Read The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5) for Free Online

rich, deep laugh that Vera remembered from parties and dinners at the farm, which took her away from this strange house with its piles of books and paper, back to a real world of lambing and freshly turned soil and rain. ‘You should have been here,’ Joanna said. ‘They should employ you to sit in on the workshops to stop students writing pretentious crap.’
    ‘I’m here,’ Vera said, serious again, ‘because a man’s dead.’
    They sat for a moment, looking at each other in silence.
    ‘I didn’t kill him,’ Joanna said. ‘I didn’t like him very much, but I didn’t kill him.’
    Vera was aware that if she continued to question Joanna she’d be crossing a line. In fact the line had already been crossed when she’d decided to come into this room on her own. The prime suspect in the case was Vera’s neighbour, could even be considered a friend, so there was a conflict of interest. She was on her own with the woman. No witness and no tape recorder, as she’d said before. She should call immediately for one of the local bobbies to escort Joanna to a waiting police car and drive her back to the station. They’d find her a duty solicitor and another member of the team should interview her. But Vera stayed where she was and said nothing. She was a detective, and listening was what she did best.
    ‘Tony wanted sex with me,’ Joanna went on. ‘In a way, it was quite flattering and for a moment I was tempted. He was good-looking in a smooth, boring kind of way, and it’s a long time since I’ve been propositioned. Completely out of the question of course.’
    ‘Why out of the question?’ Vera asked. She had imagined that the hippies went in for free sex. They seemed so relaxed with their bodies, and wasn’t that what hippies were famous for?
    Joanna looked up sharply. ‘I didn’t fancy him,’ she said, as if the answer was obvious. ‘He wasn’t my type. And he was rather a horrid man.’
    ‘In what way horrid?’ Again Vera had intended not to ask any further questions. Soon Joe Ashworth would be here. She’d phoned him before coming to talk to Joanna. Then they could progress the interview in a more orthodox way. He could take the lead. But Vera wanted to know what had happened to provoke such grotesque violence, and at the moment Joanna was her best source of information, whether she was a suspect or witness.
    ‘He was greedy,’ Joanna said after a moment’s consideration. ‘I hate greed, don’t you? It’s such a mean, small-minded vice. As if money matters at all!’
    ‘It matters to lots of people,’ Vera said.
    ‘Only to people who have nothing of real value in their lives!’ There was the imperious tone again. ‘But I shouldn’t be rude about him, should I? He didn’t deserve to die. Nobody deserves to die before their time.’
    ‘Why did you go into the glass room?’ Vera asked. ‘Everyone knew it was his favourite place, apparently. If you disliked him so much, what were you doing there?’
    ‘I went because he asked me to. Obviously it was a foolish thing to do. But wisdom has never really been my bag.’
    ‘Perhaps you should explain.’ Again Vera felt that the conversation was spinning away from her. She needed facts. Time of death. Cause of death. A list of the people in the house. Something to anchor her to reality. She looked at her watch. Joe Ashworth could drive like a cautious sixty-year-old without Vera to urge him on. And she wouldn’t have put it past him to call in on his wife and bairns on the way through from Kimmerston. But even allowing for all that, he should be here soon. Joe had as much imagination as a louse and, when he arrived, she’d let him look after Joanna. The woman would be safe with him, mad or not, and he wouldn’t let himself be distracted by her ramblings on morality.
    ‘I knew he wanted to get inside my knickers,’ Joanna said. ‘So it would have been more sensible to stay away. But this was so exciting. I had to go, didn’t I? When I