The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

chapel for their chat .
    ‘You stay where you are, Mr Rickard,’ Vera said. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to postpone our little meeting. I need a few words with another of the guests first, and it’s a bit more urgent.’ She turned to Nina. ‘If you wouldn’t mind coming with us, Ms Backworth. We’ve just got a few more questions.’
    It was the last thing Nina had been expecting. She began to blush. She followed Vera out of the dining room, aware that everyone was staring at her. She felt like a girl pulled out in front of a school assembly for a misdemeanour she hadn’t realized she’d committed.
    In the chapel the lamps were lit because the narrow windows let in so little daylight. The table and chairs were as they’d previously been, at the head of the nave, like a stageset in a theatre. The inspector lowered herself into one of the seats and gestured Nina to take another. Nina was aware of Joe Ashworth leaning against the bare wall as she walked in, but from where she sat he was outside her line of view.
    ‘Can I help you, Inspector?’ Nina knew she could come across as haughty. She thought that she and Joanna had a similar defence against the world: they became hard and brittle. Confrontational. ‘I’ve already given you a very full statement.’
    ‘So you did.’ Vera shut her eyes for a moment. It was as if she was rerunning the previous interview in her head. She opened them suddenly. ‘But other facts have since come to light.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘Mr Ferdinand died from knife wounds. He was stabbed repeatedly. It seemed odd to us from the start that he put up so little resistance. He was a tall man. Middle-aged, perhaps, but physically fit and, if someone came at him with a knife, you’d have thought he’d put up a bit of a fight.’ Vera paused. Nina saw that she was expected to comment, but what could she say? She pictured an intruder in the glass room, the damp heat and the plants, the knife and the blood, but still she could feel little sympathy for Ferdinand. So she remained silent.
    ‘Ferdinand didn’t fight back because he was drugged,’ Vera went on. ‘He’d hardly have been aware of what was happening. Maybe he was killed on the balcony because that was where he lost consciousness. He’d have been given the pills earlier in the day. During lunch perhaps. Or maybe Ferdinand fell asleep in one of the chairs in the glass room and the killer yanked him out and half-carried him outside. Thoughtful enough not to make a mess on the smart tiled floor. We probably won’t know, unless the murderer tells us.’
    ‘This is very interesting, Inspector,’ Nina said, ‘but I don’t understand what it has to do with me.’ And the first part of the statement at least was true. She did find the means of Tony Ferdinand’s death interesting. Could she work something similar into her story? All writers are parasites, she thought again.
    ‘It has everything to do with you, Ms Backworth.’ The detective’s voice seemed unnaturally clear, jerking Nina away from her fiction. ‘You take sleeping pills.’
    ‘Yes, I suffer from insomnia. My GP prescribes them.’
    ‘And your pills have the same chemical composition as the drug found in Ferdinand’s body, according to the toxicology report that we received from the pathologist this morning. He’d have taken them earlier in the day. As I say, they could have been added to his lunch or his coffee. You’ll know yourself that they don’t work immediately. You told me that you were sitting close to Professor Ferdinand that lunchtime.’
    There was a silence. Nina felt the mindless panic that had struck her when she’d woken that morning, the sense that her world had been invaded and that there was nothing she could do to control it. Then things started to come to life again. Her brain slipped back into gear.
    Her first impulse was to fight back, to protest about her personal belongings being searched, invoke her human rights, threaten an action for breach of privacy. She realized in time that such a response would be counter-productive. She had to present herself as a reasonable, intelligent woman. ‘I didn’t kill Tony Ferdinand,’ she said calmly. ‘I didn’t poison him and I didn’t stab him.’
    Vera flashed her a smile. ‘Aye, well, pet, no doubt you would say that. Even if you were the killer. Have you noticed if any of your pills have gone missing?’
    Nina pictured the brown plastic bottle, kept in her washbag.