The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5) Read Free

don’t know exactly. She had to direct me. In the middle of nowhere. She didn’t have the postcode, so I couldn’t get it on the satnav. Nightmare!’ He paused. ‘She called it the Writers’ House. Strange name.’ He paused. ‘What do you want her for anyway?’
    But Vera didn’t answer. She’d replaced the phone and her mouth was full of pie.
    The next morning Jack was lurking in the yard waiting to catch her on her way to Kimmerston. She was earlier than usual and she’d thought she might miss him. How long had he been out there? He was pretending to work on his old tractor, but Vera knew fine well he was waiting to check up on her. She went up to him and stood, legs apart, hands on hips, and put on the fierce voice she used occasionally to show her team she meant business.
    ‘I’ve promised I’ll look for her. But I’ll do it in my way and in my time. I’ll tell you as soon as there’s any news.’
    He nodded, but said nothing, and Jack – who was all words, flowery and flowing, whose life was a series of stories – made this silence speak volumes. She got into the Land Rover and drove away, aware of him watching her all the way down the lane.
    In the office she googled the Writers’ House and found it at once. It seemed there was nothing sinister about the place. Unless you found poets and novelists sinister. This was a retreat for writers of all sorts, and throughout the year it hosted a number of residential courses for writers with different levels of experience. What had she been expecting? A Gothic tower, where Joanna had been trapped by a madman who’d persuaded her to fall in love with him? The pictures on the website showed a large whitewashed farmhouse. Part of it was very old, according to the advertising pitch, and fortified against the Scots who had raided across the border. One view did show a bare-stone outside wall with crenellations. And there was a small, dark chapel. But inside it was all very tasteful and not Gothic at all. Flagstones on the kitchen floor, bare beams, stripped wooden doors. Low sofas and easy chairs, with only the occasional flipchart to indicate it wasn’t a private home. The place was run, apparently, by a company of the same name, headed by someone called Miranda Barton.
    There were pictures of the tutors, and even Vera recognized a couple of names: a poet who appeared on television occasionally, talking about the decline of British culture; a playwright. The fees seemed to her to be exorbitant, and certainly well beyond Joanna’s pocket. Unless Joanna had a secret fund left over from her marriage. In large red letters it said that bursaries were available to writers who showed talent, and it occurred to Vera that Joanna’s disappearance was no more disturbing than that: she fancied herself as a writer. Perhaps she’d been awarded one of the bursaries, but had been embarrassed to tell Jack what she was up to. Perhaps she wanted to wait until she’d finished a piece of work before telling him.
    A course had started the day Joanna took herself off from Myers Farm: ‘Short Cuts. The art of the contemporary crime short story.’ Cuts , Vera thought. Very witty. You could tell they’d be good with words. She had just clicked onto the link when she heard footsteps outside her office: her sergeant, Joe Ashworth, dead on time for their daily morning meeting. She turned off the PC, feeling faintly guilty without really understanding why.
    Mid-afternoon, she wandered through to the open-plan office where Joe was filling in his overtime form.
    ‘I’m off,’ she said. ‘Taking back some of the time I’m owed from the Lister case.’
    ‘Going to the gym?’ A sly little grin. He knew she’d been told to lose weight.
    ‘Piss off!’ But there was no animosity in it. After a week of strategy meetings and appraisals she was looking forward to being away from the office. It was still clear and bright and, driving east past the newly ploughed fields, where the low