Ann Cleeves - The Glass Room

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.

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.’