The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

and sharp suits. ‘And have a word with a woman called Chrissie Kerr. She runs a small publishing company based not very far from here. According to the woman in charge, she left the Writers’ House before Ferdinand was killed, but she might have picked up on tensions or problems, and she’ll have background on the whole organization.
    ‘Charlie, I want you digging around into the background of Joanna Tobin. She’s my neighbour, and I need to keep a bit of a distance, so this is your responsibility and, anything you find, you let Joe know as well as me. Seems as if she might have been set up. Or is she the one who’s playing games? We know she has a history of psychiatric illness and, according to her partner, there was at least one serious suicide attempt. Her family comes from Bristol or somewhere in the West Country, and I think she lived for a while in France. Check for any overseas convictions.’ Vera stopped for breath and looked across the room towards her sergeant. ‘Joe, you were there last night. Anything I’ve missed?’
    He’d been sitting at the back, a biro in his hand, and she hadn’t even been sure he’d been listening. Maybe the squiggles on his notepad were doodles. From this distance it was hard to tell. Maybe he was remembering the delights of the night before, his very special birthday treat. But he answered immediately.
    ‘The people who run the place. Mother and son. The mother’s a professional writer and apparently she was a friend of the deceased.’ He glanced up at Vera to check that the information was accurate. She nodded. ‘Something about her response to the murder seems odd. She found the body and apparently screamed the place down, yet later over dinner she appeared completely composed. Certainly she ate everything on her plate.’
    ‘Nothing wrong with a middle-aged woman having a healthy appetite, even in a crisis,’ Vera put in and was rewarded with a laugh from her audience.
    ‘It says from Holly’s notes that the place gets some Arts Council funding,’ Joe said. ‘It might be worth checking how the finances of the place work. If there were some sort of scam and Ferdinand found out, that would be a motive. I don’t know how these things work, but he could have suspected that something dodgy was going on. And Ferdinand was a tall man. He wasn’t going to just stand there and allow himself to be stabbed. Maybe the mother and son worked together to kill him. Or one of them kept watch.’
    ‘Good thinking.’ There were times, Vera thought, when Joe Ashworth was a credit to her. Maybe occasionally she should tell him so.
    Paul Keating, the pathologist, was an Ulsterman. Straightforward and a little dour, he had a rugby player’s nose and a grown-up family. He conducted his post-mortems with respect and little fuss. Vera knew colleagues, even experienced colleagues, who hated being present at the post-mortem, but she’d never seen the logic in that. She was scared of people when they were alive and dangerous. At least the dead could do you no harm.
    ‘Why was there so much blood?’
    ‘The heart continued to pump and there was a gaping wound for it to escape from.’
    ‘Was he killed out on the balcony?’ This had troubled Vera from the beginning. There had been no sign of a struggle in the glass room. The place was like a rainforest, thick with tall plants, and none of the pots had been knocked over. Although Joanna had said the furniture had been arranged differently, it hadn’t been tipped up. Everything was orderly. But it had been a cold October afternoon, not the weather for sitting outside. Vera remembered Joanna’s description of Ferdinand’s habit of eavesdropping. Had the killer caught him on the balcony, listening in on the discussion below? Or had Ferdinand heard a previous conversation, something that might ultimately have led to his death?
    ‘I think he must have been. There’s no blood spatter in the room, but plenty outside.’
    ‘Ferdinand was a big man,’ Vera said. ‘Tall at least. You’d have thought he’d have put up a fight, but none of our witnesses have scratches or abrasions.’
    ‘That struck me too.’ Keating looked up from his work. ‘I looked for skin under the fingernails, but there was nothing.’
    ‘So why did he stand there and let someone take a knife to him, without a struggle?’
    ‘He’d have been sitting,’ Keating said. ‘As you said, he was a tall man. And the angle of the wounds show that he was