Ann Cleeves - Silent Voices

She was there on her own. Maurice had been banished despite the weather.

‘Don’t worry about the boys,’ Hilda said, when Ashworth made a comment. He smiled to think of her husband and his friend as boys. ‘There’s a shed like a palace on that allotment of theirs. They were in the house all morning, but it’s cleared a bit now and they could do with some fresh air.’

She was in the middle of cooking tea, but she invited him in anyway and he sat in the kitchen on a tall stool by the workbench while she rubbed fat into flour to make pastry.

‘That cottage by the burn where Connie Masters lives,’ he said. ‘Who lived there before it became a holiday let?’

He’d been going over this in his head since his meeting with Vera in the hotel, trying to picture it. He wanted to prove to Vera that he had ideas too. Veronica Eliot would have been visiting the cottage when her son Patrick was drowned. Must have been, because the only access to the burn was through the cottage garden. So surely a woman of about Veronica’s age would have been staying there then, if they were friends, on visiting terms. A woman perhaps with young children. It could have been the mother of Mattie Jones, the mother who had given her up to care. Mattie would have been older than Veronica’s children, but not so much older. If she’d seen Patrick die in the water, had the image stuck with her? It would perhaps explain why Mattie had disciplined her own son in that way, why eventually she’d killed him.

It occurred to him that this link was just what Jenny Lister had been looking for when she’d questioned Mattie for her book. It would make a good story after all, and social workers liked neat and tidy motives, just as some detectives did. Vera would say he was back in Jackanory land and fairy tales were just for bairns, but she was always taking leaps into the dark and it seemed to work for her.

He waited now for Hilda to answer. She finished rubbing the fat into the flour, washed her hands under the tap and wiped them on a towel.

‘Mallow Cottage,’ she said at last. ‘It was never a happy house. Folk never seemed to stay there. They’d move in full of plans to do it up, but they all seemed to sell up before the work was done.’

‘I’d never have had you down as a superstitious type,’ Ashworth said.

‘Nothing to do with superstition!’ She fired the words back at him. ‘Damp and dark and too expensive to renovate – that was it, more like.’

‘But there was a tragedy there,’ Ashworth said. ‘A little boy died.’

‘Aye, Patrick Eliot. That would have been twenty years ago, almost to the day. We all turned out for the funeral. The whole village, though we didn’t know the family really then. And after that Veronica refused to speak about the boy.’ She shrugged. ‘People thought it was odd, but everyone has their own way of coping, I suppose.’ She paused again. ‘There’s another funeral for us to go to now. I saw the vicar in next door.’

‘Who was living at the cottage at the time of the accident?’ Ashworth found he was holding his breath as he waited for the answer.

She was standing at the sink, dribbling water from the cold tap into the bowl, mixing it into the pastry with a knife. She turned to speak to him.

‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘The place was empty. There was a For Sale board outside; I remember it. It was in all the newspaper pictures. That’s why Veronica could take the boys into the garden to poke around in the stream. The White House didn’t have much of a garden then. It was more like a builders’ site. The Eliots had only just moved in.’

When Ashworth went back next door and knocked at the Listers’, that house was empty too. Perhaps the vicar had taken the couple to the chapel of rest, or to the rectory to continue the conversation about hymns and eulogies there. Ashworth phoned Vera to bring her up to date, but he could tell she was preoccupied. She gave him a list of instructions without explaining the reason for them.

The rain stopped by mid-afternoon and people meeting each other in the street laughed at the sandbags and said that the Environment Agency had over-reacted this time. But as it got dark it started raining again, this time a soft drizzle that folk still didn’t take seriously.

Vera spent all day in the hotel lounge at the Willows. Most of the guests had left, despite Ryan Taylor’s reassurance that the sandbags would keep out the flood. The place was silent and gloomy; there was little natural light from outside despite the long windows. She’d shouted at him to switch off the background music after ‘Walking Back to Happiness’ had come round for the third time on the taped loop; she felt as if the tune were mocking her for her inability to get the case right.

She’d decided on inaction, at least for today. Waiting was always torture to her and she understood it was a risk. If he knew what was in her mind, Joe Ashworth would be horrified. He’d recommend arrests, dramatic chases through the countryside. And of course she could be wrong. The idea had come to her sitting here, listening to the young waiter describe how Jenny Lister had waited here on the morning of her death for someone who never turned up. It wasn’t much to build a case on. And even if she were right, Vera thought, there’d be no guarantee of a conviction. A guilty plea would be better for everyone. The decision to wait having been made, it was better that she stay here where she would do no harm. If she went out, she might put in her huge, wellie-clad foot and upset the delicate balance that she sensed now existed. There was always a danger of further violence.

So she sat in the big floral armchair by the window and occasionally summoned her team members to her. More often she spoke on the phone, sometimes persuading and sometimes swearing. Once she threw it across the room, and she had to retrieve it from the silk chaise longue where it had landed. Doreen, the elderly waitress, brought her cups of coffee, cheese sandwiches, hard scones and butter. Every hour or so Vera would pull herself to her feet and stamp around the room to bring the feeling back into her limbs. She’d stand in front of the fire, which at last seemed to throw out some warmth, or waddle to the toilet, then return to her seat and continue to scribble notes that charted the progress of the case.

Once she stopped for ten minutes to stare outside at a rainbow that spanned the valley. But the sun, which had come out briefly, was soon covered again by cloud and the rainbow faded and then disappeared.

Holly was her first visitor. She arrived in the early afternoon, starving. Vera fed her crisps and cake and listened to what she had to say about Hannah and Danny. Holly had been to the high school and talked to a couple of teachers, and through them she’d managed to meet up with some of the kids who’d been friends with Danny and Hannah. They’d met in the bar in Hexham, where one of them was working to save up to go travelling. He’d called up another couple of cronies. ‘Not that Danny had many close friends,’ Holly said, her mouth still full of cake. ‘Apparently he was a bright lad, but cocky. A tad arrogant. The teachers wouldn’t say, but you could tell they couldn’t stand him. The kids were a bit more forgiving. He was like leader of the gang. The show-off. But they admired him more than they liked him. I had the impression he was considered very cool, but a bit self-centred. Good for a fun night out, but not for a long-term friendship.’

That word again.

‘What about the relationship with Hannah?’ Vera was still taking notes. She wanted this clear in her head.

‘She wasn’t his first girlfriend, they were all clear about that. But she was the first girl he really cared for. And the first time he’d been dumped, apparently. It came as a shock to the system. Not what he’d been expecting at all.’