The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5) (36 page)

Mark Winterton made the first move. He said he had a long drive back to Cumbria, and he was sure they’d excuse him. Then there was a sudden flurry of activity. Jack and Joanna said they’d help in the kitchen, Lenny asked Alex if he might show his ex-wife something of the house. Nina thought that now she could decently go too and stood up to say goodbye. Chrissie, though, had other ideas.

‘Alex says we can store the books in the chapel for now. Could you give me a hand to take them over?’ Then classically, after issuing the request, Chrissie was distracted elsewhere and Nina was left to put the books into boxes, onto a trolley and out into the yard. The cold made her wheezy and turned her breath into a white fog. The chapel was unlocked, but dark. There was enough light from the big house to pull the trolley inside, but there she felt for a switch. Before she could find it, the door behind her swung shut and everything was black. She thought she heard a key turning in the lock and felt the first bubbles of panic. But perhaps her mind was playing tricks. Just a few yards away the house was full of people. Chrissie knew she was here. She let go of the trolley and moved along the wall, still trying to find the switch. Then came the footsteps, slow and deliberate. They were behind her, cutting off her route to the door. And a sudden bright light, as a torch shone directly into her face, so that she could see nothing. And, faint but distinctive, the smell of overripe apricots.

‘Chrissie? Is that you?’

Because who else could it be? Who else knew she’d be in the chapel? Nina told herself she was being ridiculous, that she was overreacting. Her imagination was creating the plot of an overblown horror novel, all weird noises and unexpected smells. This was her friend and publisher, coming to help her with the books at last. Or playing some tasteless prank.

‘Chrissie, shine the torch the other way, will you? You’re blinding me.’ She stumbled on.

But the footsteps got even closer and still Nina couldn’t see.

The footsteps stopped and the light went out. After the brightness, the dark was thick and deep. Nina listened. Nothing. Outside the caterers must still be loading their van and laughing and shouting, but the walls of the chapel were too thick for her to hear. If she screamed, nobody would hear her, either. And she had the sense that whoever was standing beside her on the stone floor wanted her to scream. So she kept silent. A small act of defiance. A stab at courage.

The footsteps moved on, past her towards the table that took the place of an altar. She didn’t move. Not courage this time, but the understanding that it would be useless. The turned key hadn’t been a creation of her wild imagination after all. There was a click that in the silence sounded as loud as a gunshot. Then music, recognizable from the first bars. A favourite of her mother’s, sung to Nina as a lullaby: ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. This time panic made Nina want to laugh. She felt a giggle rise inside her. If a student had presented a situation as melodramatic as this, for her consideration, she’d have covered the writing with red ink:
Tension should be created sparingly and with subtlety.

The music stopped. There was another sound, of a match being struck. A flash of light so small and fleeting that all she could see was the hand holding the match and the wick of the candle towards which it was carried. Then a steadier beam as the candle was lit. This provided a narrow circle of illumination. A white cloth on the table. A glass bowl of apricots. A long, sharp knife. The impulse to laughter faded away.

‘This is ridiculous.’ She always had a tendency to be haughty when she was scared. ‘How can you hope to get away with this?’

‘You’d be surprised what one can get away with.’ The killer’s voice was matter-of-fact. Mad. ‘And really, you know, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care about being caught. Not once you’re dead.’

The hand appeared in the circle of light again and lifted the knife. This time Nina screamed.

Vera and Joe Ashworth arrived at the Writers’ House once the party was in full swing. By then there were so many vehicles in the car park that theirs wouldn’t be noticed. Joe had been fretting to go all day.

‘We could get there early. Hide in an outbuilding or something.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ she’d said. ‘Holly had a quick look round earlier. We know what we’re waiting for. My bladder won’t stand long surveillances any more. I’ve never pissed in front of a subordinate yet, and I don’t intend to start now. It’s bad for discipline.’

He’d grinned, but she could tell he wasn’t happy. There was something going on between him and the writer woman. The last thing she needed was emotion getting in the way and Joe going all chivalrous on her. That was why she hadn’t entirely taken him into her confidence. She couldn’t face the aggro.

‘What do we do now?’ he said.

They were still in her Land Rover; Vera had taken to driving it more often throughout this investigation. ‘The seats are higher up than in the pool cars,’ she’d said when Joe had queried its use. ‘We’ll have a better view.’

Now he made to climb out of the passenger door.

‘We stay here,’ she said sharply. ‘And we wait. The hardest thing there is.’

‘We can’t protect them while we’re sitting here.’

‘And if we go inside, nothing will happen and we’ll never have a conviction.’ Vera turned so that she was looking at him. ‘Is that what you want? A double killer on the loose?’

She’d driven to the far edge of the car park, so they had a view down over the courtyard. They could see the main house, all lit up, the Barton cottage in darkness and the corner of the chapel. Vera reached for her bag and pulled out a flask of coffee, two plastic mugs and a packet of shop-bought apple pies. ‘Don’t say I never give you anything.’

‘Won’t the coffee make you wee?’

‘Cheeky monkey,’ she said, but her mouth was full of pie and she wasn’t sure he heard.

As people began to leave, Vera could feel Joe becoming tenser by the minute. He watched the visitors’ cars pull away, following them with his eyes up the track through the trees. The park emptied. Soon only a handful of vehicles were left. He rattled his fingers against the dashboard, a sign of his stress.

‘Take it easy, lad. Nothing was going to happen in front of an audience.’

A moment later Vera’s phone pinged, showing she had a text. She read it, without showing it to Joe. ‘From Joanna,’ she said. ‘My contact on the inside. It looks as if we’re on.’ She tried to keep the complacency out of her voice, but couldn’t quite manage it. ‘Just as I expected.’

Her eyes had become used to the dark and the lights from the bare windows in the big house allowed her to make out the figure slowly crossing the courtyard towards the chapel. She nudged Joe and found herself whispering, despite the distance between them and the yard. ‘What did I tell you?’ Felt the exhilaration of finding herself to be right.

‘Let’s go then, before any damage gets done.’

‘Not yet. Wait.’

And they waited. The caterers were loading their van and each time one emerged from the kitchen, Joe seemed to become nervier, more wound up.

The main door opened again and this time Nina Backworth came out, struggling to pull something behind her. Vera had expected her, but would have recognized the silhouette anyway: no one else was so tall and slim. ‘What’s going on there then?’ The words muttered to herself. Then again to Joe: ‘Wait!’

The woman reached the chapel door and disappeared within. There was a light inside and then darkness. With a sudden burst of activity, Vera fell out of the car and ran towards the chapel. Joe, having been told for so long to wait, took a while to realize what was happening. He was behind her out of the Land Rover and didn’t catch up until she’d reached the building. Despite her size and her age, she’d covered the ground as quickly as him. Excitement and fear had sent her flying.

The door was fastened by a latch. She pressed it and pushed, but nothing happened. It had been locked from inside.

I should have told Holly to take out the key. She’d never have thought of that for herself. My fault, then, if it all goes tits up.

Joe Ashworth seemed to lose his reason. The tension of the wait in the Land Rover and his anxiety for the woman, the frustrations of the case, all came together and he put his weight behind the door, swearing under his breath. Words she’d never heard him use before. She knew it would be no good. The chapel had been built to withstand the border reivers, the wild raiders from the north. One man wouldn’t shift the door. The opaque glass in the windows glowed with a gentle light. Candles had been lit. Then a woman screamed. The thickness of the walls made the noise faint, but they could make out the terror in the voice.

Joe battered on the door with his fists.

‘Police! Let us in!’ He was yelling so loud that Vera thought his throat would be scratchy and sore in the morning. He’d not be able to speak for days. He turned to her, furious that she was so calm. ‘Isn’t there another way in?’

She shook her head. She couldn’t bring herself to speak. No point in letting him see she was as scared as he was.

‘You do realize,’ he said, suddenly still, ‘that you’ve sacrificed that woman for the sake of a conviction. You do realize that I’ll never be able to work with you again.’

She felt the words physically like a punch in the belly. Then there was the sound of a key turning in the lock. The door was pushed open and Nina Backworth, white and shaky, fell towards Joe Ashworth. There was blood on the hand that reached out to clutch his shoulder, and she lost consciousness.

Vera left Nina to Joe and pushed her way inside. She still had her suspect to think about. The room was barely lit, with one candle on the altar. There was the bowl of apricots on the white cloth. And on a high-backed chair sat Mark Winterton. In his dark clothes he looked almost like a priest. But Holly had her arm around his neck and a knife at his throat. He’d stopped struggling.

‘I was too slow,’ Holly said, almost in tears. ‘He got to the woman before I could reach him.’

‘Is she badly hurt?’

Vera thought that she’d blown it. Joe had been right all along. She was an arrogant fool. She’d pulled her phone from her bag and was punching out 999 for an ambulance, and then the number of the team in the van parked in the layby up the bank.

‘I don’t know!’ It came out as a scream. Then Holly was repeating the words ‘He got to her before I could stop him.’

Vera’s pulse was racing.

Winterton was still, staring straight ahead of him. Holly set the knife on the table, and he allowed her to fasten his hands behind his back.

Vera finished her call and turned to the young woman. Her voice was angry. She always needed to take it out on someone when she’d cocked up. ‘Why didn’t you take the key out of the door? You always leave yourself a way of escape.’ She allowed a moment of silence filled with fury, and then brought her feelings under control. This wasn’t Holly’s fault.

‘Joe!’ Her shout echoed round the bare chapel. ‘Talk to me, Joe. How is she?’

But Joe didn’t answer.

Early the following morning they were in the police station. Vera and Joe, who hadn’t had any sleep, Winterton and a solicitor, who’d arrived from Carlisle. Vera wondered if this was the ex-wife’s toy boy. The woman wouldn’t want the publicity of a high-profile trial, and Vera thought that the solicitor was there to make them see Winterton as a man unfit to plead, rather than to put up any form of defence.

Nina Backworth was in hospital, but she’d be allowed home later in the day. The knife had caught the fleshy part of her upper arm. Joe still hadn’t talked to Vera. Since his refusal to answer in the chapel he’d maintained a moody silence. She thought his feelings were mixed. Of course he was furious that the inspector had put Nina in danger, but he was even angrier that Holly had been the person to save her. Vera should have allowed him to be hiding in the chapel. He should have been the rescuer, the gallant knight.

Winterton was dressed in a paper suit. He struggled to hold on to a tatter of dignity, but sitting beside his lawyer, he was falling apart. He curved his fingers so that his nails touched the table in front of him like claws. Vera leaned towards him.

‘Why don’t you tell me about Lucy?’ she said. ‘Your Lucy.’

‘She was my youngest,’ he said. ‘My baby.’ He took off his glasses for a moment to wipe them on the synthetic fabric of the suit and his eyes were unfocused and cloudy.

‘A bright girl,’ Vera prompted. ‘Everyone says how bright she was.’

‘She was always lost in a book.’ He nodded fiercely. ‘Always telling stories.’

‘So that was why you enrolled in the English-literature evening class when you retired. To connect with your daughter.’

‘Yes!’ He nodded again. ‘My ex-wife could never understand that. She said I should move on.’

‘We all have our own ways of dealing with our grief.’
But what,
Vera thought,
would I know about grief? When Hector died I felt like celebrating. Heartless cow that I am.
‘Tell me about Lucy’s death,’ she said.

‘She was never very good at handling stress.’ Even Winterton’s voice was different. He ran the words together. ‘In the run-up to A levels, Lucy had an episode. That was what the doctors called it. A stress-related psychotic episode. She had to go back and resit. Margaret, my ex-wife, couldn’t understand. She always thrived on stress.’

‘But you
did
understand?’ Vera had met police officers like Winterton before. The ones who stuck to rules. Rigid and unbending. They were the people who were so anxious about getting things wrong that they let the system take decisions for them. They were the ones who had nervous breakdowns when the rules let them down.

‘I didn’t have the care of Lucy,’ he said. ‘When Margaret left, she married again very quickly. They formed a new family. The children even took their stepfather’s name. But she was always my baby.’

‘Lucy must have passed her exams,’ Vera said. ‘She went off to university.’

‘To do English in Manchester,’ Winterton said in the same frantic tone. ‘At first she did well. She phoned me occasionally, full of her news. The end of the next year she came home for a bit and I saw her then. I thought she’d lost weight. Later I found out she’d already started taking heroin. I should have realized, shouldn’t I?’ He paused for breath and scraped his nails over the table. ‘A police officer with all those years of experience. I should have seen the signs.’