The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

laugh at us.’
    ‘Billy will place her at the scene. She’s admitted to that. And her fingerprints will be all over the knife.’ Joe was wondering how he could tactfully tell Vera that she’d have to step back from this one. ‘Most cases, that would be enough.’
    She stopped in her tracks and threw him a vicious look. ‘Are you telling me how to do my job, Sergeant Ashworth? Think you could do it better, do you? Looking to move a couple of rungs up the ladder, at my expense?’
    ‘I think you should just be aware that you’re taking this personally. Your judgement could be clouded.’
    Then he found Vera’s face right in his. So close he could only see her eyes, bloodshot and furious. ‘I take every killing on my patch personally , Sergeant Ashworth. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be doing my job right.’
    Joe took a pace backwards and said nothing. He wasn’t paid enough to stand up to Vera Stanhope when she was in one of her strops. Let one of the suits in HQ sort her out.
    Instead, he nodded again towards the dining room. ‘They haven’t started the pudding yet. We’ve got time to check with Billy before we talk to them. We’ve been invited to have coffee with them there when they’ve finished eating.’
    ‘Have we now! How civilized.’
    When they arrived at the glass room, the crime-scene manager Billy Wainwright was on the balcony with Keating, the pathologist. They’d rigged up powerful lights, so that Ferdinand was floodlit. His skin looked white and the blood looked black. It was hard to see the good-looking charmer Joanna had described. Vera called Billy out into the corridor.
    ‘How’s the wife, Billy?’ A standing joke. Well, more a routine greeting now, and perhaps not so much of a joke. Billy was a serial adulterer and seemed proud of the reputation. He ignored her. ‘What happened here, Billy?’ Vera went on. ‘Did he sit on the balcony and wait to be stabbed to death? Or was he moved afterwards? I mean, this all seems madness to me.’
    ‘Could he have been hiding out there?’ Billy asked. ‘You wouldn’t see him from just inside the door, despite all the glass.’
    ‘Who’d he be hiding from?’ It was Vera at her most sceptical. ‘He asked Joanna to meet him. He wasn’t a bairn playing hide-and-seek.’
    ‘Mr Keating thinks Ferdinand was killed where he was found,’ Billy said. ‘But he won’t commit himself until the post-mortem.’
    ‘Is there anything either of you will commit yourselves to?’
    ‘Aye. That knife they retrieved from the woman you’ve sent off to Kimmerston for questioning . . .’
    ‘What about it? Don’t stand there grinning and playing games with me, Billy Wainwright. Just spit it out.’
    ‘It wasn’t the murder weapon. Nothing like. We’re looking for something about the same length and width, but the murder weapon had a serrated blade.’

Chapter Seven
    Vera threw a triumphant grin to Joe and turned on her heels. As he hurried after the shadow thrown by the red light, she turned and called back to him, ‘You’d best organize a search of the residents’ rooms. God knows where we’re going to get the manpower for that this evening. Our mistake. We shouldn’t have taken it for granted that Joanna Tobin was the murderer.’
    She spoke about our mistake, but it seemed to Joe that she was blaming him for the assumption that Joanna had been Tony Ferdinand’s killer. She swept on and down the grand staircase so quickly that Joe almost had to run to catch up with her. Vera could move very quickly when she wanted to, even though she was so unfit.
    ‘Where are we going?’ he asked. ‘There’s no rush. They won’t have started coffee yet.’
    ‘We’re looking for knives, Joey-boy. Or rather we’re looking for a place where knives might once have been. The absence of knives. Both the one that Joanna Tobin was wandering around the corridor with, and that’s now safely on its way to the lab. And the other one, that killed Tony Ferdinand. Where do you think we’re going?’ She arrived at the kitchen before he had the chance to answer.
    The room was much as it had been when Joe had looked in earlier, though the trays of desserts had disappeared. Alex Barton was pouring coffee from a filter machine into pots.
    I should have checked about the knife when I was here before. Joe was feeling foolish, knew this was a mistake Vera would never have made . But I thought Joanna was the killer. I thought there was no urgency.
    ‘If you