Payment In Blood (31 page)

Stinhurst started to reach towards his wife, but she cried out involuntarily and shrank from the gesture. He withdrew fractionally, leaving his hand lying on the table between them. The fingers curled, then tightened into the palm.

“No, of course not. But I needed to tell them something. I needed…I
had
to keep them away from Geoff.”

“You needed to tell them…But he’s
dead
.” Her face transformed with growing revulsion as she took in the enormity of what her husband had done. “Geoff’s dead. And I’m not. Stuart, I’m not! You made a whore out of me to protect a dead man! You sacrificed me! My God! How
could
you have done that?”

Stinhurst shook his head. His words were laboured. “Not a dead man. Not dead at all. But alive and in this room. Forgive me if you can. I was a coward, first, last, and always. I was only trying to protect myself.”

“From what? You’ve done nothing! Stuart, for God’s sake. You did
nothing
that night! How can you say—”

“It isn’t true. I couldn’t tell you.”

“Tell me what? Tell me
now
!”

Stinhurst stared long at his wife, as if he were trying to summon courage from an examination of her face. “I was the one who gave Geoff over to the government. All of you learned the worst about him on that New Year’s Eve. But I…God help me, I’d known he was a Soviet agent since 1949.”

S
TINHURST HELD
himself perfectly still as he spoke, perhaps in the belief that a single movement would cause the floodgates to open and the accumulated anguish of thirty-nine years to come pouring out. His voice was matter-of-fact, and although his eyes became increasingly red-rimmed, he shed no tears. Lynley found himself wondering if Stinhurst was even capable of weeping after so many years of deceit.

“I knew that Geoff was a Marxist when we were at Cambridge. He made no secret of it, and frankly, I took it as a bit of a lark, something he would outgrow in time. And if he didn’t, I thought what a laugh it would be to have the future Earl of Stinhurst committed to the workers’ struggle to change the tide of history. What I didn’t know was that his proclivities had been duly noted, and that he had been seduced into espionage while he was still a student.”

“Seduced?” Lynley asked.

“It
is
a process of seduction,” Stinhurst replied. “A combination of flattery and cajolery, making the student believe he plays an important role in the scheme of change.”

“How did you come to know this?”

“I discovered it quite by chance, after the war when we were all in Somerset. It was the weekend my son Alec was born. I’d gone out looking for Geoff directly after I’d seen Marguerite and the baby. It was…” He smiled at his wife for the first and only time. Her face did not register a single response. “A
son
. I was so happy. I wanted Geoff to know. So I went out looking and found him in one of our boyhood haunts, an abandoned cottage in the Quantock Hills. Apparently he’d felt that Somerset was safe.”

“He was meeting someone?”

Stinhurst nodded. “I probably would have thought it was only a farmer, but earlier that weekend I’d seen Geoff working in the study on some government papers, the sort that are stamped
confidential
in garish letters across the front. I thought nothing of it at the time, just that he’d brought work home. His briefcase was on the desk, and he was putting a document into a manila envelope. Not an estate envelope, nor a government one. I remember that distinctly. But I thought nothing of it until I came upon him in the cottage and saw him pass that same envelope to the man he was meeting. I’ve often thought that had I arrived a minute sooner—a minute later—I might well have assumed his companion was indeed a Somerset farmer. But as it was, once I saw the envelope change hands, I guessed the worst. Of course, for a moment I tried to tell myself that it was all a coincidence, that the envelope could not possibly be the same one I had seen in the study. But if it was only an innocent exchange of information that I’d witnessed—all legal and aboveboard—why arrange for it to take place in the Quantock Hills, in the middle of nowhere?”

“If you’d discovered them,” Lady Stinhurst asked numbly, “why didn’t they do…something to keep you from revealing what you knew?”

“They didn’t know exactly what I’d seen. And even if they had, I was safe. In spite of everything, Geoff would have drawn the line at the elimination of his own brother. He was, after all, more of a man than I when it came right down to it.”

Lady Stinhurst looked away. “Don’t say that about yourself.”

“It’s true, I’m afraid.”

“Did he admit to his activities?” Lynley asked.

“Once the other man was gone, I confronted him,” Stinhurst said. “He admitted to it. He wasn’t ashamed. He believed in the cause. And I…I don’t know what I believed in. All I knew was that he was my brother. I loved him. I always had. Even though I was revolted by what he was doing, I couldn’t bring myself to betray him. He would have
known
, you see, that I was the one to turn him in. So I did nothing. But it ate away at me for years.”

“I should guess you finally saw your opportunity to take action in 1962.”

“The government prosecuted William Vassall in October; they already had arrested and tried an Italian physicist—Giuseppe Martelli—for espionage in September. I thought that if Geoff’s activities were uncovered then, so many years after I had come to know about them, he could hardly think I was the one to give him over to the government. So I…in November I handed my facts to the authorities. And surveillance began. In my heart, I hoped—I prayed—that Geoff would discover he was being watched and make his escape to the Soviets. He almost did.”

“What prevented him?”

At the question, Stinhurst’s clenched fist tightened. His hand shook with the pressure, knuckles and fingers white. In the outer office a telephone rang; an infectious burst of laughter sounded. Sergeant Havers stopped writing, cast a questioning look towards Lynley.

“What prevented him?” Lynley repeated.

“Tell them, Stuart,” Lady Stinhurst murmured. “Tell the truth. This once. At last.”

Her husband rubbed at his eyelids. His skin looked grey. “My father,” he said. “He killed him.”

S
TINHURST PACED
the length of the room, his tall, lean figure like a rod save for his head, which was bent, his eyes on the floor.

“It happened much the way Joy’s play depicted it the other night. There was a telephone call for Geoff, but my father and I came into the library without Geoff’s knowledge and overheard part of it, heard him say that someone would have to get to his flat for the code book or the whole network would be blown. Father began to question him. Geoff—he was always so eloquent, such a master of the language—was frantic to get away at once. There was hardly time for an inquisition. He wasn’t thinking straight, wasn’t answering questions consistently, so Father guessed the truth. It wasn’t really difficult after what we’d both heard of the telephone conversation. When Father saw that the very worst was true, something simply snapped. To him, it was more than treason. It was a betrayal of family, of an entire way of life. I think he was overcome in an instant with a need to obliterate. So…” From across the room, Stinhurst examined the lovely posters that lined his office walls. “My father went after him. He was like a bear. And I…God, I watched it all. Frozen. Useless. And every night since then, Thomas, I’ve relived that moment when I heard Geoff’s neck crack like the branch of a tree.”

“Was your sister’s husband, Phillip Gerrard, involved?” Lynley asked.

“Yes. He wasn’t in the library when Geoff’s call came through, but he and Francesca and Marguerite heard my father shouting and came running from upstairs. They burst into the room just a moment after…it was done. Of course, Phillip immediately went for the phone, insisting that the authorities be sent for at once. But we…the rest of us pressured him out of it. The scandal. A trial. Perhaps Father going to prison. Francesca became hysterical at the thought. Phillip was obdurate enough at first, but ultimately, against all of us, especially Francie, what could he do? So he helped us take his—Geoffrey, the body—to where the road forks left to Hillview Farm and begins the descent right towards Kilparie village. We took only Geoff’s car, to leave one set of tyre prints.” He smiled in exquisite self-denigration. “We were careful about that sort of thing. There’s a tremendous declivity that begins at the fork, with two switchbacks, one right after the other like a snake. We started the engine, sent the car off with Geoff in the driver’s seat. The car built speed. At the first switchback it shot across the road, broke through the fence, made the drop to the second switchback below, and went over the embankment. It burst into flames.” He pulled out a white handkerchief—a perfectly laundered linen square—and wiped at his eyes. He returned to the table but did not sit. “Afterwards, we walked home. The road was almost entirely ice, so we didn’t even leave footprints. There was never really a question of its not being an accident.” His fingers touched the photograph of his father, still lying where Lynley had placed it among the others on the table.

“Then why did Sir Andrew Higgins come from London to identify the body and testify at the inquest?”

“As insurance. Lest anyone notice anything peculiar about Geoff’s injuries that might cause questions to arise about our story. Sir Andrew was my father’s oldest friend. He could be trusted.”

“And Willingate’s involvement?”

“He arrived at Westerbrae within two hours of the accident. He’d been on his way to take Geoff back to London for questioning in the first place. A warning of his impending arrival was evidently the content of the telephone call my brother had received. Father told Willingate the truth. And a deal was struck between them. It would be an official secret. The government didn’t want it known that a mole had been in place for years in the Ministry of Defence now that the mole was dead. My father didn’t want it known that his son had been the mole. Nor did he want to stand trial for murder. So the accident story stood. And the rest of us vowed silence. We kept it as well. But Phillip Gerrard was a decent man. The knowledge that he’d allowed himself to be talked into covering up a murder consumed him for the rest of his life.”

“Is that why he’s not buried on Westerbrae land?”

“He felt he had cursed it.”

“Why is your brother buried there?”

“Father wouldn’t have his body in Somerset. It was all we could do to convince him to bury Geoff at all.” Stinhurst finally looked at his wife. “We all broke on the wheel of Geoffrey’s sedition, didn’t we, Mag? But you and I worst of all. We lost Alec. We lost Elizabeth. We lost each other.”

“It’s always been Geoff between us, then,” she said dully. “All these years. You’ve always acted as if
you
killed him, not your father. There were even times when I wondered if you had.”

Stinhurst shook his head, refusing to accept exoneration. “I did. Of course I did. In the library that night, there was a split second of decision when I could have gone to them, when I could have stopped Father. They were on the floor and…Geoff
looked
at me. Maggie, I’m the last person he saw. And the last thing he knew was that his only brother was going to stand there and do nothing and watch him die. I may as well have killed him myself, you see. I’m responsible for it in the long run.”

Treason, like the plague, doth take much in a blood
. Lynley thought that Webster’s line had never seemed so apt as it did now. For from the fountainhead of Geoffrey Rintoul’s treachery had sprung the destruction of his entire family. And since the destruction would not sicken, it continued to feed upon the other lives that touched on the periphery of the Rintouls’: on Joy Sinclair’s and Gowan Kilbride’s. But now it would stop.

There was just one more detail to be attended to. “Why did you involve MI5 this past weekend?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. All I knew was that any investigation would inevitably centre itself round the script we were reading the night Joy died. And I thought—I
believed—
that a close scrutiny of the script would reveal everything my family and the government had been so careful to keep hidden for twenty-five years. When Willingate phoned me, he agreed that the scripts had to be destroyed. Then he got in touch with your people in Special Branch and they in turn contacted a Met commissioner, who agreed to send someone—someone special—to Westerbrae.”

Those last words brought with them a renewed swelling of bitterness that Lynley fought against uselessly. He told himself that had it not been for Helen’s presence at Westerbrae and the crushing revelation about her relationship with Rhys Davies-Jones, he would have seen through the web of lies that Stinhurst had woven, he would have found Geoffrey Rintoul’s grave himself and drawn his own conclusions from it without the generous aid of his friends. At the moment, clinging to that belief was his only source of self-respect.

“I’m going to ask you to make a complete statement at the Yard,” Lynley said to Stinhurst.

“Of course,” he replied, and the denial that followed his acquiescence was as mechanical as it was immediate. “I didn’t kill Joy Sinclair. Thomas, I swear it.”

“He didn’t.” Lady Stinhurst’s tone was more resigned than urgent. Lynley didn’t respond. She went on. “I would have known had he left our room that night, Inspector.”

Lady Stinhurst could not have chosen a single rationale less likely to meet with Lynley’s belief. He turned to Havers. “Take Lord Stinhurst in for a preliminary statement, Sergeant. See that Lady Stinhurst goes home.”

She nodded. “And you, Inspector?”

He thought about the question, about the time he still needed to come to terms with all that had happened. “I’ll be along directly.”

O
NCE
L
ADY
S
TINHURST’S
taxi was on its way to the family’s Holland Park home and Sergeant Havers and Constable Nkata had escorted Lord Stinhurst from the Agincourt Theatre, Lynley went back into the building. He did not relish the idea of an accidental meeting with Rhys Davies-Jones, and there was no doubt at all that the man was somewhere on the premises today. Yet something prompted Lynley to linger, perhaps as a form of expiation for the sins he had committed in suspecting Davies-Jones of murder, in doing everything in his power to encourage Helen to suspect him of murder as well. Governed by the force of passion rather than by reason, he had scrambled for facts that would point the case in the Welshman’s direction and had ignored those that wanted to lay the blame upon anyone else.