The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5) (37 page)

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Vera said.

But Winterton seemed lost in thought and didn’t hear her. ‘She told me she was writing a novel,’ he said, his voice suddenly bright. ‘I was so proud of her. It explained her nerviness, you see. Writers aren’t like everyone else. They’re more sensitive.’

Vera said nothing.

‘She finished her degree,’ he said. ‘I went down for the graduation, but they didn’t let me in. There were only two tickets and Margaret and her husband took those. Lucy came back to Carlisle, but she never really settled. She was still working on her book.’ He looked at Vera. ‘She had her heart set on doing an MA at St Ursula’s. An obsession. She’d seen Tony Ferdinand on the television. She thought he could get her a publisher.’ The galloping words seemed too much for him and he lapsed into silence, rested his chin on his chest.

‘What happened next, Mark?’ Vera needed it for the tape recorder.

He lifted his head, took off his glasses again and looked at her with his wild eyes. ‘She got a place on the course,’ he said. ‘I was so pleased. I thought it would make her well again. I took her down to London and she was as excited as a small child. “This is my fresh start.” That’s what she said when I dropped her off.’

‘And then?’

Vera knew what had happened. She’d spent a couple of hours reading the student records in the St Ursula archives. The change of surname had thrown her at first – that had wasted them all a lot of time – but she’d known what she was looking for and she could be persistent when she set her mind to it.

‘They killed her,’ Winterton said.

Vera stared out of the window. The room was on the first floor of the police station. It looked out over the river. She saw the street lamps on the other side. Soon it would be daylight and the town would be busy with folk on their way to work. She turned back to the room. ‘That’s not entirely true, is it, Mark? She killed herself.’

‘They tormented her,’ he said. ‘They tore her apart.’

‘It was a tough regime,’ Vera said. ‘Not everyone could cope. Even Nina Backworth left before she completed the course.’

‘Her!’ Winterton shot to his feet and was rearing over her. ‘She was one of the tormenters. Lucy thought she was a friend – her only friend in the place – and Backworth ended up killing her. It was the worst sort of betrayal.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Vera said.

‘They had this session,’ he went on. ‘Everyone on the course there. Ferdinand had brought in a visiting tutor, an old friend. And they chose Lucy’s work for discussion. There she sat facing them all. Like it was some sort of interrogation. And they picked her writing apart. Sentence after sentence for three hours. She’d put her heart into that book. By destroying it, they were destroying her.’ He paused. ‘She told me that it was like exposing herself, as if her skin was made of glass and they could see into her soul.’

‘What was the name of the visiting tutor?’ Vera asked. She knew fine well, but she needed it for the tape.

‘Miranda Barton.’ He spat out the name. ‘The great novelist. The cruellest woman.’

‘Lucy left.’

‘That evening. She didn’t even go back to her room to pick up her stuff. She phoned me about midnight. She’d tried earlier, but I was at work and her mother was away on a cruise with her fancy man.’ He paused. ‘She was crying as she told me about it. Sobbing. And there was nothing I could do to help.’ He looked up. ‘I never heard from her again. I tried to get hold of her, but there was no answer on her mobile. A week later she was found in a squat in a flat near King’s Cross. Dead. A heroin overdose.’

Vera said nothing. She had no questions about that. Her former colleague, now working in the Met, had filled in all the details.

Vera shot a quick look at Joe Ashworth. He’d left the interview to her. Still sulking. Now his face was white. Chalky. She could tell that he was thinking of his kids, understanding that one day they’d leave home and be outside his control and his care.

Winterton was still talking. ‘There was an inquest, but the result was inconclusive. Lucy might have intended to take her own life or the heroin overdose could have been a terrible accident. Really, it doesn’t matter. I know who was responsible. If she hadn’t been bullied at college she’d still be alive.’

‘You can’t know that,’ Vera said.

But Winterton hadn’t heard. He’d convinced himself that the killings were justified. He’d spent his career working for the criminal-justice system. Now he’d formed his own.

‘So they all had to die,’ Vera said. ‘Ferdinand, Barton and Backworth. To avenge your daughter.’

‘It wasn’t vengeance,’ he said. ‘It was justice.’

It was only a book. Not worth killing yourself for. Not worth committing murder for.

‘This evening class that you took when you retired,’ Vera said. ‘English literature. I spoke to the teacher. The title of the course was “Classic Tragedies”. That would have appealed to you.’

‘Shakespeare,’ Winterton seemed a little calmer. ‘
Macbeth
and
Othello
.’

‘Not light reading then.’

‘Lucy did
Othello
in her first year of university. We’d talked about it. About the jealousy that drove Othello to madness.’

‘Then the class moved on,’ Vera said, ‘to the Revenge Tragedies. Webster.
The Duchess of Malfi
and
The White Devil
. Very gory. Makes today’s violence on telly look restrained.’ She looked at him. ‘But you already knew you wanted revenge, didn’t you? It didn’t take the play to make you carry it out.’

‘I’d dreamed of it since Lucy died,’ Winterton said and his voice was dreamy now. ‘I’d spent my whole career bringing killers to justice. Those people had killed Lucy as surely as if they’d injected the heroin into her vein.’

‘No, they didn’t,’ Vera said. ‘They were flawed and cruel, but there was no intent to kill. Not within the meaning of the law. And the law’s all we have to hold things together.’

Winterton shook his head and she knew he was mad. As mad as the Webster character who believed that he was a wolf and dug dead bodies from the earth.

‘You tried to kill Tony Ferdinand before,’ Vera said. ‘Last February.’

‘That didn’t feel right,’ Winterton said. ‘I felt like a thug. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be.’

‘Then you found out that he would be at the Writers’ House.’

‘It was fate,’ he said. ‘A sign. The teacher of the evening class brought in a flier for the courses.’

‘And you recognized the names,’ Vera said. ‘Tony Ferdinand, Miranda Barton and Nina Backworth. All of them there together. So you enrolled.’ Suddenly she felt very tired. What would have happened if Winterton had missed that lesson? If he’d had flu or a dodgy stomach, and had never seen the Writers’ House flier? Would Ferdinand and Barton still be working and writing?

‘When I arrived at the house on the coast it seemed so
right
for my purpose.’ Winterton’s voice was manic again. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his paper suit. ‘The atmosphere, the grandeur. It was a fitting place for justice to be executed.’

Vera looked at his face and saw there was no point arguing with him. Let him just bring his story to its conclusion.

‘You stole Nina Backworth’s sleeping pills from her room and put them in Ferdinand’s coffee at lunch. You knew he always sat in the glass room immediately after the meal. After you’d killed him, you set up the room to look like a scene from Miranda Barton’s book.’

He nodded. ‘And I left the knife. To buy me some time, but also as a sign of his guilt. Like in
Macbeth
.’

‘Oh, pet,’ she said. ‘The world couldn’t read your signs and messages. I struggled and I’m almost as daft as you are.’

He looked at her, but again she saw that he would only hear what he wanted to.

‘You played music,’ Vera said. ‘“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Was Ferdinand supposed to hear it? To remember and realize what he’d done?’

‘It was her song,’ Winterton said. ‘It was for her.’

‘You wrote the note for Joanna and hoped that she would pick up the knife.’
Let’s move this on,
Vera thought.
Get it over with.
The futility of his actions made her want to weep. And if she didn’t get her breakfast soon she’d faint. ‘Tell me about the handkerchief on the terrace after you killed Miranda,’ she said briskly. ‘Another play?’

‘
Othello
.’

Vera smiled as if she’d known all along; she thought Google was a wonderful thing. ‘Desdemona’s hankie,’ she said. ‘White cloth embroidered with strawberries. And we thought it was a heart. Embroidery’s not one of your talents, pet.’

The solicitor cleared his throat. They all looked at him. It would be his first utterance. ‘I don’t quite understand the significance of the apricots,’ he said.

Vera gave him a superior smile. ‘They feature in a play too,’ she said. ‘
The Duchess of Malfi
. A Revenge Tragedy. And the dead robin’s from
The White Devil
.’

Winterton lay back in his chair and closed his eyes, reciting:

He sat upright. ‘That’s Cornelia mourning her dead child.’

The room was very quiet. Nobody knew what to say. Vera broke the silence. ‘You certainly gave Miranda a fright. Killing Ferdinand in a scene from her most successful book. Very weird.’

‘When I heard her screaming,’ Winterton said, ‘it was the happiest I’d been since Lucy died.’

‘While everyone believed that Joanna killed Tony Ferdinand, Miranda could persuade herself that the scene was a coincidence,’ Vera went on. ‘It was only after Joanna was released from custody that she began to reconsider.’

‘She was a stupid, greedy woman,’ Winterton said.

‘She tried to blackmail you.’

‘She had grand ideas. For the Writers’ House and her own work.’ Winterton looked disdainful. ‘She needed money. She thought it was only Ferdinand I blamed for my daughter’s death.’

‘And this time you used the scene from Nina Backworth’s short story.’ Vera thought that by then his lust for revenge had taken over. Though he’d held it together in public – slipping ideas to Joe about Miranda Barton having lost a daughter, sending them in quite the wrong direction.

Winterton looked up. ‘It seemed fitting,’ he said. He gave a little smile. ‘They care so much about their fiction, after all. For Lucy it was a matter of life and death.’

Vera said nothing. She looked at Joe to see if he had any further questions. He shook his head. On the other side of the table Winterton was sitting upright and still. Now he didn’t care at all what might happen to him.

Vera thought it was time for breakfast. Maybe if she bought him a decent fry-up, Joe would forgive her.

Joe Ashworth caught up with Nina at her flat in Jesmond. He’d expected her to be with Chrissie Kerr at North Farm, thinking she’d want company after her ordeal with Winterton. But she was alone. She’d been sitting by the window looking out over the cemetery. Her arm was bandaged and she wore a red cardigan over her shoulder like a shawl. In the street outside, schoolgirls were making their way into the playground.

‘Perhaps you don’t want to be disturbed,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing that won’t wait.’

‘No, please! Do come in.’

She made him coffee and he sat beside her at the table.

‘Of course I’d gone over the events in my head, wondering who the murderer might be,’ she said. ‘Mark was at the bottom of the list. He seemed such a gentle man.’

‘Who did you have at the top?’ Joe thought they’d never have had this conversation while the investigation was still running.

She paused and seemed ashamed for a moment. ‘Lenny Thomas,’ she said. ‘Dreadful, isn’t it? The assumptions we make. Just because he’d been in prison.’

‘We had our suspicions about him for a while.’ Joe supposed he should be more discreet, but he didn’t think Nina would be talking to the press. ‘He wouldn’t tell us where he was the night of your break-in and the afternoon the cat was found in the chapel. Turned out he’d been working for a mate, a plumber from Ashington. He was being paid cash, nothing on the books. He hadn’t told the benefit people.’

‘Mark was so respectable, so courteous,’ Nina said. She turned to Joe. ‘Do you know how he got me into the chapel?’

Joe shook his head. This was a comfortable room. It occurred to him that he’d never had this. A space of his own. Quiet. Peace. He’d never thought he needed it.

‘He told Chrissie that he thought he was in love with me. We all knew he was divorced. He’d been too shy to talk to me during the Writers’ House course, but he said he didn’t want to drive back to Cumbria without telling me how he felt. Chrissie knew he was an ex-detective and didn’t think for a moment that he could be the killer. And she’s such a bloody romantic, always playing matchmaker. So she set me up. She asked me to take the books into the chapel, knowing he’d be there.’

Nina looked up.

‘He would have killed me, you know. He thought I’d caused his daughter’s death.’ She paused. ‘I remember it, that session when we pulled apart Lucy’s work. I thought about it again when you showed me the magazine article they found on the beach. Miranda looked much younger, and it reminded me that she was the visiting tutor that day. I’ve always felt guilty about the way I allowed myself to be dragged into the criticism. Lucy and I were friends, and until then we’d always supported each other. I hated the person I became that day. It was horrible.’

‘The inspector should have had more sense than to allow you into the chapel.’ Joe tried to contain his anger. ‘Playing God with other people’s lives. I told her she was crazy.’

‘She came to see me in hospital after you’d finished with Winterton,’ Nina said. ‘Apologized. I told her I understood. She was doing her job.’

‘She’s bloody lucky you don’t sue. Or make a formal complaint.’

Nina smiled at him. ‘She told me you were sulking.’

Joe didn’t know what to say to that.