The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

he’d blagged coffee and a slice of homemade cake from Alex Barton and was sitting in the lobby, the front of his jacket covered in crumbs, reading a copy of the Sun .
    ‘That Alex seems a nice enough lad,’ Charlie said, nodding in the direction of the kitchen.
    ‘Eh, Charlie, man, you’d like anyone who fed you.’ Sometimes Vera despaired of Charlie. It wasn’t that he was stupid. Not really. Just unobservant, with the judgement of a gnat.
    Now they were back in the chapel. They’d shut the door against the cold and Vera thought if she didn’t get some fresh air soon, she’d throw a fit. In the house there had been cooking smells coming from the kitchen and she tried to remember if there was a decent pub along this part of the coast, somewhere they could get a bar meal for lunch and maybe a pint. Though perhaps it would be simpler just to stay here. Alex Barton was a skilful chef. Her mind began to wander. She thought it was an odd existence for a young man like Barton: to be locked up in this house with a load of middle-aged arty types, the only real company a mother who seemed to pine for a more glamorous past.
    She thought suddenly that Alex was a bit like Giles Rickard, who had also spent much of his adult life with his mother. Until he came to his senses: Really I couldn’t continue living in the country with my mother and her incontinent dogs.
    And like me. I spent my whole life in my parent’s shadow. Hector would have liked a son to create in his own image. Someone with a passion for guns and birds of prey and breaking the law. Instead, he got a daughter with a mind of her own.
    Then she realized that Charlie and Joe were staring at her and she snapped her attention back to the present.
    ‘So what have you got for us then, Charlie? What have you and the lovely Holly conjured up between you?’
    ‘I don’t know what Holly’s been up to,’ Charlie said. ‘I think she was hoping to track down Lenny Thomas’s ex, see if there was any history of domestic violence. I’ve been on the phone to an old mate of mine who’s a DS in the service in Cumbria. He remembered Mark Winterton.’
    ‘Did he now? And what did he come up with?’
    ‘Not a lot,’ Charlie said. ‘My mate described him as one of the quiet ones. Regular church-goer. You know the sort. A good enough boss and a stickler for procedure. Management loved him. He was a bit tight with his money apparently. Never first in the queue when it came to getting in a round. And you had to get him in a corner and rattle him, to get him to shell out for the tea fund.’
    ‘So respected, but not popular.’ Vera thought it wasn’t a bad thing to have an officer like that in the team. Someone who wasn’t going to play to the gallery.
    ‘Aye, though there was a lot of sympathy when his daughter died.’
    ‘What happened?’ Vera looked up sharply.
    ‘She got mixed up with the wrong crowd at uni apparently, ended up taking a heroin overdose. The coroner couldn’t decide if it was suicide or an accident.’
    ‘But what was the word on the street?’
    ‘Uh?’
    ‘What did your DS think had happened? Winterton’s colleagues must have had an opinion.’ She thought it would have been the talk of the station for weeks. There’d be sympathy, of course, but also malicious gossip maybe. A secret satisfaction that a God-botherer who’d given them stick over their expenses had a daughter who’d gone off the rails.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Charlie seemed confused. ‘My mate didn’t say.’
    ‘Well, ask him! If he’s based in Carlisle, it’s not that far away. An hour down the A69. Go and see him and buy him a pint.’
    ‘Aye, okay.’ Charlie brightened.
    ‘Where was the lass at university?’ Vera asked suddenly.
    ‘I don’t know!’ Now he was feeling got at. ‘Does it matter?’
    ‘It might explain what Winterton’s doing here,’ she said. ‘I mean if she was at Newcastle or Northumbria when she died. The place might provide an emotional pull for him.’ Or she might have been at St Ursula’s. That would make an interesting connection between the victim and the retired cop. She looked up at two sceptical faces. ‘Otherwise, what the hell is he doing in this place? He’s not much of a writer, so he didn’t get a bursary. But Charlie said he’s tight with his money. It doesn’t hang together.’
    ‘Perhaps he thought writing about his daughter’s death – putting it into a story – might help.’ Ashworth spoke for the