Silent Voices

nothing.’
    ‘You’ve got the name of this man?’ Vera knew Holly would have. Holly was ambitious and knew better than to leave herself open to criticism.
    ‘Sure. Lawrence May. Age: late forties. Divorced. No kids. They went walking and birdwatching together.’ Vera thought Hector, her father, might have known him. Hector had been keen on birds too, but best of all he’d liked killing and stuffing them. When she’d taken over his house in the hills she’d found the freezer full of corpses waiting for his attention. As a taxidermist on the shady side of legal, he’d have seen May as the enemy. A lily-livered robin-stroker without any idea of what the countryside was all about.
    ‘Spoken to him?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    Of course not. She’d been too busy playing Mother Teresa with the girl.
    ‘Get onto it first thing tomorrow.’ Vera looked at the plate of buns and saw it was empty. Her fault. She should have known better than to leave it within reach of Charlie. ‘Did the search team turn up anything interesting from her home or her office?’
    ‘The team found her laptop at home,’ Holly said. ‘If she’s still in touch with Lawrence May, there should be emails. There was an electronic diary on it, but that was mostly work. IT is sorting through the rest now.’
    ‘We still haven’t found her handbag,’ Vera said. ‘A woman like that, surely she’d have a handbag. Probably a briefcase too. Holly, can you ask Hannah? She’d know what her mother usually carried her stuff around in.’
    Holly nodded, but Vera could tell that her mind wasn’t on such mundane details. She was still thinking about bringing comfort to the girl.
    ‘According to her best mate, there was a new man in her life,’ Vera said. ‘A secret lover. If she’d started going out with May again, no reason surely why she’d keep it secret.’
    ‘Unless she just wanted to see how it worked out before going public,’ Joe Ashworth chipped in. Sometimes Vera thought he represented her feminine side. He had the empathy and she had the muscle. Well, the bulk. Muscle, she had to admit, was sorely lacking. ‘She wouldn’t want to make a fool of herself, announce they were an item again, only for it all to fall apart.’
    ‘The friend thought the new bloke might be married,’ Vera said. ‘Something to keep in mind. We haven’t got much else as a motive.’
    ‘Except for the Elias Jones case.’ Charlie still had his mouth full. ‘Lots of hatred stirred up over that.’
    ‘So let’s look at that again.’ Vera wrote the child’s name on the whiteboard. ‘How far have we got with it? Joe, you spoke to the social worker, the one that was pilloried in the press. Connie Masters. Do we think she killed her boss?’
    ‘She claims she didn’t even know Lister was living in the village.’
    ‘And do we believe her?’ Come on, Joe. Commit yourself.
    ‘Yeah,’ he said and she wanted to cheer. Joe Ashworth spent so much of his time sitting on the fence that he should have a blister on his arse. ‘At first it seems impossible – a place that small and they’ve not bumped into each other – but Masters has only been living there for a few months, and Lister would be out all day at work. The times when she might be around, in the evenings, Connie Masters is at home with her bairn.’
    ‘They didn’t socialize at all when they were working together?’ Holly liked her evenings in the pub with the lads when a case was closed. Liked being fancied.
    ‘Apparently not. Not Jenny’s way of working. She liked to keep home and the office separate.’
    ‘Still seems a bit of a coincidence . . .’ Holly pushing it.
    ‘The boss asked me what I thought, and I’m telling you.’ They glared at each other, the two bright kids in the school vying to be top of the class.
    ‘Have we tracked down Michael Morgan yet?’ Vera asked. Sometimes the rivalry between the younger members of her team amused her, but now she needed them to pull together and focus. Then, when everyone looked at her as if they didn’t have an idea what she was talking about, she added sharply: ‘Mattie Jones’s boyfriend. The man she fell for, the man she’ll have us believe she killed for. The man who became a sort of stepdad to Elias. So far, all I know about him is that he was weird. I might be wrong here, but aren’t we looking for weird? Do we know if he’s still sticking pins into people for a living? I guess he’d have to have a basic knowledge of