The sun was up now and the garden flooded with cold light. It was still slippery underfoot and their breath came in clouds. ‘My bloody car wouldn’t start,’ Joe said. ‘And then there was an accident on the A1 caused by the ice.’
‘Nightmare!’ Vera said automatically, but she wasn’t really listening.
They put on scene suits and stood just outside the tent. Vera pulled open the flap door so that they could see inside. At the same moment one of the CSIs took a photo of Miranda’s body. It came to Vera that, in life, the woman would have loved this attention – the photographs, the audience. Perhaps that was why she had established the Writers’ House. Not for the money, but because she needed the admiration and envy of the young writers who had yet to be published. She needed to feel that she was still part of the publishing world, in the same way as ageing television actresses made guest appearances to open supermarkets or award prizes to schoolchildren.
‘What do you think?’ Vera stood aside so that Ashworth had a clear view.
‘Multiple knife wounds,’ Ashworth said. ‘The same cause of death as Tony Ferdinand. Same style too. Unnecessary violence.’
‘But not quite the same,’ Vera said. ‘That gash across the throat. It’s post-mortem, according to Paul Keating. Ferdinand was stabbed repeatedly, but there was nothing as showy as that here.’
‘Is that relevant?’
‘It certainly is. Come back inside and I’ll read you a story.’
She was about to leave, then stopped and called to one of the CSIs, ‘What have you done with the hankie that was on the floor?’
‘Already bagged ready for testing. I thought you’d want it fast-tracked for DNA.’
‘Let’s have a look before it goes off.’
The young CSI held it out for them. ‘Distinctive,’ he said. ‘Plain white, but it’s got some embroidery in the corner. Looks home-made. Something a child might have done for a Mother’s Day present? Or Valentine’s? It looks like a little red heart.’
Back in the chapel, Vera showed Joe Nina’s notebook. ‘She’s written that since she was here. Look at the detail. Everything’s the same in the description of the scene: the candle, the number of glasses, the way they’re arranged on the table. Nothing about the handkerchief, though, which could suggest it was dropped by accident.’
‘If the killer used the story as a model, this murder wasn’t planned that far in advance,’ Joe said.
‘Well, Miranda Barton might have been chosen as the intended victim, but the execution of the plan couldn’t have been decided until the killer had seen the story.’
Vera thought execution was a good word. That was how this seemed to her. There was a ritual to the killings. But then these people were experts in crime fiction. Perhaps that was the intention: to provide layers of meaning that were only for distraction. In Vera’s experience, the motive for most murders was simple. It came down in the end to money or sex.
‘Keating thinks the same knife was used as to kill Ferdinand,’ she said. It was time to get real, to concentrate on concrete facts. ‘Where the hell had it been hidden? The search team did a pretty thorough job of the house and garden. And where is it now? Barton must have been killed sometime after I saw Joanna, Rickard and Jack out here on the terrace last night. We might get something a little more precise from Paul Keating on time of death, but I won’t hold my breath. So the killer could have had all night to get rid of the weapon.’
‘Would the son be able to help with time of death?’ Joe had been listening intently. She loved that about him. The way he hung on her every word.
Vera shook her head. ‘I had a quick chat with him earlier. He says he took himself off to bed after that ruckus kicked off with Jack. “The whole thing was just embarrassing,” he said. “I knew what it would be like. The whole lot of them, slagging off the chap for daring to interrupt the stupid dinner. Actually, I thought Joanna’s partner spoke a lot of sense.”’
‘That’s a strange attitude to take when he makes a living from the writers.’ Joe paused. ‘And when his mam’s just been killed.’
‘Aye, well, I have the impression he’s a strange sort of chap.’ Vera still had a picture of the young man, as he’d been when she’d first arrived that morning. She’d found him in the kitchen, still in his whites, lifting a tray of croissants from the oven. It was as if he couldn’t take in the fact that his mother had died. Or as if he didn’t care. He still felt the need to feed his visitors.
‘He didn’t hear his mother come in last night?’ Joe interrupted her daydream.
‘He says not.’
‘You’d think,’ Joe said, and she thought he could be a persistent bugger, ‘after all the fuss, he’d want to talk to her about it. Jack’s scene in the dining room, I mean. He’d want to know how it all ended.’
‘Well, I’m not the person to ask about that, am I? We need to chat to the boy.’
‘Where did Jack stay last night? Did he go back to the farm?’
‘No.’ Vera spoke slowly. ‘Joanna didn’t want him driving back, the state he was in. They bunked up together in Joanna’s room. This morning I shipped them both off to the hotel with the other residents. Why? What are you thinking? That Jack was the murderer? Unlikely surely. He wasn’t in the place when Ferdinand was killed.’
‘We don’t know that, do we?’ Joe looked up at her and Vera saw he had some sort of theory. And that he thought it’d take a hard sell to convince her. ‘When I was driving on the afternoon Ferdinand was murdered, something – or someone – ran across the track in front of my car.’
‘You think it could have been Jack?’
He looked at her. He hadn’t expected her to take him seriously. ‘I don’t know, but we’ve always assumed the killer was someone staying in the house. No reason that has to be the case.’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘We’ll check any CCTV between here and the farm for Jack’s van. Though I don’t know what his motive might have been.’
‘Probably a stupid idea,’ Joe said. Now she’d agreed to look into it, he was happy to let the notion go. ‘Why don’t we go and have a chat with Alex Barton? Where is he?’
Vera gave a little smile. In the end she always did get her own way. ‘I didn’t send him off to the hotel with all the others. It seemed a tad heartless. Besides, I thought we might get more out of him on home territory. He’s in the cottage with a minder.’
They walked into the yard, and into sunshine so bright that it made Vera’s eyes water.
‘You always call him a boy,’ Joe said suddenly. ‘How old is he?’
‘Twenty-three.’ Vera fished into her jacket pocket for a tissue and found half a roll of toilet paper. She tore off a handful and wiped her eyes. ‘Still a boy to me.’
Alex Barton was sitting in the kitchen of the cottage, with an overfed cat on his lap. Vera had knocked at the door, then walked straight in without waiting for an answer, but he didn’t seem surprised or startled to see them. A uniformed constable sat at the table and looked relieved when Vera waved for him to go.
‘I always hated this cat,’ Alex said. ‘It stinks. And when it was more active, it killed birds.’
‘I could never see the point of pets myself.’ Vera leaned against the Aga and felt the heat penetrate her jacket and warm her spine and her buttocks. ‘Your mother liked it, though?’