The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

February, foggy. He would have been very badly hurt, but one of our office staff came along and frightened the guy away.’
    ‘It was definitely a man?’
    ‘Must have been, mustn’t it?’ Sally looked at Vera strangely. ‘How often do you get female muggers?’
    ‘Yeah.’ But Vera was lost in thought. ‘Yeah, of course.’ It was beginning to get cold and she pulled her coat around her. ‘Did you know Miranda Barton? She worked in the library here before she became a full-time writer.’
    ‘No, that was before I started.’
    ‘An odd coincidence.’ Vera could have been talking to herself. ‘Both victims connected to St Ursula’s.’
    ‘But surely it must be a coincidence,’ Sally said. ‘It’s years since Miranda worked here.’
    ‘Aye.’ But Vera wasn’t convinced. ‘There must have been talk about them, even when you started here. Tony and Miranda. Him turning her into a star overnight. Like a kind of fairy story. What was it with the two of them? And what held them together after all this time? What persuaded him north, to do her a favour by being a tutor in her house in the wilds?’
    ‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I try not to listen to departmental gossip.’
    ‘An affair, do you think?’
    ‘Maybe, but Tony was never romantic, even with women he took to bed.’
    A group of students, laughing and teasing, crossed the square in front of them. They seemed not to notice the two middle-aged women sitting on a bench.
    ‘Did Miranda ever come back to St Ursula’s?’ Vera asked.
    ‘Occasionally. Tony would take her out to lunch. He never invited her to the SCR or to any of the college dinners.’
    ‘Like he was ashamed of her?’
    ‘Perhaps.’ Sally stood up. ‘But really I’m not prepared to speculate. I didn’t know enough about the pair of them to do so. Now I’m sorry, Inspector, but I have to go back to work. I’ve got a meeting this evening and I need to prepare.’
    ‘Is there anyone in the college who might remember Miranda?’ Vera got to her feet too. She felt that the encounter had been unsatisfactory. She’d arranged a meeting with an admin officer to look at college records, and that might prove more fruitful, but so far it had been a long train journey for so little.
    ‘Jonathan Barnes, our senior librarian, has been there for years. You might talk to him.’
    St Ursula’s library was housed in a new building behind the college and hidden from the square. Barnes was a small, round man with a huge belly. He made coffee for Vera in his office and he, it seemed, had no qualms about passing on gossip.
    ‘Of course I remember Miranda. She was rather glamorous at that time. All shiny make-up and big hair. We knew she had ambitions as a writer. The day she found a publisher she brought in champagne. She thought it would change her life. Unfortunately the book sank without trace.’
    ‘Until Tony Ferdinand wrote an article about it.’ Vera sipped her coffee.
    ‘That’s right! He must have seen something in the work that none of the rest of us recognized. He always had a knack of picking up on the mood of the reading public. It wasn’t that he created best-sellers. More that he could tell which books readers would like, if they came to them. That’s a little different, don’t you think?’
    Vera didn’t answer. She had other things on her mind.
    ‘Were Ferdinand and Miranda lovers?’ she asked.
    ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Really, I don’t think so. She had a baby by then, and no way was Tony going to be saddled with a child.’
    ‘Who was the baby’s father?’ Vera looked up at him. His face was round and, for an older man, it was remarkably smooth.
    ‘Miranda would never say. It was her one big secret. She always implied that it was someone grand in the publishing world, but I never believed that.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Oh, my dear, she would never have kept that to herself. I suspected the boy was the result of a rather sordid one-night stand and that was why she refused to speak of it.’
    It was clear that Barnes would have been prepared to talk to her for hours, but Vera had an appointment with a woman in HR to keep, and a boring trawl through college records in the hope of finding another connection between Miranda, Ferdinand and any of the other suspects in the case. She drank the rest of her coffee and left.
    Later Vera met up with a lad who’d worked with her until he’d got ambition and moved to the Met. They ended up in a pub behind King’s Cross,