The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

about anybody with a posh voice and a fancy degree. I didn’t have either of those things, though. I was a working-class girl from Essex, so he treated me okay.’
    And perhaps that was why he was so encouraging to Lenny Thomas, and felt it was okay to ridicule Nina Backworth, a well-brought-up graduate with supportive parents.
    ‘He was quite a sad man,’ Sally went on. ‘A lonely man, despite his need to be the centre of attention. Six months ago he was mugged in the street outside college and he ended up in hospital for a couple of days. Nobody visited him except me.’
    Vera replaced the receiver and felt almost cheerful. If she were in hospital, she’d have visitors: Joanna and Jack, Joe and Holly and Charlie. They’d bring her grapes and make her laugh.
    She’d listened to ten minutes of the radio news when her phone rang again. Holly. ‘Are you okay to drive?’
    ‘Aye, of course.’ Implying that she was sober as a judge every evening.
    ‘I think you’d better get over here. Your mate Jack’s turned up and is shooting his mouth off. Throwing his weight about. If you don’t sort it out, someone will phone 999 and he’ll end up in the cells overnight.’
    ‘Tell them that I’m on my way.’
    She scraped enough ice off the windscreen to give her a hole to peer through, and then switched the heater up full, to blast away the rest. By the time she hit the road to the coast she could see where she was going. Approaching the Writers’ House she could make out the reflection of the moon on the sea. There was no sign of Jack’s van in the car park, but maybe he’d hidden it in the lane somewhere and come down on foot. He’d go in for that sort of drama.
    Holly was waiting for her in the lobby. The rest of the house was quiet.
    ‘I’m really sorry to have called you out.’ She seemed mortified because she hadn’t managed the situation herself. ‘I probably overreacted. It’s sorted now, I think. But your neighbour was furious, and I couldn’t get him to listen to reason.’ With the last sentence she seemed to shift the blame, to imply somehow that it was Vera’s fault.
    ‘Aye, well, it was never one of Jack’s skills, seeing reason. Has he gone home then?’ Vera wondered if she’d passed him, but she could remember seeing no other cars driving up the lane.
    ‘No, he’s on the terrace with Joanna and Giles Rickard.’
    ‘Is that a good idea?’ Though Vera couldn’t see Jack having a go at Rickard. Not physically. The man was too old and frail, and Jack was too sentimental to take on a lesser opponent. Tilting at windmills was his thing.
    ‘Joanna took them both out there. She seemed to know what she was doing.’
    Vera saw that Holly had been shaken by the episode, by Jack bursting into the dinner and letting rip. She hadn’t felt able to summon the authority to control the situation. Certainly she wouldn’t have the strength of personality to stop Joanna doing just what she wanted.
    ‘Where are the rest of the crowd?’
    ‘In the lounge,’ Holly said. ‘They were reading out their work after dinner. Some of them felt a bit cheated, I think, that they hadn’t had the chance to do that, so they’ve taken their coffee and drinks in there to carry on.’ She paused and added in a desperate attempt for approval, ‘I was getting on very well with Nina Backworth.’
    ‘I’m sure you were, pet. Kindred spirits.’ Vera turned away and went outside. She walked round the house, as she had on her first visit, until she reached the terrace. The curtains in the drawing room had been closed and the only light to the terrace came from a candle on the wrought-iron table where the three people were sitting. There was not a trace of breeze and the flame didn’t move. Joanna, Jack and Rickard sat staring at each other. Rickard was wearing a big, black overcoat and a scarf. Joanna had wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, but still, Vera thought, she must have been freezing.
    ‘What’s going on here, then?’ As soon as the words were out, Vera realized she sounded like a cartoon constable in a kids’ TV show, and she added, ‘Trying to raise the dead? Looks like some kind of seance.’
    She pulled up a chair and joined them. In the house there was the sound of muted laughter, but outside there was silence.
    ‘What were you playing at, Jack man?’
    There was no response. It was as if they were all frozen. In the end it was Joanna who answered.
    ‘He got this daft idea into his head