Silent Voices

‘He was going to be a lawyer. If anyone found out, he could ruin the whole of his life for the sake of a cup of coffee. A few more days and he’d be in Bristol and we could forget the whole thing.’
    It occurred to Joe that this woman had spent her life protecting her son and had created a monster. Would she kill to protect him? Perhaps, but there was no possibility that she would have stood behind him in the garden and strangled the boy, who had been, he saw now, her passion.
    ‘Did you discuss it with Danny?’
    This time there was a hesitation. ‘No. I know I should have done. But I didn’t want the last few days of his holiday spoiled. I wanted us to be happy, the family we’d once been. I pushed the idea out of my head. I told myself Danny wouldn’t behave like that.’
    Ashworth turned to her husband. ‘Did you know anything about this, Mr Shaw?’
    The man shook his head, apparently baffled by the events that had run up to his son’s death.
    ‘Where was Danny the morning Mrs Lister died?’ Ashworth kept his voice gentle. Not a hint of accusation there. ‘I know his shift at the Willows didn’t start until late afternoon, but is there any chance he was in the hotel that morning?’ No reply. ‘Mrs Shaw?’
    She didn’t speak for a long time, but this time he didn’t prompt her. ‘He didn’t come home the night before,’ she said at last. ‘Often when he was working late Derek would go and pick him up at the end of his shift. There are no buses in the evening and he didn’t have his own car.’ Something else for the boy to complain about. ‘But occasionally he’d stay over. There was one of the staff bedrooms he was allowed to use. If he’d swapped to work an early shift the following day, or if he’d started drinking with some of the lasses working there.’ She looked up. ‘Usually it was the lasses he stayed up chatting to. They all fell for him.’
    ‘And that was what had happened the evening before Mrs Lister was murdered?’
    She nodded. ‘Derek would have gone to get him, but Danny phoned and said not to bother. He’d stay at the hotel.’
    ‘Did you see him the next day? The day of the murder?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t around when I turned up for my shift, so I thought he’d got the first bus home, that we’d missed each other.’ She looked fiercely at Ashworth. ‘He probably wasn’t even in the hotel when the woman died.’
    ‘You didn’t ask him? Later, after the woman’s body was found, you didn’t ask if he’d been there?’
    ‘No!’ she said. ‘How could I? That would have been like accusing him of murder!’
    After her outburst, they sat again in silence. In the garden a red squirrel balanced on a branch of one of the mature trees that lined the road. A clock in another room chimed the half hour. Time was moving on, and Connie and Alice still hadn’t been found. Ashworth found himself distracted, realized he’d lost the focus of the interview.
    ‘Greenhough,’ he said. ‘That estate not far from here. Land ripe for development, I’d have thought. Did you never try to get hold of that, Mr Shaw?’
    Shaw looked at him as if he were mad. ‘What’s that got to do with this?’
    ‘Probably nothing.’ Another bee in Vera Stanhope’s bonnet. ‘But just humour me, eh?’
    ‘I nearly bought it at one time,’ Shaw said. ‘Christopher Eliot seemed close to settling. But in the end the rest of the family wouldn’t agree.’ He stared out of the window. ‘If I’d got that, we’d have been set up for life. Fifty executive homes. Danny would have had everything he’d wanted then.’
    ‘I’d like to see Danny’s room,’ Ashworth said. ‘Would you mind?’
    ‘The police have already been in,’ Karen said angrily. ‘They were there for hours, going through his things. He’d have hated that. I was never allowed in there, not even to change his sheets.’
    ‘I know. And I won’t disturb anything.’
    She stood up and he followed her, expecting to be led upstairs. Instead they went along the corridor and into the ground-floor extension. Danny’s space was almost like a self-contained flat, its own shower room, its own outside door.
    ‘We built this when he was thirteen,’ Karen said. ‘When we still had the cash. Derek’s idea. A place he could have his friends to stay without disturbing us.’
    Spoilt brat , Joe thought. Most kids would give their eye-teeth for a place like this, and he still wasn’t happy.
    The room was