The Glass Room

Chapter Fifteen

Ashworth didn’t know what to make of Nina Backworth. She was the sort of woman who would usually terrify him. But following her up the main stairs away from the lobby he found himself aware of her body, a sudden and powerful attraction that left him breathless. At her bedroom door she turned and gave an unexpected grin:

‘I thought police officers were supposed to be fit.’

He felt confused, unsure what to make of the observation – had she noticed the effect she was having on him? His words came out as brusque, almost rude.

‘The pills, Ms Backworth, if you don’t mind.’

Her room was on the same floor as those of all the other tutors. While she went into the bathroom, he stood by the window and looked out at the sea, trying to regain his composure. At an angle below him was the terrace, with its wrought-iron furniture. The garden, rather overgrown and unkempt, sloped steeply to a path that led down to the beach.

He looked back into the room. It had a faint smell of citrus. Her perfume. He’d noticed it as he’d come up the stairs. Everything was ordered. She’d made her own bed, and her pyjamas – white silk – were folded on the pillow. On the desk were a notebook and a fountain pen, neatly aligned. He hadn’t realized that anyone wrote with a real pen and ink any more. He was thinking how classy she was, well outside his sphere, when she returned from the bathroom carrying a red toilet bag.

‘The pills are inside,’ she said. ‘I didn’t touch the bottle. I thought I might smudge fingerprints. Something like that.’

Her prints would already be on the bottle, of course, but he should have thought of that, should focus now entirely on the task in hand. This was ridiculous. He was behaving like a teenager. Though when he’d been a teenager he’d already had his future mapped out. He’d met his wife when he was still at school. Sixteen years old and I was already middle-aged.

He took a clear plastic evidence bag from his pocket and, using it as a glove, he slipped the bottle inside. Then he held it to the light and tilted it so that he could count the tablets.

‘There are four left,’ he said. ‘Is that what you would have expected?’

‘No.’ He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her face was white and set. The red lipstick like a splash of fresh blood on her face. ‘My GP gave me a prescription for a month’s supply. I’d used about ten.’

He did the arithmetic in his head and checked it before he spoke. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself in front of this woman. ‘So there are sixteen missing?’

‘I can’t be precise, but certainly about that. At least a dozen.’ She slumped, so that she was sitting on the bed, leaning forward. The straight spine and upright posture were so characteristic of Nina Backworth that it seemed another, more vulnerable woman was there. A stranger. ‘Someone came into my room,’ she said. ‘They went through my things.’

He wanted to sit on the bed beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘It’s a horrible feeling.’ The words seemed inadequate to him.

‘So you believe me? You know I didn’t poison Tony Ferdinand?’ Something of the old spark returned. ‘You know I wouldn’t be so foolish as to use my own sleeping pills!’

Ashworth took a moment to answer. ‘My job’s not about belief,’ he said. ‘It’s about fact. Evidence.’

She looked up at him. ‘Then do your job,’ she said. ‘Find your evidence. Prove that I didn’t kill Ferdinand.’

Downstairs Vera was waiting for him. ‘Charlie’s coming over to pick up the pills,’ she said. ‘He’s bringing some stuff he’s dug up about Ferdinand and Lenny Thomas.’

Ashworth nodded. He knew it was ridiculous, but Nina’s words had given him a new energy, a new determination. ‘We’ve got time to fit in an interview with Rickard, then. And Charlie won’t mind waiting if he can get his hands on coffee and a home-made biscuit.’

Vera looked at him. ‘Did your lass put something in your tea this morning?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You seem like a new man.’ She paused. ‘Do you want to lead on the interview with Rickard? I mean, I know there might be some history with Joanna, so maybe you’re better doing it.’

But Ashworth shook his head. Rickard was a writer, intimidating, and anyway at the moment he wasn’t sure he’d be able to concentrate. ‘Nah, you do it. I’ll sit in.’ And from the beginning of the interview he could tell he’d made a wise decision. Vera was at her sharpest, her most outrageous and clever.

From the moment Rickard came into the chapel, leaning on a stick and struggling to push open the heavy door, Ashworth couldn’t get past the fact that this was an old man. Old men weren’t murderers. It wasn’t just that it seemed physically impossible: Rickard couldn’t have stabbed Ferdinand, and certainly couldn’t have lifted him from the wicker chair in the glass room and out onto the balcony. It was more than that. In Ashworth’s mind, old people weren’t wicked. Vera seemed not to share this inhibition, and Ashworth wondered if that had something to do with her relationship with her father. Horrible Hector, she called him, or my beastly father, though she’d spent most of her life looking after him.

Now Vera was leaning forward across the desk towards Rickard.

‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘is why you’re here at all. You’re a famous writer. Even I’ve heard of you. Seen your books in WH Smith at Central Station in town. So why give up your precious time to spend a week on the Northumberland coast?’ She smiled and stretched back in her chair, waiting for the old man to speak.

Rickard hadn’t expected the question. Ashworth thought he’d anticipated a gentle and routine interview, that he’d be treated with deference because of his age and his celebrity.

‘Perhaps, Inspector, I feel the need to give something back to the writing community. Success is such a matter of luck, and mine certainly has little to do with the quality of my work.’ He gave a little smile, apparently pleased with his answer.

‘Don’t give me that crap.’ Her voice was icy. ‘Did you know Joanna Tobin would be here, before you agreed to be a tutor?’

There was another silence. Through the window Ashworth saw that the sun had come out. From here, the blue sky gave the initial appearance of a summer’s day, but even with this restricted view he saw that the light was different. Colder. And the shadows would be longer. There must be a coffee break; students had spilled out into the courtyard. He couldn’t see them from where he was sitting, but Rickard had left the chapel door open and he could hear the voices outside and smell the cigarette smoke.

‘Miranda showed me the work of the students who had received bursaries,’ Rickard said. ‘An attempt to persuade me to sign up. She should have realized that authors hate seeing good writing by newcomers. It only proves to them how pitiful their own attempts are.’

‘You recognized Joanna’s name?’ Vera had narrowed her eyes.

‘Not immediately. She’s using her maiden name again. I only knew her when she was married.’ He paused. ‘I recognized some of the details of her story.’

‘Rather gothic, I thought,’ Vera said. Ashworth was astounded. You’d have believed she dealt with books for a living. And how could she talk with such authority about a story she’d never read?

‘You’ve read it?’ Rickard too seemed astonished.

‘Don’t you think police officers can read, Mr Rickard? Just because I don’t go much for your kind of fiction, it doesn’t mean I don’t like a good story, especially when it has some basis in truth.’

They stared at each other across the table.

Vera spoke first. ‘I take it Joanna’s story did contain some element of truth? You’d know. After all, you were close to the parties concerned.’

‘I’m a friend of her ex-husband’s,’ Rickard admitted at last. ‘At least I was close to his family.’

‘I’ve heard Joanna’s version of events,’ Vera said. She seemed suddenly more cheerful. ‘Why don’t you give me yours?’

‘I knew Paul’s father very well,’ Rickard said. ‘We met at university. Oxford. Both reading English. We came from different backgrounds. Roy was a grammar-school boy and he had an eye for business even then. He spent the summer vacation working in his father’s print company. My family were landowners. Very little ready cash, but a big pile in the country. You know.’

Ashworth didn’t know at all, but Vera nodded as if she understood exactly.

Rickard continued, ‘What we had in common was a love of the English language. Roy’s passion was Dickens. I focused on the dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare and his successors. Though, in personal reading, my taste was less grand.’ He smiled at Vera. ‘I always took pleasure in the gothic, and in detective fiction too. Sherlock Holmes, of course, then I moved on to the Golden Age stories of the Thirties.’

Ashworth was wondering what all this had to do with a murder investigation in Northumberland in the present, but Vera just nodded again as if she had all the time in the world.

‘When we graduated,’ Rickard said, ‘I retreated to the family home to write. There was just enough money that I never had to work for a living. Roy set up a publishing house. Rutherford Press. You might have heard of it. He became one of the most-established independent publishers in the country. In time Paul, his son, joined him. Paul was an ambitious man. He understood business, but he never understood books.’ Rickard paused and rubbed his left shoulder as if it was giving him pain. ‘One of the big multinationals put in a bid for Rutherford. Roy was against it, but Paul persuaded him. I found out later that Paul had been promised a lucrative post with the company, if the deal went ahead.’

‘So that was how he went to Paris,’ Vera said. ‘Taking his young bride with him.’

‘Yes, he was to head up the European operation. A poisoned chalice. I think they wanted him to fail. They’d fulfilled their commitment by giving him a leading role in the company, but they didn’t really want him.’ Rickard took a sip of water from the glass that had been put for him on the table. ‘I was living in Paris too then. I had the idea that I might write the great contemporary gothic novel, and really I couldn’t continue living in the country with my mother and her incontinent dogs. My income just about stretched to a flat in a not-very-fashionable district.’ He paused again. ‘Roy, Paul’s father, died. A heart attack. Or a broken heart.’

‘He felt that his son had betrayed him?’ Vera asked. Her voice was gentle now.

Rickard seemed surprised. ‘No, nothing like that. He was proud that Paul was so driven. But he missed the business, the meetings with authors and the excitement of new scripts arriving every day. I suggested that he should set up on his own again, but he said he didn’t have the energy. Perhaps he was already ill.’ He stared through the window, lost in thoughts of his own.

‘So you’re in Paris,’ Vera said briskly. ‘You and Paul and Joanna. Did you see a lot of them?’

‘Yes, we met up at least once a week. Paul’s idea, not mine. I’d go to their grand apartment for dinner. A way to get the quality of wine I couldn’t afford on my meagre income. And I suppose I felt a responsibility for Paul after his father died. I never married, never had children. Roy had made me Paul’s godfather. From the beginning it was clear Paul’s position in Paris was untenable. His French was appalling, and he had no knowledge of how things worked in Europe. The attitude to books and writers is still very different there. He was under considerable stress.’

‘Did you know he was beating up his wife?’ Vera’s tone was conversational.

Watching the old man’s face, Ashworth saw that his first impulse was to lie. Then Rickard thought better of it.

‘I guessed,’ he said.

‘That he kept her virtually a prisoner?’

‘If that was the case, it was a very comfortable prison. The height of luxury.’ Then Rickard saw that the flippancy wouldn’t do. ‘Paul was ill,’ he said. ‘Completely irrational. He had a sort of breakdown.’

‘And Joanna was so depressed that she attacked her husband with a knife and then attempted suicide! And, thanks to Paul’s family and friends, she was locked up in a French psychiatric hospital. If I’m not mistaken, you were one of those friends.’

‘If it wasn’t for me, she’d have found herself in a French jail!’ The retort was sharp, and Ashworth saw that Rickard regretted the outburst as soon as it was made.

‘And you expect Joanna to be grateful to you, do you?’

‘Of course not,’ Rickard said. ‘But that was a long time ago and she seems to have rebuilt her life.’

They looked at each other.

‘What about Paul?’ Vera asked, in a way that made Ashworth see that she already knew the answer. ‘Mr Paul Rutherford. What’s he up to now?’

‘He moved on from publishing,’ Rickard said. ‘Remarried, had a family.’

‘And what line of business is he in today?’

Rickard looked her straight in the face. ‘He’s an MEP.’

‘So he is.’ Vera gave a little smile. ‘And doing very well, I understand. It seems he developed an understanding of Europe after all. He’s still ambitious, though. Intending to stand for Westminster next time, so the rumours have it.’ She leaned over the desk towards Rickard. ‘I looked him up, you see, when I knew we’d be having this conversation. Now, you shouldn’t trust the Internet, but I’d say the articles I saw were right about Mr Rutherford.’ She straightened up and her voice hardened. ‘So that’s what you’re doing here, is it, Mr Rickard? Still protecting your godson’s interests? The last thing a prospective MP needs is a charge of domestic violence against him.’

‘No!’ Rickard attempted to stand up to make his point. ‘Since we spent that time together in Paris I’ve felt guilty about Joanna. I wanted to meet her, to check that things were going well for her. It was an impulse when I saw her name on the list of bursary students. An old man’s folly.’

Vera looked at him and said nothing. The silence stretched. The students had gone back to work and there was no sound from the garden. At last she spoke.

‘Things were going very well for Joanna. She’d met a man who adored her and they’d set up home in the most beautiful place in England. She’d found a way to make sense of the nightmare of her younger days, and there was a chance that the story of the abuse she’d suffered might be published. Then she was implicated in a murder. Some might consider that could be a way of getting your pal Paul off the hook. Who’s going to believe a murder suspect when she accuses a respectable MP of domestic violence? And of course she wouldn’t dare, would she? Not in her position now. Last thing she’d want would be to attract the attention of the press.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Rickard said.

‘Aye, isn’t it? Just like something out of those gothic novels you were so fond of in your youth. All madness, conspiracy and drama.’

Rickard struggled to his feet. He was on his way to the door when Vera called him back. ‘How well did you know Tony Ferdinand?’

He turned slowly to face her. ‘I didn’t. I met him a couple of times. Nothing more.’

‘But he reviewed you, I understand.’

Rickard gave a little laugh. ‘The piece in the TLS? Unkind, perhaps but very amusing. It did me no harm.’

‘I read it,’ Vera said. ‘Rather personal, I thought. And it’s hard to believe that you were no more than acquaintances. Publishing seems a very small world.’

‘A world, Inspector, of which I wanted no part. Literary success came late to me and I never believed I deserved it.’