‘Apparently so. And then, if you please, she’s going to move in with Simon in Durham. We bought him a little flat, which was a bargain the way the housing market is, and an investment. Durham’s such a popular city. But we wouldn’t have done that if we’d realized the consequences.’
Alice had waded further into the burn. The water was still shallow there, despite the swollen river beyond, and it hardly covered the feet of her boots, but Connie called after her, glad of an excuse not to answer Veronica. ‘Take care! We don’t want you slipping and getting wet.’
Veronica looked up then, distracted from her own preoccupations, it seemed. ‘Oh yes, dear, do come back and play here. That seems rather dangerous. You’d be much better on dry land.’
‘She’s fine,’ Connie said brusquely. She thought Veronica had probably over-protected her child. Besides, what right did the woman have now to interfere?
Alice had found a stick on the bank and was poking at the vegetation on the opposite side of the burn. There were huge heads of cow parsley that were higher than the girl; the lacy leaves and ribbed stalks must have seemed like a forest of trees to her, exciting and mysterious.
‘Come back!’ Veronica called, her voice seemingly close to panic. ‘Oh, do come back, please.’
Alice turned and frowned, but ignored the stranger.
‘She’s fine,’ Connie said again. She remembered the way Veronica had looked at Alice when they’d been invited to lunch. ‘Really, I think children need to feel they’re having adventures. They have to learn to deal with some risk, don’t you think so?’
‘How can you say that?’ Veronica was almost beside herself. ‘You of all people! You allowed a child to die in your care.’
Alice must have heard the shrill voice and turned back again, troubled by the tone, though she hadn’t taken in the words. There was a moment of quiet. Water running over pebbles. The distant rumble of a tractor. Connie couldn’t trust herself to speak. She wouldn’t lose her temper in front of her daughter.
‘I’m sorry,’ Veronica said at last. ‘That wasn’t fair.’
Perhaps infected by the tension between the adults, Alice began to lash out at the cow parsley with her stick, beating down the plants and stamping on them to make a path into the middle of the vegetation, her furthest foray ever away from the cottage. Connie started to pile up cups and plates. Now she just wanted Veronica to leave. She could see that really they would never do more than tolerate each other. The notion that they might be friends – that she could be included in the charmed circle of people invited for delicious lunches in the big white house – was ridiculous.
‘Look what I’ve found!’ Alice was almost hidden from view and her voice had a strange, muffled quality. Connie stood up, glad to leave Veronica’s side. She walked towards the water, the movement shaking the stress from her muscles. She crossed the burn, balancing on a large, flat rock in the middle so that she didn’t get her shoes wet.
Alice was standing in an untidy clearing in the patch of weeds, looking down. ‘Would you like it, Mummy? Could we keep it?’ And she bent to pick up the squashed leather bag.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Vera called the whole team back to the incident room in Kimmerston to brief them on the Danny Shaw murder. Joe Ashworth wasn’t sure what had got into her. There was a sort of fury that ran in spasms through her body. It was as if she thought the boy had been strangled just to taunt her. Ashworth decided this evening that she was more mad than usual. She was there before the rest of them, pacing up and down at the front of the room. He knew better than to speak to her. He waited in silence for the team to gather.
Charlie was next in. Eyes like a bloodhound and a paper cup of coffee in one hand, some sort of pastry wrapped in greaseproof paper in the other. Charlie was always on the edge of some crisis, a major depression or breakdown. When his wife had left him, they’d thought for a couple of months that he’d lose it completely. She’d always done the practical stuff – washed his clothes and ironed them, cooked his food and cleared up his mess. Like she was his mother. They couldn’t see how he’d cope without her. But he’d pulled himself through it and still he survived, and each day he turned up was a little miracle. He’d even worked out how to use the washing machine, and these days he managed a shave before leaving the house.
Tenacious. That was how Vera had described Charlie to Joe Ashworth: ‘You can’t expect him to do much under his own initiative, but give him clear instructions, then all you have to do is wind him up and let him go.’
Holly was last in, and something about her, the way she looked round her, the self-satisfied smile of apology to Vera for keeping them waiting, let Ashworth know she had something important to share. She’d wait until the end and then make her announcement. Like some bloody conjuror pulling a rabbit from a hat.
Vera glowered at them. She wrote Danny’s name on the whiteboard, stabbing out the letters with the marker.
‘Our second victim. Danny Shaw. Mother Karen works on reception at the health club at the Willows. Father Derek, builder and developer, going through hard times financially. Danny was their only child. Spoilt rotten, then he grew up, went away to university and turned moody on them. Stopped talking. He wanted to be a lawyer and he had a kind of motive for the Lister murder. If Jenny Lister caught him stealing from his colleagues.’
‘You think his killing could be a revenge attack?’ Charlie said. ‘Because he strangled the woman?’
Vera stopped, frozen, her arm still outstretched towards the board. Ashworth thought she might have a go at Charlie, call him stupid for dreaming up such a notion. One way of relieving the pent-up tension. But instead she nodded. ‘I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s worth considering. Who cared for Lister enough to kill for her?’
‘Her daughter,’ Holly called out from the back of the room.
‘Or her daughter’s boyfriend,’ Vera said. ‘Just because he’s besotted with the girl. I can see him committing murder if she asked him to do it. We mustn’t forget him.’
‘How would Hannah know Shaw?’ Ashworth was all in favour of brainstorming, but this was madness, fantasy time.
‘Wouldn’t they have gone to school together? Only a year between them. We know Simon went to a posh place in town, but Danny and Hannah were both students at the high school in Hexham. Let’s check that out with the teachers, other kids. It’s another connection between the Shaws and the Listers. Holly, you sort it, you’re good at that stuff and nearer in age to the kids than the rest of us.’
She stopped for breath, took a gasp of air. ‘Some more news. I got the call while we were with the Shaw family. They’ve found Jenny Lister’s bag. No news yet on the notebook, though. We’re still waiting to hear. Guess where the bag was found! Barnard Bridge. Just across the burn from Mallow Cottage, Connie Masters’s place.’ She looked around the room. ‘Any ideas?’
Silence. In another office someone burst out laughing. The noise seemed to tear at Vera’s nerves, and Ashworth expected another outburst about their lack of intelligence and about how crap they were as detectives, but she held it together. Instead she nodded towards Charlie.
‘What have you got on Morgan? According to Shaw’s mother, he and Danny were mates. At least Morgan seemed to have some sort of influence on the boy.’ She had set Charlie off to re-interview the people who had been working or playing in the health club the day Jenny Lister had died. Had any of them seen Michael Morgan that morning? He hadn’t had a clinic there that day, but had he used the gym or the pool? Ashworth imagined that Charlie had spent his day drinking tea in living rooms in tidy houses all over the Tyne valley, interviewing the wrinklies from the aqua-aerobic class. The sort of task he loved.