Frozen (Vera Stanhope) Page 2

‘Nothing showing yet.’

  Vera looked outside. It was still snowing, the flakes big and white against the grey sky. She was thinking about the other family in the case: the raggle-taggle gypsies. She’d never had George Summerskill down as an angry man. Passionate about his various causes and given to publicity stunts, but rather a gentle a soul, she’d always thought. If she’d got that wrong and George had upset Jenny as much as Helen the bookseller had implied, Vera would have to start looking at the case again. She wished she could go back to the house by the Wall with its tower and its fierce, close family, see them again with the new perspective. But she knew she’d never get there until the weather changed, even in the Land Rover. She turned back into the room.

  ‘Leave the Elliotts for a moment. Can you dig out all you can on the Summerskill family? What’s been going on in the last ten years? They seem frozen in time there. They’ve all got older but nothing has changed. I wonder if they knew what happened to their daughter all the time and they’re held together by a shared guilt.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Holly looked up from the laptop. ‘But wouldn’t a shared grief do that to you too?’

  Vera ignored that; she didn’t like being questioned. ‘Can you find out if George has been in trouble since Jenny disappeared?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Vera drank tea and stared into the fire. While Holly was working her magic on the internet, she was recreating the day of Jenny’s disappearance. There’d been a minibus to take the kids to the Roman site, a guided tour round the fort and a talk by the archaeologist. The minibus had dropped the students in various locations on the way back. Why take them back to the high school in Hexham, the distraught headteacher had said after Jenny’s disappearance, when they’d just have to travel home? The parents had all agreed to the arrangement. Jenny had been dropped off with a group of others, but had wandered off on her own. Vera had talked to the youngsters to find out why, but they’d just shrugged, implying that was the way Jenny was. She did her own thing. Ploughed her own furrow. The last time they’d seen her she was walking up the lane towards the family home.

  Vera got to her feet, felt the strain on her knees and thought, very briefly, that perhaps she should try to lose weight again. Her Summerskill witness statements were in a file on the table. Holly was still working at the computer. It was quite dark now. Bleak mid-winter. The time of year when Jenny had gone missing, so it would have been almost dark then too, as she’d walked off alone. Vera checked through the file. Thomas Elliott had been one of Jenny’s group and he’d talked to the police.

  I offered to walk with her but she said she’d be OK. I thought her Dad or her brother Matt would be coming to pick her up.

  Vera turned to Holly. ‘Anything?’

  ‘No. Jenny’s father seems to have become a reformed character. No court appearances and no mention in the media at all.’

  ‘Check out the brother too, will you? Matthew the famous sculptor.’ But Vera was thinking about Jenny again and the way her friends and teachers had described her: brave, confident and fiery, confident beyond her years. It wouldn’t have scared her to walk home alone in the dark.

  Holly starting talking about Matthew’s achievements: the exhibition at the Baltic, the commission by the Hepworth Gallery. His most famous work was a bronze of a young female Briton that stood outside on a mound to the north of the Wall. Vera nodded occasionally to show she was interested and then she turned back to the file. She couldn’t find anything about George or Matthew driving to fetch Jenny. The girl had been reported missing later that evening when she didn’t turn up at home.

  That night Holly slept in the room that had once belonged to Vera. Vera made a show of supplying clean sheets and a pile of blankets. The next morning, she woke first and had coffee in the pot and toast ready buttered when Holly came into the kitchen.

  ‘Jack’s cleared the track, so you can escape as soon as you like. Get back to Kimmerston and let them know they way our minds are working.’

  Holly shot Vera a glance to show she didn’t have a clue which way her boss’s mind worked, but she knew better than to speak.

  * * *

  In Corbridge, Helen had taken Vera’s advice and the bookshop’s event had been moved to the cafe on the square. They’d turned it into a coffee and cake session instead of an evening meeting because more snow was forecast for later in the day. Forum books was still surrounded by police tape and a uniformed officer stood on the door. The cafe was packed and Vera slipped in and found a place at the back. When she arrived, the proceedings were coming to an end. The primary school choir sang the Coventry Carol and Vera was pleased Joe wasn’t there. He was so soppy that he’d have been crying after the first verse. She waited until the crowd had thinned and found Helen and her son on their own at a table in the corner.

  ‘Is there any news? Can we move back into the chapel? We need the Christmas business if we’re going to survive.’

  Vera looked at her for a moment before asking the question that had been troubling her since the evening before. ‘What brought you back?’

  Helen shut her eyes and there was another silence. ‘Thomas follows the Summerskill girls on Facebook. He could see how affected they still were by Jenny’s disappearance, how they still allowed themselves to believe that she might still be alive. He thought we should let them know, give them some peace.’

  ‘Hence the charade, the pretence to discover the body. Did you know I was in town?’

  Helen shook her head. ‘Any customer would have done. Someone to be a witness.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone recognize you when you moved in? You’d been the minister’s wife.’

  ‘Oh, I looked quite different then.’ Helen gave a little smile. ‘I worked in finance, dressed the part. And I wasn’t around much anyway. When Neil got the post here, the deal was that I led my own life. Perhaps that was why I didn’t see what was going on.’

  ‘And what was going on?’

  ‘He was drinking. Hard. He hid it very well. Not even the kids, who were closer to him than I was, knew. I think it was Neil’s way of surviving the disappointment and the criticism. He arrived here with so much passion, so many ideas and the congregation ripped him apart. They were very genteel of course, the respectable elderly of Corbridge, but they killed his confidence, bit by bit.’

  ‘Had he been drinking the afternoon Jenny died?’

  Helen nodded. ‘Neil decided he’d come to pick up Thomas from the minibus after the school trip, but he was driving too fast. It was nearly dark and the road was icy. He didn’t see Jenny until it was too late, then when he braked he slid into her. She died immediately.’

  Vera wasn’t sure how a man as pissed as Neil Elliott had been could tell that. A 999 call might have saved the girl. ‘What did he do then?’

  Helen looked straight at Vera. ‘A terrible thing. He rolled her into the ditch, picked up Thomas and took him home, and then went back for her.’

  ‘And all the time Jenny’s family were searching for her, frozen in their grief, she was lying in the font in his chapel.’

  Helen nodded. ‘There was one last service before we left. Then the chapel was empty until I bought it.’

  ‘When did you know that Jenny was here?’

  ‘Not then!’ Helen was desperate for Vera to believe her. ‘Neil confessed later to us after we’d left Corbridge. He promised he’d stop drinking. We moved to the city for a fresh start. I gave up work, thinking I could save him.’ A pause. ‘But he was the only person who could do that.’ She stared out onto the snowy square. ‘And in the end, his drinking killed him. At least he didn’t take anyone else with him that time.’

  ‘Jenny loved books.’ Thomas Elliott spoke for the first time. ‘She was full of stories. Words spilled out of her. I thought it would be a memorial to her, the shop.’ He’d started to cry.

  Outside the snow had started again, blown by a wind from the north. Vera was thinking of the family whose lives had stopped abruptly with Jenny’s death
. Who were stranded in time like one of Matthew’s sculptures. She hoped they’d be able to move on now, that they’d be able to cry for Jenny too.

  By Ann Cleeves

  The Vera Stanhope Series

  The Crow Trap

  Telling Tales

  Hidden Depths

  Silent Voices

  The Glass Room

  Harbour Street

  The Moth Catcher

  The Seagull

  The Darkest Evening

  The Shetland Series

  Raven Black

  White Nights

  Red Bones

  Blue Lightning

  Dead Water

  Thin Air

  Cold Earth

  Wild Fire

  The Two Rivers Series

  The Long Call

  About the Author

  ANN CLEEVES is the multimillion copy and New York Times bestselling author behind two hit television series—the BBC’s Shetland, starring Douglas Henshall, and ITV’s Vera, starring Academy Award nominee Brenda Blethyn—both of which are watched and loved in the U.S. The Long Call, the first in the Two Rivers series introducing Detective Matthew Venn, was an instant New York Times bestseller.

  Shetland is available in the U.S. on Netflix, Amazon Video, Britbox, and PBS, and Vera is available on Amazon Video, BritBox, and PBS.

  The first Shetland novel, Raven Black, won the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel, and Ann was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger in 2017. She lives in the U.K. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  By Ann Cleeves

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  FROZEN. Copyright © 2020 by Ann Cleeves. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein Cover photographs: Hadrian’s wall © Snapshot Adventures/Shutterstock; sky © Jarmo Piironen/Shutterstock

  ISBN 978-1-250-80071-8 (ebook)

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  Originally published in Great Britain by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  First U.S. Edition: 2020

  First eBook edition: 2020