Payment In Blood Part 5

Not a woman who ever spent a great deal of time a.n.a.lysing her emotions, Barbara did so now, realising with some confusion that she had wanted to intervene in what had just occurred. All Lynley's questions had, of course, been fairly standard police procedure, but the manner in which he had asked them and the nasty insinuations carried in his tone had made Barbara want to throw herself into the fray as Lady Helen's champion. She couldn't understand why. So she thought about it in the aftermath of Lady Helen's departure, and she found her answer in the myriad ways that the young woman had shown kindness to her in the months since Barbara had been a.s.signed to work with Lynley.

"I think, Inspector," Barbara ran her thumb back and forth on a crease in the cover of her notebook, "that you were more than a bit out of line just now."

"This isn't the time for a row about procedure," Lynley replied. His voice was dispa.s.sionate enough, but Barbara could hear its taut control.

"It has nothing to do with procedure, does it? It has to do with decency. You treated Helen like a scrubber, Inspector, and if you're about to answer that she acted like a scrubber, I might suggest you take a good look at one or two items in your own chequered past and ask yourself how well they'd appear in a scrutiny the likes of which you just forced her to endure."

Lynley drew on his cigarette, but, as if he found the taste unpleasant, he stubbed it out in the ashtray. As he did so, a jerk of his hand spilled ashes across the cuff of his shirt. Both of them stared at the resulting contrast of black grime against white.

"Helen had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time," Lynley replied. "There was no way to get round it, Havers. I can't give her special treatment because she's my friend."

"Is that right?" Barbara asked. "Well, I'll be fascinated to see how that line plays out when we have the two old boys together for a confidential little chat."

"What are you talking about?"

"Lords Asherton and Stinhurst sitting down for a chew. I can hardly wait for the chance to see you treat Stuart Rintoul with the same iron glove that you used on Helen Clyde. Peer to peer, chap to chap, Etonian to Etonian. Isn't that how it plays? But as you've said, none of that will get in the way of Lord Stinhurst's unfortunate placement of himself at the wrong place at the wrong time." She knew him well enough to see his quick rise to anger.

"And what is it exactly that you would have me do, Sergeant? Ignore the facts?" Coolly, Lynley began to tick them off. "Joy Sinclair's hall door is locked. The master keys are, for all intents and purposes, unavailable. Davies-Jones' prints are on the key to the only other door that gives access to the room. We have a period of time that is unaccounted for because Helen was asleep. All that, and we haven't even begun to consider where Davies-Jones was until one in the morning when he showed up at Helen's door, or why Helen, of all people, was put into this room in the first place. Convenient, isn't it, when you consider that we have a man coincidentally coming here in the middle of the night to seduce Helen while his cousin is being murdered in the very next room?"

"And that's the rub, isn't it?" Barbara pointed out. "Seduction, not murder."

Lynley picked up the cigarette case and lighter, slipped them back in his pocket, and got to his feet. He didn't respond. But Barbara did not require him to do so. A response was pointless when she knew very well that his stiff-upper-lip breeding had a propensity towards deserting him in moments of personal crisis. And the truth of the matter was that the instant she had seen Lady Helen in the library, had seen Lynley's face when Lady Helen crossed the room to him with that ridiculous greatcoat hanging forlornly to her heels, Barbara had known that, for Lynley, the situation had the potential of developing into a personal crisis of some considerable proportions.

Inspector Macaskin appeared at the bedroom door. Fury played on his features. His face was flushed, his eyes snapped, his skin looked tight. "Not one script in the house, Inspector," he announced. "It appears our good Lord Stinhurst has burnt every last one."

"Well, la-de-da-da," Barbara murmured to the ceiling.

IN THE LOWER NORTH corridor, which was one-fourth of a quadrangle surrounding a courtyard where untouched snow reached nearly to the height of the leaded windows, a door gave out onto the estate grounds.To one side of this door, Francesca Gerrard had established a storage area-a jumble of discarded Welling-tons, fishing gear, rusty gardening tools, mackintoshes, hats, coats, and scarves. Lady Helen knelt on the floor in front of this clutter, throwing aside one boot after another, furiously seeking a mate to the one she had already pulled on. She heard the distinctive sound of St. James' awkward footsteps coming down the stairs, and she rooted frantically among gumboots and fishing baskets, determined to get out of the house before St. James found her.

But the perverse acuity that had always allowed him to know most of her thoughts before she was even aware of thinking them led him directly to her now. She heard his strained breathing from his rapid descent of the stairs and did not need to look up to know that his face would be pinched with irritation at his body's weakness. She felt his tentative touch on her shoulder. She jerked away.

"I'm going out," she said.

"You can't. It's far too cold. Beyond that, I'd have too hard a time following you in the dark, and I want to talk to you, Helen."

"I don't think we have anything to say to each other, do we? You had your place at the peep show. Or did you want to tip the tart?"

She looked up at that, saw his reaction to her words in the sudden darkening of his smoky blue eyes. But rather than rejoice in her ability to wound him, she was defeated at once. She ceased her search, and stood, with one boot on and another uselessly in her hand. St. James reached out, and Lady Helen felt his cool, dry fingers close over her own.

"I felt just like a wh.o.r.e," she whispered. Her eyes were dry and hot. She was far beyond tears. "I'll never forgive him."

"I'll not ask that of you. I've not come to excuse Tommy, merely to say that he was. .h.i.t squarely in the face today with several monumental truths. Unfortunately, he wasn't prepared to deal with any of them. But he'll have to be the one to explain that to you. When he can."

Lady Helen plucked miserably at the top of the boot she held. It was black and smudged along its upper ridge with a stickiness that made it look even blacker.

"Would you have answered his question?" she asked abruptly.

St. James smiled, a warm transformation of his otherwise unattractive, angular face. "You know, I always envied your ability to sleep through anything, Helen. Fire, flood, or thunder. I would lie next to you for hours, wide awake, and steadily curse you for having a conscience so unclouded that nothing ever got in the way of your sleep. I used to think that I could have marched the Queen's Household Cavalry right through the bedroom and you wouldn't even have noticed. But I wouldn't have answered him. There are some things, in spite of everything that's happened, that are just between the two of us. Frankly, that's one of them."

Lady Helen felt the tears then, a hot flurry behind her eyelids which she blinked back, looking away, trying to find her voice. St. James didn't wait for her to do so. Rather, he drew her gently towards a narrow bench that rested on splintered legs along one of the walls. Several coats hung on pegs above it, and he removed two of them, draping one round her shoulders and using the other himself to ward off the chill that invaded the storage area.

"Aside from the changes Joy had made to the script, did anything else strike you that might have led up to the row last night?" he asked.

Lady Helen considered the hours she had spent with the group from London prior to the turmoil in the sitting room. "I couldn't say for certain. But I do think everyone's nerves were strung."

"Whose in particular?"

"Joanna Ellacourt's, for one. From what I could gather at c.o.c.ktails last night, she was already a bit overwrought by the thought that Joy might be writing a play that was going to be a vehicle to resurrect her sister's career."

"That would certainly have bothered her, wouldn't it?"

Lady Helen nodded. "Besides the opening of the new Agincourt Theatre, the production was to celebrate Joanna's twentieth year on the stage, Simon, so its focus was supposed to be on her, not on Irene Sinclair. But I got the impression that she didn't think it would be." Lady Helen explained the brief scene she had witnessed in the drawing room last night, when the company had gathered before dinner. Lord Stinhurst had been standing near the piano with Rhys Davies-Jones, flipping through a set of designs for costumes, when Joanna Ellacourt joined them, slinking across the room in a semi-bodiceless coruscating gown that gave new definition to dressing for dinner. She had taken up the drawings for her own perusal, but her face revealed in an instant how she felt about what she saw.

"Joanna didn't like Irene Sinclair's costumes," St. James guessed.

"She claimed that every one of them showed Irene off...like a vamp, I think she said. She crumpled the drawings up, told Lord Stinhurst that his costume people would have to redesign if he wanted her in the play, and threw them all on the fire. She was absolutely livid, and I think that once she began reading the play in the sitting room, she saw in Joy's changes that her worst fears were confirmed, and that's why she threw down the script and left. And Joy...well, I couldn't help feeling that she enjoyed the sensation and the disruption she was causing."

"What was she like, Helen?"

It wasn't an easy question to answer. Physically, Joy Sinclair had been striking. Not beautiful, Lady Helen explained, she looked like a gypsy, with olive skin and black eyes, possessing the sort of features that belong on a Roman coin, finely boned, chiselled, and stamped with both intelligence and strength. She was a woman who radiated sensuality and life. Even a quick impatient gesture to her earlobe to remove an earring somehow could become a movement fraught with promise.

"Promise for whom?" St. James asked.

"That's hard to say. But I should guess that Jeremy Vinney was the most interested man here. He jumped up to join her the moment she came into the drawing room last evening-she was the last to arrive-and he stuck right to her side at dinner as well."

"Were they lovers?"

"She didn't act as if there was anything between them other than friendship. He mentioned having tried to reach her on the telephone and leaving a dozen or so messages on her answering machine over the past week. And she just laughed and said that she was terribly sorry he'd gone ignored but she wasn't even listening to her answering machine because she was six months overdue on a book she had contracted with her publisher, so she didn't want to feel guilty by listening to the messages asking her where it was."

"A book?" St. James asked. "She was writing both a book and a play?"

Lady Helen laughed regretfully. "Incredible, wasn't she? And to think that I feel industrious if I manage to answer a letter within five months of receiving it."

"She sounds like a woman who might well inspire jealousy."

"Perhaps. But I think it was more that she alienated people unconsciously." Lady Helen told him of Joy's light-hearted comments during c.o.c.ktails about a Reingale painting that hung over the fireplace in the drawing room. It was a depiction of a white-gowned Regency woman, surrounded by her two children and a frisky terrier who nosed at a ball. "She said she'd never forgotten that painting, that as a child visiting Westerbrae, she'd liked to imagine herself as that Reingale woman, safe and secure and admired, with two perfect children to adore her. She said something like, what more could one ask for than that and isn't it strange how life turns out. Her sister was sitting right below the painting as she spoke, and I remember noticing how Irene began to flush horribly, like a rash was spreading up her neck and across her face."

"Why?"

"Well, of course, Irene had once been all those things, hadn't she? Safe and secure, with a husband and two children. And then Joy had come along and destroyed it all."

St. James looked sceptical. "How can you be sure that Irene Sinclair was reacting to what her sister had said?"

"I can't, of course. I know that. Except at dinner, when Joy and Jeremy Vinney were talking together and Joy was making all sorts of amusing comments about her new book, entertaining the whole table with stories about some man she'd been trying to interview in the Fens, Irene..." Lady Helen hesitated. It was difficult to put into words the chilling effect Irene Sinclair's behaviour had had upon her. "Irene was sitting quite still, staring at the candles on the table and she...it was rather dreadful, Simon. She drove the tines of her fork right into her thumb. But I don't think she felt a thing."

ST. JAMES reflected upon the tops of his shoes. They were smudged with dried mud from the drive, and he bent to wipe them off. "Then Joanna Ellacourt must have been wrong about Irene's role in this changed version of the play.

Why would Joy Sinclair be writing for her sister if she continued to alienate her at every juncture?"

"As I said, I think the alienation was unconscious. And as for the play, perhaps Joy felt guilty. After all, she had destroyed her sister's marriage. She couldn't give that back to her. But she could give her back her career."

"But in a play with Robert Gabriel? After a messy divorce that Joy herself had likely helped cause? Doesn't that smack of sadism to you?"

"Not if no one else in London was willing to give Irene a chance, Simon. Evidently, she's been out of circulation for a good many years. This may well have been her only opportunity for a second go on stage."

"Tell me about the play."

As Lady Helen recalled, Joy Sinclair's description of the new version of the play- prior to the actors' actually seeing it-had been deliberately provocative. When asked about it by Francesca Gerrard, she had smiled up and down the length of the dining table and said, "It takes place in a house much like this. In the dead of winter, with ice sheeting the road and not a soul in miles and no way to escape. It's about a family. And a man who dies, and the people who had to kill him. And why. Especially why." Lady Helen had expected to hear wolves howling next.

"It sounds as if she intended that as a message for someone."

"It does, doesn't it? And then when we were all gathered in the sitting room and she began going over the changes in the plot, she said much the same thing."

The plot concerned itself with a family and their thwarted New Year's Eve celebration. According to Joy, the oldest brother was a man possessed of a terrible secret, a secret that was about to rip apart the fabric of everyone's life.

"And then they began to read," Lady Helen said. "I wish I had paid more attention to what they were reading, but it was so stuffy in the sitting room-no, it was more like a pan of water about to come to a boil-that I didn't really follow much of what they had to say. All I remember for a certainty is that just before Francesca Gerrard went a bit mad, the older brother in the story-Lord Stinhurst was reading the part since it hadn't been cast yet- had just received a telephone call. He decided that he had to leave at once, saying that after twenty-seven years, he wasn't about to become another va.s.sal. I'm fairly certain those were the words. And that's when Francesca leaped to her feet and the evening collapsed."

"Va.s.sal?" St. James repeated blankly.

She nodded. "Odd, isn't it? Of course, since the play had nothing to do with feudalism, I thought it was something wildly avant-garde, with me just too dim to understand what it meant."

"But they understood?"

"Lord Stinhurst, his wife, Francesca Gerrard, and Elizabeth. Decidedly. But I do think, aside from their irritation at the late changes in the script, everyone else was as confused as I was." Lady Helen ran her fingers unconsciously round the top of the boot she still held. "Altogether, I had the impression that the play was supposed to serve a n.o.ble purpose that didn't quite come off. A n.o.ble purpose for everyone. It was to honour Stinhurst's achievement vis-a-vis the renovated Agincourt, it was to celebrate Joanna Ellacourt's career on the stage, it was to bring Irene Sinclair back into the theatre, it was to get Rhys back into directing a major production in London. Perhaps Joy even intended a part for Jeremy Vinney as well. Someone mentioned that he'd started out as an actor before turning to dramatic criticism, and frankly, other than to continue following the Agincourt story, there doesn't seem to be any other real reason for him to have come to the read-through. So you see," she concluded with an urgency in her voice that she could not hide from him, "it doesn't seem reasonable that any of those people would have murdered Joy, does it?"

St. James smiled at her fondly. "Especially Rhys." His words were exceptionally gentle.

Lady Helen met his eyes, saw the kindness and compa.s.sion behind them, felt she couldn't bear it, and looked away. Yet she knew that, above all people, he was the single person who would understand. So she spoke. "Last night with Rhys. It was...the first time in years that I felt so loved, Simon. For what I am, for my faults and my virtues, for my past and my future. I haven't had that with a man since..." She hesitated, then finished what needed to be said. "Since I had it with you. And I never expected to have it again. That was to be my punishment, you see. For what happened between us all those years ago. I deserved it."

St. James shook his head sharply, without reply. After a moment he said, "If you concentrate, Helen, are you certain you heard nothing last night?"

Lady Helen answered his question with one of her own. "The first time you made love to Deborah, what else did you notice besides her?"

"You're right, of course. The house could have burned to the ground for all I would have known. Or cared, for that matter." He got to his feet, hung his coat back on the peg, and held out his hand for hers. When she gave it to him, his brow furrowed. "My G.o.d, what have you done to yourself?" he asked.

"Done?"

"Your hand, Helen."

Her eyes dropped, and she saw that her fingers had somehow become laced with blood, black with it underneath her fingernails. She started at the sight.

"Where...I don't..."

More blood, she saw, smeared along the side of her skirt, drying to brown on the wool. She looked for the source, spied the boot she had been holding, and picked it up, examining the sticky substance round its top, black upon black in the dull light of the storage area. Wordlessly, she handed it to St. James.

He upended the boot on the bench, thumped it soundly against the wood, and dislodged a large glove, at one time leather and fur but now nothing more than a pulpy ma.s.s of Joy Sinclair's blood. Not yet dried, not yet done for.

HALF THE SIZE of the library, the Westerbrae sitting room to the left of the wide baronial stairway seemed to Lynley an odd choice of locations for any large group to meet in. Yet it was still set up for the reading of Joy Sinclair's play, with a concentric arrangement of tables and chairs at the room's centre for the actors, and peripheral observation points along its walls for everyone else. Even the scent in the room bore witness to last night's ill-fated gathering: tobacco, burnt matches, coffee dregs, and brandy.

When Lord Stinhurst entered under the watchful eye of Sergeant Havers, Lynley directed him to sit in an unwelcoming ladder-back chair near the fireplace. A coal fire burned in the small grate there, cutting the chill in the room. Outside the closed door, the scene-of-crime men from Strathclyde CID were making an unusually noisy arrival.

Stinhurst took his designated seat cooperatively, crossing one well-tailored leg over the other, refusing a cigarette. He was impeccably dressed, the personification of weekend-in-the-country. Yet, in spite of his movements, which carried the a.s.surance of a man used to the stage, used to being under the eyes of hundreds of people at once, he looked physically drained, whether from exhaustion or from the effort of holding together the women in his family during this time of crisis, Lynley could not have said. But he took the opportunity of observing the man while Sergeant Havers leafed through the pages of her notebook.

Cary Grant, Lynley thought in summation of Stinhurst's general appearance and liked the comparison. Although Stinhurst was in his seventies, his face had lost none of the extraordinarily handsome, strong-jawed force of its youth, and his hair, shafted obliquely by the amiable low light of the room, was variations on silver, roughly textured and full as it had always been. With a body on which there was no spare flesh, Stinhurst belied the term old age, living proof that relentless industry was the key to youth.

Yet, underneath this pleasant, surface perfection, Lynley sensed strong undercurrents being mastered, and he decided that control was the key to understanding the man. He appeared to excel at maintaining it: over his body, over his emotions, over his mind. This last was acutely alive and, as far as Lynley could tell, perfectly capable of deciding how best to tamper with a mountain of evidence. At the moment, Lord Stinhurst manifested only one sign of agitation in the face of this interview, pressing together the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in repeated, forceful spasms. The flesh under the nails alternately whitened and blushed as circulation was interrupted and then restored. Lynley found the gesture interesting and wondered if Stinhurst's body would continue to reveal his increasing tension.

"You look a great deal like your father," Stinhurst said. "But I suppose you hear that frequently."

Lynley saw Havers' head come up with a snap. "Generally not, in my line of work," he replied. "I'd like you to explain why you've burnt Joy Sinclair's scripts."

If Stinhurst was disconcerted by Lynley's unwillingness to recognise any bond between them, he did not show it. Rather, he said, "Without the sergeant, please."

Gripping her pencil more firmly, Havers regarded the older man with eyes narrowed in contempt at his lord-of-the-manor dismissal of her. She waited for Lynley's response and flashed a brief, satisfied smile when he said firmly, "That's not possible." Hearing that, she settled back into her chair.

Stinhurst didn't move. He had not, in fact, even glanced at Sergeant Havers before he requested her removal. He merely said, "I have to insist, Thomas."

The use of his given name was a stimulus that brought back to Lynley not only Havers' angry challenge to treat Lord Stinhurst with an iron glove, but also the trepidation he had earlier felt about his a.s.signment to this case. It set off every alarm.

"That's not one of your rights, I'm afraid."

"My...rights?" Stinhurst offered the smile of a card-player with a winning hand. "This entire fantasy that says I have to speak with you is just that, Thomas. A fantasy. We don't have that kind of legal system. You and I both know it. The sergeant goes or we wait for my solicitor. From London."

Stinhurst might have been mildly disciplining a fractious child. But there was absolute reality behind his words, and in the s.p.a.ce of time that it had taken to hear them, Lynley saw the alternatives, a legal minuet with the man's attorney or a momentary compromise that could well be used to purchase some truth. It had to be done.

"Step outside, Sergeant," he told Havers, his eyes unwavering from the other man.

"Inspector..." Her voice was unbearably restrained.

"See to Gowan Kilbride and Mary Agnes Campbell," Lynley went on. "It will save us some time."

Havers drew a tense breath. "May I speak to you outside, please?"

Lynley allowed her that much, following her into the great hall and closing the door behind them. Havers gave rapid scrutiny to the left and right, wary of listeners. When she spoke, her voice was a whisper, fierce and angry.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing, Inspector? You can't question him alone. Let's chat about the procedure you've been so b.l.o.o.d.y fond of throwing in my face these last fifteen months."

Lynley felt unmoved by her quick flare of pa.s.sion. "As far as I'm concerned, Sergeant, Webberly threw procedure out the window the moment he got us involved in this case without a formal request from Strathclyde CID. I'm not about to spend time agonising over it now."

"But you've got to have a witness! You've got to have the notes! What's the point of questioning him if you've nothing written down to use against..." Sudden comprehension dawned on her face. "Unless, of course, you know right now that you intend to believe every blessed word his sweet lordship has to say!"

Lynley had worked with the sergeant long enough to know when a conversational skirmish was about to escalate into verbal warfare. He cut her off.

"At some point, Barbara, you're going to have to decide whether an uncontrollable factor such as a person's birth is reason enough to distrust him."

"What's that supposed to mean? I'm supposed to trust Stinhurst? He's destroyed a stack of evidence, he's sitting smack in the middle of a murder, he's refusing to cooperate. And I'm supposed to trust him?"

"I wasn't talking about Stinhurst. I was talking about myself."