Silent Voices

asked.
    ‘No.’ Joe saw Connie hesitate. She was reluctant to commit herself, but in the face of Vera’s barrage of questions she thought she should give an answer.
    ‘We understand you can’t be certain,’ he said. ‘Not after such a brief conversation. We won’t make too much of it. But what we’re after is an impression. In your line of work you must be good at summing people up, making a judgement about them.’
    Connie looked up at him and smiled. ‘But I was a crap judge of character, wasn’t I? It never occurred to me for a second that Mattie Jones would kill her son.’
    ‘I bet you were right more often than you were wrong,’ Vera said. ‘And like Joe says, we’re after your best guess. That’s all.’
    Connie took a deep breath. ‘My best guess, thinking about it afterwards? That he was working. It wasn’t a social call.’
    ‘He was selling something?’ Joe saw Vera was trying to rein herself in, so that Connie wouldn’t be intimidated by her enthusiasm. But still the question came out like a firecracker. It seemed to light up the room.
    ‘Perhaps.’
    Connie sounded doubtful, but Vera got to her feet and started pacing the small room. It seemed to Ashworth that if she’d sat still much longer, she’d have exploded. She was muttering to herself, throwing out occasional questions to Joe and Connie, but not really expecting answers: ‘Who else might visit a customer or client in their own home? Solicitor? Estate agent, if he was doing a valuation? Come on, Joey, help me out here!’
    ‘He didn’t look like that,’ Connie said. ‘He wasn’t wearing a suit.’
    Then Vera reached the point Joe knew she’d been aiming for all along. She looked directly at Connie. ‘Could it have been Michael Morgan?’
    ‘No! I’d have recognized him.’ But Ashworth could see that Vera had thrown in a seed of doubt. And Connie wanted to please Vera, to get once again that beam of approval. ‘Anyway, why would Morgan be visiting the Eliots?’
    ‘Perhaps Veronica likes having pins stuck into her. Or perhaps he didn’t go there at all and it was just an excuse.’
    ‘He wouldn’t come here,’ Connie said. ‘Not if he knew I lived in the cottage. He’d be scared I’d know him. I only met him twice, but his photo was everywhere in the papers.’
    ‘Like I said . . .’ Vera grinned. ‘We’re looking for someone who likes playing games, who enjoys taking a risk. And it wouldn’t be such an enormous risk. You see someone out of context, how often do you recognize them?’
    Nobody answered.
    ‘Veronica was here this afternoon,’ Connie said. ‘She came for tea, but left soon after I called you.’
    They all realized the implication of the words, but Vera didn’t pick up on it immediately. She was delighted, though, Ashworth could tell that. There was that shiver of anticipation, the sort she got when she was standing at the bar and he was getting in the first round. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you two would be best mates,’ Vera said, keeping it as calm as she could manage.
    ‘We haven’t been.’ Connie’s face seemed to close down and become expressionless. ‘Veronica was rather a bitch actually, as soon as she realized who I was. She made my life hell in the village with her gossip and her rumours.’
    Joe could tell Vera didn’t really get the significance of what Connie was saying. Vera had always been an outsider: she was used to being considered the eccentric, the mad cop. It was only since she’d made pals with her druggie neighbours that she’d belonged to any sort of community. But Joe’s wife had found it a nightmare to fit into their estate when they’d first moved. A couple of nights she’d cried herself to sleep. Something about the babysitting circle and unused tokens, about the PTA committee. The small, unkind digs that stick in the brain and suck out all the confidence, made worse because the insults were so petty and she’d known she shouldn’t care.
    ‘What happened to change things between you and Veronica?’ he asked.
    ‘Jenny Lister’s death,’ Connie said. ‘Suddenly Veronica wanted my company. She invited me to lunch. Maybe it was just the voyeurism you get when things hit the papers. People seem attracted by that strange second-hand celebrity.’
    ‘And you asked her back here.’ Vera was grinning like a wolf. ‘Very neighbourly.’
    ‘It’s been lonely,’ Connie said. And Joe, catching the bleakness in her voice, understood how