Is it? “Yes.”
“I’ll see you there, shall I?”
“Yes,” she said again, more quickly, glad that the decision had been made for her.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course,” she said. “Of course.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Ashworth was sitting in his car at the end of the drive to Springhead. Vera pulled into a gateway leading into a small patch of woodland and walked down the road to join him. There was a smell of wet leaves and cows. She felt better, though anxiety about Emma had settled at the pit of her stomach, a dull ache. She couldn’t cope with breaking more bad news. And she couldn’t cope with being wrong about what had happened here. She climbed into the passenger seat. Joe was listening to the radio. Classic FM. He was doing an evening class in music appreciation. She reached over and switched it off.
“Well?” she said.
“I did as you suggested, talked to the neighbours. It wasn’t very useful at first. Most of them had moved in since the Winters left. It’s one of those classy areas where everyone’s too busy to wonder what’s going on behind closed doors. Big houses, lots of garden. Then I tracked down one elderly woman who remembered them. “A lovely family,” she said. “Such a shame when they moved.” He put on an old lady’s voice, high pitched, with a BBC accent. Vera thought he’d be good in the local pan to He could play the dame.
Joe went on. “She was a widow even then and she used to babysit for the Winters when the kids were small. Until they stopped asking. She’d been upset by that, wondered if she’d done something wrong, if the children had taken against her for some reason. It troubled her so much that she went to see Mary. “Of course I was worrying quite unnecessarily. One of Robert’s colleagues had a daughter who needed the money. It was only natural that they should ask her instead.”
“Ah,” Vera said. A sigh of relief and satisfaction.
“The colleague’s name is Maggie Sullivan. There’d only been four of them working together. Three architects and someone to run the office. Two of them an architect and the office manager had been close to retirement, a bit old to have teenage daughters, so it wasn’t hard to work out she was the most likely. She’s still working in York. When I explained what I was there for, she was only too pleased to see me. She felt guilty because she hadn’t gone to the police when it happened.”
And what, exactly, did happen?”
“Robert Winter became obsessed with the daughter. He followed her around, waited for her outside school. Made a real nuisance of himself.” Ashworth paused. “How did you know?”
“I didn’t. Not really. But there had to be something to make them change their lives so dramatically.” And there was something about him, something that made my flesh crawl. And the psychiatrist said someone sufficiently controlled could get away with it.
“To make him turn to God?”
Aye, I suppose…” She nodded towards the house. “What’s happening in there?”
“I don’t know. It’s been quiet while I’ve been here.”
“You’ve not seen Emma Bennett go in?”
“No, but I’ve only just arrived.”
“She’s had a row with her husband and gone missing.” Vera explained about Michael Long and the scene in the Anchor. “Probably nothing, but I’ve got a nasty feeling about it.”
“It can’t be significant, can it?” He turned to her easily. He thought he knew now exactly who’d killed Abigail and Christopher. She didn’t answer immediately. Now it came to it, she wasn’t sure any more.
“Maybe not.”
“How do you want to play it?” he said. “We could wait until morning, get a warrant. The boy’s mobile has still not been found. If that’s in there, we’ve got a result.”
Vera thought she couldn’t stand to wait until morning. She hated this case. She hated all the pretending, the unfinished grieving, the foul, flat country. She wanted to be home. Besides, there was Emma and the bairn to consider.
“Why don’t we go in?”
“Now?”
“No big deal. A few informal questions. And we’ve got an excuse. We’re looking for Emma.”
“What if we scare him away?”
“I don’t think that’s likely, do you?” Ashworth considered for a moment. “No,” he said. “Someone like that, he wants to be caught.”
Vera didn’t think Joe had got that quite right, but she was still hoping to persuade him to bend a few rules, so she didn’t say anything.
Ashworth reached for the key to turn on the engine, but she stopped him.
“We’ll walk in. Don’t want to give any warning.”
And she needed time to work it all out. Not so much that, to psyche herself up, to believe again that she was up to the job. To forget that moment of panic outside the Captain’s House. They walked up the straight, flat drive to the house and their eyes got used to the dark, so after a while they didn’t need Joe Ashworth’s torch. It was a clear night. It might freeze later, like the night Christopher was killed. Would Robert and Mary be looking out at the stars, remembering? There was enough light from the traffic passing on the road and the moon. To their right, the coast was marked by the red lamp on the pilot mast and ahead of them were two orange squares, one above the other. One downstairs and one upstairs window in the ugly square house. Another sort of beacon.
The curtains at the kitchen window weren’t drawn, and Vera stood, pressed against the wall so she couldn’t be seen from inside, looking in. Robert and Mary were sitting at the kitchen table. Mary stood up, took a pan of milk from the Aga and poured it into mugs. Only two mugs, Vera saw. Something of the panic returned. Where was Emma? From another room there came a noise, a howl.
Then Emma walked in and Vera felt her pulse slow. She was carrying a screaming baby on her hip and her eyes were red from crying. Mary offered to take Matthew from her, but she held onto him. She paced up and down, rubbing his back until the cries subsided, then she took her place at the table. Immediately Robert started to talk to her.
All this talk, Vera thought. Everyone sitting around telling stories to justify themselves or shift the guilt. She wondered what could have happened. Had Emma been to the pottery at all? Perhaps Dan had given her a lift. Another story, Vera thought. More explanations. Emma had come to Springhead to collect the baby of course, not to talk to her parents. She’d never confided in them.
She continued to stand there in the yard looking in. Outside was the huge winter sky, which made you dizzy just to think of it, inside a small family drama, a soap opera. And she was in the middle. Even if they’d been able to make out her shadow in the darkness, she thought they wouldn’t have noticed. They were engrossed in conversation and she could hear everything which was going on. Springhead House had never run to double glazing.
Mary was talking now. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would James do such a thing?”
“I don’t understand either. He lied to me. What else is there to know? If Mr. Long hadn’t dug up his past he probably never would have told me.”
“Shouldn’t you ask him?”
“Perhaps he lied because he killed Abigail. I don’t want to hear that.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Mary said. “James changed his name. It doesn’t make him a different person. He didn’t lie about anything important. And you married him, you had his child. It’s not something you can just walk out of. You can’t run away.” She was clutching the big patchwork bag on her knee as if she had a baby of her own.
“Why not? Isn’t that what he did? He didn’t like who he was, so he ran away.”
“You should phone him,” Robert said. “He’ll be worried.”
“Good.” Emma could have been fifteen again, defiant, determined to get her own way. Vera thought she must have had exactly that expression before she set off to meet Abigail in the Old Chapel, venting her fury in her battle against the wind. “I hope he’s desperate with worry.”