The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

married.’ He paused. ‘I recognized some of the details of her story.’
    ‘Rather gothic, I thought,’ Vera said. Ashworth was astounded. You’d have believed she dealt with books for a living. And how could she talk with such authority about a story she’d never read?
    ‘You’ve read it?’ Rickard too seemed astonished.
    ‘Don’t you think police officers can read, Mr Rickard? Just because I don’t go much for your kind of fiction, it doesn’t mean I don’t like a good story, especially when it has some basis in truth.’
    They stared at each other across the table.
    Vera spoke first. ‘I take it Joanna’s story did contain some element of truth? You’d know. After all, you were close to the parties concerned.’
    ‘I’m a friend of her ex-husband’s,’ Rickard admitted at last. ‘At least I was close to his family.’
    ‘I’ve heard Joanna’s version of events,’ Vera said. She seemed suddenly more cheerful. ‘Why don’t you give me yours?’
    ‘I knew Paul’s father very well,’ Rickard said. ‘We met at university. Oxford. Both reading English. We came from different backgrounds. Roy was a grammar-school boy and he had an eye for business even then. He spent the summer vacation working in his father’s print company. My family were landowners. Very little ready cash, but a big pile in the country. You know.’
    Ashworth didn’t know at all, but Vera nodded as if she understood exactly.
    Rickard continued, ‘What we had in common was a love of the English language. Roy’s passion was Dickens. I focused on the dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare and his successors. Though, in personal reading, my taste was less grand.’ He smiled at Vera. ‘I always took pleasure in the gothic, and in detective fiction too. Sherlock Holmes, of course, then I moved on to the Golden Age stories of the Thirties.’
    Ashworth was wondering what all this had to do with a murder investigation in Northumberland in the present, but Vera just nodded again as if she had all the time in the world.
    ‘When we graduated,’ Rickard said, ‘I retreated to the family home to write. There was just enough money that I never had to work for a living. Roy set up a publishing house. Rutherford Press. You might have heard of it. He became one of the most-established independent publishers in the country. In time Paul, his son, joined him. Paul was an ambitious man. He understood business, but he never understood books.’ Rickard paused and rubbed his left shoulder as if it was giving him pain. ‘One of the big multinationals put in a bid for Rutherford. Roy was against it, but Paul persuaded him. I found out later that Paul had been promised a lucrative post with the company, if the deal went ahead.’
    ‘So that was how he went to Paris,’ Vera said. ‘Taking his young bride with him.’
    ‘Yes, he was to head up the European operation. A poisoned chalice. I think they wanted him to fail. They’d fulfilled their commitment by giving him a leading role in the company, but they didn’t really want him.’ Rickard took a sip of water from the glass that had been put for him on the table. ‘I was living in Paris too then. I had the idea that I might write the great contemporary gothic novel, and really I couldn’t continue living in the country with my mother and her incontinent dogs. My income just about stretched to a flat in a not-very-fashionable district.’ He paused again. ‘Roy, Paul’s father, died. A heart attack. Or a broken heart.’
    ‘He felt that his son had betrayed him?’ Vera asked. Her voice was gentle now.
    Rickard seemed surprised. ‘No, nothing like that. He was proud that Paul was so driven. But he missed the business, the meetings with authors and the excitement of new scripts arriving every day. I suggested that he should set up on his own again, but he said he didn’t have the energy. Perhaps he was already ill.’ He stared through the window, lost in thoughts of his own.
    ‘So you’re in Paris,’ Vera said briskly. ‘You and Paul and Joanna. Did you see a lot of them?’
    ‘Yes, we met up at least once a week. Paul’s idea, not mine. I’d go to their grand apartment for dinner. A way to get the quality of wine I couldn’t afford on my meagre income. And I suppose I felt a responsibility for Paul after his father died. I never married, never had children. Roy had made me Paul’s godfather. From the beginning it was clear Paul’s