The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

‘Ten Green Bottles’ all the way back to Blyth . She’d never been able to carry a tune, and he’d stared out of the window pretending she had nothing to do with him.
    The hotel was on the edge of town looking down over the harbour. It had been painted recently, so the stained concrete of his memory was a clean, bright white. But closer to, you could tell that it hadn’t been well done. The paint of the fascia boards had leached into the white walls. The last throw of the dice, Joe reckoned, before the owner gave up. There were empty hotels all along the coast.
    The Writers’ House party was sitting in a lounge that reminded Joe of somewhere institutional. An old folks’ home or a doctors’ waiting room. Upright chairs set around the wall. There were huge picture windows and the sunlight showed the streaks of salt on the glass outside. He thought they probably hadn’t been cleaned since the gales at the beginning of September. The room was big enough for Holly and Charlie to have set up camp at one end and not be overheard by the people at the other. There were empty cups, screwed-up napkins and on low coffee tables a couple of trays with a few sad remaining sandwiches. Lunch had been provided then. Joe wondered if that had come out of Vera’s budget.
    When he pushed open the door they all looked at him. Even Charlie and Holly. And stared, as if he was an exhibit in a zoo. The detective sergeant , a strange and alien specimen. Did they expect him to bite or scratch? He must be tired. His mind was working in peculiar ways.
    ‘Everyone who has already given a statement can go home,’ he said. ‘We’ll provide lifts back to the Writers’ House so that you can pick up your cars. We’re sorry to have inconvenienced you. If you wait outside, a minibus should be here in a few minutes.’ He’d expected cheers of jubilation but they all seemed subdued and there was little response. They gathered up bags and started to wander out. Joanna and Jack were last to leave. Joanna had her arm around Jack’s shoulder, a protective gesture. You’d have thought he was the one who’d been accused of murder.
    It seemed that Holly and Charlie only had Lenny Thomas and Mark Winterton still to interview. The men sat at opposite sides of the room. Lenny grinned and shrugged and moved closer to the ex-policeman. ‘And then there were two, eh, Mark?’ He waved at Joe to show there were no hard feelings. As he joined his colleagues and began to read through the witness statements, Joe heard Lenny’s voice in the background, asking questions about crime scenes and procedure, and Mark’s patient replies. Tired and strung-out, he thought the muttered voices sounded like waves on shingle, and he remembered again his earlier encounter with Nina Backworth. It came to him that he had her home address and that he might find an excuse for going to visit her.

Chapter Twenty-Six
    Joe Ashworth turned to his colleagues. ‘So everybody went to bed once the party had broken up, and no one saw or heard anything,’ he said. He kept his voice low, but Lenny and Mark were still deep in conversation at the other end of the room and were taking no notice of them. He looked at Holly and Charlie and waited for an answer.
    ‘Pretty much,’ Charlie said. ‘Jack got up in the middle of the night for a piss and thought he heard music. The Beatles’ album Sergeant Pepper .’
    ‘What time was that?’
    ‘About two in the morning. Does it really matter?’
    ‘It shows someone was still up. A possible witness.’
    ‘If you think you can believe anything that man says.’ Charlie rolled his eyes.
    Holly jumped in. ‘And they all thought Miranda Barton was a wonderful woman, and nobody had met her before this week.’
    ‘Not even Giles Rickard?’ Joe Ashworth asked. ‘They were writing at the same time.’
    ‘Different sort of material, apparently. She was considered a literary novelist. He wrote detective stories. They’d have no reason to bump into each other.’ Holly paused. ‘And nobody can remember seeing a handkerchief with a red heart in the corner.’
    ‘You need to have a word with the boss,’ Charlie broke in angrily. It seemed to Joe that he hadn’t even been listening to this last exchange. He got that way sometimes, for no reason. Since his wife had run off there were times when he was angry at the whole world.
    ‘What about?’ Joe said, though he could guess.
    ‘She’s making a fool of herself over those