Silent Voices

bent forward, her hands wrapped round the glass. There was a smudge of foamed milk on her upper lip. She must have seen him looking at it, because she blushed and wiped it away with her napkin.
    The lounge was set out like the drawing room in one of the National Trust houses Joe’s wife had made him go to, before the kids had come along. Polished dark-wood floor with a square carpet in the middle. The carpet was red and woven, almost as hard on the feet as the floor itself, so threadbare that in some places there was no pattern left. Pictures in big gilt frames on the walls. Mostly portraits, men in wigs and women in long dresses. Big leather chesterfields against the walls and chintz-covered chairs grouped around tables with fragile legs. At one end there was a huge fireplace, but without a fire today, and the big radiators were cold too, so there was a chill as soon as you walked in. The room had a background smell of dust.
    Now the remnants of the pensioners’ coffee and sandwiches were scattered on white china plates over the tables. There were coffee pots and bowls of lump sugar. Crumbs and crusts had ended up on the floor. At the other end of the room a middle-aged woman was starting to clear up the debris.
    ‘Thanks for sticking around,’ he said. By now Lisa’s shift should be over. They were sitting in a corner, and his words seemed to echo around the space.
    She slid her eyes up to look at him. ‘That’s all right.’
    ‘The dead woman’s called Jenny Lister,’ he said. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’
    She shook her head. ‘She never came to any of my classes. But mostly I do the over-fifties stretch-and-tone, and she looked a bit young for that.’
    ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Sorry the boss made you look at her.’
    ‘Though she didn’t look that old,’ Lisa went on. ‘She might have gone to Natalie’s mums-and-babies class. It’s not unusual to get new mothers in their forties. Not these days. You should check with her.’
    ‘Were you on duty at the pool all morning?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘We only have trained lifeguards in after nine-thirty, when the off-peak membership starts. Before that it’s the keen swimmers. They sign a disclaimer form. There’s usually someone around, but we’re short-staffed at the moment. I popped in a few times, but I didn’t see or hear anything unusual.’
    There was a moment of silence and she looked up at him bleakly. Ashworth felt he was floundering. What would Vera Stanhope do now? She’d thought this lass was worried about something, and usually she was right about people. ‘What’s it like working here?’
    He saw the question had surprised Lisa. What relevance could that have to the murder of a middle-aged woman?
    She looked at him suspiciously. ‘It’s OK. Usually.’
    ‘This is between ourselves,’ Ashworth said. ‘I won’t pass anything you say on to your boss.’
    ‘He’s all right.’
    Perhaps she’s not really anxious , Ashworth thought. Perhaps she’s just a sulky, uncommunicative teenage girl. He’d had younger sisters and could remember them driving his mam and dad crazy with their silences and their moods.
    ‘So is there anything you think I should know, anything odd or unpleasant that might be important to our investigation?’ He spoke briskly, but resisted the urge to raise his voice.
    Lisa put down her latte and looked uncomfortable. She twisted a strand of hair between her fingers. ‘Things have been going missing,’ she said. ‘Just in the last couple of weeks.’
    ‘What sort of things?’
    ‘Purses, credit cards, watches.’
    ‘From the changing rooms?’ Why hadn’t Taylor mentioned that? It might have provided a motive of a sort, if Jenny Lister had walked in on the culprit.
    ‘Once or twice,’ Lisa said. ‘But more often from the staffroom. That’s why Ryan could get away with not reporting it. He didn’t want the fuss, you see. He didn’t want people cancelling their membership because they thought someone was thieving. Not with Louise, the general manager, being away.’
    And that’s why he didn’t mention it to me.
    Lisa looked up at him again. ‘They think it was me,’ she said. ‘Not Ryan, he’s OK. Fair. He knows I wouldn’t do anything like that. But the rest of the staff. I’ve heard them talking. It’s because my dad’s been inside and I live in the west end. You just have to give your address and you get blamed. But it wasn’t me. I like this job. I’m not going to screw