The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

by Ann Cleeves

  ‘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.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  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 ta
tter 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.’

  ‘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.’