Payment In Blood Part 8

It was an interesting point. "If you wish."

"I manage my wife's career. I see to her contracts, book her engagements, run interference for her when the pressure mounts. I read her scripts, coach her with her lines, manage her money." Sydeham appeared to perceive a change in Lynley's expression. "Yes," he repeated, "I manage her money. All of it. And there's quite a bit. She makes it, I invest it. So I'm a kept man, Inspector." Upon this last remark, he smiled without the slightest trace of humour. His skin seemed thin enough when it came to the superficial inequities in his relationship with his wife.

"How well did you know Joy Sinclair?" Lynley asked.

"Do you mean did I kill her? I'd only met the woman at half past seven. And while Joanna wasn't altogether happy with the manner in which Joy had taken to revising her play, I generally negotiate improvements with playwrights. I don't kill them if I don't like what they've written."

"Why wasn't your wife happy with the script?"

"All along, Joanna had been suspicious that Joy was attempting to create a vehicle to bring her sister back to the stage. At Joanna's expense. Joanna's would be the name that would bring in the audience and the critics, but Irene Sinclair's performance would be spotlighted for them to see. At least, that was Jo's fear. And when she saw the revised script, she jumped to conclusions and felt the worst had actually come true." Sydeham slowly lifted both arms and shoulders. It was a curious, Gallic shrug. "I...we had quite a row about it after the read-through, in fact."

"What sort of row?"

"The sort of row married couples always have. A look-at-what-you-got-me-into row. Joanna was determined not to go on with the play."

"And that's been taken care of rather nicely for her, hasn't it?" Lynley remarked.

Sydeham's nostrils flared. "My wife didn't kill Joy Sinclair, Inspector. Nor, for that matter, did I. Killing Joy would hardly have put an end to our real problem." He moved his head abruptly from Lynley and Havers, focussing on the table that stood under the sitting-room window and on the silver-framed photographs arrayed on it.

Lynley saw the other man's remark for the fishing line it was and decided to take the bait. "Your real problem?"

Sydeham's head swivelled back to them. "Robert Gabriel," he said broodingly. "Robert bleeding Gabriel."

Lynley had learned years before that silence was as useful a tool of interrogation as any question he might ask. The attendant tension it nearly always caused was a form of appanage, one of the few benefits to carrying a warrant card from the police. So he said nothing, letting Sydeham simmer himself into further disclosure. Which he did, almost immediately.

"Gabriel's been after Joanna for years. He fancies himself some kind of cross between Casanova and Lothario, only it never worked with Jo, in spite of all his efforts. She can't stand the bloke. Never has."

Lynley was amazed to hear this revelation, considering the reputation Ellacourt and Gabriel had for sizzling across the stage. Evidently, Sydeham recognised this reaction, for he smiled as if in acknowledgement and went on.

"My wife is one h.e.l.l of an actress, Inspector. She always was. But the truth of the matter is that Gabriel put his hands up her skirt one time too many during Oth.e.l.lo last season, and she was through with him. Unfortunately, she didn't tell me how determined she was never to perform with him again until it was too late. I'd already negotiated the deal with Stinhurst for this new production. And I saw to it personally that Gabriel had a part in it as well."

"Why?"

"Simple business. Gabriel and Ellacourt have chemistry. People pay to see chemistry. And I thought Joanna could take care of herself well enough if she had to appear with Gabriel again. She did it in Oth.e.l.lo, bit him like a shark when he went for tongue during a stage kiss, and laughed like h.e.l.l about it afterwards. So I didn't think that one more play with Gabriel would set her off the way it did. Then like a fool, when I found out how absolutely dead set against him she was, I lied to her, told her that Stinhurst had insisted that Gabriel be in the new production. But unfortunately, last night, Gabriel let it out of the bag that I was the one who had wanted him in the play. And that was part of what set Joanna off."

"And now that it's certain there's to be no play?"

Sydeham spoke with ill-concealed impatience. "Joy's death does nothing to change the fact that Joanna's still under contract to do a play for Stinhurst. So is Gabriel. And Irene Sinclair, for that matter. So Jo's working with both of them whether she likes it or not. My guess is that Stinhurst will take them back to London and start putting together another production as soon as he can. So if I wanted to help Joanna-or at least put an end to the anger between us-I'd be orchestrating a quick end to either Stinhurst or Gabriel. Joy's death put a stop to Joy's play. Believe me, it didn't really do a thing to benefit Joanna."

"To benefit yourself, perhaps?"

Sydeham gave Lynley a long look of evaluation. "I don't see how anything that hurts Jo might benefit me, Inspector."

There was certainly truth to that, Lynley admitted to himself. "When did you last have your gloves with you?"

Sydeham appeared to want to continue their previous discussion. Nonetheless, he answered cooperatively enough. "Yesterday afternoon when we arrived, I think. Francesca asked me to sign the register, and I would have taken my gloves off to do so. Frankly, I don't know what I did with them after that. I don't remember putting them back on, but I might have shoved them in the pocket of my coat."

"That was the last time you saw them? You didn't miss them?"

"I didn't need them. Joanna and I didn't go out again, and I'd no need to put them on in the house. I didn't even know they were missing until your man brought the one into the library a few minutes ago. The other may be in my coat pocket or even on the reception desk if I left them there. I simply don't remember."

"Sergeant?" Lynley nodded towards Havers who got up, left the room, and returned in a moment with the second glove.

"It was on the floor between the wall and the reception desk," she said and laid it on the table.

All of them gave a moment over to examining the glove. The leather was rich, comfortably worn, and initialled on the inner wrist with the letters DS in intricate scrollwork. The faint scent of saddle soap spoke of a recent cleaning, but no remnants of that preservative clung to seams or to lining.

"Who was in the reception area when you arrived?" Lynley asked.

Sydeham's face wore the meditative expression of looking back upon an activity that one thinks at the time is unimportant in order, in retrospect, to place persons and events in their correct positions. "Francesca Gerrard," he said slowly. "Jeremy Vinney came briefly to the door of the drawing room and said h.e.l.lo." He paused. He was using his hands as he talked, ill.u.s.trating each person's position in the air in front of him in a process of visualisation. "The boy. Gowan was there. Perhaps not immediately, but he'd have had to be eventually since he came for our luggage and showed us up to our room. And...I'm not entirely certain, but I think I may have seen Elizabeth Rintoul, Stinhurst's daughter, darting into one of the rooms along that corridor off the entrance hall. Someone was down there, at any rate."

Lynley and Havers exchanged speculative glances. Lynley directed Sydeham's attention towards the plan of the house which Havers had brought with her into the sitting room. It was spread out on the central table, next to Sydeham's glove. "Which room?"

Sydeham pushed out of his chair, came to the table, and ran his eyes over the plan. He scrutinised it conscientiously before he replied. "It's hard to say. I only caught a glimpse, as if she were trying to avoid us. I just a.s.sumed it was Elizabeth because she's peculiar that way. But I should guess this last room." He pointed to the office.

Lynley considered the implications. The master keys were kept in the office. They were locked in the desk, Macaskin had said. But then he had gone on to say that Gowan Kilbride may have had access to them. If that were the case, the locking of the desk may well have been a casual matter at best, sometimes done and sometimes ignored. And on the day of the arrival of so large a party, surely the desk would have been unlocked, the keys easily accessible to anyone involved in preparing the rooms. Or to anyone at all who knew about the existence of the office: Elizabeth Rintoul, her mother, her father, even Joy Sinclair herself.

"When was the last time you saw Joy?" Lynley asked.

Sydeham shifted restlessly on his feet. He looked as if he wanted to go back to his chair. Lynley decided he wanted him standing.

"A while after the read-through. Perhaps half past eleven. Perhaps later. I wasn't paying much attention to the time."

"Where?"

"In the upstairs corridor. She was heading towards her room." Sydeham looked momentarily uncomfortable but continued. "As I said before, I'd had a row with Joanna over the play. She'd stormed out of the read-through, and I found her in the gallery. We had some fairly nasty words. I don't much care for rowing with my wife. I was feeling low afterwards, so I was going to the library to fetch myself a bottle of whisky. That's when I saw Joy."

"Did you speak to her at all?"

"She didn't look very much like she wanted to speak to anyone. I just brought the whisky back to my room, had a few drinks, well... maybe four or five. Then I simply slept it off."

"Where was your wife all this time?"

Sydeham's eyes drifted to the fireplace. His hands automatically sought the pockets of his grey tweed jacket, perhaps in a fruitless search for cigarettes to still his nerves. Obviously, this was the question he had hoped to avoid answering.

"I don't know. She'd left the gallery. I don't know where she went."

"You don't know," Lynley repeated carefully.

"That's right. Look, I learned a good number of years ago to leave Joanna to herself when she's in a temper, and she was in a fair one last night. So that's what I did. I had the drinks. I fell asleep, pa.s.sed out, call it whatever you want to. I don't know where she was. All I can say is that when I woke up this morn-ing-when the girl knocked on the door and babbled at us to get dressed and meet in the drawing room-Joanna was in bed beside me." Sydeham noticed that Havers was writing steadily. "Joanna was upset," he a.s.serted. "But it was at me. No one else. Things have been...a bit off between us for a while. She wanted to be away from me. She was angry."

"But she did return to your room last night?"

"Of course she did."

"What time? In an hour? In two? In three?"

"I don't know."

"But surely her movement in the room would have awakened you."

Sydeham's voice grew impatient. "Have you ever slept off a binge, Inspector? Pardon the expression, but it would have been like waking the dead."

Lynley persisted. "You heard nothing? No wind? No voices? Nothing at all?"

"I told you that."

"Nothing from Joy Sinclair's room? She was on the other side of yours. It's hard to believe that a woman could meet her death without making a sound. Or that your own wife could be in and out of the room without your awareness. What other things might have gone on without your knowledge?"

Sydeham looked sharply from Lynley to Havers. "If you're pinning this on Jo, why not on me as well? I was alone for part of the night, wasn't I? But that's a problem for you, isn't it? Because, saving Stinhurst, so was everyone else."

Lynley ignored the anger that rode just beneath Sydeham's words. "Tell me about the library."

There was no alteration in expression at this sudden, new direction in the questioning. "What about it?"

"Was anyone there when you went for the whisky?"

"Just Gabriel."

"What was he doing?"

"The same as I was about to. Drinking. Gin by the smell of it. And no doubt hoping for something in a skirt to wander by. Anything in a skirt."

Lynley picked up on Sydeham's black tone. "You don't much like Robert Gabriel. Is it merely because of the advances he's made towards your wife, or are there other reasons?"

"No one here much likes Gabriel, Inspector. No one anywhere much likes him. He gets by on sufferance because he's such a b.l.o.o.d.y good actor. But frankly, it's a mystery to me why he wasn't murdered instead of Joy Sinclair. He was certainly asking for it from any number of quarters."

It was an interesting observation, Lynley thought. But more interesting was the fact that Sydeham had not answered the question.

APPARENTLY, Inspector Macaskin and the Westerbrae cook had decided to carry a burgeoning conflict to the sitting room, and they arrived at the door simultaneously, bearing two disparate messages. Macaskin insisted upon being the first heard, with the white-garbed cook lurking in the background, wringing her hands together as if every wasted moment brought a souffle closer to perdition in her oven.

Macaskin gave David Sydeham a head-totoe scrutiny as the man moved past him into the hall. "We've done all that's to be done," he said to Lynley. "Fingerprinted the whole lot. Clyde and Sinclair rooms are sealed off, crimescene men are done. Drains appear clean, by the way. No blood anywhere."

"A clean kill save for the glove."

"My man will test that." Macaskin jerked his head towards the library and went on curtly. "Shall I let them out? Cook says she's got dinner and they've asked for a bit of a wash."

The request, Lynley saw, was out of character for Macaskin. Giving the reins of an investigation over to another officer was not an accustomed routine for the Scot, and even as he spoke, the tips of his ears grew red against his fine, grey hair.

As if she recognised a concealed message within Macaskin's words, the cook belligerently continued, "Ye canna keep them from fude. 'Tisna richt." Clearly, it was her expectation that the police modus operandi was to put the entire group on bread and water until the killer was found. "I do hae a bit prepared. They've ha nowt but one wee san'wich a' day, Inspector. Unlike the police," she nodded meaningfully, "who hae been feeding themsel' since this mornin' from what I can tell by lookin' a' my kitchen."

Lynley flipped open his pocket watch, surprised to see that it was half past eight. He couldn't have been less hungry himself, but since the crime-scene men were finished, there was no further purpose to keeping the group from adequate food and from the relatively restricted, supervised freedom of the house. He nodded his approval.

"Then we'll be off," Macaskin said. "I'll leave Constable Lonan with you and get back myself in the morning. I've a man ready to take Stinhurst to the station."

"Leave him here."

Macaskin opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, throwing protocol to the wind long enough to say, "As to those scripts, Inspector."

"I'll see to it," Lynley said firmly. "Burning evidence isn't murder. He can be dealt with when the time arrives." He saw Sergeant Havers move in a recoiling motion, as if she wished to distance herself from what she saw as a poor decision.

For his part, Macaskin seemed to consider arguing the point and decided to let it go. His official good-night comprised the brusque words: "We've put your things in the northwest wing. You're in with St. James. Next to Helen Clyde's new room."

Neither the political manoeuvring nor the sleeping arrangements of the police were of interest to the cook, who had remained in the doorway, eager to resolve the culinary dispute that had brought her to the sitting room in the first place. "Twinty minutes, Inspector." She turned on her heel. "Bey on time."

It was a fine point of conclusion. And that is how Macaskin used it.

RELEASED at last from their day's confinement in the library, most of the group were still in the entrance hall when Lynley asked Joanna Ellacourt to step into the sitting room. His request, made so soon after his interview with her husband, reduced the small cl.u.s.ter of people to breath-holding suspense, as if they were waiting to see how the actress would respond. It was, after all, couched as a request. But none of them were foolish enough to believe that it was an invitation that might be politely rebuffed should Joanna choose to do so.

It looked as if she was considering that as a possibility, however, walking a quick line between outright refusal and hostile cooperation. The latter seemed ascendant, and as she approached the sitting-room door, Joanna gave vent to the umbrage she felt after a day of incarceration by favouring neither Lynley nor Havers with so much as a word before she pa.s.sed in front of them and took a seat of her own choosing, the ladder-back chair by the fire that Sydeham had avoided and Stinhurst had only reluctantly occupied. Her choice of it was intriguing, revealing either a determination to see the interview through in the most forthright manner possible or a desire to choose a location where the benefits of firelight playing upon her skin and hair might distract an idle watcher at a crucial moment. Joanna Ellacourt knew how to play to an audience.

Looking at her, Lynley found it hard to believe that she was nearly forty years old. She looked ten years younger, possibly more, and in the forgiving light of the fire that warmed her skin to a translucent gold, Lynley found himself recalling his first sight of Francois Boucher's Diana Resting, for the splendid glow of Joanna's skin was the same, as were the delicate shades of colour across her cheeks and the fragile curve of her ear when she shook her hair back. She was absolutely beautiful, and had her eyes been brown instead of cornflower blue, she might herself have posed for Boucher's painting.

No wonder Gabriel's been after her, Lynley thought. He offered her a cigarette which she accepted. Her hand closed over his to steady the lighter's flame with fingers that were long, very cool, flashing several diamond rings. It was a stagey sort of movement, intentionally seductive.

"Why did you argue with your husband last night?" he asked.

Joanna raised a well-shaped eyebrow and spent a moment taking in Sergeant Havers from head to toe, as if in an evaluation of the policewoman's grubby skirt and sootstained sweater. "Because I'd grown tired of being on the receiving end of Robert Gabriel's l.u.s.t for the last six months," she replied frankly, and paused as if in the expectation of a response- a nod of sympathy, perhaps, or a cluck of disapproval. When it became evident that none was forthcoming, she was forced to continue her story. Which she did, her voice a bit tight. "He had a nice hard-on every night in my last scene in Oth.e.l.lo, Inspector. Just about the time he was supposed to smother me, he'd begin squirming about on the bed like a p.u.b.escent twelve-year-old who's just discovered how much fun he can have with that sweet little sausage between his legs. I'd had it with him. I thought David understood as much. But apparently he didn't. So he arranged a new contract, forcing me to work with Gabriel again."

"You argued about the new play."

"We argued about everything. The new play was just part of it."

"And you objected to Irene Sinclair's role as well."

Joanna flicked cigarette ash onto the hearth. "As far as I was concerned, my husband couldn't have manipulated this affair with more resounding idiocy. He put me in the position of having to fight off Robert Gabriel for the next twelve months at the same time as trying to keep Gabriel's ex-wife from climbing up my back on the way to her new, superlunary career. I won't lie to you, Inspector. I'm not at all sorry that this play of Joy's is finished. You may say that's an open admission of guilt if you like, but I'm not about to sit here and play the mourner over the death of a woman I scarcely knew. I suppose that gives me a motive to kill her, as well. But I can't help that."

"Your husband says that you were out of your room for part of last night."

"So I had the opportunity to do Joy in? Yes, I suppose it looks that way."

"Where did you go after your row in the gallery?"

"To our room, at first."

"What time was this?"

"Shortly after eleven, I imagine. But I didn't stay there. I knew David would be coming back, sorry about it all and eager to make it up in his usual fashion. And I wanted none of it. Or of him. So I went to the music room next to the gallery. There's an ancient gramophone there and some even more ancient records. I played show tunes. Francesca Gerrard appears to be quite an Ethel Merman fan, by the way."

"Would someone have heard you?"

"As corroboration, you mean?" She shook her head, apparently unconcerned by the fact that her alibi thus had absolutely no grounds for credibility. "The music room's off by itself in the northeast corridor. I doubt anyone would have heard. Unless Elizabeth was doing her usual routine, snooping at doors. She seems to excel at it."

Lynley let that one go by. "Who was in the reception area when you arrived yesterday?"

Joanna fingered a few strands of her firelit hair. "Aside from Francesca, I don't recall anyone in particular." Her brow furrowed thoughtfully. "Except Jeremy Vinney. He came to the drawing room door and said a few words. I do remember that."

"Curious that Vinney's presence sticks in your mind."