Payment In Blood Part 28

"JOY'S DOOR wasn't locked," Sydeham said.

They sat at a metal-legged table in one of the interrogation rooms at New Scotland Yard. It was a room designed to allow no escape, bearing not a single decorative appointment that might give flight even to imagination. Sydeham did not look at any of them as he spoke, not at Lynley, who sat across from him and worked to draw together all the details of the case; not at Sergeant Havers, who for once took no notes but merely interjected questions to add to their body of knowledge; not at the yawning shorthand typist-a twenty-two-year veteran of police work who recorded everything with an expression of boredom that suggested she had already heard every entanglement possible in the kinds of human relationships that end in violence. Faced with the three of them, Sydeham had turned his body to give them the benefit of his profile. His eyes were on a corner of the room where a dead moth lay, and he stared at it as if seeing there a re-creation of the past days of violence.

His voice sounded nothing more than monumentally weary. It was half past three. "I'd got the dirk earlier when I went down to the library for the whisky. It was easy enough to pull it off the dining room wall, go through the kitchen, up the back stairs, and along to my room. And then, of course, all I had to do was wait."

"Did you know that your wife was with Robert Gabriel?"

Sydeham moved his eyes to the Rolex whose gold casing glittered in a half-crescent beneath his black sweater. Caressingly, he rotated a finger round its face. His hands were quite large, but without callosity, unexposed to labour. They didn't look at all like the hands of a killer.

"It didn't take long to work it out, Inspector," he finally replied. "As Joanna herself would no doubt point out, I had wanted her together with Gabriel, and she was just giving me what I wanted. Theatre of the real in spades. It was an expert revenge, wasn't it? Of course, I wasn't sure at first that she was actually with him. I thought-perhaps I hoped- she'd gone somewhere else in the house to sulk. But I suppose I really knew that's not at all her style. And at any rate, Gabriel was fairly forthright about his conquest of my wife the other day at the Agincourt. But then, it isn't the kind of thing he'd be likely to keep quiet about, is it?"

"You a.s.saulted him in his dressing room the other night?"

Sydeham smiled bleakly. "It was the only part of this b.l.o.o.d.y mess that I truly enjoyed. I don't like other men stuffing my wife, Inspector, whether she's a willing partic.i.p.ant or not."

"But you're more than willing to have another man's wife, if it comes down to it."

"Ah. Hannah Darrow. I had a feeling that little minx would do me in, in the end." Sydeham reached for a Styrofoam cup of coffee on the table before him. His nails made crescent patterns upon it. "When Joy talked at dinner about her new book, she mentioned the diaries she was trying to get off John Darrow, and I could see fairly well how everything was going to come down. She didn't seem the sort to give up just because Darrow said no once. She hadn't got to where she was in her career by shrinking away from a challenge, had she? So when she talked about the diaries, I knew it was just a matter of time before she had them. And I didn't know what Hannah had written so I couldn't take the chance."

"What happened that night with Hannah Darrow?"

Sydeham brought his eyes to Lynley. "We met at the mill. She was some forty minutes late, and I'd begun to think-to hope, actual-ly-that she wasn't coming. But she showed up at the last in her usual fashion, hot to make love right there on the floor. But I...I put her off. I'd brought her a scarf she'd seen in a boutique in Norwich. And I insisted she let me put it on her right then." He watched his hands continue their play on the white cup, fingers pressing upon its rim. "It was easy enough. I was kissing her when I tightened the knot."

Lynley thought about the innocent references he had been too blind to see earlier in Hannah's diary and took a calculated gamble with, "I'm surprised you didn't have her one last time right there in the mill, if that's what she wanted."

The payoff he was looking for came without a pause. "I'd lost the touch with her. Each time we met, it was becoming more difficult." Sydeham laughed shortly, an expression of contempt that was self-directed. "It was going to be Joanna all over again."

"The beautiful woman who rises to fame, who's the object of every man's steamy fantasy, whose own husband can't service her the way she wants."

"I'd say you've got the picture, Inspector. Nicely put."

"Yet you've stayed with Joanna all these years."

"She's the one thing in my life that I did completely right. My unmitigated success. One doesn't let something like that go easily, and as for me, I'd never have considered it. I couldn't let her go. Hannah merely came along at a bad time for Jo and me. Things had been...off between us for about three weeks. She'd been thinking of signing on with a London agent and I felt a bit left out in the cold.

Useless. That must have been what started my...trouble. Then when Hannah came along, I felt like a new man for a month or two. Every time I saw her, I had her. Sometimes two or three times in a single evening. Christ. It was like being reborn."

"Until she wanted to become an actress like your wife?"

"And then it was history repeating itself. Yes."

"But why on earth kill her? Why not just break it off?"

"She'd found my London address. It was bad enough when she showed up at the theatre one evening when Jo and I were setting off with the London agent. After that happened, I knew if I left her behind in the Fens, she'd show up one day at our flat. I would have lost Joanna. There simply didn't seem to be another choice."

"And Gowan Kilbride? Where did he fit in?"

Sydeham placed his coffee cup back onto the table, its rim caved in all around, entirely useless now. "He knew about the gloves, Inspector."

THEY COMPLETED their preliminary interview with David Sydeham at five-fifteen in the morning and staggered, red-eyed, out into the corridor where Sydeham was led to a telephone to make a call to his wife. Lynley watched him go, feeling caught in a flood of pity for the man. This surprised him, for justice was being served by the arrest.Yet he knew that the effect of the murders-that stone thrown into a pond whose surface cannot remain unchanged by the intrusion-had only just begun for everyone. He turned away.

There were other things to contend with, among them the press, finally eager for a statement, materialising from nowhere, shouting questions, demanding interviews.

He pushed past them, crumpled into nothing a message from Superintendent Webberly that was pressed into his hand. Nearly blind with exhaustion, he made his way towards the lift, caught up at last in only one conscious thought: to find Helen. In only one conscious need: to sleep.

He found his way home like an automaton and fell onto his bed fully clothed. He did not awaken when Denton came in, removed his shoes, and covered him with a blanket. He did not awaken until the afternoon.

"IT WAS HER EYESIGHT," Lynley said. "I noticed nearly everything else in Hannah Darrow's diaries save the reference to the fact that she hadn't worn her spectacles to that second play, so she couldn't see the stage clearly. She only thought Sydeham was one of the actors because he came out the stage door at the end of the performance. And of course, I was too blinded by Davies-Jones' role in The Three Sisters to realise what it meant that Joanna Ellacourt had been in the same scene from which the suicide note was drawn. Sydeham would know any scene Joanna was in, probably better than the actors themselves. He helped her with her lines. I heard him doing that myself at the Agincourt."

"Did Joanna Ellacourt know her husband was the killer?" St. James asked.

Lynley shook his head, taking the proffered cup of tea from Deborah with a faint smile. The three of them sat in St. James' study, dividing their attention among cakes and sandwiches, tarts and tea. A misty shaft of late afternoon sunlight struck the window and reflected against a mound of snow on the ledge outside. Some distance away, rush-hour traffic on the Embankment began its noisy crawl towards the suburbs.

"She'd been told by Mary Agnes Campbell-as had they all-that Joy's bedroom door was locked," he responded. "Like me, she thought Davies-Jones was the killer. What she didn't know-what no one knew until late yesterday afternoon-was that Joy's door hadn't been locked all night. It was only locked once Francesca Gerrard went into the room to look for her necklace at three-fifteen, found Joy dead, and, a.s.suming her brother had done it, went down to her office for the keys and locked the door in an attempt to protect him. I should have heard the lie when she told me the pearls were on the chest of drawers by the door. Why would Joy have put them there when the rest of her jewellery was on the dressing table on the other side of the room? I'd seen that myself."

St. James selected another sandwich. "Would it have made a difference had Macaskin managed to reach you before you left for Hampstead yesterday?"

"What could he have told me? Only that Francesca Gerrard had confessed to him that she lied to us at Westerbrae about the door being locked. I don't know whether I would have had the common sense to put that together with a number of facts that I had been choosing to ignore. The fact that Robert Gabriel had a woman with him in his bedroom; the fact that Sydeham admitted that Joanna had not been with him for some hours the night Joy died; the fact that Jo and Joy are two easy names to confuse, especially for a man like Gabriel, who pursued women tirelessly and took as many to bed as he could manage."

"So that's what Irene Sinclair heard." St. James moved in his chair to a more comfortable position, grimacing as the lower part of his leg brace caught against the piping on the ottoman's edge. He disengaged it with an irritable grunt. "But why Joanna Ellacourt? She's not made it a secret that she loathes Gabriel. Or was that dramatic loathing part of the ploy?"

"She loathed Sydeham more than Gabriel that night, because he'd got her into Joy's play in the first place. She felt he'd betrayed her.

She wanted to hurt him. So she went to Gabriel's bedroom at half past eleven and waited there, to take her revenge on her husband in coin that he would well understand. But what she didn't realise was that, in going to Gabriel, she'd given Sydeham the opportunity he had been looking for ever since Joy made the remark about John Darrow at dinner."

"I suppose Hannah Darrow didn't know that Sydeham was married."

Lynley shook his head. "Evidently not. She'd only seen them once together and even then another man was with them. All she knew was that Sydeham had access to drama coaches and voice coaches and everything else that went into success. As far as Hannah was concerned, Sydeham was the key to her new life. And for a time, she was his key to a s.e.xual prowess he had been lacking."

"Do you suppose Joy Sinclair knew about Sydeham's involvement with Hannah Darrow?" St. James asked.

"She hadn't got that far in her research. And John Darrow was determined she never would. She merely made an innocent remark at dinner. But Sydeham couldn't afford to take a chance. So he killed her. And of course, Irene's references to the diaries at the theatre yesterday were what took him to Hampstead last night."

Deborah had been listening quietly, but now she spoke, perplexed. "Didn't he take a terrible chance when he killed Joy Sinclair, Tommy? Couldn't his wife have returned to their room at any moment and found him gone? Couldn't he have run into someone in the hall?"

Lynley shrugged. "He was fairly sure where Joanna was after all, Deb. And he knew Robert Gabriel well enough to believe that Gabriel would keep her with him as long as he could possibly continue to demonstrate his virility. Everyone else in the house was easily accounted for. So once he heard Joy return from Vinney's room shortly before one, all he had to do was wait a bit for her to fall asleep."

Deborah was caught on an earlier thought. "But his own wife..." she murmured, looking pained.

"I should guess that Sydeham was willing to let Gabriel have his wife once or twice if he could get away with murder. But he wasn't willing to let the man boast about it in front of the company. So he waited until Gabriel was alone at the theatre. Then he caught him in his dressing room."

"I wonder if Gabriel knew who was beating him," St. James mused.

"As far as Gabriel was concerned, it probably could have been any number of men. And he was lucky it wasn't. Anyone else might have killed him. Sydeham didn't want to do that."

"Why not?" Deborah asked. "After what happened between Gabriel and Joanna, I should think Sydeham would be more than happy to see him dead."

"Sydeham was n.o.body's fool. The last thing he wanted to do was narrow my field of suspects." Lynley shook his head. His next words reflected the shame he felt. "Of course, what he didn't know was that I had sufficiently narrowed it myself already. A field of one. Havers said it best. Police work to be proud of."

The other two did not respond. Deborah twisted the lid on the porcelain teapot, slowly tracing the petal of a delicate pink rose. St. James moved a bit of sandwich here and there on his plate. Neither of them looked at Lynley.

He knew they were avoiding the question he had come to ask, knew they were doing it out of loyalty and love. Still, undeserving as he was, Lynley found himself hoping that the bond between them all was strong enough to allow them to see that he needed to find her in spite of her desire not to be found. So he asked the question.

"St. James, where's Helen? When I got back to Joy's house last night, she'd vanished. Where is she?"

He saw Deborah's hand drop from the teapot, saw it tighten on the pleats of her russet wool skirt. St. James lifted his head.

"That's too much to ask," he responded.

It was the answer Lynley had expected, the answer he knew was owed to him. Yet, in spite of this, he pressed them. "I can't change what happened. I can't change the fact that I was a fool. But at least I can apologise. At least I can tell her-"

"It's not time. She's not ready."

Lynley felt a surge of anger at such implacable resolution. "d.a.m.n you, St. James. She tried to warn him off! Did she tell you that as well? When he came over the wall, she gave a cry that he heard, and we nearly lost him. Because of Helen. So if she's not ready to see me, she can tell me that herself. Let her make the decision."

"She's decided, Tommy."

The words were spoken so coolly that his anger died. He felt his throat tighten in quick reaction. "She's gone with him, then. Where? To Wales?"

Nothing. Deborah moved, casting a long look at her husband, who had turned his head to the unlit fire.

Lynley felt rising desperation at their refusal to speak. He'd met with the same kind of refusal from Caroline Shepherd at Helen's flat earlier, the same kind of refusal on the telephone when he spoke to Helen's parents and three of her sisters. He knew it was a punishment richly due him, and yet in spite of that knowledge, he railed against it, refused to accept it as just and true.

"For G.o.d's sake, Simon." He felt riven by despair. "I love her. You, above all people, know what it means to be separated like this from someone you love. Without a word. Without a chance. Please. Tell me."

Unexpectedly then, he saw Deborah reach out quickly. She grasped her husband's thin hand. Lynley barely heard her voice as she spoke to St. James.

"My love, I'm sorry. Forgive me. I simply can't do this." She turned to Lynley. Her eyes were bright with tears. "She's gone to Skye, Tommy. She's alone."

HE FACED only one last task before heading north to Helen, and that was to see Superintendent Webberly and, through seeing him, to put a period to the case. To other things as well. He had ignored the early-morning message from his superior, with its official congratulations for a job well done and its request for a meeting as soon as possible. Filled with the realisation of how blind jealousy had governed every step of his investigation, Lynley had hardly wanted to hear anyone's praise. Much less the praise of a man who had been perfectly willing to use him as an unwitting tool in the master game of deceit.

For beyond Sydeham's guilt and Davies-Jones' innocence, there still remained Lord Stinhurst. And Scotland Yard's dance of attendance upon the commitment of the government to keeping a twenty-five-year-old secret out of the public eye.

This remained to be dealt with. Lynley had not felt himself ready for the confrontation earlier in the day. But he was ready now.

He found Webberly at the circular table in his office. There, as usual, open files, books, photographs, reports, and used crockery abounded. Bent over a street map which was outlined heavily in yellow marking pen, the superintendent held a cigar clenched between his teeth, filling the already claustrophobic room with a malodorous pall of smoke. He was talking to his secretary, who sat behind his desk, cooperatively nodding and note-taking and all the time waving her hand in front of her face in a useless attempt to keep the cigar smoke from permeating her well-tailored suit and smooth blonde hair. She was, as usual, as close a replica of the Princess of Wales as she could make herself.

She rolled her eyes at Lynley, wrinkled her nose delicately in distaste at the smell and the clutter, and said, "Here's Detective Inspector Lynley, Superintendent."

Lynley waited expectantly for Webberly to correct her. It was a game the two of them played. Webberly preferred mister to the use of t.i.tles. Dorothea Harriman ("call me Dee, please") vastly preferred t.i.tles to anything else.

This afternoon, however, the superintendent merely growled and looked up from his map, saying, "Did you get everything, Harriman?"

His secretary consulted her notes, adjusting the high scalloped collar of her Edwardian blouse. She wore a pert bow tie beneath it. "Everything. Shall I type this lot up?"

"If you will. And run thirty copies. The usual routing."

Harriman sighed. "Before I leave, Superintendent?...No, don't say it. I know, I know. 'Put it on the tick, Harriman.'" She shot Lynley a meaningful look. "I've so much time on the tick right now that I could take my honeymoon on it. If someone would be so good as to pop the question."

Lynley smiled. "Blimey. And to think I'm busy tonight."

Harriman laughed at the answer, gathered up her notes, and brushed three paper cups from Webberly's desk into the rubbish. "See if you can get him to do something about this pit," she requested as she left.

Webberly said nothing until they were alone. Then he folded the map, slid it onto one of his filing cabinets, and went to his desk. But he did not sit. Rather, puffing on his cigar contentedly, he looked at the London skyline beyond the window.

"Some people think it's lack of ambition that makes me avoid promotion," Webberly confided without turning. "But actually it's the view. If I had to change offices, I'd lose the sight of the city coming to light as darkness falls. And I can't tell you what pleasure that's given me through the years." His freckled hands played with the watch fob on his waistcoat. Cigar ash fluttered, ignored, to the floor.

Lynley thought about how he had once liked this man, how he had respected the fine mind inside the dishevelled exterior. It was a mind that brought out the best in those under his command, conscientiously using each one to his personal strength, never to his weakness. That quality of being able to see people as they really were had always been what Lynley admired most in his superior. Now, however, he saw that it was double-edged, that it could be used-indeed, had been used in his case- to probe a man's weakness and use that weakness to meet an end not of his own devising.

Webberly had known without a doubt that Lynley would believe in the given word of a peer. That kind of belief was part and parcel of Lynley's upbringing, a precious clinging to "my word as a gentleman" that had governed people of his cla.s.s for centuries. Like the laws of primogeniture, it could not be sloughed off easily. And that is what Webberly had depended upon, sending Lynley to hear Lord Stinhurst's manufactured tale of his wife's infidelity. Not MacPherson, Stewart, or Hale, or any other DI who would have listened sceptically, called in Lady Stinhurst to hear the story herself and then moved on to uncover the truth about Geoffrey Rintoul without a second thought.

Neither the government nor the Yard had wanted that to happen. So they had sent in the one man they believed could be depended upon to take the word of a gentleman and hence to sweep all connections to Lord Stinhurst right under the carpet. That, to Lynley, was the unpardonable offence. He couldn't forgive Webberly for having done it to him.

He couldn't forgive himself for having mindlessly lived up to their every expectation.

It didn't matter that Stinhurst had been innocent of Joy Sinclair's death. For the Yard had not known that, had not even cared, had desired only that key information in the man's past not come to light. Had Stinhurst been the killer, had he escaped justice, Lynley knew that neither the government nor the Yard would have felt a moment's compunction as long as the secret of Geoffrey Rintoul was safe.

He felt ugly, unclean. He reached into his pocket for his police identification and tossed it onto Webberly's desk.

The superintendent's eyes dropped to the warrant card, raised back to Lynley. He squinted against the smoke from his cigar. "What's this?"

"I'm done with it."

Webberly's face looked frozen. "I'm trying to misunderstand you, Inspector."

"There's no need for that, is there? You've all got what you wanted. Stinhurst is safe. The whole story is safe."

Webberly took the cigar from his mouth and crushed it among the stubs in his ashtray, spattering ash. "Don't do this, lad. There's no need."

"I don't like being used. It's a funny quirk of mine." Lynley moved to the door. "I'll clean out my things-"

Webberly's hand slammed down against the top of his desk, sending papers flying. A pencil holder toppled to the floor. "And you think I like being used, Inspector? Just what's your fantasy about all this? What role have you a.s.signed me?"

"You knew about Stinhurst. About his brother. About his father. That's why I was sent to Scotland and not someone else."

"I knew only what I was told. The order to send you north came from the commissioner, through Hillier. Not from me. I didn't like it any better than you did. But I had no choice in the matter."

"Indeed," Lynley replied. "Well, at least I can be grateful that I do have choices. I'm exerting one of them now."

Webberly's face flooded with angry colour. But his voice stayed calm. "You're not thinking straight, lad. Consider a few things before your righteous indignation carries you n.o.bly towards professional martyrdom. I didn't know a thing about Stinhurst. I still don't know, so if you care to tell me, I'd be delighted to hear it. All I can tell you is that once Hillier came to me with the order that you were to have the case and no one else, I smelled a dead rat floating in somebody's soup."

"Yet you a.s.signed me anyway."

"d.a.m.n you for a fool! I wasn't given a choice in the matter! But see it for what it was, at least. I a.s.signed Havers as well. You didn't want her, did you? You fought me on it, didn't you? So why the h.e.l.l do you think I insisted she be on the case? Because of all people, I knew Havers would stick to Stinhurst like a tick on a dog if it came down to it. And it came to that, didn't it? Blast you, answer me! Didn't it?"

"It did."