The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

she began to understand the attraction of the genre. Nothing was more shocking than murder, yet the traditional structure of crime fiction provided a way of examining the subject with distance and grace. The idea that she might create her own detective story had grown slowly and insidiously all day, but by mid-afternoon she could think of nothing else. She felt as excited as she had as a new graduate, the ideas buzzing in her head, the fingers twitching to hold a pen. The exercise she’d set for the students was that they should choose a place in the house or garden as a setting for a crime scene. They should describe it, and use the description as a jumping-off point for their story. A good discipline: to make the scene real for the author and for the reader. Nina thought now that it would be a sensible way for her to get started too.
    She prowled through the house looking for a setting for her piece. Nothing indoors sparked her imagination. The house was quiet. From the kitchen she heard the sound of cooking and the door banged as Mark Winterton returned from his interview with the good-looking sergeant in the chapel, but nobody else was about.
    She fetched her coat from upstairs and went outside. The police officers on the doors had gone and she slipped through the back door and into the car park. The light had almost disappeared and the mist had returned like a fine drizzle on her skin. On the terrace the wrought-iron furniture appeared ghostly and insubstantial, a distorted memory of warm summer days. Water dripped through the ornate holes cut into the tables, and the chairs were tipped forward to allow rain to drain away. A lamp had been switched on in the drawing room beyond the glass, but nobody was inside. A fire had been lit in the big grate.
    Nina imagined this as her crime scene. The terrace designed for use in sunshine, now gloomy on a grey October afternoon. One of the white chairs set upright and occupied by her victim, the moisture like pearls on her hair and skin. Nina dried a chair with a tissue and sat down, taking the place of the victim. Who would it be? Important, surely, to get inside the head of the person who’d been murdered, even if he or she were already dead when the story started. She , Nina decided. Her victim would be a woman, but someone quite different from herself.
    Her concentration was broken by a sound from inside the drawing room. Raised voices. She turned to look, but from where she was sitting she couldn’t see them. Nor could they see her.
    ‘Really, Mother, you have to be careful.’ That was Alex Barton. Alex the son, who must have left the dinner preparations for a while. Nina supposed she should make herself known. There was something shabby about sitting here in the fading light eavesdropping on the conversation inside. But she didn’t move. Writers were like parasites, preying on other people’s stress and misery. Objective observers like spies or detectives.
    Except I’m not objective, Nina thought. I don’t like Miranda. I don’t know about her son. He seems harmless enough, but I certainly don’t like her.
    The boy continued to speak, sounding concerned and exasperated at the same time. ‘Why don’t we just cancel the rest of the course?’
    ‘We can’t do that!’ His mother’s voice was sharp. ‘We’d have to give them a refund, and we can’t afford to throw money away. You know how tough things are at the moment. Besides . . .’
    ‘Besides, what?’
    ‘I’d rather have the investigation taking place here, where we can keep an eye on what’s going on. If we send everyone home we won’t know what’s happening.’
    ‘I don’t want to know!’ Alex said. ‘I want to forget all about Tony Ferdinand. You don’t know how pleased I am that he won’t be part of our lives from now on.’
    ‘You should be careful.’ The mother repeated her son’s words, so that it sounded like a mantra. ‘You don’t want people to think you’re pleased he’s dead.’
    ‘Of course I’m pleased!’ The words were high-pitched and childish. ‘Given the chance, I’d dance on his grave.’
    The spite in his voice took Nina back to St Ursula’s, to one of the dreaded seminars. She’d heard the same note in her own voice that afternoon in London. The afternoon she’d described to Inspector Stanhope, when for once she hadn’t been the object of the group’s criticism. When the relief of someone else bearing the brunt of the bullying had caused Nina to