Hidden Depths--A Vera Stanhope Mystery Read online

  ‘You used to lose your temper with him.’

  He looked up, shocked. He was a bereaved father. She wasn’t supposed to talk to him like that.

  ‘It was a bad time,’ he said. ‘I’d lost my job, no money, Julie and me weren’t getting on. Lately I’d been trying to understand him better. Then that lad he was knocking around with drowned and it freaked Luke out. No one could get through to him then.’

  ‘Did you visit him in hospital?’

  ‘Kath and I both went. I’m not sure I could have faced it on my own. First few times you could tell he was really doped up. I mean, I’m not sure he knew we were there. But even then he looked scared. He jumped whenever anyone came up behind him. When he got better we took him out for an afternoon. A pizza and a bit of a walk round Morpeth. He was more chatty then, but still very nervy. He kept saying it was his fault, that lad drowning. We got to the bridge, you know over the river by the church, and he really lost it. Shaking, crying. We’d only just got him calm when we arrived back at the hospital.’

  ‘Did he say why he was scared? Did anyone blame him for the boy’s death?’

  ‘He was never able to explain himself very well even before the breakdown. We asked, but questions only made it worse.’

  ‘You’d been to see him a couple of times after he came out of hospital?’

  ‘Yes, and he seemed better. He didn’t like to leave the house, Julie said. But he was more himself.’

  ‘His sister will have been glad to have him home.’

  Armstrong leaned forward across the breakfast bar. His hands were hard and callused, the nails very short. ‘Aye, perhaps.’ He paused, seemed to study his fingers. ‘But it wasn’t easy for her. She found it hard to get on with Luke at times. Maybe she’s got too much of her father in her to make allowances. Maybe she was just fed up with him getting all their mother’s attention.’

  They heard a door shut upstairs, more footsteps and Kath appeared. She was wearing her uniform and had put up her hair.

  ‘Is it OK? Or would you rather talk to Geoff on his own?’

  ‘Come away in,’ Vera said. ‘I’m just about to get to the hard bit. Could do with a woman’s common sense. Stop your man flying off the handle.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I need to ask you both what you were doing when Luke was killed. That doesn’t mean I think you had anything to do with his death. But I have to ask. You do understand?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘Geoff?’

  He nodded reluctantly.

  ‘I was at work,’ Kath said. ‘The gynaecology ward at the RVI. There were three of us on. It was frantic. A couple of emergency admissions from A&E. I didn’t even have time for a break. Geoff was here all night, babysitting Rebecca.’

  ‘Do you always work nights?’

  ‘I have done since I went back after Rebecca. It suits us. Geoff’s self-employed. Most of his work comes from a builder in Shields, Barry Middleton. Geoff does all his plastering and joinery. Barry’s well thought of and the work’s regular, but Geoff can suit himself pretty well, fit it in round the family, school holidays. He has Rebecca ready for school in the morning when I get in and Fridays he picks her up. It’s almost her bedtime when I leave for the hospital in the evening. Neither of us gets much of a social life, but it means Rebecca sees plenty of us.’

  ‘Did your daughter wake up the night Luke was killed?’

  The question was directed at Geoff, but it was Kath who answered again. ‘She never wakes up! She’s a miracle. She’s slept through since she was six weeks. Once she’s in her bed you don’t hear from her till seven the next morning.’

  There was an awkward silence. Almost as she spoke Kath realized the implication of her words. ‘But he wouldn’t leave her,’ she cried. ‘You’ve seen what he’s like with her. He’d never go away and leave her on her own.’

  ‘Geoff?’

  ‘I didn’t leave her,’ he said. She knew he was controlling his temper, to prove to her and to Kath that he could, that he didn’t lose it any more. ‘I couldn’t even go to the end of the road without imagining things. That the house was on fire. That she was sick. I wouldn’t do it. Anyway, I could go to see Luke any time. Why wait till the middle of the night?’

  ‘Right, then,’ Vera said. ‘Now that’s out of the way, we can move on.’ Though it wasn’t out of the way. Not really. He could have got someone in to sit with Rebecca. Or if he was desperate enough he could have left her whatever he claimed in front of his wife. She’d get the team chatting to the neighbours tomorrow. Check if anyone was called in to babysit, or if anyone saw his car moved from the drive. She took a breath. ‘Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Luke? Julie said he had no enemies, but a mam always thinks her bairn can do no wrong. I need something to work on here. Somewhere to start.’

  From the living room they heard the little girl singing along to a rhyme on the television. Vera didn’t know much about children but thought it must be unusual to get one this undemanding. It was a very different household from the one in Seaton where Luke had grown up. This was calm, ordered. The family lived by routine. Julie needed a bit of drama in her life to get through the day. Vera kept her eyes fixed on the adults, waiting for them to speak.

  ‘Luke could wind you up,’ Armstrong said. ‘He didn’t mean to. He just didn’t understand what you were saying to him. You’d ask him to do something and he’d look at you like you were the daft one for expecting him to catch on. I can imagine that getting him into bother. Some of the people he mixed with, they were used to being treated with respect.’

  ‘Like the Sharps?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Did the Sharps blame Luke for their son’s death?’

  It seemed Armstrong needed time to think about that. ‘I don’t mix with them,’ he said at last. ‘I wouldn’t know. They’re not famous for their patience, though, are they? And our Luke would have tried the patience of a saint. If one of them had asked him what happened that night Thomas died, Luke wouldn’t have been able to answer. He’d get stressed, flustered. The words wouldn’t come out and he’d just end up staring. Like I said, that would wind you up. Even if you didn’t believe Luke was responsible, it would still make you mad.’

  ‘Not mad enough to go round to his house and strangle him,’ Kath said.

  Armstrong shrugged. ‘I can’t think of anyone else who’d want to kill him.’

  ‘Did Luke ever talk to you about the accident?’

  ‘Not the accident itself,’ Kath said. ‘He came here soon after it happened. He talked about all the flowers that had been thrown into the river afterwards. How pretty they were. He’d gone with Julie and seemed really moved by it. There was a picture on the front page of the Chronicle. He brought it for me to see.’

  Rebecca appeared at the kitchen door. She stood shyly, curious about the stranger.

  ‘Do you mind starting on the tea, Geoff?’ Kath said. ‘I need to get ready for work.’

  She followed Vera towards the front door. In the kitchen Geoff had switched on the radio and he and Rebecca were singing along to a pop song.

  Vera had dozens of questions. She wanted to know how Kath and Geoff had met. What had she seen in him? How had she seen the potential doting father under the loutishness and the anger? But that was probably just prying and none of her business and she contented herself with a single comment. ‘I was told your man had a bit of a temper,’ she said. ‘No sign of that now.’

  Kath paused for a moment, reaching out towards the door handle. ‘He’s happy,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason for him to get angry any more.’

  Vera thought that sounded a bit glib. Too good to be true. But she didn’t push it. She had an appointment, someone else to see.

  Chapter Eight

  Lying in the bath, the window open a crack, the water deep and very hot, Felicity found herself brooding on the past. She wasn’t given much to introspection and wondered what might be the cause
of it. Peter’s sixtieth birthday perhaps. Anniversaries occasionally had that effect. Or a menopausal moodiness. Meeting Lily Marsh had unsettled her. She was jealous of the young woman’s youth and vitality, the firm skin and flat stomach, and she had envied her independence.

  Felicity had married too early. She’d met Peter at a party. She was an undergraduate, only six weeks into her degree. Her parents had tried to persuade her to apply to a university a bit further from home, but she’d been daunted enough at the prospect of a hall of residence. She needed the security of the vicarage only an hour away, an escape route. Her father was a priest, mild, relaxed about theology, but strict on kindness. In fact, she’d taken to university life, the friendships and the late nights and especially the men. She saw that she might be attractive to them. They quite liked her shyness, perhaps they even saw her demure demeanour as a challenge. But she wasn’t sure how she should respond to them. She wandered around, bewildered and a little lost. Alice in an academic wonderland.

  So, she was at this party in a student house in Heaton. There were bare floorboards and Indian cotton pinned on the walls, unfamiliar music and the heavy smell of dope which registered without her knowing what it was. It was very cold, she remembered, despite all the people crowded into the room. They’d had the first severe frost of the autumn and there was no form of heating. Outside, the soggy fallen leaves were frozen in heaps on the pavement.

  Whatever had Peter been doing there? It really wasn’t his thing at all and beneath his dignity anyway to fraternize with undergraduates. But he was there, dressed in corduroy trousers and a hand-knitted woollen jumper, completely anachronistic, as if he’d wandered out of a Kingsley Amis novel. He was drinking beer from a can and looking miserable. Although he’d been out of place in the student party, he had been a familiar figure to Felicity, a familiar type at least. There had been lonely men in the parish, attracted to the church because, surely, there they would not be rejected. The last curate had been terribly shy. Her mother had made fun of him behind his back, and the middle-aged spinsters in the village had taken to competing for his affection with lamb casseroles and spicy gingerbread.

  But when she started talking to Peter, Felicity had discovered that he was nothing like the weedy young Christians she’d met at summer camp, or the amiable curate. He was abrupt and arrogant and quite sure of himself despite the bizarre clothes.

  ‘I’d arranged to meet someone,’ he said angrily. ‘But they’ve not turned up. A complete waste of time.’

  Felicity wasn’t sure whether the person who’d failed to materialize was male or female.

  ‘I’ve papers to mark.’

  Then she realized that he wasn’t a mature student. He hadn’t looked thirteen years her senior. She was immensely dazzled by his status. She had always been attracted to men in authority, liking the idea of someone else taking control, of educating and informing her. She had so little experience of men and was convinced she would do everything wrong. Better let someone who knew what they were about lead the way.

  She asked haltingly about his work and he began to talk about it with such energy and fire that she was enthralled, though she didn’t understand a word. They moved into the hall where the music wasn’t so loud, and sat on the stairs. They couldn’t sit side by side because they had to leave room for the people stumbling up to the bathroom, so he sat above her and she took a place at his feet.

  The conversation wasn’t all one way. He asked about her and listened when she described her home and her parents. ‘I’m an only child. I suppose I’ve been very sheltered.’

  ‘This must all come as rather a shock,’ he said. ‘Student life, I mean.’ She didn’t like to say that actually she was enjoying the noise, the chaos and the freedom of university. He seemed taken with the idea that she was vulnerable and it seemed rude to contradict him. He was even tolerant of her religious faith, as if it was appropriate for someone at her stage of experience. As if she were a six-year-old who had confided a belief in the tooth fairy. ‘Even I agree that not everything can be explained by science,’ he said and that was when he first touched her, stroking her hair as if he wanted to reassure her that she wasn’t making a fool of herself. Not really. And she was grateful for his understanding.

  They left when the party was in full swing. He offered to walk her back to the hall of residence. They took the bus into town and then walked over the Town Moor. It was bitterly cold, everything white and silver, mist caught in the hollows and coming from their mouths. There was a swollen white moon. ‘It looks too heavy,’ she said. ‘As if it should crash to earth.’

  She expected then a brief sermon on gravity and the planets, but he stopped and turned towards her, taking her face in his gloved hands. ‘You are delightful,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you.’

  Later she realized that was probably true. He had been to a boys’ school, then straight to university and all his energies had been taken up with his academic work. Perhaps he had dreamed of women, perhaps they had haunted him, diving into his consciousness once every six minutes. Certainly he must have had sexual encounters. But he hadn’t allowed himself to be distracted. Until now. When they walked on he put his arm around her shoulders.

  Outside her hall he pulled her to him and kissed her, and he stroked her hair, not gently this time, but with a violent, rubbing motion which made her feel how frustrated he must be. This pressure on her hair and scalp was the only expression of desire he allowed himself. She felt the contained passion stinging and fizzing inside him like electricity.

  ‘Can we meet for lunch?’ he asked. ‘Tomorrow?’

  When she agreed she felt as if she was in control. She was the one with the power.

  As he walked off, a friend wandered up. ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Peter Calvert.’

  The friend was impressed. ‘I’ve heard of him. Isn’t he supposed to be brilliant? Almost a genius?’

  He took her to Tynemouth for lunch, driving her there in his car. She had expected they’d go somewhere in town, somewhere close to the university. The car and the hotel restaurant full of businessmen again set him apart from her student friends. It took very little to impress her. Afterwards they climbed the bank to the priory and looked down over the river to South Shields. They walked along the bank of the Tyne and he pointed out a Mediterranean gull. He’d been wearing binoculars. She had thought that was odd because his subject was botany. She hadn’t understood then the nature of his ruling passion.

  ‘Do you have to be back?’ he asked. ‘A lecture?’ He took her hand in his, drew on her palm with his finger. The sun was shining and today he had no need of gloves. ‘I don’t want to lead you astray.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Well, perhaps. Come and have tea with me.’

  His flat wasn’t far away, in North Shields, an attic overlooking Northumberland Park. Two elderly sisters lived in the rest of the house. One of them was in the small garden when they arrived, raking up leaves from the lawn. She waved in a friendly way, then went back to her work without taking undue interest in Felicity. The flat was very tidy and Felicity imagined that Peter had cleaned it specially. It was full of books. A large-scale Ordnance Survey map showing the area of his field study had been pinned to the wall and the way in was blocked by a telescope on a tripod. There was a living room with a cramped kitchen and a bathroom off and a door which she presumed must lead to the bedroom. The door into the bedroom seemed to hold a fascination for her and while Peter was making tea she found her eyes drawn to it. It was panelled and the grain of the wood showed through the white gloss paint. It had a round brass knob. She wondered if the bedroom was also tidy, if he had changed the sheets in expectation. She would have sneaked a look but he came in, carrying a tea tray. There were cups and saucers which didn’t match and slices of fruit loaf, buttered.

  Later that afternoon they went into the bedroom and made love. Her first time and nothing to write home about, of course.
There was a lot of fumbling with a Durex, which he seemed as uncertain about how to use as she was, and they must have got the whole thing seriously wrong, or there had been an accident, because she found out soon after that she was pregnant. It must have been that first time. Later they became more proficient. The sex got better too. Even that first afternoon, though, she had a glimpse, an inkling of something wonderful, and that was more than she had expected.

  She took Peter to meet her parents soon after, before she realized she was pregnant. It was a damp, raw day and, although it was only lunchtime, as they drove through the trees they could see the lights on in the living room, and a fire. ‘It was always like this when I came home from school,’ she said. ‘Welcoming.’ He never talked much about his parents. They were in business, rather driven. He made her feel as if her attitude to her family was sentimental and unreal.

  Her mother had made a thick vegetable soup because it was Felicity’s favourite and home-made bread. After lunch they took coffee and chocolate cake and sat by the fire. Peter had been very quiet at first. It was as if he felt out of place, much as she did in the university. He was feeling his way. Now, sitting by the fire, he seemed to relax. Felicity seemed unnaturally tired. She listened to the conversation as if she was half asleep. He was talking about his work and her father was asking questions – not out of politeness, Felicity could always tell when he was simply being polite – but because he was interested. That’s good, Felicity thought. They get on. Then she must have fallen asleep because she woke with a start when a log fell and a spark cracked and spat onto the hearth rug. Her mother smiled indulgently and made a comment about wild parties. Felicity felt the same exhaustion in the first stage of all her pregnancies.

  Marriage was Peter’s idea. Her parents put no pressure on them. Indeed, they seemed unsure about the wisdom of such haste. ‘You have been together for such a short time.’ They would probably have supported her through an abortion if that had been her choice. Peter asked to speak to her parents alone. There was another trip to the vicarage and the three of them talked in the kitchen while she dozed once more over a book in the living room. She felt altogether that the matter was out of her hands. She lacked the energy to make a decision.