, then a sideways move to give him greater experience. Times like this, Ashworth thought it was a sensible suggestion.

He saw Lisa, the young lass Vera had co-opted to help her, in the hotel lounge, which was empty finally; all the health-club members had been interviewed and sent away, and a big notice on the hotel door said that the club was closed for business for twenty-four hours ‘Due to Unforeseen Circumstances’. He believed Vera had been thoughtless with Lisa – making the girl peer into the steam room to look at the body, just to save herself a few minutes in the identification, was unprofessional and unkind.

A young woman with a Polish accent seemed to be in charge of the lounge. She wore a black dress and flat shoes. ‘Can I get you some refreshment?’ He asked Lisa if she’d like a coffee and, when her latte arrived, with small round home-made biscuits on a plate, Lisa sat, bent forward, her hands wrapped round the glass. There was a smudge of foamed milk on her upper lip. She must have seen him looking at it, because she blushed and wiped it away with her napkin.

The lounge was set out like the drawing room in one of the National Trust houses Joe’s wife had made him go to, before the kids had come along. Polished dark-wood floor with a square carpet in the middle. The carpet was red and woven, almost as hard on the feet as the floor itself, so threadbare that in some places there was no pattern left. Pictures in big gilt frames on the walls. Mostly portraits, men in wigs and women in long dresses. Big leather chesterfields against the walls and chintz-covered chairs grouped around tables with fragile legs. At one end there was a huge fireplace, but without a fire today, and the big radiators were cold too, so there was a chill as soon as you walked in. The room had a background smell of dust.

Now the remnants of the pensioners’ coffee and sandwiches were scattered on white china plates over the tables. There were coffee pots and bowls of lump sugar. Crumbs and crusts had ended up on the floor. At the other end of the room a middle-aged woman was starting to clear up the debris.

‘Thanks for sticking around,’ he said. By now Lisa’s shift should be over. They were sitting in a corner, and his words seemed to echo around the space.

She slid her eyes up to look at him. ‘That’s all right.’

‘The dead woman’s called Jenny Lister,’ he said. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

She shook her head. ‘She never came to any of my classes. But mostly I do the over-fifties stretch-and-tone, and she looked a bit young for that.’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Sorry the boss made you look at her.’

‘Though she didn’t look
that
old,’ Lisa went on. ‘She might have gone to Natalie’s mums-and-babies class. It’s not unusual to get new mothers in their forties. Not these days. You should check with her.’

‘Were you on duty at the pool all morning?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘We only have trained lifeguards in after nine-thirty, when the off-peak membership starts. Before that it’s the keen swimmers. They sign a disclaimer form. There’s usually someone around, but we’re short-staffed at the moment. I popped in a few times, but I didn’t see or hear anything unusual.’

There was a moment of silence and she looked up at him bleakly. Ashworth felt he was floundering. What would Vera Stanhope do now? She’d thought this lass was worried about something, and usually she was right about people. ‘What’s it like working here?’

He saw the question had surprised Lisa. What relevance could that have to the murder of a middle-aged woman?

She looked at him suspiciously. ‘It’s OK. Usually.’

‘This is between ourselves,’ Ashworth said. ‘I won’t pass anything you say on to your boss.’

‘He’s all right.’

Perhaps she’s not really anxious
, Ashworth thought.
Perhaps she’s just a sulky, uncommunicative teenage girl.
He’d had younger sisters and could remember them driving his mam and dad crazy with their silences and their moods.

‘So is there anything you think I should know, anything odd or unpleasant that might be important to our investigation?’ He spoke briskly, but resisted the urge to raise his voice.

Lisa put down her latte and looked uncomfortable. She twisted a strand of hair between her fingers. ‘Things have been going missing,’ she said. ‘Just in the last couple of weeks.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Purses, credit cards, watches.’

‘From the changing rooms?’
Why hadn’t Taylor mentioned that? It might have provided a motive of a sort, if Jenny Lister had walked in on the culprit.

‘Once or twice,’ Lisa said. ‘But more often from the staffroom. That’s why Ryan could get away with not reporting it. He didn’t want the fuss, you see. He didn’t want people cancelling their membership because they thought someone was thieving. Not with Louise, the general manager, being away.’

And that’s why he didn’t mention it to me.

Lisa looked up at him again. ‘They think it was me,’ she said. ‘Not Ryan, he’s OK. Fair. He knows I wouldn’t do anything like that. But the rest of the staff. I’ve heard them talking. It’s because my dad’s been inside and I live in the west end. You just have to give your address and you get blamed. But it wasn’t me. I like this job. I’m not going to screw it up.’