The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

persuaded Alex to turn to religion. She’d always thought it would be comforting to have faith, had tried it in her youth because Hector had despised it, but had never found it possible to believe. Rationality had been the one perspective on which she and her father agreed.
    She pulled open the heavy door, remembered Alex bringing her here the morning following Tony Ferdinand’s death to set it up as an interview room. Inside there was one light, suspended from the high ceiling on a long chain. As she opened the door the wind caught it and made it swing, scattering the light over the dark wood chairs, throwing moving shadows. Vera tried to remember that she was a rational woman. Still she couldn’t see Alex. She called his name and her voice echoed around the space.
    There was an object lying on the stone floor in front of the table at the end of the nave. Not Alex. Too small for a grown man. And besides, it glittered, reflecting the swinging light. She walked towards it. The sound of her feet on the flags sounded very loud.
    She knelt to look at the object on the floor, and felt suddenly sick. Like some new PC, she thought, called to her first corpse. Pull yourself together, Vera. This is a crime scene and you don’t want to throw up all over it. You’d never live it down. It was Miranda’s tabby cat. As a way of focusing away from her nausea, Vera tried to remember its name. Ophelia. A stupid name. Why call a cat after a mad lass in a play? The animal looked fat and ridiculous, lying on its back. A kitchen knife had been stuck in its belly. Part of the blade was exposed and that was reflecting in the hanging light. There wasn’t much blood, but the guts were spilling out.
    She stood up and saw another corpse on the white table, this time tiny. A robin. No blood. She remembered the bird feeders outside the drawing-room window of the big house, and Alex filling them with nuts and seed. Had he been attracting the birds, just to kill them? Or was stabbing the cat a kind of retribution because it had caught the robin? Mad, either way.
    The chapel door banged and she stood up.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Not her voice. The voice of Alex Barton standing at the back of the nave. He looked wild and windswept. No coat. A thick jersey and baggy jeans. Baseball boots on his feet. He stood, blocking her exit from the building.
    ‘We’ll go back to the cottage, shall we?’ Vera said. ‘I could murder a cup of tea.’ She thought she could make a phone call from there. Get the mental-health team out. He probably just needed a few nights in a psychiatric unit to sort him out. Unless he turned out to be a murderer. And now, alone with him, she didn’t want to think that way.
    ‘Didn’t you see the cat?’ he demanded. He almost ran up the aisle towards her. ‘Did you see what happened?’
    ‘Did you do that?’ She tried to keep the judgement out of her voice. She’d never liked cats much anyway. ‘Tell me about it.’
    ‘No!’ He almost spat out the word in his frustration, his determination to make her understand. ‘Of course it wasn’t me. Somebody was in here. I heard them outside.’ When she didn’t answer he continued, ‘Look at that bird! That has nothing to do with me. You know how I felt about them. And I hated the cat, but it reminded me of my mother. I needed to have it around. I wouldn’t even have given it away to a good home!’
    Vera saw that he was quite overwrought, on the edge of tears. She thought a couple of nights in hospital wouldn’t do him any harm anyway. She’d persuade a sympathetic medic at the Wansbeck Hospital to admit him later. But not until she’d had a few words with him. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with all this in a little while. Let’s get you home.’
    In the cottage he curled up in the rocking chair like a baby. It was hard to remember him as the confident young man in charge of the kitchen in the big house. She found milk in the fridge and heated it up on the Aga, made mugs of hot chocolate for them both. ‘They say you need tea for shock, but chocolate always cheers me up.’ Wittering as usual. Outside it was still windy, but she thought the worst of the storm had passed. She felt awkward in front of his grief. A real woman – a woman who’d had kids – would know how to deal with him.
    She sat on a hard kitchen chair and leaned towards him.
    ‘Are you up to talking me through what happened here tonight?’
    He nodded. Big eyes