Her voice was flat and he couldn’t tell if she was apologising or if it was a complaint.
‘No problem. I’ll get something when they’re in bed.’ He scooped up the middle child, the boy, and put him on his knee. His thumb was in his mouth and he was almost asleep.
I need to spend more time with them. When the investigation’s over… All evening – with the kids, and later eating scrambled eggs on a tray, with Sal sitting next to him – Joe felt that he was a peeping Tom, snooping on his own family. It was as if he was in the garden, peering in through the window. He wasn’t part of it at all.
Sal went to bed early, but he said he’d stay up for a bit. He was all wired up and he’d only keep her awake too.
‘You drink too much coffee.’ Her only comment, but he could tell she was hurt. He heard her upstairs, her footsteps on the bedroom floor, the flush of the toilet. Every sound a reproach.
He’d been reading Miranda Barton’s book Cruel Women and finding it heavy going. Too many words that he didn’t understand. Not very much happening. It was about a single mother making her way in London. The first chapter described the woman giving birth and he thought she made a lot of fuss about something that Sal took in her stride. The rest of the novel followed her encounters with work colleagues and lovers. Even the sex scenes were boring.
It was eleven o’clock, but there was only one chapter left. Joe read on; he wanted to be sure Sal was fast asleep before he went up. In this scene Samantha, the businesswoman central character, had just been rejected by a lover. The book ended with Samantha slumped on the floor. The conclusion was ambiguous. Perhaps she’d committed suicide or perhaps she was just sleeping. To Joe, that felt like cheating.
But despite that, Joe reread the final chapter, making sure he didn’t skip a word. Not because the story held his attention – he couldn’t, for a moment, believe in Samantha or her desperation – but because the setting of the final scene was so familiar. The encounter took place in the home of a friend, in a conservatory. The arrangement of the furniture and the plants, the colour of the new rug on the floor, the newspaper on the table, all these matched exactly the room in which Miranda had found Tony Ferdinand’s body. And the position of Ferdinand’s body, in a corner, had mirrored that of the fictional Samantha. Once again, it seemed, a scene from a story had been brought to life.
Joe’s first impulse was to phone Vera Stanhope. Other detectives saw intricate complications in a case as distractions or put them down to coincidence. Vera was excited by them. She hated things to be too easy. Where was the challenge in that? Then he decided there was no rush. Let his boss have her beauty sleep. The notion of ‘Vera’ and ‘beauty’ in the same thought made him smile, and he was still smiling when he went upstairs. When he climbed into bed beside Sal and felt how warm and soft she was, he no longer felt like a stranger in his own house.
Chapter Thirty-Six
‘Of course I knew the book was important,’ Vera said. ‘That’s why I took it from Miranda’s cottage.’ She didn’t care if Joe believed her or not. His description of the final chapter of Cruel Women was firing sparks in her brain. Confusing sparks. She’d thought she was groping towards a solution. Did this new information confirm her theory or would she have to think again? They were in Hector’s Land Rover, breaking all the rules about officers using their own vehicles, but she had plans for later in the day and didn’t want to be tied to a pool car.
She looked at Joe, expecting him to challenge her, but he let the comment go. He probably realized she’d have got round to reading Miranda’s book in the end. She changed into four-wheel drive to go down a steep bank. In the night there’d been hail and the roads were still greasy.
‘So that’s why Miranda was so hysterical when she found the professor’s body,’ Vera said. ‘It would have been like walking into one of her own books. Or into a nightmare.’
‘Like Nina finding Miranda on the terrace and recognizing her own short story.’
Vera looked at him sharply. She couldn’t work out what was going on between Joe and the Backworth woman. This was something else that confused her. A month ago she’d have bet her home on Joe Ashworth’s fidelity. Now she wasn’t so sure. And she’d never have thought he’d go for someone intellectual and skinny.
‘Aye.’ They’d reached the bottom of the hill and she changed gear again.
‘Is that coincidence, do you think?’ Joe said. ‘The writers discovering the bodies? Or did the killer organize it that way?’
‘Joanna could have found the first one.’ Vera thought she shouldn’t have had to remind Joe of that. He was losing his focus on the case. ‘And she was meant to. All that business with the different knives and the note. Miranda came along later and screamed the house down. I don’t think that was intended.’ It wasn’t grief that had caused the hysteria, Vera saw now, but shock because she recognized the scenario; she’d created it. And Miranda had recovered from that more quickly than anyone would have expected. It seemed she hadn’t really cared for Tony Ferdinand at all.
‘Why didn’t she tell us that the scene came from her book?’ Joe frowned and looked like a school kid doing difficult sums. ‘That’s been bothering me since I read that last chapter.’
‘Perhaps she was worried that we’d see her as the killer.’ Vera paused. ‘And then she decided she could use the situation to her advantage. If she worked out who was playing games with her stories.’
‘Blackmail?’
‘It’s always seemed likely as a motive for the second murder.’ But Vera thought that wasn’t the big question. The big question was, why had the killer created the fictional scenes in the first place? A warped sense of fun? Or was there a greater significance? And you could ask the same questions about the objects he’d left behind.
Now they’d reached the highest point of the road and there was a view of the coast and the house below them. The earlier storm had stripped the trees of leaves, so the outline of the building was clearer than Vera had remembered. It was strange being back here with the place almost empty. No CSIs, no students, theirs the only car in the visitors’ car park. Alex had heard the Land Rover and came out of the cottage to meet them. He seemed calm enough, but slightly dazed. Vera thought he was probably still on tranquillizers. Or maybe it was losing a mother he’d never been close to.
‘I’ve just had Chrissie Kerr on the phone,’ Alex said, his voice distant and uninterested. ‘She seems to ring about three times a day. This time it was about what time the caterers can get here on Friday. I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal for her.’
Oh, I do, Vera thought. It’s her big chance.
‘You’re not doing the cooking yourself then?’ Joe was concerned for the young man. He probably thought Vera was a callous cow to allow the party to take place here. Vera saw that he wasn’t sure what they were doing here now. Why was it so important for them to visit the Writers’ House? And she didn’t know that she had an answer for him.
‘Chrissie asked if I’d like to do the cooking,’ Alex said. ‘She told me that she’d pay the going rate. But I didn’t think I could take it on. These days I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Are you sure you’re up for the party?’ Vera knew she was going through the motions even as she put the question. She was desperate for the event to take place. Like Chrissie, she saw this as her last chance. Her only opportunity to get this killer. How would she react if Alex said he wasn’t sure, that the last thing he wanted was his home invaded by a bunch of strangers?