She made to turn away from him and shut the door, but Ashworth called her back.
‘Would it be possible to speak to Hannah?’
‘Hannah’s not here. She and Simon left soon after you did this morning. I assume they’re back in her house, but they didn’t say where they were going.’ She stood on the doorstep, a lonely and dignified figure, watching the detective walk away.
He found the girl in the garden behind the little house she’d shared with her mother. There was no answer when he knocked at the door and he was about to give up when Hilda waved at him from her living-room window, pointing to an arched gap in the terrace between their two houses.
Hannah was alone. Her red hair was tied back in an untidy plait and she was wearing wellingtons, a big hand-knitted sweater with a frayed rib and holes in the elbows. She was digging over the small vegetable patch. When she saw him she stopped and leaned on the fork. She was flushed and breathless.
‘Mum always planted a few new potatoes over the Easter holiday. Broad beans too. I didn’t want to let it go.’
‘You’ve been going at that like a dog at broth.’ One of his grandda’s sayings. ‘You’ll wear yourself out.’
‘I hope so.’ She smiled at him. ‘It’d be good to get to sleep without a pill. They make me feel lousy the next morning.’
‘Simon not with you?’
‘He’s taken Mum’s car to the supermarket in Hexham. I couldn’t face it – the supermarket or the car – so I said I’d stay here. We have to eat, I suppose, and I don’t want to go to the White House for meals every day.’ She bent absent-mindedly and pulled a strand of goose grass from the soil and threw it onto the wheelbarrow, then straightened. ‘Do you know who killed my mother yet?’
He shook his head. ‘Are you up to answering some questions?’
‘If you don’t mind doing it here. I feel better outside.’ And it seemed to him that she was much better, almost cheerful in the spring sunshine. She’d lost the pallor and the doped indifference.
‘Did your mum mention seeing anything unusual about the health club lately? We think one of the staff had been stealing from guests and other employees. It might be a motive.’ He wanted to start off with something impersonal, not too close to home.
‘No. Nothing like that. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t see something. We were both busy. Often she didn’t get back until late from work, and by then I’d be out with Si or holed up in my room revising. We were close, but there wasn’t a lot of time for chat.’
‘I’d like to talk again about Danny Shaw.’ Joe hesitated. This was more sensitive, but he wanted to broach it while he had Hannah to himself. ‘There’s a collage on his wall. His mother said you gave it to him. It sounds as if there was more between you than the fact that you went out together a few times. Karen says you were his first love, that he never quite got over you.’
She stooped again to pull out more weeds, avoiding his eye.
‘I fancied myself in love with him for a while. I gave him the picture while I was still a little bit besotted.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘Nothing really. I hooked up with Simon and saw that Danny was basically a bit of a prat.’
‘So you dumped Danny for Simon? That wasn’t the impression you gave yesterday.’
‘Wasn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘I don’t know. All that stuff seems so important when you’re going through it, but later it hardly seems to matter. This is a small place. There aren’t that many people of our age. You tend to have been out with most of the available boys by the time you hit seventeen. It’s like one of those Scottish country dances. Change your partner when the music stops. In the end we just all become good friends.’
Joe supposed that was true. It had been the same for him. He’d been out with a couple of his wife’s friends before hooking up with her; one had been to dinner at their house with her husband the week before. Teenage passion soon faded.
He wanted to ask Hannah if she’d slept with Danny, if they’d been that close, but resisted. His reluctance was more a matter of knowing the question would have seemed ridiculous to her than of not wanting to pry.
‘Was Danny upset? You said yesterday he emailed and phoned you after you dumped him. Did he make a nuisance of himself?’
She shrugged. ‘Nah. He soon got over it. He started going out with his new lass in freshers’ week, so he can’t have been that heart-broken.’
She pushed the wheelbarrow to the end of the garden and lifted the weeds onto the compost heap. ‘Is that all you wanted to know? I don’t think I’ve been much help.’
‘Did Simon ever talk to you about Patrick?’ Joe hadn’t meant to ask her about the dead brother, but he thought it was important: the child drowning, the effect on the adult Simon.
‘Of course.’ She wiped a stray hair away from her face and left a streak of mud. ‘We tell each other everything.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That Patrick was like a ghost in their lives. Nothing of him remains. Veronica threw away all his toys and his clothes, and they hardly ever mentioned his name after the accident. Simon said that sometimes he felt as if Patrick had never existed, that he’d created the whole incident in his imagination.’
‘Would your mother have been working as a social worker then?’ Ashworth felt as if he was groping towards a connection, an explanation.
‘I suppose so.’ Hannah looked up sharply. ‘Do you think she worked with the Eliot family after the tragedy? I suppose she would have qualified by then, and we’d be living here.’
‘It just crossed my mind,’ Joe said. ‘But that would be too much of a coincidence. Your mother would surely have remembered the case, happening so close to home. She would have mentioned it.’
‘Oh, I don’t think she would.’ Hannah was quite certain. ‘She had a thing about confidentiality. She said work had to stay in the office, where it belonged.’ She leaned the empty wheelbarrow against the wall. ‘Look, I probably won’t do any more of this now. Do you want some tea?’
‘Does Simon feel responsible for his brother’s death?’
She’d already started walking towards the back door of the house, and his question made her stop in her tracks.
‘Of course.’ She pulled out the band that was tying up her hair and shook it loose. ‘It’s made him the person he is.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Vera wanted to talk to Michael Morgan. She’d never admit it to Joe Ashworth, but she’d seriously cocked up that last meeting when they’d barged into the flat. Something about the man – his ease with his body, his assumption of superiority – had got under her skin and made her lose the plot. He was into mind-games. That was how he made his living. He depended on the gullibility of his clients. This time she’d be calm. She’d take him through the facts, box him into a corner.
She met Joe in the cafe in Tynemouth where they’d taken Freya. He was already waiting for her, jotting notes in his Filofax, frowning a bit like a schoolboy doing difficult homework. Vera ordered coffee and a slab of chocolate cake. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast in Barnard Bridge.
‘How did you get on at the Shaw house?’
‘Danny was in the Willows the morning Jenny Lister died.’
‘Was he now?’ Vera wasn’t sure if this was good news or if it just complicated matters. ‘So he might have seen what happened, even if he wasn’t implicated himself.’
‘I asked Shaw about Greenhough.’
‘And?’ Vera looked up sharply from her cake. Something about that place still haunted her.