Silent Voices

whole village, though we didn’t know the family really then. And after that Veronica refused to speak about the boy.’ She shrugged. ‘People thought it was odd, but everyone has their own way of coping, I suppose.’ She paused again. ‘There’s another funeral for us to go to now. I saw the vicar in next door.’
    ‘Who was living at the cottage at the time of the accident?’ Ashworth found he was holding his breath as he waited for the answer.
    She was standing at the sink, dribbling water from the cold tap into the bowl, mixing it into the pastry with a knife. She turned to speak to him.
    ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘The place was empty. There was a For Sale board outside; I remember it. It was in all the newspaper pictures. That’s why Veronica could take the boys into the garden to poke around in the stream. The White House didn’t have much of a garden then. It was more like a builders’ site. The Eliots had only just moved in.’
    When Ashworth went back next door and knocked at the Listers’, that house was empty too. Perhaps the vicar had taken the couple to the chapel of rest, or to the rectory to continue the conversation about hymns and eulogies there. Ashworth phoned Vera to bring her up to date, but he could tell she was preoccupied. She gave him a list of instructions without explaining the reason for them.
    The rain stopped by mid-afternoon and people meeting each other in the street laughed at the sandbags and said that the Environment Agency had over-reacted this time. But as it got dark it started raining again, this time a soft drizzle that folk still didn’t take seriously.

 
Chapter Thirty-Six
     
    Vera spent all day in the hotel lounge at the Willows. Most of the guests had left, despite Ryan Taylor’s reassurance that the sandbags would keep out the flood. The place was silent and gloomy; there was little natural light from outside despite the long windows. She’d shouted at him to switch off the background music after ‘Walking Back to Happiness’ had come round for the third time on the taped loop; she felt as if the tune were mocking her for her inability to get the case right.
    She’d decided on inaction, at least for today. Waiting was always torture to her and she understood it was a risk. If he knew what was in her mind, Joe Ashworth would be horrified. He’d recommend arrests, dramatic chases through the countryside. And of course she could be wrong. The idea had come to her sitting here, listening to the young waiter describe how Jenny Lister had waited here on the morning of her death for someone who never turned up. It wasn’t much to build a case on. And even if she were right, Vera thought, there’d be no guarantee of a conviction. A guilty plea would be better for everyone. The decision to wait having been made, it was better that she stay here where she would do no harm. If she went out, she might put in her huge, wellie-clad foot and upset the delicate balance that she sensed now existed. There was always a danger of further violence.
    So she sat in the big floral armchair by the window and occasionally summoned her team members to her. More often she spoke on the phone, sometimes persuading and sometimes swearing. Once she threw it across the room, and she had to retrieve it from the silk chaise longue where it had landed. Doreen, the elderly waitress, brought her cups of coffee, cheese sandwiches, hard scones and butter. Every hour or so Vera would pull herself to her feet and stamp around the room to bring the feeling back into her limbs. She’d stand in front of the fire, which at last seemed to throw out some warmth, or waddle to the toilet, then return to her seat and continue to scribble notes that charted the progress of the case.
    Once she stopped for ten minutes to stare outside at a rainbow that spanned the valley. But the sun, which had come out briefly, was soon covered again by cloud and the rainbow faded and then disappeared.
    Holly was her first visitor. She arrived in the early afternoon, starving. Vera fed her crisps and cake and listened to what she had to say about Hannah and Danny. Holly had been to the high school and talked to a couple of teachers, and through them she’d managed to meet up with some of the kids who’d been friends with Danny and Hannah. They’d met in the bar in Hexham, where one of them was working to save up to go travelling. He’d called up another couple of cronies. ‘Not that Danny had many close