The Glass Room (Vera Stanhope 5)

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