The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

so she wouldn’t have far to go to get her train at the end of the night. They were drinking brown ale because the man was homesick and she wanted to keep him sweet. At the end of the evening she was a lot more sober than he was. One more bottle and he’d be singing ‘The Blaydon Races’ and applying for a transfer back north .
    But the trip to London had provided her with the information she wanted. Hurtling through the night in the carriage with exhausted businessmen and a couple of pissed housewives who’d spent the day Christmas shopping for themselves, she thought she knew what had happened in the Writers’ House. Now, she just had to prove it.

Chapter Thirty-Seven
    Nina Backworth took the Friday of the Writers’ House party as a day off work. She was tempted to throw a sickie, but in the end she played it straight, went to her head of department and explained.
    ‘Take a day’s compassionate leave,’ he’d said. He was old and tired and counting the days to retirement. He didn’t have to play games with the management. ‘You were there when the woman died, it’s not unreasonable that you’d want to pay your respects at her memorial service.’
    Memorial service made Nina think of a cold church and gloomy hymns. Chrissie’s plans for the event were a million miles away from that. The farmhouse had been full of preparations for days. She’d had her mother and a couple of the other women from the WI making floral decorations, great glowing balls of dahlias and chrysanthemums, berries and coloured leaves – very similar, Nina thought, to the flowers that had been in the Writers’ House on the evening of Miranda’s death. The flower arrangements were already loaded in a van hired for the occasion. ‘Alex wants a celebration for his mother,’ Chrissie said. ‘We have to respect that, don’t we?’
    Now, sitting in the kitchen at North Farm, Chrissie was as high as a child looking forward to a birthday party. She couldn’t sit still. Nina found the excitement distasteful and wished the evening was over, wished she’d spoken up against it when she’d had the chance.
    The present conversation was about clothes. ‘What will you wear, Nina? Not black. Really, darling, I know it’s your statement style, but please don’t wear black tonight. It’s so funereal.’
    Nina thought funereal might be appropriate, but to her relief Chrissie broke off to answer her mobile phone and she was saved the need for an immediate answer. It was the producer of the local BBC news programme, confirming that he’d send out a reporter and a cameraman. As soon as the call was over, though, Chrissie persisted. ‘What about that red frock? The one you wore to the launch of the novel. It makes you look stunning.’
    ‘I can’t wear that dress. I had it on the night Miranda died.’
    ‘That makes it rather suitable then, doesn’t it?’
    ‘No!’ Nina thought Chrissie must be mad, wondered if she’d already been drinking. ‘No, really. We’re not trying to re-create that night, are we? You’re not hoping for another murder?’
    ‘Of course not, darling! This is a party. A celebration.’
    Nina thought it was time to move back to her flat in town. She wasn’t made for communal living. This house in the country, with its shared meals and lack of privacy, was already starting to lose its attraction. She longed to be on her own. The possibility of an intruder suddenly seemed less threatening.
    Chrissie had arranged for a big taxi to pick up the contributors to the anthology and to take them back at the end of the event. She would have liked them to stay over in the Writers’ House, but Alex had refused to countenance that. He’d insisted that the party should start early in the evening, and that everyone should be away from the place by ten. As if, Chrissie said later to Nina, reporting back on the conversation, he was a sort of male Cinderella and would turn into a pumpkin at the strike of the clock at midnight.
    Nina had decided she would take her own car. She felt the need of an escape route. She allowed the van driven by Chrissie’s father, with Chrissie sitting beside him, to drive ahead of her, and was relieved when it disappeared from view and she felt at last that she was alone. She drove slowly, putting off the moment when she’d arrive and be drawn into discussions about canapés and the arrangement of chairs, when she’d have to fix a smile onto her lips and greet the other guests.
    She drove