The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

Joe and Charlie approach over the shingle, and Billy waved at them. Closer still and they saw he was grinning.
    ‘What have you got?’ Joe asked the question. Charlie was wheezing.
    Billy moved to one side. Still Joe saw nothing unusual. There’d been a small rock-slide, a pile of boulders at the foot of the cliff. Water leached from the ground, a spring or a hidden stream, and ran across the sand to the sea. Joe imagined his bairns playing here, building dams, castles and moats.
    ‘The rock-fall’s not recent, is it?’ He was starting to lose patience. Billy was a great one for playing games. Practical jokes. ‘What am I looking for?’
    ‘Here!’ And in the shadow of the rock-slide there was a rusting outflow pipe, more than half a yard in diameter. ‘Once it would have carried the waste water from the house. They use mains drainage now, I guess.’ He shone a torch into the pipe, at an angle so that Ashworth could see inside. In the distance, an arm’s length from the cliff face, there was a glint of metal and something soft and dark.’
    ‘What is it? The knife?’
    ‘Definitely the knife. But something else. Clothing? I’ve done all I could in situ . I was just going to pull it out.’
    He spread a plastic sheet over the shingle beneath the outflow pipe and reached inside. First out was the knife. A black handle with a serrated blade.
    ‘Similar to the one in the kitchen up there,’ Joe Ashworth said. ‘The bread knife.’
    ‘Similar to knives you’d find in every kitchen in the county.’ Billy dropped it onto the plastic sheet.
    ‘The murder weapon?’
    ‘Not for me to say.’ Billy straightened for a moment. ‘You’d need to ask Mr Keating. But I’d bet my pension on it.’
    He lay on his stomach and reached in once again. This time it was harder to retrieve what was inside. It was a snugger fit and caught on the jagged edge of the pipe.
    ‘This might help you, though.’ He pulled the bundle free and allowed it to fall onto the sheet. ‘A waterproof jacket. Gore-Tex. Large. And I’d guess that those stains aren’t just salt water and rust.’
    ‘Blood.’ Ashworth squatted to get a closer look. He felt relief, the comfort of tangible evidence. Let Vera Stanhope get deep and meaningful with her witnesses. He preferred forensics. Fingerprints and DNA. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything on the jacket to identify the owner. Anything in the pocket?’
    Billy Wainwright turned the jacket over and felt with his gloved hands into the outside pockets: a tissue, a biro and thirty pence in change. ‘You should get DNA from the tissue. Though surely someone will recognize the coat anyway.’ He slipped his hand into the inside pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. A newspaper cutting. Or rather, Ashworth decided, a cutting from a colour magazine. Billy laid it carefully on the plastic and smoothed it out so they could read it. A picture of a younger Miranda Barton. The blonde hair shorter and more flattering, the body slimmer. The caption read: One Cruel Woman.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Looks like something from a women’s magazine,’ Billy said. ‘I don’t think it’s a Sunday supplement from a paper. An interview with the victim. I didn’t realize she was famous.’
    ‘She’s not.’ Ashworth stood up. ‘Not any more.’ It occurred to him that this was no coincidence. The piece had been put in the jacket pocket specially. The killer had expected it to be found. They’d thought they’d been clever finding the evidence, but all the time the murderer had been playing with them.
    ‘Look at this.’ Billy had moved his fingers to the neck of the jacket. A white label had been sewn inside. On it in permanent marker the words: For use by Writers’ House residents. Feel free to borrow in bad weather, but please return to cloakroom after use. ‘It belonged to the house,’ he said. ‘Not to any individual. I guess any of your suspects could have worn it. Let’s hope we can get DNA on the tissue.’ He sounded almost cheerful. Ashworth couldn’t bear the flippant tone and turned his back on the group and looked out towards the sea. He knew they’d get nothing useful from the contents of the pockets. This was a set-up, a piece of theatre. The coat and the knife were props, just there to distract them. He resented being made to look a fool.
    Someone was making their way down the path from the house to the shore. The figure was tall, wearing a full-length black coat. It took a