‘Did you know?’ Vera sat on a wooden rocking chair with a patchwork cushion.
‘I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. I think I guessed. Then I told myself I was being paranoid and tried to forget about it. What reason could Nigel have for killing two strangers?’ She paused. ‘I wondered if the cancer had spread to my brain, eating away at it, making me imagine things. If I was going quietly mad. It’s been a horrible week.’
‘You’re one of the sanest people I know. When did you suspect?’
‘Friday afternoon, just before the party. Not that Nige was the killer then, but that something was wrong. He’d been in town shopping, stocking up on drinks and snacks.’
‘He showed us the receipt,’ Vera said.
‘He seemed to be away a long time. And when he came back he changed and put all his clothes in the washing machine. He’s pretty domesticated, but that seemed odd.’ She turned away from the painting and wiped her brush on an oily rag. ‘And he seemed very wired and hyper, insisting on dragging me down to The Lamb for a drink.’
Vera didn’t speak and Lorraine continued.
‘Also I knew there was something in his past, something that he wanted to forget. He refused to tell me about it. Once there was the start of a news item, and he switched off the television before I could see what it was about. “Why can’t they leave all that alone, after all this time?” he said. “What good does it do now?” He wasn’t himself for days.’
‘He’d worked as a senior prison officer,’ Vera said. ‘Before he set up his own security company. One reason why the business did so well. He had contacts. People trusted him, just at a time when a number of the prison functions were being put out to private tender.’
There was a noise in the next-door garden. Janet O’Kane locking the hens in for the night.
‘I knew he’d worked in the prison service,’ Lorraine said. ‘He never liked to talk about it. I thought it was a kind of snobbishness. He wanted people to think of him as a successful businessman.’
‘He worked in a detention centre for young offenders in Staffordshire. Shirley Hewarth was a recently qualified probation officer based in the same institution. It took us a while to make the connection. Perhaps we didn’t really know what we were looking for and we got distracted by other things.’
‘What could possibly have happened there to make Nigel kill three people?’
Vera was surprised by how calm Lorraine seemed. Her interest in the story was almost academic. Perhaps she had her own death on her mind.
‘It was a different time,’ Vera said. Though perhaps not so different. ‘The Home Office thought the answer to youth crime was a short, sharp shock. Military – everything done on the run. No excuses and no compassion.’
‘Like a US boot-camp.’
‘Maybe. A few of the officers took the idea too far. Even enjoyed the cruelty, perhaps. The power. There was abuse. Some lads tried to break their own limbs to get invalided out.’ Like soldiers in the First World War, though surely the regime can’t have been that horrific. ‘Many of them lived with the effect of their sentence for years. There’ve been some recent court cases, lawyers representing the kids and demanding justice, a public inquiry. The inmates were young. Some boys only fourteen and fifteen. Lots of them were screwed up and disturbed.’
‘So that was the news report Nigel turned off.’ Lorraine stretched. She seemed uncomfortable and rubbed her back.
‘One of the lads was from a well-to-do family. A bit of a tearaway who’d got involved with drugs. Name of Simon Randle.’
‘A relative of the Carswells’ house-sitter.’
‘An older brother. He never got over the experience. Went off to Oxford, but then committed suicide halfway through his first year. The parents never told Patrick that Simon had been inside, but he must have found out about it somehow. Got obsessed and started digging into the past to find out what had happened. Resented the fact that his parents hadn’t told him the whole story about his brother. He was a bright boy and he knew about research.’
‘He came to the valley because he’d tracked Nigel down?’ Lorraine got to her feet and went to a small fridge in the corner of the room. She took out a bottle of wine and found two glasses and a corkscrew on a shelf. ‘Will you do the honours, Inspector? I don’t have the strength in my arms any more. Some days I can’t hold a paintbrush.’
Vera opened the bottle and poured two glasses. ‘Nigel was the officer that Simon Randle hated most.’
‘I can’t imagine Nigel as a sadist.’ Lorraine looked up at Vera. ‘Are you sure about all this?’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t about being a sadist,’ Vera said, ‘but about not wanting to stand out from the crowd. Obeying orders. Doing what was expected. Being good at his job. He’d have been a young man then.’
Lorraine gave a little smile. ‘That does sound more like Nigel.’
‘It was premeditated.’ Vera couldn’t quite give Lucas an easy ride, even to please Lorraine. ‘He killed Randle with a spade stolen from the O’Kanes’ house and he scattered a few of John’s sweet wrappers on his way. Laying a false trail. He’d have been happy for someone else to be convicted.’
‘I suppose he was desperate.’
Vera thought this was a surreal conversation. She was chatting quite calmly to a woman who was about to die, about a man who’d killed three people.
‘He must have felt trapped,’ Lorraine went on. ‘He wanted so much to be respectable and to make me proud. He’d just become a magistrate and thought that would be the opportunity he needed to meet the right sort of people.’ She drank half the glass in one go. ‘I love it here. It’s my idea of paradise. I wouldn’t have wanted to move away.’
‘Another of the lads in the centre was a local lad called Jason Crow. He was there a few years after Randle.’ Vera kept her voice even. The woman deserved information. It was quite dark outside now and the whole room was lit by the single spot from the anglepoise lamp. ‘Builder and businessman. Lover of Lizzie Redhead, before she went wild and ended up in prison.’
‘So Lizzie knew about Nigel?’
‘Jason recognized him when they negotiated the work on your house. He must have told Lizzie.’ Vera paused. ‘Jason survived the experience of the detention centre very well. Says it was the making of him. It didn’t stop him offending, but he was never convicted again. But Lizzie remembered the stories he’d told about the abuse there. And Jason still had nightmares about it. When we arrested Nigel this evening, she was trying to blackmail him.’
Lorraine reached out and topped up her glass, waved the bottle at Vera, who shook her head. ‘What about the older man? Martin Benton. Was he in the detention centre too?’
‘No. Martin was a computer geek. A bit sad. Patrick Randle was employing him to dig around in the old Home Office files and find out what the government knew about the regime at the centre. He was planning a big story in the press about his brother’s suicide. Martin and Patrick had come across each other because they shared a passion for moths. Not exactly a coincidence, but a weird connection that threw us for a bit.’ Vera thought how thrilled Martin must have been. His first job as a self-employed computer consultant and Patrick had asked him to be an ethical hacker. It would be the most exciting thing he’d ever done in his life. He’d told his friend Frank that the work was secret, and that Frank would be proud of him.
‘And the woman? The social worker?’
‘As I told you, she worked in the same detention centre. Benton must have come across her name when he was digging around in the records. He admired her and was grateful to her because she gave him work, but he passed on her name to Randle and they corresponded. She’d always felt guilty about her time at the detention centre, the fact that she hadn’t done anything to stop what was happening. It was what drove her to work for practically nothing at the charity for offenders. I think she suspected that Nigel was involved in the murder and confronted him.’ Vera knew this was all guesswork. She hoped Nigel would be filling in the gaps to Joe and Holly now. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ she said. ‘The CPS would go ape if they found out. But I thought you should know.’