Silent Voices

presiding over a wicker hamper, trying to recapture the glory of her grandfather’s home.
    Walking back to the car, she felt almost sorry for the woman.

 
Chapter Thirteen
     
    Outside Connie Masters’s cottage, Ashworth hesitated for a moment to look at her car; it was pulled into the verge, so the cow parsley and the long grass had been flattened. A silver Micra seven years old, with a distinctive bump on the offside wing. He wrote down the registration number. If there was CCTV at the car park where she’d claimed to have left it in Hexham the previous day, it might be possible to rule her out of the inquiry altogether.
    He checked his voicemail. Vera had left a message saying she was meeting Jenny Lister’s boss for lunch. No orders or requests. Maybe she was mellowing with age. Then he rang back to the station to ask for the CCTV tapes of the Hexham car park to be picked up. Giving his own orders. God, am I turning into Vera Stanhope? The idea made him smile. Nobody else on Earth was anything like Vera.
    At the Willows he met Charlie, who was on his way out, saw him from a distance leaving the hotel, his back bent and his hands in his jacket pocket. A posture like that, Ashworth thought, he’d have chronic back pain by the time he was sixty. Standing by Charlie’s car, chatting, Ashworth was aware that they were visible from the public areas in the hotel. Even though they couldn’t be overheard he felt awkward, as if he were on a stage and being stared at by a hostile audience, and he kept the conversation brief.
    ‘Any joy?’
    Charlie shrugged. ‘I showed Lister’s photo to the workers who came on duty this morning. A couple vaguely recognized her as someone who used the swimming pool, but nothing more than that. You’d have thought one of them would have had some contact with her, had a bit of a chat. The records showed she came swimming at least once a week.’
    ‘I don’t know. These places are all very impersonal.’ Joe Ashworth had joined a gym the year before, in his local-authority leisure centre, though, not a smart place like this. He’d been there for an hour each session, but plugged into his Walkman, he’d hardly spoken to the other people. Unconsciously he ran a hand over his belly. Definitely running to flab. Since the new baby he hadn’t had much time for getting fit.
    ‘I reckon she must have been killed more than an hour before the body was found,’ Charlie said. ‘After nine-thirty, there’s an off-peak membership deal and that’s when all the older people turn up. Before then it’s the serious swimmers. They do lengths up and down the pool before work. Concentrated stuff. You get the impression they wouldn’t notice anything happening outside the water, and they don’t usually have time for the sauna or steam room.’
    ‘And before nine-thirty there isn’t the same staff supervision.’ Ashworth remembered his conversation with Lisa.
    Charlie got into his car and wound down the window to have a fag before driving away.
    Inside, Ashworth went straight to Ryan Taylor’s office. Both the hotel and the leisure club were open again now, though the place seemed quieter than Ashworth might have expected. Perhaps murder wasn’t good for business after all. A young woman was vacuuming the carpet in the lobby. No sign of Danny, but then he didn’t start until the afternoons. Ashworth wondered how the student spent his days. At home catching up on work for university, or out with his friends?
    He thought again how cool the murderer must have been to have killed Jenny while all the other people were just feet away, even if they were ploughing up and down the pool. Or was the killing opportunistic? A madman after all, just wanting to feel the exhilaration of taking another life.
    Taylor was on the phone, his office door ajar, and Ashworth waited for him to complete the call before tapping on the glass and walking in. The manager was frowning.
    ‘That was another cancellation,’ he said. ‘A conference booked in for next week. They said they couldn’t take the risk of bringing clients here. What’s wrong with them all? Do they think the murderer’s still here, prowling the corridors and waiting to get them?’
    ‘Maybe not.’ Ashworth took a seat. ‘But they ought to know you’ve got a petty thief causing problems. Why didn’t you tell me about the stealing?’
    ‘You can’t think that’s relevant to the killing.’ Taylor fiddled with the knot of his tie,