Silent Voices (Vera Stanhope 4) (29 page)

Another silence.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ Joe said gently. ‘If it’s not relevant, his stealing will never be made public. The witness won’t talk. But you must tell me what you know.’

‘I didn’t
know
,’ Karen said.

‘But you guessed? Suspected?’

‘He’d been moaning about being skint one morning and then suddenly there was a ten-pound note in his pocket and he was buying coffee in the hotel lounge before his shift started. I wondered.’

‘That must have been terrible,’ Joe said. He imagined finding out that one of his own kids was a thief. ‘It must have eaten away at you. Did you discuss it with anyone at work?’

‘No!’ The thought appalled her. ‘He was going to be a lawyer. If anyone found out, he could ruin the whole of his life for the sake of a cup of coffee. A few more days and he’d be in Bristol and we could forget the whole thing.’

It occurred to Joe that this woman had spent her life protecting her son and had created a monster. Would she kill to protect him? Perhaps, but there was no possibility that she would have stood behind him in the garden and strangled the boy, who had been, he saw now, her passion.

‘Did you discuss it with Danny?’

This time there was a hesitation. ‘No. I know I should have done. But I didn’t want the last few days of his holiday spoiled. I wanted us to be happy, the family we’d once been. I pushed the idea out of my head. I told myself Danny wouldn’t behave like that.’

Ashworth turned to her husband. ‘Did you know anything about this, Mr Shaw?’

The man shook his head, apparently baffled by the events that had run up to his son’s death.

‘Where was Danny the morning Mrs Lister died?’ Ashworth kept his voice gentle. Not a hint of accusation there. ‘I know his shift at the Willows didn’t start until late afternoon, but is there any chance he was in the hotel that morning?’ No reply. ‘Mrs Shaw?’

She didn’t speak for a long time, but this time he didn’t prompt her. ‘He didn’t come home the night before,’ she said at last. ‘Often when he was working late Derek would go and pick him up at the end of his shift. There are no buses in the evening and he didn’t have his own car.’
Something else for the boy to complain about.
‘But occasionally he’d stay over. There was one of the staff bedrooms he was allowed to use. If he’d swapped to work an early shift the following day, or if he’d started drinking with some of the lasses working there.’ She looked up. ‘Usually it was the lasses he stayed up chatting to. They all fell for him.’

‘And that was what had happened the evening before Mrs Lister was murdered?’

She nodded. ‘Derek would have gone to get him, but Danny phoned and said not to bother. He’d stay at the hotel.’

‘Did you see him the next day? The day of the murder?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t around when I turned up for my shift, so I thought he’d got the first bus home, that we’d missed each other.’ She looked fiercely at Ashworth. ‘He probably wasn’t even in the hotel when the woman died.’

‘You didn’t ask him? Later, after the woman’s body was found, you didn’t ask if he’d been there?’

‘No!’ she said. ‘How could I? That would have been like accusing him of murder!’

After her outburst, they sat again in silence. In the garden a red squirrel balanced on a branch of one of the mature trees that lined the road. A clock in another room chimed the half hour. Time was moving on, and Connie and Alice still hadn’t been found. Ashworth found himself distracted, realized he’d lost the focus of the interview.

‘Greenhough,’ he said. ‘That estate not far from here. Land ripe for development, I’d have thought. Did you never try to get hold of that, Mr Shaw?’

Shaw looked at him as if he were mad. ‘What’s that got to do with this?’

‘Probably nothing.’
Another bee in Vera Stanhope’s bonnet.
‘But just humour me, eh?’

‘I nearly bought it at one time,’ Shaw said. ‘Christopher Eliot seemed close to settling. But in the end the rest of the family wouldn’t agree.’ He stared out of the window. ‘If I’d got that, we’d have been set up for life. Fifty executive homes. Danny would have had everything he’d wanted then.’

‘I’d like to see Danny’s room,’ Ashworth said. ‘Would you mind?’

‘The police have already been in,’ Karen said angrily. ‘They were there for hours, going through his things. He’d have hated that. I was never allowed in there, not even to change his sheets.’

‘I know. And I won’t disturb anything.’

She stood up and he followed her, expecting to be led upstairs. Instead they went along the corridor and into the ground-floor extension. Danny’s space was almost like a self-contained flat, its own shower room, its own outside door.

‘We built this when he was thirteen,’ Karen said. ‘When we still had the cash. Derek’s idea. A place he could have his friends to stay without disturbing us.’

Spoilt brat
, Joe thought.
Most kids would give their eye-teeth for a place like this, and he still wasn’t happy.

The room was long and low. It had the feel of a rather grand student bedsit. A guitar lay on the floor next to a pile of CDs. There was a television and PC. At one end a workbench with a kettle and microwave, a small fridge. Flat-pack bookshelves. The posters on the walls seemed to date back to school days. Rock musicians and weird prints that meant nothing to Joe. On one wall a huge collage made of scraps of fabric and shiny paper in vivid colours, arresting and vital. At first it seemed to have no apparent form, but staring, Joe made out a huge, smiling face. Karen saw him looking at it.

‘Hannah did that,’ she said. ‘She made it for her GCSE exam. Danny said he liked it and she gave it to him for a birthday present.’ There was a pause. ‘Sometimes I think things would have been different if he’d stayed with Hannah. That’s when we started to lose him: when she told him she didn’t want to see him any more. It was as if he gave up on us then.’

‘But he had a new girlfriend in Bristol?’ Joe wanted to believe that Danny had been happy at university.

‘Oh, yes.’ Karen walked around the room, picking up small objects. ‘And she was lovely too. But more like a trophy. Something else for him to possess. He’d never have been able to possess Hannah.’

Sitting in the car outside the Shaw house, Joe Ashworth tried to imagine what it must have been like living there for the last few years. Derek, the strong man, who’d built houses, made money, provided well for his family, suddenly seeing himself as a failure. Living with dreams of what might have been. The woman, forced to give up the easy life and take work she despised. Had she blamed Derek? Secretly, and hating herself for it, had her resentment eaten into the marriage? Led her to find a lover, start an affair? Ashworth wouldn’t have been surprised. Then there was the boy, bright and charming and used to getting everything he wanted, thwarted first by Hannah and then by the change in his parents’ fortunes. Ashworth wished Vera had been with him for the interview. She would have teased out the implications of the situation. She would have made more sense of it.

He started the car and drove along the valley towards Barnard Bridge. Connie’s Nissan was still missing from outside the cottage, but he stopped there anyway, knocked on the door and looked through the windows. The post was sticking out through the letter-box. He pushed it through. Sitting in the garden, he worked through the names of Connie’s friends given to him by Frank, calling each in turn. It didn’t take long. There were only three of them, all women, and none had seen Connie for a while. ‘We sort of lost touch when she moved out west,’ one said, and that was the gist of each of the responses. They felt awkward because they hadn’t been better friends. Joe realized again how isolated Connie had become, too proud to keep up with the friends from her old life and ignored by the women in her new one. He tried Connie’s mobile once again, but the call was immediately transferred to the answering service.

On impulse he walked across the lane and up the drive to the big house where the Eliots lived. One time he’d have been nervous. He hadn’t liked policing when work took him into smart houses, was happier in the council estates, the small miners’ cottages. But Vera had worked on him:
You’re as good as any of them. Don’t be intimidated by money. It doesn’t mean they’re brighter than you, and it certainly doesn’t make them better people.

Veronica Eliot opened the door. She didn’t invite him in and he felt about as welcome as a double-glazing salesman. At least the Shaws had been pleased to see him.

‘I wondered if you have any idea where Connie Masters might be?’ he asked.

‘Why would I?’

‘You were at her house yesterday afternoon when Jenny Lister’s bag was found. Being neighbourly. She’s having a tough time at the moment. I thought she might have told you. If she was hiding out from the press.’

‘I don’t think the press have got to her yet.’ Veronica seemed less hostile. Had she thought she might be the subject of his attention? ‘She didn’t mention anything to me about going away.’

‘Is there anywhere in the village she might be?’

Veronica appeared to consider, but he could tell she had already dismissed the idea out of hand. ‘She hasn’t made any close friends here. I must say, it seems unlikely.’

Perhaps because she was so offhand, Joe stayed on the doorstep. Vera had taught him to be stubborn, to face down the snotty middle classes. ‘It must have been hard,’ he said, ‘to see another child in the cottage down there.’

She looked at him with distaste. If he’d farted at one of her smart dinner parties, she couldn’t have despised him more.

‘I’m not entirely sure why you think you have the right to dig around in my family’s personal tragedies.’

He ignored that and continued, as if he were thinking aloud and no response were required. ‘There would have been an inquiry, I’m sure. A sudden death and the police would have been involved. Social services too, I expect. People must have talked. It can’t have been easy.’

Veronica lost control. The disintegration was sudden and completely unexpected, and it made him feel like a worm. Her face was flushed and she ranted at him, the words beating against him, making him flinch. ‘Do you really think I cared about that? I’d just lost my son. Do you imagine I worried that people might be talking?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘And it wasn’t just me. Christopher had lost his baby boy. I knew I couldn’t bear to have any more children after him. Simon had lost his brother. Have you any idea what that did to us?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ashworth said again.

It was as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘We never blamed Simon for what happened that day. Never. He was a child. But he was old enough to remember it. He knew he shouldn’t have run away from me. He thinks it was his fault. He’s had to live with the knowledge all his life. Do you think a bit of gossip is worse than the pain of that?’

‘No,’ Ashworth said. He had to stop himself putting up his hands to protect his head from the violence of the words. ‘No, of course not.’

The outburst ended as quickly as it had begun. Veronica became distant, icy, once again. ‘To answer your question, Sergeant, of course it was difficult to see a child playing where Patrick died. I had mixed feelings. Perhaps my response to Connie was coloured by my experience. I was unkind. But I’ve had nothing to do with her disappearance. I don’t know where she is.’

She made to turn away from him and shut the door, but Ashworth called her back.

‘Would it be possible to speak to Hannah?’

‘Hannah’s not here. She and Simon left soon after you did this morning. I assume they’re back in her house, but they didn’t say where they were going.’ She stood on the doorstep, a lonely and dignified figure, watching the detective walk away.

He found the girl in the garden behind the little house she’d shared with her mother. There was no answer when he knocked at the door and he was about to give up when Hilda waved at him from her living-room window, pointing to an arched gap in the terrace between their two houses.

Hannah was alone. Her red hair was tied back in an untidy plait and she was wearing wellingtons, a big hand-knitted sweater with a frayed rib and holes in the elbows. She was digging over the small vegetable patch. When she saw him she stopped and leaned on the fork. She was flushed and breathless.

‘Mum always planted a few new potatoes over the Easter holiday. Broad beans too. I didn’t want to let it go.’

‘You’ve been going at that like a dog at broth.’ One of his grandda’s sayings. ‘You’ll wear yourself out.’

‘I hope so.’ She smiled at him. ‘It’d be good to get to sleep without a pill. They make me feel lousy the next morning.’

‘Simon not with you?’

‘He’s taken Mum’s car to the supermarket in Hexham. I couldn’t face it – the supermarket or the car – so I said I’d stay here. We have to eat, I suppose, and I don’t want to go to the White House for meals every day.’ She bent absent-mindedly and pulled a strand of goose grass from the soil and threw it onto the wheelbarrow, then straightened. ‘Do you know who killed my mother yet?’

He shook his head. ‘Are you up to answering some questions?’

‘If you don’t mind doing it here. I feel better outside.’ And it seemed to him that she was much better, almost cheerful in the spring sunshine. She’d lost the pallor and the doped indifference.