Ann Cleeves - Silent Voices

‘Recently, I suppose, it was me talking and her listening.’ Anne seemed strained suddenly, and Vera thought now that she’d been tense throughout the conversation. It wasn’t just that her best friend had been murdered. Perhaps she was that sort of woman – nervous, anxious. Perhaps that was why she’d chosen to spend her professional career teaching well-brought-up bairns in a pleasant rural school. She wouldn’t manage stress of any kind.

Anne took a deep breath and continued, ‘Recently my marriage has been going through a bad patch. Sort of mid-life crisis, I suppose. I was attracted to a new member of staff at school. Nothing happened, not really, but feeling like a besotted teenager unsettled me. Jenny made me see how ridiculous I was being. She said that John and I had just built this place, spent years getting it perfect and, having achieved it, everything seemed like an anticlimax. I was just looking for something exciting. I’m sure she was right.’

God , Vera thought, what self-indulgent drivel. I’d rather spend time with an honest criminal any day than with this introspective woman.

‘She was going to come to France with us this time, but she decided not to. She said John and I needed some time to ourselves. She was that sort of friend.’

‘What about her ?’ Vera said briskly. ‘Did she have any men friends?’

‘I’m not sure.’

So, it seemed the confidences had all gone one way. Jenny had been happy to listen to her friend talking about her adolescent crush, but had given nothing in return. Discretion, it seemed, was a part of her personal as well as her professional life. What secrets did she have to hide?

‘Recently I thought there might have been someone,’ Anne said suddenly. ‘She cancelled one of our Wednesday nights at the last minute, without a proper excuse. And she seemed very happy. Glowing.’

‘Didn’t you ask her what was going on?’ Now Vera was really starting to lose patience. This woman was sounding like a soppy story from a magazine.

‘She said she was in a relationship, but she couldn’t talk about it,’ Anne said.

‘Where did she meet her mystery lover?’ Vera couldn’t help herself. ‘The flamenco class?’

‘No!’ Anne seemed shocked by the thought. ‘No, really, I don’t think so. And if she had, why wouldn’t she tell me?’

‘Why all the secrecy then?’

‘I thought maybe she’d started seeing a colleague.’ Anne looked awkward. ‘Or a married man.’

So, not such a saint after all .

Driving down the narrow track towards the village, Vera was pleased. It was as if she was rediscovering the Jenny Lister of the welcoming little house and the charming daughter. Vera had always been more comfortable with sinners.

Lost in her thoughts, she had to stop suddenly to let a tractor past. She pulled off the road and saw the gateposts with the carved cormorants’ heads that she’d first noticed in the painting on Veronica’s wall. The vegetation had grown up around them and they wouldn’t have been visible from the road. On impulse Vera switched off the engine and got out of the car. She walked down the grass track between the pillars, through a spinney of alder and birch. There were wood anemones and violets, the colours very bright in the shaft of sunlight that shot through the trees. Then the woodland stopped and she saw where the house must once have stood.

There were still the remains of a formal garden, wide terraces and a walled patch where vegetables had been grown, where the skeleton of a greenhouse still leaned against the wall, but the brick and stone of the house had all been removed. Old dressed stone would be worth a fortune here in the Tyne valley. Why had the land never been sold? Did Veronica own it, or some other branch of the family? This would be a developer’s dream location. Perhaps it was in a conservation area and building was prohibited.

Grand stone steps led through the middle of the grass terraces. She walked down them, feeling as if she’d walked onto a film set. There was a series of statues on either side. Chipped and covered in lichen, they were mostly of strange mythical creatures. Some were hidden by ivy and a few had disappeared under a tangle of bramble. On one of the terraces there was the huge empty bowl of a fountain.

Looking down towards the river, she saw a pool. Trying to remember far-off geography lessons, Vera thought that perhaps the course of the river had changed over time and this lake had been left. Beside it, quite intact, was the boathouse, about which Veronica had spoken. It was made of wood that had recently been varnished; a deck on stilts was built out over the water. No boats were kept inside it now; the window was glazed and there were red-and-white curtains. A couple of dinghies, upended, lay beside it. Vera imagined it would be the perfect spot for grand family picnics, pictured Veronica presiding over a wicker hamper, trying to recapture the glory of her grandfather’s home.

Walking back to the car, she felt almost sorry for the woman.

Outside Connie Masters’s cottage, Ashworth hesitated for a moment to look at her car; it was pulled into the verge, so the cow parsley and the long grass had been flattened. A silver Micra seven years old, with a distinctive bump on the offside wing. He wrote down the registration number. If there was CCTV at the car park where she’d claimed to have left it in Hexham the previous day, it might be possible to rule her out of the inquiry altogether.

He checked his voicemail. Vera had left a message saying she was meeting Jenny Lister’s boss for lunch. No orders or requests. Maybe she was mellowing with age. Then he rang back to the station to ask for the CCTV tapes of the Hexham car park to be picked up. Giving his own orders. God, am I turning into Vera Stanhope? The idea made him smile. Nobody else on Earth was anything like Vera.

At the Willows he met Charlie, who was on his way out, saw him from a distance leaving the hotel, his back bent and his hands in his jacket pocket. A posture like that, Ashworth thought, he’d have chronic back pain by the time he was sixty. Standing by Charlie’s car, chatting, Ashworth was aware that they were visible from the public areas in the hotel. Even though they couldn’t be overheard he felt awkward, as if he were on a stage and being stared at by a hostile audience, and he kept the conversation brief.

‘Any joy?’

Charlie shrugged. ‘I showed Lister’s photo to the workers who came on duty this morning. A couple vaguely recognized her as someone who used the swimming pool, but nothing more than that. You’d have thought one of them would have had some contact with her, had a bit of a chat. The records showed she came swimming at least once a week.’

‘I don’t know. These places are all very impersonal.’ Joe Ashworth had joined a gym the year before, in his local-authority leisure centre, though, not a smart place like this. He’d been there for an hour each session, but plugged into his Walkman, he’d hardly spoken to the other people. Unconsciously he ran a hand over his belly. Definitely running to flab. Since the new baby he hadn’t had much time for getting fit.

‘I reckon she must have been killed more than an hour before the body was found,’ Charlie said. ‘After nine-thirty, there’s an off-peak membership deal and that’s when all the older people turn up. Before then it’s the serious swimmers. They do lengths up and down the pool before work. Concentrated stuff. You get the impression they wouldn’t notice anything happening outside the water, and they don’t usually have time for the sauna or steam room.’

‘And before nine-thirty there isn’t the same staff supervision.’ Ashworth remembered his conversation with Lisa.