About Clara Vennick

Some people see a room. Clara sees what has changed.

Clara Vennick clears houses for a living.

It is practical work. Furniture has to be measured, carried, valued, sold, donated or disposed of. Cupboards have to be emptied. Keys have to be returned. Families need answers about what can be kept and what probably should have gone years ago.

Clara understands all of that.

What makes her unusual is that she also notices everything around it.

The chair standing where something else used to be. The photograph that has been removed while the others remain. The drawer nobody mentions. The object that is too new for the dust around it. The person who answers a slightly different question from the one Clara actually asked.

She does not think of herself as a detective.

She simply has difficulty ignoring things that do not make sense.

And in Clara’s line of work, other people’s lives have a habit of leaving evidence behind.

A working woman

Clara is forty when the Clara Vennick Mysteries begin.

She runs her own house-clearance business in and around Minehead, Somerset, working from a rented lock-up in a shared yard on North Hill.

It is not a picturesque little office arranged for visitors.

It is a working space.

There are wide doors, furniture waiting for collection, mirrors turned towards walls, tools, paperwork, keys, job folders, a workbench, a printer, a kettle and mugs that have probably been used more often than they have been washed.

From outside, the ground drops away towards Minehead and the Bristol Channel. On a clear day, Wales can be seen across the water.

Clara notices the view.

She just rarely has time to stand looking at it.

There is normally a van that needs unloading.

Vennick House Clearances

Clara’s work puts her into houses at unusual moments.

Sometimes somebody has died.

Sometimes somebody is moving into a smaller property.

Sometimes a relationship has ended and neither person particularly wants to deal with what remains.

Sometimes a family has simply reached the point where a house that has accumulated forty years of possessions finally has to be emptied.

Clara walks into these situations when people are tired, grieving, arguing or overwhelmed.

She has learnt not to make that worse.

Her first instinct is practical.

What needs to be kept?

Who has authority to make decisions?

What belongs to somebody else?

What has value?

What needs specialist handling?

What cannot fit through the door no matter how confidently somebody tells her that it came in that way?

Clara photographs rooms, makes notes and keeps records.

Partly that is good business.

Partly it is experience.

And partly it is because Clara understands that memory becomes remarkably unreliable when several people are standing in the same room insisting that they all remember it correctly.

She notices things

Clara has spent years looking at rooms most people are trying not to look at.

That has trained her eye.

She notices marks where furniture has stood for years. She notices when something has recently been moved. She remembers which cupboard was open and which one was closed. She sees the difference between a room that has simply been unused and one somebody has deliberately left a certain way.

Objects interest her because people are often less careful with objects than they are with words.

A person can rehearse an explanation.

A room cannot.

That does not mean Clara assumes everything unusual is suspicious.

Quite the opposite.

She knows how strange ordinary homes can be.

People keep receipts for appliances they threw away fifteen years ago. They hide jewellery in biscuit tins and important documents in drawers full of instruction manuals. They store valuable furniture in damp garages and worthless furniture as though it were part of the Crown Jewels.

Clara has seen enough houses to know that odd does not necessarily mean important.

But sometimes it does.

Practical intelligence

Clara is intelligent, but she is not academic about it.

She thinks through doing.

Put her in front of a blocked doorway, a badly packed van or a chest of drawers that refuses to move and she will normally find a solution.

Put her in front of an inconsistency and she approaches it much the same way.

She separates what she knows from what somebody has told her.

She checks dates.

She keeps records.

She asks the next useful question.

That practical way of thinking is one of Clara’s greatest strengths.

It can also become one of her weaknesses.

Once something stops making sense, she has difficulty leaving it alone.

Clara’s humour

Clara is funny without particularly trying to be.

Her humour is dry, understated and often delivered with a completely straight face.

She has little patience for unnecessary drama, although drama has an unfortunate habit of finding her anyway.

Much of her humour comes from the absurdities of ordinary work: furniture that was apparently carried upstairs by people who no longer exist, customers who describe three rooms of possessions as “a few bits”, and the extraordinary optimism people develop when estimating the size of their own staircase.

Clara is rarely cruel.

She simply tends to say the practical thing everybody else has been avoiding.

Not fearless

Clara is capable.

That is not the same thing as fearless.

She gets things wrong.

She can misjudge somebody.

She can make an assumption and later discover that she should have checked it.

She can postpone something inconvenient until it becomes more inconvenient.

She can become too involved.

And sometimes she knows perfectly well that the sensible thing would be to leave something alone.

Knowing that and actually doing it are different matters.

Clara’s confidence comes from experience rather than certainty.

When she makes a mistake, she remembers it.

Then she changes the way she works.

Other people’s possessions

Clara does not become sentimental about everything she handles.

She could not do her job if she did.

Most objects are simply objects.

Furniture is furniture. Crockery is crockery. A broken lamp does not acquire importance merely because it has been sitting in the same house since 1978.

But Clara understands that value and price are different things.

An object worth almost nothing at auction may be the one thing somebody cannot bear to lose.

That distinction matters to her.

It is why one of the most important questions in Clara’s work is not:

What should go?

It is:

What do you want to keep?

That tells her considerably more about people.

Compassion without fuss

Clara is compassionate, although she would probably be uncomfortable if somebody described her that way.

She does not usually express care through speeches.

She expresses it by doing something useful.

She moves a box somewhere safer.

She makes tea.

She gives somebody another ten minutes before asking a difficult question.

She wraps the photograph instead of putting it into the general pile.

She listens when somebody needs to explain why an apparently worthless object cannot be thrown away.

Clara knows that grief cannot be organised into labelled boxes.

She also knows that labelled boxes occasionally help.

Martin Searle

Martin Searle is a furniture dealer and one of Clara’s closest working contacts.

Their businesses overlap naturally. Clara encounters furniture that needs valuing, selling or moving; Martin has customers, experience and an occasionally optimistic belief in what can be carried up or down a staircase.

They know each other well enough to argue without falling out.

Martin teases Clara.

Clara usually gives as good as she gets.

Their friendship is built more on turning up than talking about turning up.

When one of them needs help, the other is usually there.

Neither feels the need to make a ceremony of it.

Clara’s mother

Clara’s mother remains part of her life.

Their relationship is affectionate, familiar and capable of surviving teasing in both directions.

Clara’s mother keeps things.

Clara clears things.

That difference probably explains quite a lot about them.

Childhood drawings, old schoolwork and things Clara herself would have discarded decades ago have a tendency to survive because her mother decided that they should.

Clara occasionally discovers that professional detachment towards other people’s possessions is considerably easier than deciding what to do with her own.

Minehead

Minehead is home territory for Clara.

Her working life stretches through the town and into the surrounding Somerset communities, with North Hill, the Bristol Channel and Exmoor always close by.

She knows the area in the practical way somebody does when their livelihood depends on moving around it.

She notices narrow access.

Parking.

Steep approaches.

Weather.

Whether a van is going to fit.

Whether a customer who says there are “only a few steps” has counted them.

The landscape is beautiful, but Clara’s relationship with it is not romantic.

It is simply where her life happens.

The sea is there when she opens the workshop doors.

North Hill is there when she drives home from a job.

Exmoor sits beyond the town.

The weather changes.

Work continues.

The setting is part of Clara rather than scenery placed behind her.

What Clara looks like

Clara has dark hair, usually tied back when she is working.

Loose strands rarely cooperate for long.

She dresses practically because her work demands it. Jackets, knitwear, trousers and boots make more sense in dusty houses, workshops and vans than anything delicate or particularly fashionable.

She is not someone who spends much time constructing an image of herself.

If clothing is comfortable, useful and survives contact with old furniture, Clara considers that a considerable advantage.

There is a lived-in quality to her appearance that suits her.

She looks like somebody who works.

Because she does.

A life outside the mystery

Clara’s life does not stop when something unusual happens.

That is important.

Customers still telephone.

Furniture still needs collecting.

Invoices still need sending.

There are jobs in Minehead, Carhampton, Williton and elsewhere around the area.

Some will become mysteries.

Most will not.

Clara will continue clearing houses whether anybody is hiding a secret inside them or not.

That ordinary working life is what keeps her grounded.

It is also what continually puts her in places most people never get to see.

Behind closed doors.

Inside emptied rooms.

Among the objects people leave behind.

Barney

Clara is joined by a black Labrador named Barney.

Barney becomes part of Clara’s life from the second Clara Vennick mystery onward and quickly settles into the practical rhythm of her world — workshops, vans, coastal walks and the occasional job where standing quietly and watching proves surprisingly useful.

He is steady, loyal and observant, with the sort of calm presence that suits Clara.

Barney is named after one of author Mark Kiernan’s own dogs, who has since passed away.

Bringing the name into the Clara Vennick Mysteries gives it a small place to continue.

Clara and secrets

Clara does not believe everybody has a dark secret.

She does believe everybody has things they do not tell strangers.

There is a difference.

Her work has taught her that families create their own versions of the past.

Sometimes those versions are harmless.

Sometimes they are necessary.

Sometimes everybody genuinely remembers events differently.

And occasionally a story has been repeated for so long that nobody thinks to ask whether it was ever true.

Clara asks.

Not because she enjoys exposing people.

Because she wants things to fit.

What drives her

Clara is not motivated by excitement.

She does not want danger.

She does not dream of solving crimes.

What drives her is considerably simpler.

She dislikes unfinished explanations.

If somebody tells her a chair has always been in one place and the floor says otherwise, Clara notices.

If three people describe the same event differently, she notices.

If somebody desperately wants her not to look inside an ordinary box, she notices that too.

She may decide it is none of her business.

Sometimes she is even right.

But Clara Vennick has spent too many years clearing away what people no longer want to understand one unavoidable truth:

What people leave behind can tell you almost as much as what they take with them.