The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

room,’ Joe said. ‘Why was that different?’
    ‘There was something left, though, wasn’t there?’ Joe thought he’d never seen Vera this hyper. She looked around at them and waved her arms. ‘Come on, people! Think about it!’
    ‘The knife,’ he said slowly. ‘We always thought the knife was left to throw us off the scent and implicate Joanna Tobin, but it could have been a sign or a message as well as that.’
    ‘So what’s going on here?’ Vera demanded. ‘And who’s behind it? Let’s have a few ideas. It doesn’t matter how daft they sound.’
    ‘Alex could have done it,’ Joe said slowly. ‘He has a car and had access to Nina’s address through the Writers’ House bookings. He’s not stupid and could have worked out where her spare key would be. We don’t know where he was the night before last. He could have been watching and waiting. He could have broken into her flat.’
    ‘Why would he do that, though?’ Holly asked.
    Joe thought she would have contradicted him whatever he’d said. Before he could think up a cogent reply, Charlie broke in: ‘Because he’s a loony, like the boss said. If he killed his own mother, why would he think twice about sticking a knife into a cat? Or having a thing about expensive fruit? He’s a cook, isn’t he, and it’s food. Sort of related.’ He paused. ‘And if we’re talking about crazies, does anyone know what Joanna Tobin was up to that night?’
    ‘If you carry on talking like that, Charlie, I’ll make sure you’re sent on the next diversity-awareness course.’
    Joe could tell that Charlie was about to make another flippant remark when he realized that Vera wasn’t joking.
    Another silence while she drummed her fingers on the desk and looked exasperated.
    ‘Lenny Thomas has a conviction for burglary,’ Holly said. Her voice was tentative. She remembered the inspector’s earlier pronouncements about jumping to conclusions. ‘He might have played the trick with the key.’
    ‘Lenny doesn’t have a car.’ Joe felt an irrational need to defend the man. Just because he’d sat in his flat and drunk his tea? Because his elderly neighbour liked him?
    ‘He has friends, though.’ Holly’s voice, bright and triumphant cut into Joe’s thoughts. ‘Friends who also have convictions for burglary.’
    ‘Stop behaving like a bunch of bairns.’ Vera could have been a long-suffering parent. ‘We’re all supposed to be on the same side here. If it comes to that, I dare say Winterton would know a thing or two about breaking into houses. We need to know where he was the night someone got into Nina’s place. And Chrissie Kerr, though I’m damned if I can come up with a motive for her. She’s on the periphery of the case too.’ She looked at them. ‘Good old-fashioned policing, eh? Let’s ask some questions, check out the movements of our suspects. The boring stuff that leads to convictions.’
    The boring stuff, Joe thought, that you’ve spent all your career avoiding.
    ‘What about Jack Devanney?’ he said, partly to spite her. ‘He wasn’t on our original list of suspects, but we’re all agreed that he could have been at the Writers’ House for the murders. Can we see him killing the cat and the bird, playing the stunt at Nina’s place?’
    ‘Oh, aye,’ Vera said. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past our Jack if he thought he was protecting Joanna. And in his mind the objects cluttering up the crime scenes might be all about distracting us. He could be devious if he wanted.’
    ‘So that leaves Rickard,’ Joe said. ‘The only one on the list that we’ve not discussed yet. Didn’t you go to see him yesterday?’
    ‘And he’s the only one we can dismiss.’ Vera wrote Rickard’s name on the whiteboard and put a cross beside it. ‘There’s no way he could have driven from Craster and got to the Writers’ House before me with enough time to set up the theatricals in the chapel. Even if he were fit, which he isn’t. He can hardly walk.’
    Joe was going to push the point, to ask what Vera had discussed with Rickard. Why had she gone to see him anyway? But then she looked at him and he kept his mouth shut. He’d ask her later when they were on their own.
    ‘Are you saying we can dismiss Rickard from the murders too?’ Holly looked up from her notebook. Kept her voice bland so that she wouldn’t incur Vera’s wrath by getting it wrong.
    ‘I don’t see how he could have done the stabbing,’ Vera said, ‘with the