Vera stopped speaking, made a sort of shooing gesture with her hands. ‘Go on then. This is a murder inquiry, not a mothers’ union meeting. You haven’t got all day.’
‘What about you?’ Charlie said, verging on the rude.
‘Me?’ She gave another of her self-satisfied grins. ‘I’m management and I don’t go out in the rain. I’m doing some strategic thinking.’
Joe Ashworth liked Durham city. Only twenty minutes down the A1, he thought you could have been in a different world from the centre of Newcastle. This was an old town, classy, with its huge red sandstone cathedral and the castle, the smart shops and the fancy restaurants, the university colleges and the students with their posh voices. Like a southern city, he always thought, lifted up and stuck on the Wear. The prison was quite a different matter. Joe hated most prisons, but this was one of the worst. It was grim and old and made him think of dungeons and rats. It didn’t belong in Durham. It had a unit for long-term and dangerous female prisoners.
Seeing Mattie now, it was hard to think of her as dangerous. He talked to her in a small office, reluctantly relinquished by staff, on the hospital wing. She was already there when he arrived, escorted by a male officer who’d brought him from the gate. She was dressed in a prison-issue tracksuit, but there were slippers on her feet and she seemed very young, reminded Joe of his daughter when she was ready for bed. He’d wanted to bring Mattie something. He always came with a small sweetener on his prison visits – cigarettes usually, especially if he was coming to see a man, cigarettes that were chain-smoked throughout the interview because prisoners weren’t allowed to take anything away with them. Most of the men smoked. Cigarettes hadn’t seemed appropriate on a hospital visit, so he handed over a small box of chocolates, not sure about the rules.
Mattie seemed disproportionately grateful and held the gift-wrapped box on her lap.
‘Did that fat cop send you?’
She could only be talking about Vera. ‘Aye, she thought you could do with the company.’
‘She was canny, like.’
Not when you really know her.
Mattie looked at him. Huge blue eyes in a wide, smooth forehead. ‘But what do you really want?’
‘A chat,’ he said. ‘About Jenny Lister.’
She nodded. ‘But I told the lady everything I know.’
Vera would like that, being called a lady!
‘You were ill,’ Joe said. ‘You had a fever. We thought you might remember a bit more now.’
‘It still knacks,’ she said and lifted her tracksuit top, quite unselfconsciously, to show him the wound on her abdomen covered with a dressing. Again he was reminded of his daughter showing off a scab on her knee.
‘It must be very painful,’ he said gently. He could understand why Jenny had been so taken with Mattie, why she’d come each week to visit, even though really she’d no longer had any formal responsibility for her. ‘Tell me about Jenny’s visits,’ he went on. ‘Was it the same every week?’
‘Yes. Every week. Not in the main visits room – you know, where you see your family and they have toys for the bairns. She said it was too noisy there and we wouldn’t be able to talk properly. Though if you’re there, they bring you a cup of tea and there are biscuits – chocolate if you get in early.’ She looked at the chocolates he’d brought her.
‘Why don’t you open them?’ Joe smiled. ‘I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but you could have a couple.’
She ripped the wrapping off and took one out.
‘So where did Jenny see you?’
‘In those little cubicles where you talk to your lawyer or the cops.’ Her mouth was already full of strawberry cream.
Did that mean that Jenny hadn’t wanted to be overheard? ‘What did you talk about?’
‘Like I told the lady, it was about me. Jenny was going to write a book.’
‘Did she make notes?’
‘Yeah, mostly. Sometimes we just chatted.’
‘Where did she write the notes?’
‘In a big black book.’ Mattie was already getting bored. Maybe she was missing something she liked on the television in the ward.
‘Did she talk to you about Michael?’
‘She said I had to forget about him.’ Mattie reached out and took another chocolate, unwrapped the silver paper carefully and put the sweet into her mouth. ‘She wanted me to talk about when I was little, what I could remember about growing up.’
‘Where did you grow up?’ he asked.
‘In the country,’ she said. ‘That’s what I remember. When I was very little, before I went into care. At least I think it was before I went into care. Or maybe I went there for a visit. It was a little house by the water. That’s what Jenny wanted from me, my memories. I wanted to talk about Michael, but she said I wasn’t to speak of him.’ Mattie paused, reached out greedily for another chocolate. ‘I didn’t think that was fair. Jenny never even stayed for very long. She was in a rush to get back to her real work, the other kids she was looking after now. Sometimes it was like she didn’t even care about me. All she wanted to know about was that house in the country, and she’d make me close my eyes and picture it and tell her what I could see.’
They sat for a moment in silence and again Mattie closed her eyes. Ashworth was going to ask her to tell him what she saw, ask her perhaps to sketch it, but in the ward a woman started screaming and the spell was broken. Mattie opened her eyes. ‘Stupid cow,’ she said. ‘She’s always doing that. Makes you want to slap her.’
‘Why did you go into care?’ Joe asked.
‘I dunno.’ Mattie stared into space. He thought she was about to cry, but she turned back to him, dry-eyed, and said in a matter-of-fact way, ‘I think my mam died. Or maybe that was just what I wanted to think. I asked a bit when I was growing up, but I kept getting different stories. In the end you don’t know who to believe.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
The gate officer handed him back his phone and he switched it on, running back from the prison to his car in the rain. It rang immediately. Not the answering service with a message from Connie, but Vera. He thought either she’d been phoning him every five minutes or she had an instinct for how long these prison visits took. It occurred to him in a moment of whimsy that she could have a sort of telepathic link to him, but that idea was so scary that he forced it out of his head.
‘How did it go?’ Her voice was cheerful, but he wasn’t deceived. She was crap at delegating. It would have been a nightmare for her to be sitting in the office while he was doing the real work.
He sat in the car with the rain battering the roof and she made him take her through the entire interview almost word for word.
‘Good,’ she said in the end. ‘In fact, bloody brilliant. I could have talked to her, but I knew what I was looking for and I’d have asked leading questions. She was always going to be a suggestible witness.’
He knew better than to ask what was so significant. Vera would tell him without the question, if she’d wanted him to know. ‘Any news on Connie?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ashworth demanded. ‘Where is she?’
‘Oh, I don’t know that.’ She sounded impatient. ‘But I have some ideas about who might be hiding her.’ This was Vera at her most infuriating.
‘What do you want me to do now?’
‘Come back to the Tyne valley,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way there now.’
They sat in the lounge at the Willows looking out at the river. It had spilled over its banks and the raised driveway into the hotel was like a drawbridge over a moat, the only way in. A pile of sandbags stood in the car park. Ryan Taylor met Ashworth in reception and pointed him to the lounge where Vera was waiting. He said there’d been a flood alert. If it continued raining that night, the whole valley would be under water. There was a big tide forecast and that always made things worse, even this far inland. The hotel was on high enough land to be safe, but the last thing they wanted was guests stranded or health-club members not able to get in, so he planned to build a wall of sandbags by the side of the drive.