The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

off it, Inspector! How many of the other residents have a criminal record and speak like Lenny does? I bet you’re not speaking to everyone else’s partner.’
    Vera was about to snap back, but then she thought of the summary she’d heard of Lenny’s background at the morning briefings. ‘Sometimes the police make assumptions,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t always mean that they’re right. So why don’t you put us straight?’
    Helen didn’t reply immediately. It seemed she needed time to think about her answer. ‘Would you like tea? Coffee?’
    They shook their heads.
    ‘Lenny is a good man,’ Helen said. ‘A romantic and a dreamer, but basically a good man.’
    ‘Is that why you divorced? Because you couldn’t live with his dreams?’
    ‘That was why I had an affair, Inspector.’ The retort was immediate. ‘I needed a man who lived in the present and not in the future. When he was made redundant from Banks, Lenny was full of wild plans and I was just concerned about paying the mortgage. My lover was stable, reliable, but very boring, and I soon got rid of him. The divorce was Lenny’s idea. He’d thought I was perfect, and he couldn’t forgive me for spoiling the image.’ She paused. ‘We’re still good friends. We have a son, Daniel, and we see each other often. Sometimes I wonder . . .’
    ‘. . . if you’ll get back together?’ Vera completed the sentence.
    ‘Yeah!’ She smiled. ‘Daft, isn’t it?’
    ‘How long were you married?’ Joe asked. Vera thought he was genuinely interested and wondered if he’d been having dreams of his own.
    ‘More than fifteen years. I’d known Lenny when we were still at school, though. He was the class clown, desperate to please. I went away to college and he got into trouble. Nothing serious. One of the Blyth hard men was pulling his strings, made him believe he could make easy money. More daft dreams. I met Lenny again when he’d just come out of prison, at a wedding of an old school friend. He made me laugh.’
    ‘And he adored you,’ Vera said. She thought of Jack, who adored Joanna, and wondered again if somewhere there was a lover in the background in that relationship too. Someone secret and unlikely.
    ‘Aye, maybe he did.’ Helen gave a little laugh.
    ‘It’s hard to live up to, that sort of adoration.’
    ‘It was very good for me.’ Helen became serious. Somewhere down the corridor a baby was crying. She listened for a moment and seemed to decide that there was nothing wrong. ‘I’d been a terribly shy child. Bright enough, but not willing to stand out or give an opinion. Lenny gave me the confidence to take more exams and try for promotion. He always believed in me, but somehow I could never quite believe in him.’
    ‘In his dreams?’ Vera prompted.
    ‘Aye, in the dreams.’
    ‘How long had he wanted to be a writer?’ The baby had stopped crying. Just outside the office there was a conversation between two mothers.
    ‘Since we got together,’ Helen said. ‘He’d got some education in prison and the teacher had encouraged him. Sometimes he’d read out his stuff and I thought it was good too, but what would I know? I did know that we had a child, and I wanted more for Daniel than Lenny or I had had growing up, and Lenny didn’t seem to mind working on the open-cast. He made friends there and the money was more than he’d ever had before. He seemed happy enough.’
    ‘Then he got the back trouble?’
    ‘Aye, folk make fun of back pain, as if it’s something you make up to fool the doctors, but Lenny was in agony.’ Again Helen was distracted for a moment by a noise outside. This time it came from a group of older children singing nursery rhymes. ‘At first I encouraged his writing. I thought it would take his mind off the pain. Then his back got better, and I thought he was ready to find another real job. It wasn’t so much the money. By then I was earning enough to keep us. I didn’t want Daniel seeing a dad who sat around the house doing nothing all day. But all Lenny could talk about were the stories, how he was going to get a publisher and what he’d buy for us when he was rich and famous.’
    ‘The man who died at the Writers’ House,’ Vera said. ‘He was a bit of a celebrity. On the telly all the time talking about books. Apparently he’d told Lenny that his work was good enough to get published. He’d offered to put him in touch with a publisher. Told him he had a good chance of seeing his books