The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

own. Stolen pleasures.
    He looked up at her again. ‘I wondered what it would be like to run down the path to the shore and run into the sea and keep on running until I drowned.’
    ‘Bloody cold,’ she said. ‘That’s what it would be like.’
    ‘I didn’t do it.’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘You had more sense.’
    ‘I came back round to the yard and I saw the door of the chapel closing.’
    ‘That would have been me,’ she said. Her voice comfortable. Ordinary. She thought he could do with more of the ordinary in his life.
    ‘Yes, it was you.’ He curled his legs under him again and sat there in silence. He didn’t object when Vera told him she’d like him to spend a few days in hospital. ‘Shock does weird things to us.’ Perhaps he was relieved after all to have an excuse to leave the house. When the hospital car came to collect him he was docile. He carried a small bag with a pair of pyjamas and a toothbrush inside it and reminded her of an obedient child.

Chapter Thirty-Three
    Joe Ashworth couldn’t get worked up over a dead cat. Or a dead bird. The inspector wanted him, immediately, to drive out there in the worst storm of the autumn, and for what? In these conditions it would be dangerous just getting to the end of the road.
    He explained all this to Vera Stanhope, keeping his voice reasonable. There was never any point in losing his temper with her. She liked it when she provoked a reaction. In the end he came up with a lie, ‘Anyway, I can’t drive. I’ve had a couple of drinks.’
    Even she couldn’t order him out after that.
    He wasn’t sure what had kept him at home, because he would have enjoyed the drama of the drive through the windy night, being Vera’s confidant and right at the heart of the case. That evening he would even have been glad of an excuse to get out of the house. The wind always made the children wild and the weather meant they’d been cooped up all day. Guilt, he thought. Nobody did guilt like good Catholics. Not that he had anything to feel guilty about, except a vague attraction to a female academic.
    All the same he did his penance: cleared the dishes after supper, pulled apart the squabbling children, took on bathtime single-handed, read each of the bedtime stories. When they were alone at last, he sat with his wife on the sofa, his arm around her shoulders, cuddling together like teenagers. Thought there was nobody in the world he would feel so at ease with. He couldn’t imagine Nina Backworth watching old episodes of The Simpsons and laughing with him at the same jokes. Later he took Sal to bed and they made love. Afterwards he lay awake, listening to her breathing, loving her with all his heart and soul and pushing away the feeling that there should be more to life than this.
    In the morning he was first in the incident room for the briefing. Guilt again. Maybe he should have responded to Vera’s call after all. Holly was there before the inspector too.
    ‘Did the boss phone you last night?’ he asked. He wouldn’t have put it past Vera to drag Holly out, after he’d refused to go.
    ‘No, why?’
    ‘She was out at the Writers’ House. Somebody had killed Miranda Barton’s cat, laid it out in the chapel, like a sacrifice, she said.’
    ‘Gross!’ Holly wrinkled her nose, as if she were there in the chapel with the smell of damp stones and dead cat in her nostrils.
    ‘Gross indeed.’ And there was Vera, breezy and energetic, as if she’d had twelve hours’ sleep, though she’d probably been up all night. Followed by Charlie, who looked as if he’d been up all night, though he’d probably fallen asleep in front of the television at nine o’clock and had been pretty well comatose until about half an hour before.
    Vera stood in front of the whiteboard and pinned up a photo of the animal, a knife in its belly and the guts exposed. ‘Now here’s the big question: has young Alex gone loop the loop and killed the poor beast himself, or is someone trying to scare the shit out of him? And if it’s the latter, why?’ She took another blown-up photo from her canvas bag and stuck it on the board too. ‘And if you’ve got a thing about cats, why kill a small, inoffensive bird too?’
    ‘It’s like someone’s sending us a sort of message,’ Holly said. ‘The apricots, the dead animals.’
    ‘And the hankie at the Miranda Barton scene,’ Vera said. ‘Don’t forget the hankie!’
    ‘But nothing left with Ferdinand’s body in the glass