Ann Cleeves: Silent Voices

Now the remnants of the pensioners’ coffee and sandwiches were scattered on white china plates over the tables. There were coffee pots and bowls of lump sugar. Crumbs and crusts had ended up on the floor. At the other end of the room a middle-aged woman was starting to clear up the debris.

‘Thanks for sticking around,’ he said. By now Lisa’s shift should be over. They were sitting in a corner, and his words seemed to echo around the space.

She slid her eyes up to look at him. ‘That’s all right.’

‘The dead woman’s called Jenny Lister,’ he said. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

She shook her head. ‘She never came to any of my classes. But mostly I do the over-fifties stretch-and-tone, and she looked a bit young for that.’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Sorry the boss made you look at her.’

‘Though she didn’t look that old,’ Lisa went on. ‘She might have gone to Natalie’s mums-and-babies class. It’s not unusual to get new mothers in their forties. Not these days. You should check with her.’

‘Were you on duty at the pool all morning?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘We only have trained lifeguards in after nine-thirty, when the off-peak membership starts. Before that it’s the keen swimmers. They sign a disclaimer form. There’s usually someone around, but we’re short-staffed at the moment. I popped in a few times, but I didn’t see or hear anything unusual.’

There was a moment of silence and she looked up at him bleakly. Ashworth felt he was floundering. What would Vera Stanhope do now? She’d thought this lass was worried about something, and usually she was right about people. ‘What’s it like working here?’

He saw the question had surprised Lisa. What relevance could that have to the murder of a middle-aged woman?

She looked at him suspiciously. ‘It’s OK. Usually.’

‘This is between ourselves,’ Ashworth said. ‘I won’t pass anything you say on to your boss.’

‘He’s all right.’

Perhaps she’s not really anxious , Ashworth thought. Perhaps she’s just a sulky, uncommunicative teenage girl. He’d had younger sisters and could remember them driving his mam and dad crazy with their silences and their moods.

‘So is there anything you think I should know, anything odd or unpleasant that might be important to our investigation?’ He spoke briskly, but resisted the urge to raise his voice.

Lisa put down her latte and looked uncomfortable. She twisted a strand of hair between her fingers. ‘Things have been going missing,’ she said. ‘Just in the last couple of weeks.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Purses, credit cards, watches.’

‘From the changing rooms?’ Why hadn’t Taylor mentioned that? It might have provided a motive of a sort, if Jenny Lister had walked in on the culprit.

‘Once or twice,’ Lisa said. ‘But more often from the staffroom. That’s why Ryan could get away with not reporting it. He didn’t want the fuss, you see. He didn’t want people cancelling their membership because they thought someone was thieving. Not with Louise, the general manager, being away.’

And that’s why he didn’t mention it to me.

Lisa looked up at him again. ‘They think it was me,’ she said. ‘Not Ryan, he’s OK. Fair. He knows I wouldn’t do anything like that. But the rest of the staff. I’ve heard them talking. It’s because my dad’s been inside and I live in the west end. You just have to give your address and you get blamed. But it wasn’t me. I like this job. I’m not going to screw it up.’

Ashworth nodded. The council estates in the west end of Newcastle had been notorious when he was growing up, still had a reputation for crime and gangs despite the private housing that had gone up around it. He thought that Vera had been right again. ‘Any idea who might have been stealing?’

She paused. She’d have been brought up not to grass.

‘I’m not going to charge in with the handcuffs,’ he said. ‘But you work here. I’m just asking for your opinion.’

He saw her take that in and watched her give a little smile. Maybe people didn’t ask her opinion very often. She considered.

‘Things started going walkabout around the time Danny started working here.’

‘Danny?’

‘Danny Shaw. The temporary cleaner. I heard Ryan tell that fat lady detective about him. He’s a student. His mam works on reception.’

‘What’s he like?’

She paused to choose her words and folded her arms across her chest. ‘A bit kind of sly. He tells you what you want to hear. And not a great cleaner. But then I don’t think men do clean very well, do you?’ Ashworth was thinking she’d probably got that bit of wisdom from her mother, and in fact that it could have been an older woman talking, when she shot him a look. ‘But he’s fit, mind. All the girls here fancy him something rotten.’

‘Any of them been out with him?’

She shook her head. ‘He plays them along, all flirty and flattering, but you can tell it’s just a game with him. He thinks he’s better than us.’

‘What about you then?’ Ashworth asked, jovial as if he was about fifty-five and her uncle. ‘Have you got yourself a nice lad?’ And he hoped she had. He hoped she’d be happy.

She went all serious on him again. ‘Not yet. I saw what happened to my mother. Married when she was seventeen and three kids by the time she was twenty-one. I’m taking my time. I’ve got my career to think about.’ She sat, straight-backed with her hands on her knee, until he smiled at her and told her she could go.

Karen Shaw, the receptionist, was about to leave. She was sitting behind her desk, staring at the clock on the wall opposite, and as soon as the minute hand hit the hour she was off her chair and packing her magazine and putting her cardigan over her shoulders. Ashworth wondered why Taylor had kept her there all afternoon. Perhaps he’d just forgotten about her. Or perhaps Vera had told her to stick around until the end of her shift.

‘Have you got a moment?’

She glared at him. ‘A day like this, all I want is to get home to a deep bath and a big glass of wine.’

‘You’ve hardly been rushed off your feet! There’ve been no customers this afternoon.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve been bored out of my tiny mind.’ She pulled her bag onto her shoulder. ‘Look, it’s not challenging work at the best of times. Today I’ve felt like screaming.’ He could feel the energy fizzing around her.

He gave her his best smile, the one his mam said would charm the birds from the trees. ‘Tell you what, give me half an hour of your time and I’ll buy you that glass of wine.’

She hesitated, then grinned. ‘Better be a small one then. I’m driving.’

She led him upstairs to the hotel bar. The whole place had an empty, rather eerie feel. Ashworth was reminded of a horror movie that Sarah had forced him to watch on the telly one night. She had a taste for the macabre. He imagined an axeman appearing in the empty corridors. Only Jenny Lister hadn’t been killed with an axe.

The room was smaller than the lounge and the style was different. Ashworth imagined men in white jackets and girls in flapper dresses with headbands and long cigarette holders. There were shelves with cocktail glasses, and a silver cocktail shaker stood on the curved wooden bar. Behind it a spotty adolescent sat on a high stool, reading the sports page of the Chronicle, spoiling the atmosphere . All the staff, it seemed, had been told to continue working as if there hadn’t been a murder by the pool. The boy obviously resented their interrupting him. ‘Sorry, the hotel is closed.’

Karen flashed him a smile. ‘I’m staff and he’s fuzz.’