Payment In Blood (4 page)

“What about the victim, Joy Sinclair? Do you have anything much on her?”

Macaskin folded his arms, scowled, and wished he had been able to wrest more information from the group at Westerbrae before he had been ordered to leave. “Little enough. Author of the play they’d come to work on this weekend. A lady of some letters, from what I could gather from Vinney.”

“Vinney?”

“Newspaperman. Jeremy Vinney, drama critic for the
Times
. Seems to have been fairly thick with Sinclair. And more broken up about her death than anyone else, from what I could tell. Odd, too, when you think about it.”

“Why?”

“Because her sister’s there as well. But while Vinney was demanding an arrest that very minute, Irene Sinclair had absolutely nothing to say. Didn’t even ask how her sister had been done in. Didn’t care, if you ask me.”

“Odd indeed,” Lynley remarked.

St. James stirred. “Did you say there’s more than one room involved?”

Macaskin nodded. He went over to a second table which abutted the wall and picked up several folders and a roll of paper. The latter he smoothed out on the tabletop, revealing a more than adequate floor plan of the house. It was extraordinarily detailed, considering the time constraints that had been put upon him at Westerbrae this morning, and Macaskin smiled at his finished work with real pleasure. Weighing it down at either end with the folders, he gestured to the right.

“Victim’s room is on the east side of the house.” He opened one of the folders and glanced at his notes before continuing. “One side of her was the room belonging to Joanna Ellacourt and her husband…David Sydeham. Other side was a young woman…here it is. Lady Helen Clyde. It’s this second room that’s been sealed off.” He looked up in time to see the surprise on all three of the London faces. “You know these people?”

“Just Lady Helen Clyde. She works with me,” St. James replied. He looked at Lynley. “Did you know Helen was coming to Scotland, Tommy? I thought she’d planned to go to Cornwall with you.”

“She begged off the trip last Monday night, so I went alone.” Lynley looked at the floor plan, touching his fingers meditatively to it. “Why has Helen’s room been sealed?”

“It adjoins the victim’s room,” Macaskin answered.

“Now there’s a piece of luck,” St. James said with a smile. “Leave it to our Helen to get herself booked right next door to a murder. We’ll want to talk to her at once.”

Macaskin frowned at this and leaned forward, placing himself squarely between the two men to get their attention with a physical intrusion before he went on with a verbal one. “Inspector,” he said, “about Lady Helen Clyde.” Something in his voice arrested the other two men’s conversation. Warily, they looked at each other as Macaskin added grimly, “About her room.”

“What about it?”

“It appears to be the means of access.”

L
YNLEY WAS STILL
trying to understand what Helen was doing with a group of actors in Scotland when Inspector Macaskin imparted this new piece of information.

“What makes you think that?” he asked at last, although his mind was taken up mostly with his last conversation with Helen, less than a week ago in his library in London. She’d been wearing the loveliest jade-coloured wool, had tasted his new Spanish sherry—laughing and chatting in that light-hearted way of hers—and had rushed off promptly to meet someone for dinner.
Who?
he wondered now. She hadn’t said. He hadn’t asked.

Macaskin, he noted, was watching him like a man who had things on his mind and was merely waiting for the right opportunity to trot them all out.

“Because the victim’s hall door was locked,” Macaskin replied. “When Mary Agnes tried to rouse her without success this morning, she had to use the master keys—”

“Where are they kept?”

“In the office.” Macaskin pointed to the map. “Lower floor, northwest wing.” He continued. “She unlocked the door and found the body.”

“Who has access to these master keys? Is there another set of them?”

“Only one set. Just Francesca Gerrard and the girl, Mary Agnes, use them. They were kept locked in the bottom drawer of Mrs. Gerrard’s desk. Only she and the Campbell girl have keys to get into it.”

“No one else?” Lynley asked.

Macaskin looked thoughtfully down at the plan, moving his eyes along the lower northwest corridor of the house. It was part of a quadrangle, possibly an addition to the original building, and it grew out of the great hall not far from the stairway. He pointed to the first room in the corridor.

“There’s Gowan Kilbride,” he said pensively. “A kind of jack-of-all-trades. He could have got to the keys had he known they were there.”

“Did he know?”

“It’s possible. I gather that Gowan’s duties don’t generally range to the upper floors of the house, so he’d have no need of the master keys. But he might have known about them had Mary Agnes told him where they were.”

“And might she have done so?”

Macaskin shrugged. “Perhaps. They’re teenagers, aren’t they? Teenagers sometimes try to impress each other all sorts of silly ways. Especially if there’s an attraction between them.”

“Did Mary Agnes say if the master keys were in their normal place this morning? Had they been disturbed?”

“Apparently not, since the desk was locked as usual. But it’s not the kind of thing the girl is likely to have noticed. She unlocked the desk, reached into the drawer for the keys. Whether they were in the exact spot she had last left them, she doesn’t know, since the last time she put them in the desk she merely dropped them inside without a second thought.”

Lynley marvelled at the amount of information Macaskin had been able to gather in his restricted time at the house. He eyed the man with growing respect. “These people all knew each other, didn’t they? So why was Joy Sinclair’s door locked?”

“Argie-bargie last nicht,” Lonan put in from his chair in the corner.

“An argument? What sort?”

Macaskin shot the constable an aggrieved look, apparently for lapsing into colloquialism, something that his men were obviously not supposed to do. He said, apologetically, “That’s all we managed to get from Gowan Kilbride this morning before Mrs. Gerrard strong-armed him away with the order to wait for Scotland Yard. Just that there was some sort of row involving the lot of them. Seems some china was broken in the midst of it, and there was an accident in the great hall with liquor. One of my men found bits and pieces of broken porcelain and glass thrown into the rubbish. Some Waterford also. It looks like quite a set-to.”

“Involving Helen as well?” St. James didn’t wait for an answer. “How well does she know these people, Tommy?”

Lynley shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know she knew them at all.”

“She didn’t tell you—”

“She begged off Cornwall with other plans, St. James. She didn’t tell me what they were. And I didn’t ask.” Lynley looked up to see the change in Macaskin’s expression, a sudden movement of his eyes and lips, nearly imperceptible. “What is it?”

Macaskin seemed to give pause to think before he reached for a folder, flipped it open, and drew out a slip of paper. It was not a report but a message, the kind that gives information in “eyes only” fashion from one professional to another. “Fingerprints,” he explained. “On the key that locked the door adjoining Helen Clyde’s and the victim’s rooms.” As if in the knowledge that he was dancing his way down a very fine line between disobeying his own chief constable’s orders to leave everything to the Yard and giving a brother officer what assistance he could, Macaskin added, “Appreciate it if you’d make no mention of hearing this from me when you write your report, but once we saw that the door between those two rooms was our access route, we brought its key back here for testing on the sly and compared the prints on it with some we lifted from water glasses in the other rooms.”

“The other rooms?” Lynley asked. “So they’re not Helen’s prints on the key?”

Macaskin shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was tellingly noncommittal. “No. They belong to the director of the play. A Welshman, bloke called Rhys Davies-Jones.”

Lynley did not respond immediately. Rather, after a moment, he said, “Then Helen and Davies-Jones must have exchanged rooms last night.”

Across from him, he saw Sergeant Havers wince, but she didn’t look at him. Instead, she ran one stubby finger along the edge of the table and kept her eyes on St. James. “Inspector—” she began in a careful voice, but Macaskin interrupted her.

“No. According to Mary Agnes Campbell, no one at all spent the night in Davies-Jones’ room.”

“Then where on earth did Helen—” Lynley stopped, feeling the grip of something awful take him, like the onslaught of an illness that swept right through his skin. “Oh,” he said, and then, “Sorry. Don’t know what I was thinking about.” He fixed his eyes on the floor plan intently.

As he did so, he heard Sergeant Havers mutter a brooding oath. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the six cigarettes she had taken from him in the van. One was broken, so she tossed it in the rubbish and picked another. “Have a smoke, sir,” she sighed.

O
NE CIGARETTE
, Lynley found, did not do much to ameliorate the situation.
You have no hold on Helen
, he told himself roughly.
Just friendship, just history, just years of shared laughter. And nothing else
. She was his amusing companion, his confidante, his friend. But never his lover. They had both been too careful, too wary for that, too much on guard ever to become entangled with each other.

“Have you started the autopsy?” he asked Macaskin.

Clearly, this was the question the Scot had been awaiting ever since their arrival. With the kind of undisguised flourish typical of magicians on the stage, he removed several copies of a perfectly assembled report from one of his folders and passed them out, indicating the most pertinent piece of information: the victim had been stabbed with an eighteen-inch-long Highland dagger that had pierced her neck and severed her carotid artery. She had bled to death.

“We’ve not done the complete postmortem, however,” Macaskin added regretfully.

Lynley turned to St. James. “Would she have been able to make any noise?”

“Not from this kind of wound. Burbles at best, I should guess. Nothing that anyone could have heard in another room.” His eyes went down the page. “Have you managed a drug screen?” he asked Macaskin.

The inspector was ready. “Page three. Negative. She was clean. No barbiturates, no amphetamines, no toxins.”

“You’ve set the time of death between two and six?”

“That’s the preliminary. We’ve not analysed the intestines yet. But our man’s given us fibres in the wound. Leather and rabbit fur.”

“The killer was wearing gloves?”

“That’s our guess. But they’ve not been found and we had no time to search for much of anything before we got the message to come back here. All we can say is that the fur and leather didn’t come from the weapon. Nothing came from the weapon, in fact, save the victim’s blood. The handle was wiped clean.”

Sergeant Havers flipped through her copy of the report and tossed it on to the table. “Eighteen-inch dagger,” she said slowly. “Where does one find something like that?”

“In Scotland?” Macaskin seemed surprised by her ignorance. “In every house, I should say. There was a time when no Scotsman ever went out without a dirk strapped to his hip. In this particular house,” he pointed to the dining room on the floor plan, “there’s a display of them on the wall. Hand-carved hilts, tips like rapiers. Real museum pieces. Murder weapon appears to have been taken from there.”

“According to your plan, where does Mary Agnes sleep?”

“A room in the northwest corridor, between Gowan’s room and Mrs. Gerrard’s office.”

St. James was making notes in the margin of his report as the inspector talked. “What about movement on the victim’s part?” he asked. “The wound isn’t immediately fatal. Was there any evidence that she tried to seek help?”

Macaskin pursed his lips and shook his head. “Couldn’t have happened. Impossible.”

“Why?”

Macaskin opened his last folder and took out a stack of photographs. “The knife impaled her to the mattress,” he said bluntly. “She couldn’t go anywhere, I’m afraid.” He dropped the pictures on to the table. They were large, eight by ten, and in glossy colour. Lynley picked them up.

He was used to looking at death. He had seen it manifested in every way imaginable throughout his years with the Yard. But never had he seen it brought about with such studied brutality.

The killer had driven the dirk in right up to its hilt, as if propelled by an atavistic rage that had wanted more than the mere obliteration of Joy Sinclair. She lay with her eyes open, but their colour was changed and obscured by the settled stare of death. As he looked at the woman, Lynley wondered how long she had lived once the knife was driven into her throat. He wondered if she had known at all what had happened to her in the instant it took the killer to plunge the knife home. Had shock overcome her at once with its blessing of oblivion? Or had she lain, helpless, waiting for both unconsciousness and death?