The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

he’s scared. What could a big man like him be frightened of?
    When Joe got home the kids were ready for bed, but still up and waiting for him. Sal had put on a DVD for the big ones and she was sitting beside them, feeding the baby. They all looked up when he came in, but none of the children seemed excited to see him. They were drowsy after their baths and their attention was on the screen. A cartoon about giant insects. He was pleased to find the house calm, but oddly disappointed all the same.
    ‘I ate with the kids,’ Sal said. ‘I wasn’t sure what time you’d be home.’
    Her voice was flat and he couldn’t tell if she was apologising or if it was a complaint.
    ‘No problem. I’ll get something when they’re in bed.’ He scooped up the middle child, the boy, and put him on his knee. His thumb was in his mouth and he was almost asleep.
    I need to spend more time with them. When the investigation’s over . . . All evening – with the kids, and later eating scrambled eggs on a tray, with Sal sitting next to him – Joe felt that he was a peeping Tom, snooping on his own family. It was as if he was in the garden, peering in through the window. He wasn’t part of it at all.
    Sal went to bed early, but he said he’d stay up for a bit. He was all wired up and he’d only keep her awake too.
    ‘You drink too much coffee.’ Her only comment, but he could tell she was hurt. He heard her upstairs, her footsteps on the bedroom floor, the flush of the toilet. Every sound a reproach.
    He’d been reading Miranda Barton’s book Cruel Women and finding it heavy going. Too many words that he didn’t understand. Not very much happening. It was about a single mother making her way in London. The first chapter described the woman giving birth and he thought she made a lot of fuss about something that Sal took in her stride. The rest of the novel followed her encounters with work colleagues and lovers. Even the sex scenes were boring.
    It was eleven o’clock, but there was only one chapter left. Joe read on; he wanted to be sure Sal was fast asleep before he went up. In this scene Samantha, the businesswoman central character, had just been rejected by a lover. The book ended with Samantha slumped on the floor. The conclusion was ambiguous. Perhaps she’d committed suicide or perhaps she was just sleeping. To Joe, that felt like cheating.
    But despite that, Joe reread the final chapter, making sure he didn’t skip a word. Not because the story held his attention – he couldn’t, for a moment, believe in Samantha or her desperation – but because the setting of the final scene was so familiar. The encounter took place in the home of a friend, in a conservatory. The arrangement of the furniture and the plants, the colour of the new rug on the floor, the newspaper on the table, all these matched exactly the room in which Miranda had found Tony Ferdinand’s body. And the position of Ferdinand’s body, in a corner, had mirrored that of the fictional Samantha. Once again, it seemed, a scene from a story had been brought to life.
    Joe’s first impulse was to phone Vera Stanhope. Other detectives saw intricate complications in a case as distractions or put them down to coincidence. Vera was excited by them. She hated things to be too easy. Where was the challenge in that? Then he decided there was no rush. Let his boss have her beauty sleep. The notion of ‘Vera’ and ‘beauty’ in the same thought made him smile, and he was still smiling when he went upstairs. When he climbed into bed beside Sal and felt how warm and soft she was, he no longer felt like a stranger in his own house.

Chapter Thirty-Six
    ‘Of course I knew the book was important,’ Vera said. ‘That’s why I took it from Miranda’s cottage.’ She didn’t care if Joe believed her or not. His description of the final chapter of Cruel Women was firing sparks in her brain. Confusing sparks. She’d thought she was groping towards a solution. Did this new information confirm her theory or would she have to think again? They were in Hector’s Land Rover, breaking all the rules about officers using their own vehicles, but she had plans for later in the day and didn’t want to be tied to a pool car.
    She looked at Joe, expecting him to challenge her, but he let the comment go. He probably realized she’d have got round to reading Miranda’s book in the end. She changed into four-wheel drive to go down a steep bank. In the night there’d