Ann Cleeves - Silent Voices

They sat for a moment in silence and again Mattie closed her eyes. Ashworth was going to ask her to tell him what she saw, ask her perhaps to sketch it, but in the ward a woman started screaming and the spell was broken. Mattie opened her eyes. ‘Stupid cow,’ she said. ‘She’s always doing that. Makes you want to slap her.’

‘Why did you go into care?’ Joe asked.

‘I dunno.’ Mattie stared into space. He thought she was about to cry, but she turned back to him, dry-eyed, and said in a matter-of-fact way, ‘I think my mam died. Or maybe that was just what I wanted to think. I asked a bit when I was growing up, but I kept getting different stories. In the end you don’t know who to believe.’

The gate officer handed him back his phone and he switched it on, running back from the prison to his car in the rain. It rang immediately. Not the answering service with a message from Connie, but Vera. He thought either she’d been phoning him every five minutes or she had an instinct for how long these prison visits took. It occurred to him in a moment of whimsy that she could have a sort of telepathic link to him, but that idea was so scary that he forced it out of his head.

‘How did it go?’ Her voice was cheerful, but he wasn’t deceived. She was crap at delegating. It would have been a nightmare for her to be sitting in the office while he was doing the real work.

He sat in the car with the rain battering the roof and she made him take her through the entire interview almost word for word.

‘Good,’ she said in the end. ‘In fact, bloody brilliant. I could have talked to her, but I knew what I was looking for and I’d have asked leading questions. She was always going to be a suggestible witness.’

He knew better than to ask what was so significant. Vera would tell him without the question, if she’d wanted him to know. ‘Any news on Connie?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ashworth demanded. ‘Where is she?’

‘Oh, I don’t know that.’ She sounded impatient. ‘But I have some ideas about who might be hiding her.’ This was Vera at her most infuriating.

‘What do you want me to do now?’

‘Come back to the Tyne valley,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way there now.’

They sat in the lounge at the Willows looking out at the river. It had spilled over its banks and the raised driveway into the hotel was like a drawbridge over a moat, the only way in. A pile of sandbags stood in the car park. Ryan Taylor met Ashworth in reception and pointed him to the lounge where Vera was waiting. He said there’d been a flood alert. If it continued raining that night, the whole valley would be under water. There was a big tide forecast and that always made things worse, even this far inland. The hotel was on high enough land to be safe, but the last thing they wanted was guests stranded or health-club members not able to get in, so he planned to build a wall of sandbags by the side of the drive.

After Vera’s response on the phone, Ashworth had expected her to be in high spirits. It had seemed from her words that the case was all but over, that they’d have an arrest before the day was out. But seeing her now, crouched over her coffee, a plate of shortbread on the arm of her chair, he thought she seemed tense. Almost undecided. Like a gambler unsure which call to make. Or as if she didn’t trust her judgement after all. There was a fire in the grate, but it was giving out more smoke than heat, and the room was cold. Her mobile phone was on the table in front of her. She glared at it.

‘Bloody social services,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on to Craig, the big boss. You’d think he’d be able to help track down where Mattie Jones was born. Apparently it’s a nightmare going back that far. Nothing computerized. He said he’d ring as soon as he had something.’

‘What’s going on then?’

‘If I knew that, pet, I’d ride in like a knight in my trusty Land Rover and rescue the fair maiden.’

‘Are you talking about Connie?’ Ashworth couldn’t stand it when Vera went all weird on him. It was her way of keeping her thoughts to herself. As if she didn’t trust him enough to share her ideas.

‘Well, her for one.’ She looked up at him. ‘Did you get any more details from Mattie about the place she grew up? Apart from the fact that it was in the country and near water? That wasn’t what I sent you in for, but it’s significant, isn’t it? It’s set me thinking…’ And she lapsed into silence. Joe was reminded of an old woman in a care home, rambling away to herself, losing her thread in the middle of a sentence. It came to him that if Vera did end up that way, he’d be the only person to visit her.

She looked up at him and he saw that she was far from senile and was expecting an answer.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I think there could have been more, but some woman kicked off in the ward and she lost concentration.’ He paused, added pointedly, ‘It would have helped if I’d known what you were looking for.’

‘No,’ Vera said, ‘that wouldn’t have helped at all.’

‘So what are we going to do now?’ He was starting to lose patience. He’d feel happier if he knew Connie and the child were safe. He had the feeling that it was their lives Vera was gambling.

She didn’t answer immediately and again there was that sense of uncharacteristic indecision.

‘The place by the water Mattie was talking about,’ he said. The idea had come to him suddenly, looking out over the sodden parkland. There was no reason for it, apart from his instinct that the killer was linked to Barnard Bridge. ‘Could it be Connie Masters’s cottage? We know it’s a holiday let now, but someone must have lived there once. A family? Mattie’s mother?’

‘No point guessing, is there?’ she said, dismissing the idea without even considering it. ‘Could be anywhere. I need to make some more phone calls.’

It seemed to him that her decision had been made. The dice had been thrown. He waited for her to elaborate, but she sat back in the deep chair, her eyes half closed. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said after a while. He wanted to shake her. He wanted her fizzing with energy again, indomitable, taking on the world. He hated to see her so frail.

‘Go to Barnard Bridge,’ she said, ‘and keep an eye on Hannah Lister.’

‘You think she might be in danger?’

Vera didn’t answer directly. He wasn’t even convinced she’d heard the question. ‘Jenny Lister and Danny Shaw,’ she said. ‘Someone’s covering his tracks.’ She looked up at him and gave one of her old wicked grins. ‘Or her tracks. I thought I knew what had been going on here. Now I’m not so sure.’

In Barnard Bridge there was a sense of a community under siege. There were sandbags piled outside all the doorways in the main street. The burn that had been just a trickle outside Connie’s cottage was more than a foot deep and the Tyne was brown and fierce, frothing under the bridge, covered with a cream-coloured scum. The place was deserted. Ashworth phoned Connie’s mobile again and left a message. ‘If it continues raining tonight, the river will flood. You should come and move your belongings while you can.’

But, he thought, few of her belongings remained in the cottage. When he and Vera had checked her wardrobe, most of her clothes, and those of the child, had gone. The furniture was the property of the owner, not of Connie. After all, she had no reason to return. His message would have no effect, even if she picked it up.

In the Lister house he found Hannah, Simon and a vicar, who was there, it seemed, to discuss Jenny’s funeral. Her body had been released to the undertaker and arrangements could now be made. The vicar was wearing jeans and had a Barbour jacket over his clerical collar. Hannah invited Ashworth in and offered him coffee, but the detective felt he couldn’t stay. Hannah would surely be safe in the company of these men, and religious people always made him slightly uncomfortable. There’d been a stern Sunday-school teacher in the Methodist Chapel where his mother had taken him as a boy. Instead, he went next door and knocked at Hilda’s house.