Payment In Blood (10 page)

“I wasn’t even aware until this moment that twenty minutes had elapsed,” Stinhurst replied.

Lynley wondered how long he had rehearsed that response. It was clever enough, the type of nonanswer to which no further comment or accusation could be attached.

“Then why don’t you tell me exactly what happened this morning,” he said with deliberate courtesy. “Perhaps we can account for the twenty minutes that way.”

“Mary Agnes found the…Joy. She went immediately for my sister, Francesca. Francesca came for me.” Lord Stinhurst seemed to be ready for Lynley’s next thought, for he went on to say, “My sister was panicked. She was terrified. I don’t imagine she thought to phone the police herself. She’d always depended upon her husband Phillip to be the master of any unpleasant situation. As a widow, she merely turned that dependence on me. That’s not abnormal, Thomas.”

“And that’s all?”

Stinhurst’s eyes were on the porcelain head he held gingerly in his palm. “I told Mary Agnes to gather everyone into the drawing room.”

“They cooperated?”

He looked up. “They were in shock. One doesn’t really expect a member of one’s party to be stabbed through the neck during the night.” Lynley raised an eyebrow. Stinhurst explained, “I had a look at the body when I locked her room this morning.”

“You were fairly clear-headed for a man who’s just encountered his first corpse.”

“I think one ought to be clear-headed when there’s a murderer in one’s midst.”

“You’re sure of that?” Lynley asked. “You never considered that the murderer might have come from outside the house?”

“The nearest village is five miles away. It took the police nearly two hours to get here this morning. Do you really see someone coming in on snowshoes or skis to do away with Joy during the night?”

“Where did you place the call to the police?”

“From my sister’s office.”

“How long were you in there?”

“Five minutes. Perhaps less.”

“Is that the only call you made?”

The question clearly took Stinhurst off guard. His face looked shuttered. “No. I telephoned my secretary in London. At her flat.”

“Why?”

“I wanted her to know about the…situation. I wanted her to cancel my engagements on Sunday evening and Monday.”

“How farsighted of you. But all things considered, wouldn’t you agree that it’s a bit odd to be thinking about your personal engagements directly after discovering that a member of your party has been murdered?”

“I can’t help what it looks like. I just did it.”

“And what were the engagements that you had to cancel?”

“I’ve no idea. My secretary keeps my engagement book with her. I merely work off the daily schedule she gives me.” He concluded impatiently, as if in the need of a defence, “I’m out of the office frequently. It’s easier this way.”

Yet, Lynley thought, Stinhurst did not have the look of a man who required that his life be arranged round elements that made it easier and more liveable. So the last two statements wore the guise of both fencing and prevaricating. Lynley wondered why Stinhurst had even made them.

“How does Jeremy Vinney fit into your weekend plans?”

It was a second question for which Stinhurst seemed unprepared. But this time his hesitation bore the quality of thoughtful consideration rather than evasion. “Joy wanted him here,” he answered after a moment. “She told him about the read-through we were going to have. He’d been covering the renovation of the Agincourt with a series of articles in
The Times
. I suppose this weekend seemed like a natural extension of those stories. He phoned me and asked if he could come along. It seemed harmless enough, the possibility of good press prior to the opening. And at any rate, he and Joy appeared to know each other quite well. She was insistent that he come.”

“But why would she want him here? He’s the arts critic, isn’t he? Why would she want him to have access to her play so soon in the process of production? Or was he her lover?”

“He could have been. Men always found Joy immensely attractive. Jeremy Vinney wouldn’t have been the first.”

“Or perhaps his interest was solely in the script. Why did you burn it?”

Lynley made sure that the question had the ring of inevitability. Stinhurst’s face reflected a patient recognition of this fact.

“Burning the scripts had nothing to do with Joy’s death, Thomas. The play as it stood wasn’t going to be produced. Once I withdrew my support—and I did that last night—it would have died on its own.”

“Died. Interesting choice of words. Then why burn the scripts?”

Stinhurst did not reply. His eyes were on the fire. That he was struggling with a decision was more than obvious. The fact played across his features like a battle. But who the opposing forces were and what was at stake in the victory were fine points of the conflict that were not yet clarified.

“The scripts,” Lynley said again, implacably.

Stinhurst’s body gave a convulsive movement akin to a shudder. “I burned them because of the subject matter Joy had chosen to explore,” he said. “The play was about my wife Marguerite. And her love affair with my older brother. And the child they had thirty-six years ago. Elizabeth.”

5

G
OWAN
K
ILBRIDE
was in a new kind of agony. It began the moment Constable Lonan opened the library door and called out that the London police wanted to speak with Mary Agnes. It increased in intensity when Mary Agnes jumped to her feet, displaying an undisguised eagerness for the encounter. And it reached its zenith with the knowledge that for the past fifteen minutes she had been gone from his sight and his determined—if hardly adequate—protection. Worse still, she was now under the sure, the entirely adequate, the decidedly masculine protection of New Scotland Yard.

Which was the source of the problem.

Once the police group from London—but most particularly the tall, blond detective who appeared to be in charge—had left the library after their brief encounter with Lady Helen Clyde, Mary Agnes had turned to Gowan, her eyes ablaze. “He’s
haiven
,” she had breathed.

That remark boded ill, but, like a fool for love, Gowan had been willing to take the conversation further.

“Haiven?” he’d asked irritably.

“Tha’ policeman!” And then Mary Agnes had gone on rhapsodically to catalogue Inspector Lynley’s virtues. Gowan felt them tattooed into his brain. Hair like Anthony Andrews, a nose like Charles Dance, eyes like Ben Cross, and a smile like Sting. No matter that the man had not bothered to smile once. Mary Agnes was perfectly capable of filling in details when necessary.

It had been bad enough to be in fruitless competition with Jeremy Irons. But now Gowan saw that he had the entire front line of Britain’s theatrical performers to contend with, all embodied in a single man. He ground his teeth bitterly and writhed in discomfort.

He was sitting in a cretonne-covered chair whose material felt like a stiff second skin after so many hours. Next to him—moved carefully out of everyone’s way only a quarter hour into their group incarceration—Mrs. Gerrard’s treasured Cary Globe rested on an impossibly ornate, gilded stand. Gowan stared at it morosely. He felt like kicking it over. Better yet, he felt like heaving it through the window. He was desperate for escape.

He tried to quell the need by forcing himself to consider the library’s charms, but he found there were none. The white plaster octagons on the ceiling needed paint, as did the garlands that ornamented their centres. Years of coal fires and cigarette smoke had taken their toll, and what looked like deep shadows in the nooks and crannies of the raised decoration was really soot, the kind of grime that promised a miserable two weeks or more of work in the coming months. The bookshelves, too, spoke of added misery. They held hundreds of volumes—perhaps even thousands—bound in leather and, behind the glass, all smelling equally of dust and disuse. Another job of cleaning and drying and repairing and…
Where
was Mary Agnes? He had to find her. He had to get out.

Near him, a woman’s voice rose in a tear-filled plea. “My God, please! I can’t stand this another moment!”

Within the last weeks, Gowan had developed a mild dislike of actors in general. But in the past nine hours, he had found he’d developed a hardy loathing of one group in the very particular.

“David, I’ve reached my breaking point. Can’t you
do
something to get us out of here?” Joanna Ellacourt was wringing her hands as she spoke to her husband, pacing the floor and smoking. Which, Gowan thought, she’d been doing all day. The room smelled like a smouldering rubbish heap largely because of her. And it was interesting to note that she had only reached this newest level of nervous agitation when Lady Helen Clyde reentered the room and promised the possibility of attention being directed somewhere other than upon the great star herself.

From his wing chair, David Sydeham’s hooded eyes followed his wife’s slim figure. “What would you have me do, Jo? Batter down the door and club that constable over the head? We’re at their mercy,
ma belle
.”

“Sit, Jo darling.” Robert Gabriel extended a well-tended hand to her, beckoning her to join him on the couch by the fire. The coals there had burned down to small grey lumps speckled with glowing rose. “You’re doing nothing more than unstringing your nerves. Which is exactly what the police would like you to do, would like all of us to do, in fact. It makes their job easier.”

“And you’re hell-bent on not doing that, I dare say,” Jeremy Vinney put in just a pitch above
sotto voce
.

Gabriel’s temper flared. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Vinney ignored him, struck a match, and applied it to his pipe.

“I asked you a question!”

“And I’m choosing not to answer it.”

“Why, you miserable—”

“We all know Gabriel had a row with Joy yesterday,” Rhys Davies-Jones said reasonably. He was sitting furthest from the bar, in a chair next to the window whose curtains he had recently pulled back. Black night yawned through the glass. “I don’t think any of us need make veiled references to it in the hope that the police will get the point.”

“Get the
point
?” Robert Gabriel’s voice held the cutting edge of his ire. “Nice of you to have
me
fingered for the murder, Rhys, but I’m afraid it won’t wash. Not a bit of it.”

“Why? Have you an alibi?” David Sydeham asked. “The way it looks to me, you’re one of the very few people at significant risk, Gabriel. Unless, of course, you can produce a second party with whom you spent the night.” He smiled sardonically. “What about the little girl? Is that what Mary Agnes is up to right now, trotting out stories about your technique? That must be keeping the coppers on the edge of their seats, all right. An intimate description of what it’s like for a woman to have you between her legs. Or was Joy’s play heading us towards that kind of revelation last night?”

Gabriel surged to his feet, knocking against a brass floor lamp. Its arc of light flashed wildly round the room. “I bloody well ought to—”

“Stop it!” Joanna Ellacourt put her hands over her ears. “I can’t stand it! Stop!”

But it was too late. The quick exchange of words had struck Gowan like fists. He leaped out of his chair. In four steps he made it across the room to Gabriel and furiously whipped the actor around to face him.

“Damn ye tae hell!” he shouted. “Did ye titch Mary Agnes?”

But the answer didn’t interest him. Seeing Gabriel’s face, Gowan needed no response. They were a match for size, but the boy’s fury made him stronger. It crested within him, firing him to fight. His single punch put Gabriel flat on the floor, and he fell upon him, one hand at the man’s throat, the other solidly delivering nasty and well-placed blows to his face.

“Wha’ did ye dae tae Mary Agnes?” Gowan roared as he struck.

“Jesus God!”

“Stop him!”

Fragile composure—that thin shell of civility—disintegrated into uproar. Limbs flailed viciously. Hoarse cries charged the air. Glassware smashed onto the hearth. Feet kicked and jolted abandoned furniture to one side. Gowan’s arm encircled Gabriel’s neck, and he dragged the man, panting and sobbing, to the fire.

“Tell me!” Gowan forced Gabriel’s handsome face, now twisted with pain, over the fender, within an inch of the coals. “Tell me, ye bystart!”

“Rhys!” Irene Sinclair backed stiffly into her chair, her face ashen. “Stop him! Stop him!”

Davies-Jones and Sydeham climbed past the overturned furniture and the frozen figures of Lady Stinhurst and Francesca Gerrard, who cowered together like two versions of Lot’s wife. They reached Gowan and Gabriel, struggled uselessly to haul them apart. But Gowan held the actor in a grip made unbreakable by the force of his passion.

“Don’t believe him, Gowan,” Davies-Jones said urgently into the boy’s ear. He gripped his shoulder hard, jerking him to sensibility. “Don’t lose yourself like this. Let him be, lad.
Enough
.”

Somehow the words—and the implication of complete understanding behind them—reached past Gowan’s red tide of anger. Releasing Robert Gabriel, he tore himself away from Davies-Jones and fell to his side on the floor, gasping convulsively.

He realised, of course, the gravity of what he had done, the fact that he would lose his job—and Mary Agnes—because of it. But beyond the enormity of his behaviour, it was the torment of loving and being unloved in return that drove the threat from him, entirely blind to the impact it might have on others in the room, seeking only to wound as he had been wounded.

“I know bluidy all! An’ I’ll tell the police! An’ ye’ll pay!”

“Gowan!” Francesca Gerrard cried out in horror.

“Better speak now, lad,” Davies-Jones said. “Don’t be a fool to talk like that when there’s a killer in the room.”

Elizabeth Rintoul had not moved once during the altercation. Now she stirred, as if from a deep sleep. “No. Not here. Father’s gone to the sitting room, hasn’t he?”

“I
SHOULD GUESS
you see Marguerite as she is now, a sixty-nine-year-old woman very much near the end of her resources. But at thirty-four, when all this occurred, she was lovely. Lively. And eager—so eager to live.”

Restlessly, Lord Stinhurst had gone to a different chair, not one of those in the centre of the room, but one on its perimeter, well out of the light. He sat forward in it, leaning his arms on his knees, and he studied the floral carpet as he talked, as if its muted arabesque pattern held answers for him. His voice was toneless. It was the voice of a man giving a recitation that had to be got through with no expenditure of emotion.

“She and my brother Geoffrey fell in love shortly after the war.”

Lynley said nothing. But he wondered how, even at a distance of thirty-six years, any man could speak of such a monumental act of disloyalty with so little affect. Stinhurst’s lack of emotion spoke of a man who was dead inside, who could no longer afford to let himself be touched, who single-mindedly pursued excellence in his career so that he never had to face the agony rife in his personal life.

“Geoff had been decorated numerous times. He came back from the war a hero. I suppose it was natural that Marguerite was attracted to him. Everyone was. He had a way about him…an air.” Stinhurst paused reflectively. His hands sought each other and pressed hard together.

“You served in the war as well?” Lynley asked.

“Yes. But not like Geoffrey. Not with his flair, not with his devotion. My brother was like a fire. He blazed through life. And like a fire, he attracted lesser creatures to him, weaker creatures. Moths. Marguerite was one of them. Elizabeth was conceived on a trip that Marguerite made alone to my family’s home in Somerset. It was during the summer and I’d been gone two months, travelling from spot to spot in order to direct regional theatre. Marguerite had wanted to come with me, but frankly, I felt I would be burdened with her, with having to…keep her entertained. I thought,” he didn’t bother to disguise his self-contempt, “that she would be in the way. My wife was no fool, Thomas. She still isn’t, for that matter. She could read my reluctance to have her about, so she stopped badgering me to take her. I ought to have realised what that meant, but I was too much caught up in the theatre to understand that Marguerite was making arrangements of her own. I didn’t know at the time that she went to Geoffrey. I only knew at the end of the summer that she was pregnant. She would never tell me whose child it was.”

That Lady Stinhurst had refused her husband this knowledge made perfect sense to Lynley. But that Stinhurst, in the face of it, had carried on with the marriage made no sense at all. “Why did you not divorce her? Messy as it would have been, surely you would have gleaned some peace of mind.”

“Because of Alec,” Stinhurst replied. “Our son. As you said yourself, a divorce like that would have been messy. More than messy. At that time it would have produced an attendant scandal that, God knows, would have spread across the front page of every newspaper for months. I couldn’t let Alec be tormented like that. I wouldn’t. He meant too much to me. More, I suppose, than my marriage itself.”

“Last night Joy accused you of killing Alec.”

A weary smile touched Stinhurst’s lips, comprising equal parts sorrow and resignation. “Alec…my son was in the RAF. His plane went down in a test flight over the Orkney Islands in 1978. Into…” Stinhurst blinked quickly and made a change in his position. “Into the North Sea.”

“Joy knew that?”

“Of course. But she was in love with Alec. They wanted to marry. She was devastated by his death.”

“You opposed the marriage?”

“I wasn’t delighted by it. But I didn’t actively oppose it. I merely suggested that they wait until Alec had done his time in the military.”

It was a decidedly odd choice of words. “Done his time?”

“Every man in my family has gone into the military. When that pattern has been in motion for three hundred years, one doesn’t want one’s son to be the first Rintoul to break it.” For the first time Stinhurst’s voice was clouded by a wisp of emotion. “But Alec didn’t want to do it, Thomas. He wanted to study history, to marry Joy, to write, and perhaps teach at university. And I—blind fool of a patriot with more love for my family tree than for my own son—I gave him no peace until I’d persuaded him to do his duty. He chose the Royal Air Force. I think he believed it would take him farthest from conflict.” Stinhurst looked up quickly and commented as if in defence of his son, “It wasn’t danger he was afraid of. He merely couldn’t stomach war. Not an unnatural reaction from a decent historian.”