She’d arranged for someone to take the Winters home. The woman wouldn’t stop sobbing and the noise had got to them all. Robert had wanted to take his own car.
“This is a crime scene,” she’d said. “There could be a trace, you know, someone knocking against your vehicle. We have to check.”
He’d accepted that and gone quietly enough in the end.
Above her the sky was still clear, but pools of mist had collected over the ditches and in dips in the fields.
The track to Springhead House was pitted and her tyres crunched through the frozen puddles. The people inside must have heard the engine, but they didn’t move when she went in. A uniformed police woman opened the door and showed her into the kitchen where they were all sitting, facing towards a big brown teapot on a tray, not speaking. Robert Winter sat at the head of the table with his wife slumped beside him. James clasped a mug of tea between both hands. Emma was holding a sleeping child on her knee.
Vera nodded gently towards the baby. “You collected the bairn, then?”
It had been Emma’s main concern when Vera had asked them all to leave the lane and wait for her. Robert had wanted them back at Springhead. Mary was hysterical, he said. She needed to be in her own home. Emma had been worried about Matthew and had insisted on going to the Captain’s House first. Vera had been surprised by that. The woman’s brother had been killed and her only response had been a calm insistence that they go back to Elvet to collect her child. But then Vera couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be a mother and anyway people expressed their grief in different ways.
Vera hadn’t expected Mary still to be with them. That grief had been raw and obvious, especially shocking because the woman seemed so reserved. Later Vera would tell her sergeant that it was like a vicar’s wife getting up on the church hall stage and doing a striptease. It made you uncomfortable. She had told the policewoman, detailed to stay with the family, to get a doctor, had imagined Christopher’s mother would be in bed, sedated.
Though they all sat wrapped up in thick sweaters, the kitchen was warmer than it had been outside. The sudden increase in temperature set off Vera’s eczema again. She resisted the urge to scratch the back of her knees and joined them at the table.
“Tea, ma’am? It’s not long been made.”
The constable was hovering. Vera waved her away impatiently. The others sat, looking at Vera with fixed, dazed expressions, waiting for her to speak. Despite herself, Vera savoured the moment. She’d always liked an audience.
“We believe that Christopher was murdered,” she said carefully. She knew they’d find it hard to take in the facts. It was a kindness to be straight with them. “He has a wound to his skull.”
“Could he have slipped?” James asked. “The road was very icy.”
“He could have slipped and knocked his head on the road, perhaps. But that wouldn’t explain his lying in the ditch. There was nothing there which could have caused that sort of injury. I’m sorry.”
Mary gave a deep intake of breath which was released as a sob.
“Are you ready for this?” Vera asked. “I can speak to you tomorrow, if you’d prefer. Should we call a doctor?”
The last question was directed towards Robert but before he could answer Mary said sharply, “No. No doctor.”
“It would help me to know what Christopher might have been doing at Mr. Mantel’s house.”
“He could have been there to look for us.” Vera thought Emma spoke reluctantly, but perhaps she was just being quiet, worried about waking the baby.
“Of course. That must be it!” Mary seemed feverish. Her eyes were bright and there was a flush to her face. “He came to Mantel’s to find us. There were posters all over the village about the open evening for the lifeboat. I told you, Robert! I told you he wouldn’t go back to the university without coming to see us.”
“Christopher was a student?”
“He held a postgraduate research position at Aberdeen,” Robert said. There was a pause. “He was an extremely gifted scientist. A zoologist.” He looked at Vera apologetically as if he’d realized that this wasn’t the moment for parental boasting.
“Was there any special reason for the visit? Was it planned?”
“No,” Emma said. “But nothing much he did was planned. Except his work. He was always completely wrapped up in that.”
“Had he warned Mr. and Mrs. Winter of his visit?”
“No,” Robert said. “We didn’t know anything about it. We didn’t know he was in Elvet until Emma phoned me at work at lunchtime.”
“You work as a probation officer, Mr. Winter?”
“That’s right.”
“You worked with Jeanie Long?”
“I prepared the home circumstance report for the parole board. That was all.”
i Vera made no comment. There was a moment of silence, which Emma filled. “I phoned Mum and Dad here as soon as I realized Chris had gone, but by then they’d both already left. I didn’t like to bother them until lunchtime. I didn’t see him this morning, you see. He’d gone by the time I got up.”
An early riser, was he?”
“Not usually, no. I was surprised, a bit worried, I suppose.”
“Worried? Why was that? It seems a bit strange to be worried about a grown man.” There was a pause. “How did he seem last night?”
Emma and James looked at each other. Vera suspected an unspoken request from Emma, which James ignored.
“He was behaving oddly,” James said. “He was drunk but there was more to it than that. He’d always come across as intense about his work, pretty self-obsessed, but last night he seemed completely absorbed by some problem of his own. I wondered if he was having a sort of minor breakdown. It sounds callous but I was too tired to deal with it and I was still on call. In the end I left Em to cope with him. I don’t know if she got any sense out of him.”
“Did you, Emma?” Robert asked. He had been sitting, quite calmly, following the conversation. Vera couldn’t make him out. His son had been murdered but she had no sense that he was grieving. There was a terrible self-control. Perhaps it had something to do with his faith. Dan Greenwood had told her Winter was an evangelical. She’d always thought they were the showy bunch who waved their hands in the air, though there’d been no sign of that at the church service she’d attended. Did he think it would be wrong to grieve for a son who was now with his maker? Is that why he sat, rigid and frozen, so only his eye’s moved?
“We talked,” Emma said at last. “Like James has told you, he was very drunk. He didn’t make a lot of sense.”
Vera nodded sympathetically, but there was the flash of excitement, which was why she’d come into this job, what it was really about. You’re lying, pet. You know more than you’re saying. Why’s that then? What did your brother tell you? Skeletons in his cupboard, maybe. Are you trying to protect your mum and dad? Or is something more sinister going on here?
“How old would Christopher have been when Abigail Mantel died?” she asked.
“Fourteen,” Emma said. “He was a year younger than me.”
“Did he know her?”
“He’d seen her around with me. And at school.”
“Go back to that Sunday, the day you found her body. Was Christopher at home that day?”
“He came to church with us,” Robert said. “Then we all had lunch. He was still here when Emma went out. It wasn’t the weather for being outdoors.”