The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

the space. Especially in the dark, with no views from the windows, he’d lost all sense of direction, of the way the house was laid out. He presumed the big double doors faced east towards the sea. He wandered around the ground floor, peering into empty rooms. It was a large house with the feel of a country hotel, and too plush for a college. There were dark wooden floors and the furniture was large and looked comfortable. The smell of flowers and furniture polish. In one room the chairs had been pulled into a semicircle facing a whiteboard, which still contained a list of underlined headings: C rime scene? Weapon? Suspects? A strange parody of the board they’d soon be looking at in the incident room back at the station. On the lecturer’s table there was a pile of handouts. He glanced down briefly. They seemed to contain a book list. The sheet was headed North Farm Press .
    He realized that there were books everywhere. They were piled on coffee tables and on the arms of chairs in the room with the whiteboard. One large room looked just like the public library in his village. There were even books in the small bar and the public lavatories. Joe wondered what his wife would make of it. She’d recently joined a book group, but he thought the attraction was more about a night out with her mates, giggling over the Pinot Grigio and nosing into someone else’s home, than a serious study of literature.
    He opened the door into a large and well-equipped kitchen. A mix of industrial catering and farmhouse traditional. An Aga and a stainless-steel range cooker. A big scrubbed pine table and gleaming worktops. On one of the benches desserts had already been placed in fancy glass bowls on two big trays and covered with tea towels. Some sort of mousse, he thought, lifting the corner of the cloth. Lemon or orange with a raspberry sauce. He felt hungry and wished he’d stopped to eat his birthday cake. A big pan was still bubbling on the slow plate of the Aga. It smelled of beef and wine, herbs and garlic.
    A swing door on the opposite wall opened, letting in the murmur of voices from the dining room beyond and a skinny dark man.
    ‘Who are you?’ The man stopped in his tracks – startled, it seemed, by the intruder into his territory.
    ‘DS Ashworth. And you?’
    ‘Alex Barton. Director, cook and bottle-washer. Murder doesn’t seem to have dulled their appetites. They want more casserole.’ He took a set of oven gloves and lifted the pan onto the table, before shutting the lid of the Aga. His face was flushed and Ashworth thought he’d been drinking. ‘Can I help you?’
    Make sure there’s some of that stew left by the end of the evening. ‘Not at the moment. Just getting a feel for the lie of the land. That okay with you?’
    Alex shrugged. ‘Sure. Make yourself at home.’
    ‘We’ll need to talk to your guests when they’ve finished dinner. And to you, of course. Can you make sure nobody leaves?’
    ‘Of course. Why don’t you join us for coffee? In about half an hour.’
    He gave a sardonic little wave, before picking up the pan and disappearing again through the swing door. Ashworth was left with a tantalizing glimpse of the room beyond, candlelight throwing shadows on the faces of the diners.
    He left the kitchen and found himself back at the place where he’d first come into the house, the back door that led into the car park. Vera was there with Joanna. They were waiting for one of the local cops to bring a police car to the door. Joanna was now dressed in clothes that Vera had retrieved from her room – jeans and hand-knitted sweater – and seemed unusually quiet and passive. Vera helped her carefully into the vehicle and gave her shoulder a little pat. They watched the lights disappear up the lane.
    ‘What do you think?’ Joe said. ‘Did she do it?’
    ‘I don’t see that she had any motive. She claims Ferdinand was a lechy old goat. But she’ll have dealt with a few of those in her time, without resorting to stabbing them in the belly.’ But really , Vera thought, how well do I know her?
    Joe nodded in the direction of the dining room. ‘They say Joanna was unbalanced.’
    ‘Eh, pet, they all seem like a bunch of loonies to me, but I’m not accusing them of murder.’ She paused. ‘Billy Wainwright’s taking a look at the scene now. Let’s see what he comes up with before we come to a decision, eh? As it stands, I don’t see we have enough to charge her with anyway. The CPS would