Ann Cleeves - Silent Voices

‘What do you mean?’ Charlie, hunched over his coffee, seemed almost alert.

‘Maybe Hannah’s not telling us the truth, and Danny visited her when he was home from uni.’ Vera looked at her audience. ‘Maybe she thinks she’s too young to be settling down after all.’

‘No!’ Holly was horrified. ‘She’s devoted to Simon. No way would she cheat on him.’

‘We know Danny was in the Lister house a couple of years ago when he and Hannah were going out together,’ Vera went on. ‘But it’s unlikely he stole any material from Jenny then. What would be the point? It would have been before Elias’s death, so there’d have been no press interest.’

Ashworth lifted his hand from the desk in front of him. ‘It’d be interesting to find out if Morgan and Danny knew each other before they met at the Willows?’

‘It would, wouldn’t it?’ Vera gave no sign whether or not this idea had occurred to her. ‘I’d have thought Karen would have mentioned a previous connection with Morgan when we talked to her about him, but she was all over the place. Could you follow that up, Holly? With the mother and with any of Danny’s mates we can track down.’

Holly nodded and scribbled a couple of lines in her notebook.

Vera turned to Charlie. ‘Any joy in tracking down witnesses around the Shaw house the day Danny died?’

‘Nah. That place is like a dormitory village. Most people work in Hexham or Newcastle. During the day it’s quiet as the grave. I found an elderly gent who was taking his dog for a walk at about the right time. He was passed by a small car he didn’t recognize, but it could have belonged to anybody and he can’t even remember the colour of the vehicle.’

‘Anyone else got any bright ideas?’ Vera looked around the room. There was silence apart from the rain still gushing from a blocked gutter outside. ‘Actions then.’ She paused for effect, but Ashworth thought she’d had these worked out from the moment she stood up. Before that even. Who knew what she dreamed about at night?

‘Holly’s to follow up on Danny Shaw and Michael Morgan. Check out possible previous points of contact. Joe, I’d like you to go to Durham nick. Have another chat with Mattie. She’s back there now, recovering in the hospital wing. You’re good with helpless females. I need more details of the visits Jenny Lister made to her. What exactly did they talk about? Charlie, see if you can track down Connie Masters. Her car must be somewhere, and it’s not easy to hide a four-year-old girl. They haven’t been in the cottage in Barnard Bridge since yesterday morning. She left a message on Joe’s phone saying she was fine and needed a bit of space, but he thinks there’s more to it than that.’ Another pause, even longer than the first. ‘And so do I. I want to speak to her.’ Ashworth wasn’t sure what to make of that. Did she think Connie was in danger? If so, why would she leave her in Charlie’s unreliable hands?

Vera stopped speaking, made a sort of shooing gesture with her hands. ‘Go on then. This is a murder inquiry, not a mothers’ union meeting. You haven’t got all day.’

‘What about you?’ Charlie said, verging on the rude.

‘Me?’ She gave another of her self-satisfied grins. ‘I’m management and I don’t go out in the rain. I’m doing some strategic thinking.’

Joe Ashworth liked Durham city. Only twenty minutes down the A1, he thought you could have been in a different world from the centre of Newcastle. This was an old town, classy, with its huge red sandstone cathedral and the castle, the smart shops and the fancy restaurants, the university colleges and the students with their posh voices. Like a southern city, he always thought, lifted up and stuck on the Wear. The prison was quite a different matter. Joe hated most prisons, but this was one of the worst. It was grim and old and made him think of dungeons and rats. It didn’t belong in Durham. It had a unit for long-term and dangerous female prisoners.

Seeing Mattie now, it was hard to think of her as dangerous. He talked to her in a small office, reluctantly relinquished by staff, on the hospital wing. She was already there when he arrived, escorted by a male officer who’d brought him from the gate. She was dressed in a prison-issue tracksuit, but there were slippers on her feet and she seemed very young, reminded Joe of his daughter when she was ready for bed. He’d wanted to bring Mattie something. He always came with a small sweetener on his prison visits – cigarettes usually, especially if he was coming to see a man, cigarettes that were chain-smoked throughout the interview because prisoners weren’t allowed to take anything away with them. Most of the men smoked. Cigarettes hadn’t seemed appropriate on a hospital visit, so he handed over a small box of chocolates, not sure about the rules.

Mattie seemed disproportionately grateful and held the gift-wrapped box on her lap.

‘Did that fat cop send you?’

She could only be talking about Vera. ‘Aye, she thought you could do with the company.’

‘She was canny, like.’

Not when you really know her.

Mattie looked at him. Huge blue eyes in a wide, smooth forehead. ‘But what do you really want?’

‘A chat,’ he said. ‘About Jenny Lister.’

She nodded. ‘But I told the lady everything I know.’

Vera would like that, being called a lady!

‘You were ill,’ Joe said. ‘You had a fever. We thought you might remember a bit more now.’

‘It still knacks,’ she said and lifted her tracksuit top, quite unselfconsciously, to show him the wound on her abdomen covered with a dressing. Again he was reminded of his daughter showing off a scab on her knee.

‘It must be very painful,’ he said gently. He could understand why Jenny had been so taken with Mattie, why she’d come each week to visit, even though really she’d no longer had any formal responsibility for her. ‘Tell me about Jenny’s visits,’ he went on. ‘Was it the same every week?’

‘Yes. Every week. Not in the main visits room – you know, where you see your family and they have toys for the bairns. She said it was too noisy there and we wouldn’t be able to talk properly. Though if you’re there, they bring you a cup of tea and there are biscuits – chocolate if you get in early.’ She looked at the chocolates he’d brought her.

‘Why don’t you open them?’ Joe smiled. ‘I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but you could have a couple.’

She ripped the wrapping off and took one out.

‘So where did Jenny see you?’

‘In those little cubicles where you talk to your lawyer or the cops.’ Her mouth was already full of strawberry cream.

Did that mean that Jenny hadn’t wanted to be overheard? ‘What did you talk about?’

‘Like I told the lady, it was about me. Jenny was going to write a book.’

‘Did she make notes?’

‘Yeah, mostly. Sometimes we just chatted.’

‘Where did she write the notes?’

‘In a big black book.’ Mattie was already getting bored. Maybe she was missing something she liked on the television in the ward.

‘Did she talk to you about Michael?’

‘She said I had to forget about him.’ Mattie reached out and took another chocolate, unwrapped the silver paper carefully and put the sweet into her mouth. ‘She wanted me to talk about when I was little, what I could remember about growing up.’

‘Where did you grow up?’ he asked.

‘In the country,’ she said. ‘That’s what I remember. When I was very little, before I went into care. At least I think it was before I went into care. Or maybe I went there for a visit. It was a little house by the water. That’s what Jenny wanted from me, my memories. I wanted to talk about Michael, but she said I wasn’t to speak of him.’ Mattie paused, reached out greedily for another chocolate. ‘I didn’t think that was fair. Jenny never even stayed for very long. She was in a rush to get back to her real work, the other kids she was looking after now. Sometimes it was like she didn’t even care about me. All she wanted to know about was that house in the country, and she’d make me close my eyes and picture it and tell her what I could see.’