‘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:
Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren.
Since o’er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flow’rs do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
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.