‘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 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.’
‘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: