And then there’d been a murder. It seemed trite, almost ridiculous. If someone had come up with such a scenario in a story presented to her for appraisal, she’d have mocked the idea. Too Christie for words. That Tony Ferdinand had been the victim was a complication she had yet to explore properly. She was too tired to think. Perhaps there would be time for a walk on the beach before her first workshop, and that would clear her head.
In the dining room breakfast was served from a sideboard from heated dishes. Miranda liked to preserve the atmosphere of an Edwardian country-house party, though here there were no housemaids in frilly aprons, only Miranda herself and her son. Nina saw that she was almost the last person to arrive for the meal. Again they sat round one large table, but dinner was the only formal meal. At breakfast, guests helped themselves. She gathered, as she spooned fresh fruit salad into a bowl and dipped the bag of herbal tea into a mug of hot water, that people were acting as if the murder had never taken place. Across the table from her, novelist Giles Rickard had his nose in the Telegraph. Among the students, the conversation was about writing and the fruitless search for agent or publisher. Was that a sign of the self-obsession of the aspiring writer? Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that the two police officers who had been posted there overnight were in the room too, tucking into a pile of bacon and egg.
Nina had expected the appearance of the fat female detective of the evening before, but there was no sign of anyone in plain clothes. The officers changed shift and two more arrived, but they just stood awkwardly, one at each of the external doors, as if they were unsure what they were doing there. She fetched her jacket from her room.
‘I’m just going for a walk on the beach,’ she said. ‘That is all right?’
The man was very young, fresh-faced and eager. She presumed it was his first murder and he was excited to be there. Had he woken up this morning thinking that life was good, and that he had chosen the best job in the world? ‘You’ll not be long?’
She promised that she would not be long. She was teaching in an hour. But she needed fresh air and exercise. She gave a little smile. ‘I’ll go mad if I’m stuck in there all day.’
He stood aside and let her out, shouting after her, ‘Have a nice stroll!’
Alex Barton was filling the bird feeders below the terrace, but was so concentrated on the task that he didn’t notice her. She watched for a moment and saw how tame the small birds had become. They sat on the table within inches of him, apparently unconcerned by his presence, and a robin perched on the wooden strut that held the narrow cage of feed. The path led straight from the garden to the beach. It was low tide, so there was sand; at high water only rock and shingle were visible. They’d woken to mist, but the sun was already burning through it and shone straight into her eyes. There was that familiar smell of salt and rotting seaweed that reminded her of childhood holidays. Gulls calling. At one point she looked back at the house. From there she could see the glass room, the windows reflecting the sunlight. A screen hid any activity that might be taking place on the balcony. After the oppressive claustrophobia of the Writers’ House, it was a pleasure to be outside. The water was calm and oily and she searched for flat pebbles to skim across it, and felt a rush of jubilation when she managed five skips. Again she thought of being young, on holiday in her grandparents’ home – Enid Blyton summers of exploration and picnics.
As she returned to the house she was amused to see the relief in the young policeman’s eyes when he glimpsed her approaching through the garden. Perhaps he’d been reprimanded for letting her out, warned he’d be in big trouble if she escaped. There was still no sign of Vera Stanhope or her colleague. Perhaps it’s all over, she thought. Perhaps they’ve arrested Joanna Tobin and need nothing more from us. That made her think of the short story Joanna had submitted the day before, and how she’d have been proud to have written it. But just as she was turning into the door, a minibus arrived and a group of uniformed men and women spilled out, chatting and laughing. She hesitated long enough to discover that they were there to search the gardens. All day she would catch glimpses of them, walking in lines across the lawns and through the trees.
Alex had moved inside and was clearing the grate in the drawing room. He was bending over the fireplace sweeping the last of the ash into a big, flat rusty dustpan. He was wearing jeans and a tight black T-shirt. Nina had noticed before that he never seemed to be affected by the cold.
He heard her come in and turned round. ‘Sorry. I should have done this last night. But after all that happened…’
‘How’s Miranda this morning?’ Really, Nina didn’t care how Miranda was feeling. She’d taken a dislike to the woman from the minute she’d arrived here. From before that, even. But it seemed the right thing to say.
He straightened. He’d tipped the ash into a metal bucket. ‘She’s okay. It’s not as if she was particularly close to Tony. Not recently. I don’t think they’d had much to do with each other professionally for years. It was the shock, I suppose, that made her so hysterical.’
‘Oh, I thought they were great friends.’ That, certainly, was the impression Ferdinand had given all those years ago.
Alex looked up sharply. ‘Once perhaps. Not now.’
Nina brought out her notes. This was her standard lecture on the structure of the short story. She’d given it so many times that she could deliver it standing on her head. She looked at her watch. Ten minutes to go. Soon the keen ones would be dribbling in.
An hour later they stopped for coffee. The lecture had gone well enough. The students had laughed in the right places, had seemed focused, had taken notes. Nina enjoyed teaching mature students more than she did lecturing to undergraduates, who were usually super-cool and unengaged. And yet this morning she had the sense that they were all just going through the motions. Wasn’t everyone actually thinking about a real crime while she’d been speaking of fiction?
‘Storytelling is all about what if?’ she’d said. ‘What if this character acts in this particular way? What if things aren’t quite what they seem?’
Now, drinking her black decaff coffee, listening to the murmured conversation all around her, she thought she had her own questions, which could affect the narrative of these particular events: What if Joanna Tobin didn’t kill Tony after all? What if I tell the detective everything I know about Tony Ferdinand?
After the break she set the group an exercise. The room was quiet and warm, from the background heat of the radiators, but also from the sun that flooded in through the big windows. Nina found that she was drifting into a daydream, part memory and part fantasy. This is what writers do, she thought. We create fictions even from our own experience. None of our recollections are entirely reliable. For she considered herself a writer, even though her work was only published by a small independent press based in the wilds of Northumberland.
In her story (or her memory) she was twenty-one, a bright young woman, newly graduated with a First in English literature from Bristol University. She spent the summer in her grandparents’ home in Northumberland, working in the local pub every evening and writing during the day. A novel, of course. A great young woman’s novel about growing up and love. It had been a joyous book, Nina thought now – the writing as glittering as the water had been that wonderful summer, when she sat in the garden of her grandparents’ house, with her laptop on the rickety wooden table, tapping out her 2,000 words a day. She would be far too cynical to write a novel like that now. And her grandparents had watched admiringly, interrupting only to bring her cold drinks, bowls of raspberries from the garden, slices of home-made cake.