The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

first time. He’d had a vacant look all morning and Vera hadn’t even been sure he’d been listening. She wondered if his wife had been giving him grief again. ‘I don’t know, a way of coming to terms with the loss.’
    ‘Do we know what he wrote about?’ Vera was remembering Joanna’s work. All these words, she thought. All I seem to be doing on this case is sit around talking. About words written by the suspects. Again she felt the need for fresh air and a longing to escape this house. She envied Charlie his excuse for a drive to Cumbria. But she was the boss after all. She could create her own excuse.
    Ashworth shook his head and Charlie looked blank.
    ‘What now then?’ Ashworth asked.
    ‘Charlie’s going to take Nina Backworth’s pills back to HQ and get them off to the lab. You and me are going out for lunch. Then if Holly has found out where Lenny Thomas’s ex-wife’s living, we’ll pay her a visit.’
    ‘What about this place?’ Ashworth asked.
    Vera thought this place could be left to its own devices for a few hours, and really she didn’t care as long as she had a break from it. Then she had an idea. ‘Let’s get Holly over and ask her to have a chat with Mark Winterton. Two cops in the same mould, I’d say. She might get more out of him than I could. And we’ve kept her in the office for too long.’
    ‘What about going to Carlisle to chat to my mate?’ She could tell Charlie was pissed off because he hadn’t been invited to lunch.
    ‘That, Charlie, you do in your own time.’
    They had lunch in the pub in Craster, sitting upstairs so there was a view over a quiet sea. Crab sandwiches and smoked salmon from the smokery over the road. The day was still cold and clear and Vera felt like a truant. She’d got Joe Ashworth to drive and had spoken to Holly on the way. Lenny’s ex-wife worked in a nursery in Cramlington and she’d be expecting them at three.
    ‘I felt I couldn’t breathe in the Writers’ House,’ she said. She’d gone for a glass of dry white with the sandwiches. Beer at lunchtime sometimes made her sleepy. ‘And I couldn’t think straight. This is more like it.’
    ‘So you’ve cracked it then, have you?’ There were times when Joe could be facetious. ‘You know who killed the letchy old goat, and why?’
    ‘Eh, pet, I haven’t got a clue. But at least now I feel I’ve got a chance of working it all out.’
    The nursery was part of a Sure Start centre, and at first they went the wrong way and ended up with a group of pregnant women who were lying on the floor, doing breathing exercises. They reminded Vera of seals, hauled onto a beach, all round and sleek, gleaming in the sunshine. Vera had had a broody phase in her late thirties. There’d been a man then – the only man she could have contemplated living with – but he hadn’t thought the same way about her and nothing had come of it. Now she wasn’t sure she’d ever have felt the need to go through all this palaver.
    Helen Thomas was in the baby room. A couple of the children were so tiny that they were lying in cots, the rest were sitting with the carers on a brightly coloured rug, surrounded by plastic toys. Ashworth, always a sucker for bairns, squatted down to make silly noises at them.
    ‘Don’t get any ideas, Joe,’ Vera said, only partly joking. ‘Three is enough for anyone, and they get in the way of your work.’
    Lenny’s ex-wife called over to a colleague, ‘Take over here, will you, Gill. I’ll be in my office if you need me.’ Vera had been expecting their interviewee would be a nursery assistant, someone who changed nappies and wiped up sick, not this confident woman who seemed to be in charge.
    The office was small, but impressively tidy. Helen Thomas nodded for them to take the two chairs and perched on the edge of the desk. On the walls there were charts and rotas, and posters about healthy eating and the importance of play.
    ‘How can I help you? The officer who phoned didn’t say.’
    ‘It’s about Lenny Thomas. You were married to him?’ Vera found it hard to imagine this neat little woman in the same bed as the man she’d met at the Writers’ House.
    ‘Yes.’ There was a pause. ‘Is he in some sort of trouble?’
    ‘Probably not. You must have seen in the press that there was a murder at the Writers’ House up the coast. Lenny was one of the witnesses.’
    ‘Not a suspect then?’
    ‘Only in the same way as all the other residents are.’
    ‘Oh, come