Ann Cleeves: The Glass Room

The fifth book in the Vera Stanhope series, 2012

Vera Stanhope climbed out of Hector’s ancient Land Rover and felt the inevitable strain on her knees. Hector’s Land Rover. Her father had been dead for years, but still she thought of the vehicle as his. She stopped for a moment to look down the valley at the view. Another thing her father had gifted her: this house. Sod all else, she thought, maybe she should forgive him because of this. It was October and the light was going. A smell of wood-smoke and ice. Most of the trees were already bare and the whooper swans had come back to the lough.

She’d stopped at the supermarket outside Kimmerston on her way home from work and there were carrier bags piled on the passenger seat. She took a guilty look round to make sure the coast was clear. Her eco-warrior neighbours despised the use of plastic bags, and after a day in the office she couldn’t face a right-on lecture about saving the planet. But there was no one in the yard next door. A couple of hens poked around a weed patch. No sound, and if Jack was working in the barn there’d be loud rock music. Or howling blues. She lifted the bags out of the Land Rover, then set them down on her doorstep to search for her keys.

But the door was already open. She felt a shiver of tension, but also of excitement. No way would she have gone to work without locking it. She’d never believed all the romantic crap about it being safe for country folk to leave their doors open. The rural communities experienced crime too. She’d read the reports and knew there was as much drug use in the pleasant middle-class high schools in Northumberland as in the ones in town. It was just that teachers were better at keeping it quiet. She pushed the door open, using her elbow, thinking that really the last thing she needed was a burglary. She didn’t have much to steal. Any self-respecting robber would turn up his nose at her Oxfam clothes and her pitiful PC, her ten-year-old telly. But she hated the thought of anyone being in the house. And she’d have to call in the CSIs, and they’d leave the place in chaos, fingerprint powder over every surface. Then they’d go back to the office with tales of the squalor in which she lived.

Despite her considerable weight she moved quietly. A skill she’d learned in childhood. She stopped in the hall and listened. Nobody was moving in the house. Unless they were as quiet as she was. But there was sound, a cracking of twigs, of sparks. A fire had been lit. The smell of wood-smoke was coming from her home, not from the cottages in the valley as she’d first thought. But it surely wasn’t a fire out of control. There were no fumes seeping into the rest of the house. No roaring flames. No heat where she was standing.

She opened the door into the small living room and saw Jack, her neighbour, sitting in the most comfortable chair. The chair where Hector had always sat. He’d put a match to the fire she’d already laid in the grate and was staring at the flames. Shock, and relief of the tension she’d felt on coming into the house, made Vera angry. Bloody hippies! She’d given them a key for emergencies, not so that they could wander into her house whenever they felt like it. They had no respect for personal boundaries.

‘What the shit do you think you’re doing?’

Jack looked up at her and she saw there were tears running down his cheeks. She swore under her breath. What was it? Some domestic crisis? A family bereavement? It had been a mistake to get to know these people. Let folk into your life and they started making demands. She hated people making demands.

Then she remembered the times Jack and Joanna had dug the snow from the track so that she could get down the hill to work. The nights she’d gone uninvited into their house to steal bottles of homebrew when she was desperate for a drink. Evenings of good food at their kitchen table and the three of them laughing at some daft joke.

He nodded towards the fire. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was bloody cold. And I hated waiting at home, once I’d made up my mind to speak to you.’

‘What is it, Jack? What’s happened?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s Joanna. I don’t know where she is.’

Jack was a Scouser, soft and sentimental. He’d been in the merchant navy once, travelled the world, had stories enough to keep you entertained from teatime until a drunken early morning. Later he’d got hooked by the dream of the good life and, reaching the age of forty, he’d bought the smallholding next to Vera’s house. A city boy, his only experience of rural living had been his annual pilgrimage to the Glastonbury Festival, yet somehow he’d made a go of it. Worked from dawn to dusk and even longer. Often, coming home close to midnight after a difficult case, Vera would hear him in the barn, would tip her head round the door to say goodnight. And that brief contact allowed her to believe that her colleagues were wrong. She did have friends. She did have a life away from the job.

‘What do you mean?’ Vera tried to keep her voice patient, although something about a weeping man made her feel like slapping him.

‘She’s been away for two days. No word. I think she’s ill. She won’t talk about it.’

‘What sort of ill?’ A pause. ‘Cancer?’ Vera’s mother had died of cancer when she was a child. She still had a kind of superstition about speaking the word.

He shook his head. His greying hair was pulled back into a ponytail. ‘I think it’s her nerves. Depression. She went on Monday while I was at Morpeth farmers’ market. Must have got a taxi. She said she needed some space.’

‘She warned you she was leaving?’

He shook his head again. ‘Nah, she left a note.’ He pulled a scrap of paper from his jeans pocket, set it on the small table next to him, moving a mug with five-day-old coffee dregs so that Vera could see it.

Vera recognized the writing. Joanna often communicated by notes. Purple ink and immaculate italic, spiky and beautifully formed. ‘Septic tank emptied.’ ‘Parcel in barn.’ ‘Fancy coming in for supper tonight?’ This one read: ‘Gone away for a few days. Need some space. Soup in pan. Don’t worry.’ No signature, not even J. No x.

‘A few days,’ Vera said. ‘She’ll be back. Or she’ll phone.’

He looked up at her bleakly. ‘She hasn’t been taking her drugs.’

‘What drugs?’ Vera knew Jack smoked dope. Their house smelled of it. Sometimes, after a few beers too many, he rolled a giant spliff when he was in her place, not thinking that she might be compromised. Once he’d even offered it to her. She’d been tempted, but had turned him down. She knew she had an addictive personality; best to keep her vices legal. She’d presumed Joanna smoked too, but couldn’t remember having seen it. Red wine was Joanna’s poison, drunk from a large Bristol Blue glass. ‘My only inheritance,’ she’d said once, holding the glass to the light. ‘All that I have left from home.’

‘Pills,’ Jack said. ‘Lithium. To keep her on an even keel, like.’

‘And that’s why you’re so worried?’

‘I’ve been worried for weeks. She’s been acting weird. Not talking. And now she’s disappeared.’

It had been clear to Vera from the moment she’d seen the couple that Jack adored Joanna. He stole looks at her, basked in her presence. She was big-boned with long, corn-coloured hair worn in a plait down her back. Dramatically dark eyebrows. A wide mouth and large brown eyes. All her features big and generous – hands and feet to match. She wore red, boat-shaped leather shoes and patchwork dungarees, hand-knitted sweaters in bright colours. If Vera had been asked to describe her in one word, it would have been ‘jolly’. She’d never thought of Joanna as being depressed. Maybe a bit the other way, laughing too loudly sometimes and always the last one to leave a party, hugs and kisses all round. Not really in a sexy way, but flamboyant. Vera thought in an earlier life Joanna could have been in the theatre, or an artist. Or a lady. She spoke like an aristocrat, the sort of voice you’d have heard on the BBC in the Sixties. But life before Jack was never mentioned.