Payment In Blood Part 26

"No. She's not here, Tommy. That's why you've come, isn't it?" Without waiting for his answer, she said kindly, "Do come up and talk to Simon. He knows Helen better than anyone, after all."

St. James met them at the door to his laboratory, an old copy of Simpson's Forensic Medicine in one hand and a particularly grisly-looking anatomical specimen in the other: a human finger preserved in formaldehyde.

"Are you rehearsing a production of t.i.tus Andronicus?" Deborah asked with a laugh. She took the jar and the book from her husband, brushed a kiss against his cheek, and said, "Here's Tommy, my love."

Lynley spoke to St. James without preamble. He wanted his questions to sound purely professional, a natural extension of the case. He knew he failed miserably. "St. James, where's Helen? I've been phoning her since last night. I stopped by her flat this morning. What's happened to her? What's she told you?"

He followed his friend into the lab and waited impatiently for a response. St. James typed a quick notation into his word processor, saying nothing. Lynley knew the other man well enough not to push for an answer when none was forthcoming. He bit back his misgivings, waited, and let his eyes roam round the room in which Helen spent so much of her time.

The laboratory had been St. James' sanctuary for years, a scientific haven of computers, laser printers, microscopes, culture ovens, shelves of specimens, walls of graphs and charts, and in one corner a video screen on which microscopic samples of blood or hair or skin or fibre could be enlarged. This last modernity was a recent addition to the lab, and Lynley recalled the laughter with which Helen had described St. James' attempts to teach her how it worked just three weeks past. Hopeless, Tommy darling. A video camera hooked into a microscope! Can you imagine my dismay? My G.o.d, all this computer-age wizardry! I've only just recently come to understand how to boil a cup of water in a microwave oven. Untrue, of course. But he'd laughed all the same, immediately freed of whatever cares the day had heaped upon him. That was Helen's special gift.

He had to know. "What's happened to her? What's she told you?"

St. James added another notation to the word processor, examined the consequent changes in a graph on the screen, and shut down the unit. "Only what you told her," he replied in a voice that was perfectly detached. "Nothing more, I'm afraid."

Lynley knew how to interpret that careful tone, but for the moment he refused to engage in the discussion that St. James' words encouraged. Instead he temporised with, "Deborah's told me Vinney phoned you."

"Indeed." St. James swung around on his stool, pushed himself off it awkwardly, and walked to a well-ordered counter where five microscopes were lined up, three in use. "Apparently, no newspapers are picking up the story of the Sinclair death. According to Vinney, he turned in an article about it this morning only to have it rejected by his editor."

"Vinney's the drama critic, after all," Lynley noted.

"Yes, but when he phoned round to see if any of his colleagues were working on the murder, he discovered that not one had been a.s.signed to the story. It's been killed from higher up. For the time being, according to what he's been told. Until there's an arrest. He was in a fair state, to say the least." St. James looked up from a pile of slides he was organising. "He's after the Geoffrey Rintoul story, Tommy. And a connection between that and Joy Sinclair's death. I don't think he plans to rest until he has something in print."

"He'll never see it happen. In the first place, there's not one accessible shred of evidence against Geoffrey Rintoul. In the second place, the princ.i.p.als are dead. And without d.a.m.ned solid evidence, no newspaper in the country is going to take on so potentially libelous a story against so distinguished a family as Stinhurst's." Lynley felt suddenly restless, needing movement, so he walked the length of the room to the windows and looked down at the garden far below. Like everything else, it was covered with last night's snow, but he saw that all the plants had been wrapped in burlap and that breadcrumbs were spread out neatly on the top of the garden wall. Deborah's loving hand, he thought.

"Irene Sinclair believes that Joy went to Robert Gabriel's room the night she died," he said and sketched out the story that Irene had related to him. "She told me last night. She'd been holding it back, hoping to protect Gabriel."

"Then Joy saw both Gabriel and Vinney during the night?"

Lynley shook his head. "I don't see how it's possible. She can't have been with Gabriel. At least not in bed with him." He related the autopsy information from Strathclyde CID.

"Perhaps the Strathclyde team have made a mistake," St. James noted.

Lynley smiled at the idea. "With Macaskin as their DI? What do you think the likelihood of that is? Certainly nothing I'd want to make book on. Last night when Irene told me, I thought at first that she had been mistaken in what she heard."

"Gabriel with someone else?"

"That's what I thought. That Irene had only a.s.sumed it was Joy. Or perhaps a.s.sumed the worst about what was going on between Joy and Gabriel in the room. But then I thought that she might very well have been lying to me, to implicate Gabriel in Joy's death, all the time protesting that she wants to protect him for her children's sake."

"A fine revenge, that," Deborah noted from the doorway of her darkroom where she stood listening, with a string of negatives in one hand and a magnifying gla.s.s in the other.

St. James crisscrossed the stack of slides absently. "It is indeed. Clever as well. We know from Elizabeth Rintoul that Joy Sinclair was in Vinney's room. So there's corroboration, if Elizabeth's to be trusted. But who's to corroborate Irene's claim that Joy was also with her husband? Gabriel? Of course not. He'll deny it hotly. And no one else heard it. So it's left to us to decide whether to believe the philandering husband or the long-suffering wife." He looked at Lynley. "Are you still certain about Davies-Jones?"

Lynley turned back to the window. St. James' question brought back with stinging clarity the report he had received from Constable Nkata just three hours before, immediately after the constable's night of trailing Davies-Jones. The information had been simple enough. After leaving Helen's flat, he had gone into the off-licence, where he purchased four bottles of liquor. Nkata was completely certain of the number, for following the purchase, Davies-Jones had begun to walk. Although the temperature had been well below freezing, he appeared to notice neither that nor the snow that continued to fall. Instead, he had kept up a brutal pace along the Brompton Road, circling Hyde Park, making his way up to Baker Street, and ultimately ending at his own flat in St. John's Wood. It had taken over two hours. And as Davies-Jones walked, he twisted off the cap of one bottle after another. But in lieu of a swig of the liquid inside, he had rhythmically, savagely, dashed the contents out into the street. Until he'd gone through all four bottles, Nkata had said, shaking his head at the waste of fine liquor.

Now Lynley thought again about Davies-Jones' behaviour and concentrated on what it implied: a man who had overcome alcoholism, who was fighting for a chance to put his career and his life back together. A man rigidly determined not to be defeated by anything, least of all by his past.

"He's the killer," Lynley said.

IRENE SINCLAIR knew it had to be the performance of her career, knew she had to gauge the proper moment without a single cue from anyone to tell her when it had arrived. There would be neither an entrance nor an instance of supreme drama when every eye was focussed on her. She would have to forego both of those pleasures for the theatre of the real. And it began after the company's lunch break when she and Jeremy Vinney arrived at the Agincourt Theatre simultaneously.

She was alighting from a cab just as Vinney dodged through the heavy traffic to cross the street from the cafe. A horn sounded its warning, and Irene looked up. Vinney was carrying his overcoat rather than wearing it, and seeing this, she wondered if his departure from the cafe had been prompted hastily by her own arrival. The journalist verified this himself with his first words. They were tinged with what sounded like malicious excitement.

"Someone got to Gabriel last night, I understand."

Irene stopped, her hand on the theatre door. Her fingers were curled tightly round its handle, and even through her gloves she could feel the sharp stab of icy metal. There didn't seem to be a point to questioning how Vinney had come upon the news. Robert had managed to get himself to the theatre this morning for the second reading, in spite of taped ribs, a black eye, and five st.i.tches in his jaw. The news of his beating had travelled through the building within minutes of his arrival. And although cast members, crew, designers, and production a.s.sistants had smote the air with their hot exclamations of outrage, any one of them could have surrept.i.tiously phoned Vinney with the story. Especially if any of them felt the need to engineer a spate of embarra.s.sing public notoriety that would enable them to settle a private score or two with Robert Gabriel.

"Are you asking me about this for publication?" Irene asked. Hugging herself against the cold, she entered the theatre. Vinney followed. No one appeared to be about. The building was hushed. Only the persistent odour of burnt tobacco gave evidence that the actors and staff had been meeting all that morning.

"What did he tell you about it? And no, this isn't for publication."

"Then why are you here?" She kept her brisk pace towards the auditorium with Vinney d.o.g.g.i.ng her stubbornly. He caught her arm and stopped her just short of the heavy, oak doors.

"Because your sister was my friend. Because I can't get a single word from anyone at the Met in spite of their long afternoon with our melancholy Lord Stinhurst. Because I couldn't get Stinhurst on the phone last night and I've an editor who says I can't write a syllable about any of this until we've some sort of miraculous clearance from above to do so. Everything about the mess stinks to heaven. Or doesn't that concern you, Irene?" His fingers dug into her arm.

"What a filthy thing to say."

"I come by it naturally. I get particularly filthy when people I care for are murdered and life just cranks on with merely a nod of acknowledgement to mark it."

Sudden anger choked her. "And you think I don't care about what happened to my sister?"

"I think you're delighted as h.e.l.l," he replied. "The crowning glory would have been to be the one to plunge the knife yourself."

Irene felt the cruel shock of his words, felt the colour drain from her face. "My G.o.d, that's not true and you know it," she said, hearing how close her voice was to breaking. She jerked away from him and dashed into the auditorium, only imperfectly aware of the fact that he followed her, that he took a seat in the darkness of the last row, like a lurking Nemesis, champion of the dead.

The confrontation with Vinney was exactly what she had not needed prior to meeting with the cast members again. She had hoped to use all of her lunch hour to reflect upon how she would perform the role that Sergeant Havers had schooled her for last night. Now, however, she felt her heart pounding, her palms sweating, and her mind taken up with a violent denial of Vinney's final accusation. It was not true. She swore that to herself again and again as she approached the empty stage. Yet the turmoil she felt would not be stilled by such a simple expedient as denial, and knowing how much rested on her ability to perform today, she fell back upon an old technique from drama school. She took her place at the single table in the centre of the stage, brought her folded hands to her forehead, and closed her eyes. Thus, it proved nothing at all for her to move into character a few moments later when she heard approaching footsteps and her cousin's voice.

"Are you all right, Irene?" Rhys Davies-Jones asked.

She looked up, managing a weary smile. "Yes. Fine. A bit tired, I'm afraid." That would be enough for now.

Others began to arrive. Irene heard rather than saw them, mentally ticking off each person's entrance as she listened for signs of strain in their voices, signs of guilt, signs of increased anxiety. Robert Gabriel gingerly took his place next to her. He fingered his swollen face with a rueful smile.

"I've not had a chance to say thank you for last night," he said in a tender voice. "I'm... well, I'm sorry about it, Renie. I'm most wretchedly sorry about everything, in fact. I would have said something when the doctors had finished with me, but you'd already gone. I rang you up, but James said you were at Joy's in Hampstead." He paused for a reflective moment. "Renie. I thought...I did hope we might-"

She cut him off. "No. There was a great deal of time for me to think last night, Robert. And I did that. Clearly. At last."

Gabriel took in her tone and turned his head away. "I can guess what kind of thinking you accomplished at your sister's," he said with aggrieved finality.

The arrival of Joanna Ellacourt allowed Irene to avoid an answer. She swept up the aisle between her husband and Lord Stinhurst as David Sydeham was saying, "We want final approval of all the costumes, Stuart. It's not part of the original contract, I know. But considering everything that's already happened, I think we're within our rights to negotiate a new clause. Joanna feels-"

Joanna did not wait for her husband to argue the merits of their case. "I'd like the costumes to reflect who the starring role belongs to," she said pointedly, with a cool glance at Irene.

Stinhurst did not reply to either of them. He looked and moved like a man ageing rapidly. Managing the stairs seemed to drain him of energy. He appeared to be wearing the very same suit, shirt, and tie that he'd had on yesterday, the charcoal jacket rumpled, its sleeves badly creased. As if he'd given up interest in his appearance entirely. Watching him, Irene wondered, with a chill, if he would even live to see this production open. When he took his chair, with a nod of acknowledgement towards Rhys Davies-Jones, the new reading began.

They were midway through the play when Irene allowed herself to drop off to sleep. The theatre was so warm, the atmosphere on the stage was so close, their voices rose and fell with such hypnotic rhythm that she found it easier than she had supposed it would be to let herself go. She stopped worrying about their willingness to believe in the role she was playing and became the actress she had been years ago, before Robert Gabriel had entered her life and undermined her confidence with year after year of public and private humiliation.

She even felt herself beginning to dream when Joanna Ellacourt's voice snapped angrily, "For G.o.d's sake, would someone wake her up? I've no intention of trying to work my way through this with her sitting there like a drooling grandmother snoring at a kitchen fire."

"Renie?"

"Irene!"

She opened her eyes with a start, pleased to feel the rush of embarra.s.sment sweep over her. "Did I drop off? I'm terribly sorry."

"Late night, sweetie?" Joanna asked tartly.

"Yes, I'm afraid...I..." Irene swallowed, smiled flickeringly to mask pain, and said, "I spent most of the night going through Joy's things in Hampstead."

Stunned astonishment met this announcement. Irene felt pleased to see the effect her words had upon them, and for a moment she understood Jeremy Vinney's anger. How easily indeed they had forgotten her sister, how conveniently their lives had moved on. But not without a stumbling block for someone, she thought, and began to construct it with every power available to her. She brought tears into her eyes.

"There were diaries, you see," she said hollowly.

As if instinct alone told her that she was in the presence of a performance capable of upstaging her own, Joanna Ellacourt sought their attention again. "No doubt an account of Joy's life makes absolutely fascinating reading," she said. "But if you're awake now, perhaps this play will be fascinating as well."

Irene shook her head. She allowed her voice to raise a degree. "No, no, that isn't it. You see, they weren't hers. They had come by express yesterday, and when I opened them and found the note from the husband of that wretched woman who had written them-"

"For G.o.d's sake, is this really necessary?" Joanna's face was white with anger.

"-I started to read. I didn't get very far, but I saw that they were what Joy had been waiting for to do her next book. The one she talked about just the other night in Scotland. And suddenly...I seemed to realise that she was really dead, that she wouldn't ever be back." Irene's tears began to fall, becoming suddenly copious as she felt the first swelling of genuine grief. Her next words only marginally touched upon the script that she and Sergeant Havers had so painstakingly prepared. She was rambling, she knew it, but the words had to be said. And nothing else mattered but saying them. "So she'll never write it now. And I felt as if...with Hannah Darrow's diaries sitting there in her house...I ought to write the book for her if only I could. As a means of saying that...in the end, I understood how it happened between them. I did understand. Oh, it hurt. G.o.d, it was agony all the same. But I understood. And I don't think...She was always my sister. I never told her that. Oh G.o.d, I can't go back there now that she's dead!"

And then, having done it, she let herself weep, understanding at last the source of her tears, mourning the sister she had loved but forgiven too late, mourning the youth she had wasted in devotion to a man who finally meant nothing to her. She sobbed despairingly, for the years gone and the words unspoken, caring for nothing at last but this act of grief.

Across from her, Joanna Ellacourt spoke again. "This cuts it. Can't any of you do something with her, or is she going to blubber for the rest of the day?" She turned to her husband. "David," she insisted.

But Sydeham was gazing out into the theatre. "We've a visitor," he said.

Their eyes followed his. Marguerite Rintoul, Countess of Stinhurst, was standing midway down the centre aisle.

SHE WAITED only as long as it took to close the door to her husband's office. "Where were you last night, Stuart?" she demanded, doing nothing to hide the asperity in her voice as she pulled off her coat and gloves and threw them down on a chair.

It was a question which Lady Stinhurst knew quite well she would not have asked twenty-four hours ago. Then she would have accepted his absence in her usual, pathetically cringing fashion, hurt and wondering and afraid to know the truth. But now she was beyond that. Yesterday's revelations in this room had combined with a long night of soulsearching to produce an anger so finely honed that it could not be blunted by any stony wall of protective and deliberate inattention.

Stinhurst went to his desk, sat behind it in the heavy leather chair.

"Sit down," he said. His wife didn't move.

"I asked you a question. I want an answer. Where were you last night? And please don't ask me to believe that Scotland Yard kept you until nine this morning. I like to think I'm not that much of a fool."

"I went to an hotel," Stinhurst said.

"Not your club?"

"No. I wanted anonymity."

"Something you couldn't have at home, of course."

For a moment, Stinhurst said nothing, fingering a letter opener that lay on his desk. Long and silver, it caught the light. "I found I couldn't face you."

Perhaps more than anything else, her reaction to that single sentence signalled the manner in which their relationship had changed. His voice was even, but brittle, as if the slightest provocation might cause him to break down. His skin was pallid, his eyes bloodshot and, when he placed the letter opener back on his desk, his wife saw that his hands trembled. And yet, she felt herself unmoved by all this, knowing perfectly well that its cause was not his concern for her welfare or the welfare of their daughter or even for himself, but concern over how he was going to keep the story about Geoffrey Rintoul's despicable life and his violent death out of the newspapers. She had seen Jeremy Vinney herself in the back of the theatre. She knew why he was there. Her anger swelled anew.

"There I was at home, Stuart, patiently waiting as I always have done, worrying about you and what was happening at Scotland Yard. Hour after hour. I thought-I realised only later how foolish I was being-that somehow this tragedy might serve to bring us closer to each other. Imagine my thinking that, in spite of the story you produced about my 'affair' with your brother, we might still put this marriage of ours back together. But then you never even phoned, did you? And, like a fool, I waited and waited obediently. Until I finally saw that things are quite dead between us. They have been for years, of course, but I was far too afraid to face that. Until last night."

Lord Stinhurst raised a hand as if in the hope of forestalling further words. "You do choose your moments, don't you? This isn't the time to discuss our marriage. I should think you'd see that if nothing else."

Always, it was his voice of dismissal. So cold and final. So rigid with restraint. Odd, how it didn't affect her one way or the other now. She smiled politely. "You've misunderstood. We aren't discussing our marriage, Stuart. There's nothing to discuss."

"Then why-"

"I've told Elizabeth about her grandfather. I thought we might do it together last night. But when you didn't come home, I told her myself." She walked across the room to stand in front of his desk. She rested her knuckles against its pristine surface. Her fingers were newly bare of rings. He watched her but did not speak. "And do you know what she said when I told her that her beloved grandfather had killed her uncle Geoffrey, had snapped his handsome neck in two?"

Stinhurst shook his head. He lowered his eyes.

"She said, 'Mummy, you're standing in the way of the telly. Would you move, please?' And I thought, isn't that rich? All these years, dedicated to protecting the sacred memory of a grandfather she adored, have come down to this. Of course, I stepped out of her way at once. I'm like that, aren't I? Always cooperative, eager to please. Always hoping things will turn out for the best if I ignore them long enough. I'm a sh.e.l.l of a person in a sh.e.l.l of a marriage, wandering round a fine house in Holland Park with every advantage save the one I've wanted so desperately all these years. Love." Lady Stinhurst watched for a reaction on her husband's face. There was nothing. She continued. "I knew then that I can't save Elizabeth. She's lived in a house of lies and half-truths for too many years. She can only save herself. As can I."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"That I'm leaving you," she said. "I don't know if it's permanent. I don't have the bravado to claim that, I'm afraid. But I'm going to Somerset until I have everything sorted out in my mind, until I know what I want to do. And if it does become permanent, you're not to worry. I don't require much. Just a few rooms somewhere and a bit of peace and quiet.

No doubt we can work out an equitable settlement. But if not, our respective solicitors-"

Stinhurst swung his chair to one side. "Don't do this to me. Not today. Please. Not on top of everything else."

She gave a regretful laugh. "That's really what it is, isn't it? I'm about to cause you one more headache, just another inconvenience. Something else to have to explain away to Inspector Lynley, if it comes down to that. Well, I would have waited, but as I needed to talk to you anyway, now seemed as good a time as any to tell you everything."

"Everything?" he asked dully.

"Yes. There's one thing more before I'm on my way. Francesca telephoned this morning. She couldn't bear it any longer, she said. Not after Gowan. She thought she would be able to. But Gowan was dear to her, and she couldn't bear to think that she had made less of his life and his death by what she had done. She was willing to at first, for your sake, of course. But she found that she couldn't keep up the pretence. So she plans to speak to Inspector Macaskin this afternoon."

"What are you talking about?"

Lady Stinhurst pulled on her gloves, picked up her coat, preparatory to leaving. She took brief, hostile pleasure in her final remarks. "Francesca lied to the police about what she did, and what she saw, the night Joy Sinclair died."

"I'VE BROUGHT Chinese food, Dad." Barbara Havers popped her head into the sitting room. "But I shall have to ask you not to fight with Mum over the shrimp this time. Where is she?"

Her father sat before the television set, which was tuned deafeningly into BBC-1. The horizontal hold was slipping, and people's heads were being cut off right at the eyebrows so that it looked a bit like a science fiction show.

"Dad?" Barbara repeated. He gave no answer. She walked into the room, lowered the volume, and turned to him. He was asleep, his jaw slack, the tubes that fed him oxygen askew in his nostrils. Racing magazines covered the floor near his chair and a newspaper was opened over his knees. It was too hot in the room, in the entire house for that matter, and the musty smell of her parents' ageing seemed to seep from the walls and the floor and the furniture. This mixed with a stronger, more recent scent of food overcooked and inedible.

Barbara's movement made sufficient noise to waken her father, and, seeing her, he smiled, showing teeth that were blackened, crooked, and in places altogether missing. "Barbie. Mussa dozed off."

"Where's Mum?"

Jimmy Havers blinked, adjusting the tubes in his nostrils and reaching for a handkerchief into which he coughed heavily. His breathing sounded like the bubbling of water. "Just next door. Mrs. Gustafson's come down with flu again and Mum's taken her some soup."

Knowing her mother's questionable culinary talents, Barbara wondered briefly if Mrs. Gustafson's condition would improve or worsen under her ministrations. Nonetheless, she was encouraged by the fact that her mother had ventured out of the house. It was the first time she had done so in years.

"I've brought Chinese," she told her father, indicating the sack she cradled in one arm. "I'm off again tonight, though. I've only half an hour to eat."