Vera looked at her watch. Past midnight. The questions were too difficult for this time of night, and tomorrow would be an important day. She felt that she was grappling towards some sort of solution. Ashworth was right; they needed to find Connie. She shut down the computer and sat for a moment listening to it grind and chug to a close. When this case was over, she’d treat herself to a new machine. Perhaps Joe would come with her to buy one.
Lying in the bed she’d slept in as a child, between the sheets grey with washing, which had probably been in use since then too, images and ideas floated into her head and then fluttered away from her, like the charred tatters of paper blowing from a bonfire. Outside, it was still raining.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Joe Ashworth hated the rain. It meant his kids were trapped indoors and his wife moaned about mud and mess. He thought she had that illness, SAD – seasonal affective disorder. She seemed to wilt without the sun, to become crabby and ungenerous. Mornings like this, he envied Vera’s solitary life. It would be great to be selfish without the guilt. He drove away from the house, from the damp children’s clothes stretched over radiators, the toy-strewn living room, the whining baby, and told himself he was the breadwinner, that he couldn’t be expected to do it all.
Travelling towards the police station for the morning briefing, he hit a traffic jam. It was still raining and the standing water had caused a minor accident on the way into town. His windscreen-wiper blades were faulty and squeaked at the same pitch as the baby’s cries. He switched them off and couldn’t see, put them back on and got the noise that set his teeth on edge and made him feel like putting his fist through the glass.
It didn’t help that, when he reached the incident room, Vera was at her most jaunty. She’d blagged a proper filter machine from somewhere and the smell of the coffee hit him as soon as he walked in.
‘Where are the others?’ His question. Usually Vera hated people to be late, one of the reasons why he’d been so tense when his way had been blocked by the crawling traffic. Now he hoped to hear her slag off the rest of the team. After all, he’d made the effort to be there.
But she only shrugged. ‘This weather’s a nightmare, isn’t it?’ She poured him coffee. ‘Have you tried Connie this morning?’
He looked at her, suspecting she was mocking him, but she seemed serious enough. ‘Yes, it went straight to voicemail again. I left a message asking her to get in touch.’
‘I’d like her opinion on these.’ Vera pinned a series of sheets onto the board. Copies of the charred paper rescued from the bonfire in Danny Shaw’s garden. ‘More than anyone, she’d know the way Jenny thought about her work.’
‘You’ve dismissed Connie altogether as a suspect then?’
‘Eh, pet, I didn’t say that. That’s another thing entirely.’ She gave the smile that was supposed to be enigmatic, but only made her look constipated.
He carried his coffee to look at the burnt paper more closely, but found it hard to make any sense from the words, even to concentrate on them. He couldn’t understand why Vera was so happy. Holly and Charlie came in together, laughing at a shared joke, and again he felt isolated, an outsider, trapped in the gap between Vera and her troops. I need to move on, he thought. I’ll always be in her shadow.
Vera regarded the latecomers indulgently, waited until they’d fetched coffee and then swung into her performance. It occurred to Ashworth that from these scraps of text she’d deduced some meaning or motive for the murders. That would explain her good humour. In that moment his envy was so intense that he almost hated her.
Vera set out the events of the previous day: the interviews with Veronica Eliot, Lisa, the Shaw family, Freya and Morgan. Joe had to admit that she was bloody good at this summing up, at pulling out links and meanings that would probably have passed him by, at laying out the facts in a way that was easy to follow.
‘It seems to me that the only intended victim was Jenny Lister,’ she said. ‘At first, at least. Danny Shaw was killed because he knew something or found out something about the first killing. The fact that the bonfire in his garden contained documents belonging to Lister suggests that he’d found her notebook.’
She paused for breath and Holly took the opportunity to stick up her hand. ‘Could Shaw have killed Jenny then? How else would he have her notebook?’
‘How else indeed? It seems that Danny and Hannah had a bit of a fling before he went away to university. By all accounts it meant a lot more to him than to her, but of course we can’t get his take on that. We might assume that the fragments in the fire were stolen at the same time as Jenny’s handbag, after the murder, but I think we have to keep an open mind.’
‘What do you mean?’ Charlie, hunched over his coffee, seemed almost alert.
‘Maybe Hannah’s not telling us the truth, and Danny visited her when he was home from uni.’ Vera looked at her audience. ‘Maybe she thinks she’s too young to be settling down after all.’
‘No!’ Holly was horrified. ‘She’s devoted to Simon. No way would she cheat on him.’
‘We know Danny was in the Lister house a couple of years ago when he and Hannah were going out together,’ Vera went on. ‘But it’s unlikely he stole any material from Jenny then. What would be the point? It would have been before Elias’s death, so there’d have been no press interest.’
Ashworth lifted his hand from the desk in front of him. ‘It’d be interesting to find out if Morgan and Danny knew each other before they met at the Willows?’
‘It would, wouldn’t it?’ Vera gave no sign whether or not this idea had occurred to her. ‘I’d have thought Karen would have mentioned a previous connection with Morgan when we talked to her about him, but she was all over the place. Could you follow that up, Holly? With the mother and with any of Danny’s mates we can track down.’
Holly nodded and scribbled a couple of lines in her notebook.
Vera turned to Charlie. ‘Any joy in tracking down witnesses around the Shaw house the day Danny died?’
‘Nah. That place is like a dormitory village. Most people work in Hexham or Newcastle. During the day it’s quiet as the grave. I found an elderly gent who was taking his dog for a walk at about the right time. He was passed by a small car he didn’t recognize, but it could have belonged to anybody and he can’t even remember the colour of the vehicle.’
‘Anyone else got any bright ideas?’ Vera looked around the room. There was silence apart from the rain still gushing from a blocked gutter outside. ‘Actions then.’ She paused for effect, but Ashworth thought she’d had these worked out from the moment she stood up. Before that even. Who knew what she dreamed about at night?
‘Holly’s to follow up on Danny Shaw and Michael Morgan. Check out possible previous points of contact. Joe, I’d like you to go to Durham nick. Have another chat with Mattie. She’s back there now, recovering in the hospital wing. You’re good with helpless females. I need more details of the visits Jenny Lister made to her. What exactly did they talk about? Charlie, see if you can track down Connie Masters. Her car must be somewhere, and it’s not easy to hide a four-year-old girl. They haven’t been in the cottage in Barnard Bridge since yesterday morning. She left a message on Joe’s phone saying she was fine and needed a bit of space, but he thinks there’s more to it than that.’ Another pause, even longer than the first. ‘And so do I. I want to speak to her.’ Ashworth wasn’t sure what to make of that. Did she think Connie was in danger? If so, why would she leave her in Charlie’s unreliable hands?