After Vera’s response on the phone, Ashworth had expected her to be in high spirits. It had seemed from her words that the case was all but over, that they’d have an arrest before the day was out. But seeing her now, crouched over her coffee, a plate of shortbread on the arm of her chair, he thought she seemed tense. Almost undecided. Like a gambler unsure which call to make. Or as if she didn’t trust her judgement after all. There was a fire in the grate, but it was giving out more smoke than heat, and the room was cold. Her mobile phone was on the table in front of her. She glared at it.
‘Bloody social services,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on to Craig, the big boss. You’d think he’d be able to help track down where Mattie Jones was born. Apparently it’s a nightmare going back that far. Nothing computerized. He said he’d ring as soon as he had something.’
‘What’s going on then?’
‘If I knew that, pet, I’d ride in like a knight in my trusty Land Rover and rescue the fair maiden.’
‘Are you talking about Connie?’ Ashworth couldn’t stand it when Vera went all weird on him. It was her way of keeping her thoughts to herself. As if she didn’t trust him enough to share her ideas.
‘Well, her for one.’ She looked up at him. ‘Did you get any more details from Mattie about the place she grew up? Apart from the fact that it was in the country and near water? That wasn’t what I sent you in for, but it’s significant, isn’t it? It’s set me thinking…’ And she lapsed into silence. Joe was reminded of an old woman in a care home, rambling away to herself, losing her thread in the middle of a sentence. It came to him that if Vera did end up that way, he’d be the only person to visit her.
She looked up at him and he saw that she was far from senile and was expecting an answer.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I think there could have been more, but some woman kicked off in the ward and she lost concentration.’ He paused, added pointedly, ‘It would have helped if I’d known what you were looking for.’
‘No,’ Vera said, ‘that wouldn’t have helped at all.’
‘So what are we going to do now?’ He was starting to lose patience. He’d feel happier if he knew Connie and the child were safe. He had the feeling that it was their lives Vera was gambling.
She didn’t answer immediately and again there was that sense of uncharacteristic indecision.
‘The place by the water Mattie was talking about,’ he said. The idea had come to him suddenly, looking out over the sodden parkland. There was no reason for it, apart from his instinct that the killer was linked to Barnard Bridge. ‘Could it be Connie Masters’s cottage? We know it’s a holiday let now, but someone must have lived there once. A family? Mattie’s mother?’
‘No point guessing, is there?’ she said, dismissing the idea without even considering it. ‘Could be anywhere. I need to make some more phone calls.’
It seemed to him that her decision had been made. The dice had been thrown. He waited for her to elaborate, but she sat back in the deep chair, her eyes half closed. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said after a while. He wanted to shake her. He wanted her fizzing with energy again, indomitable, taking on the world. He hated to see her so frail.
‘Go to Barnard Bridge,’ she said, ‘and keep an eye on Hannah Lister.’
‘You think she might be in danger?’
Vera didn’t answer directly. He wasn’t even convinced she’d heard the question. ‘Jenny Lister and Danny Shaw,’ she said. ‘Someone’s covering his tracks.’ She looked up at him and gave one of her old wicked grins. ‘Or her tracks. I thought I knew what had been going on here. Now I’m not so sure.’
In Barnard Bridge there was a sense of a community under siege. There were sandbags piled outside all the doorways in the main street. The burn that had been just a trickle outside Connie’s cottage was more than a foot deep and the Tyne was brown and fierce, frothing under the bridge, covered with a cream-coloured scum. The place was deserted. Ashworth phoned Connie’s mobile again and left a message. ‘If it continues raining tonight, the river will flood. You should come and move your belongings while you can.’
But, he thought, few of her belongings remained in the cottage. When he and Vera had checked her wardrobe, most of her clothes, and those of the child, had gone. The furniture was the property of the owner, not of Connie. After all, she had no reason to return. His message would have no effect, even if she picked it up.
In the Lister house he found Hannah, Simon and a vicar, who was there, it seemed, to discuss Jenny’s funeral. Her body had been released to the undertaker and arrangements could now be made. The vicar was wearing jeans and had a Barbour jacket over his clerical collar. Hannah invited Ashworth in and offered him coffee, but the detective felt he couldn’t stay. Hannah would surely be safe in the company of these men, and religious people always made him slightly uncomfortable. There’d been a stern Sunday-school teacher in the Methodist Chapel where his mother had taken him as a boy. Instead, he went next door and knocked at Hilda’s house.
She was there on her own. Maurice had been banished despite the weather.
‘Don’t worry about the boys,’ Hilda said, when Ashworth made a comment. He smiled to think of her husband and his friend as boys. ‘There’s a shed like a palace on that allotment of theirs. They were in the house all morning, but it’s cleared a bit now and they could do with some fresh air.’
She was in the middle of cooking tea, but she invited him in anyway and he sat in the kitchen on a tall stool by the workbench while she rubbed fat into flour to make pastry.
‘That cottage by the burn where Connie Masters lives,’ he said. ‘Who lived there before it became a holiday let?’
He’d been going over this in his head since his meeting with Vera in the hotel, trying to picture it. He wanted to prove to Vera that he had ideas too. Veronica Eliot would have been visiting the cottage when her son Patrick was drowned. Must have been, because the only access to the burn was through the cottage garden. So surely a woman of about Veronica’s age would have been staying there then, if they were friends, on visiting terms. A woman perhaps with young children. It could have been the mother of Mattie Jones, the mother who had given her up to care. Mattie would have been older than Veronica’s children, but not so much older. If she’d seen Patrick die in the water, had the image stuck with her? It would perhaps explain why Mattie had disciplined her own son in that way, why eventually she’d killed him.
It occurred to him that this link was just what Jenny Lister had been looking for when she’d questioned Mattie for her book. It would make a good story after all, and social workers liked neat and tidy motives, just as some detectives did. Vera would say he was back in Jackanory land and fairy tales were just for bairns, but she was always taking leaps into the dark and it seemed to work for her.
He waited now for Hilda to answer. She finished rubbing the fat into the flour, washed her hands under the tap and wiped them on a towel.
‘Mallow Cottage,’ she said at last. ‘It was never a happy house. Folk never seemed to stay there. They’d move in full of plans to do it up, but they all seemed to sell up before the work was done.’
‘I’d never have had you down as a superstitious type,’ Ashworth said.
‘Nothing to do with superstition!’ She fired the words back at him. ‘Damp and dark and too expensive to renovate – that was it, more like.’