Payment In Blood (8 page)

“What was everyone else doing?”

Lady Helen sketched out each person’s behaviour as best she remembered it: Robert Gabriel staring at Stuart Rintoul, Lord Stinhurst, obviously waiting for him either to deal with Joy or to go to his sister’s aid; Irene Sinclair growing pale to the very lips as the situation escalated; Joanna Ellacourt flinging her script down and stalking out of the room in a rage, followed a moment later by her husband David Sydeham; Joy Sinclair smiling across the walnut reading table at Lord Stinhurst, and that smile apparently firing him into action so that he jumped to his feet, grabbed her arm, and dragged her into the morning room next door, slamming the door behind them. Lady Helen concluded with:

“And then Elizabeth Rintoul went after her aunt Francesca. She appeared…it was hard to tell, but she may have been crying, which seems a bit out of character for her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Elizabeth seems to have given up crying some time ago,” Lady Helen replied. “She’s given up on lots of things, I think. Joy Sinclair, among them. They used to be close friends, from what Rhys told me.”

“You haven’t mentioned what he did after the read-through,” Lynley pointed out. But he gave her no time to answer, saying instead, “Stinhurst and Joy Sinclair had the quarrel by themselves, then? The others weren’t involved?”

“Only Stinhurst and Joy. I could hear their voices from the morning room.”

“Shouting?”

“A bit from Joy. But actually I didn’t hear much from Stinhurst. He doesn’t seem to be the kind of man who has to raise his voice to get one’s attention, does he? So the only thing I really heard clearly was Joy shouting hysterically about someone called Alec. She said Alec knew and Lord Stinhurst killed him because of it.”

Next to her, Lady Helen heard Sergeant Havers’ indrawn breath, which was followed by a speculative look in Lynley’s direction. Immediately comprehending, Lady Helen hurried on to say:

“But surely that was a metaphorical statement, Tommy. A bit like, ‘If you do that, you’ll kill your mother.’ You know what I mean. And at any rate, Lord Stinhurst didn’t even respond to it. He just left, saying something like as far as he was concerned, she was through. Or words to that effect.”

“And after that?”

“Joy and Stinhurst went upstairs. Separately. But they both looked dreadful. As if neither had won the argument and both wished it had never come about. Jeremy Vinney tried to say something to Joy when she came out into the hall, but she wouldn’t talk. She may have been crying as well. I couldn’t tell.”

“Where did you go from there, Helen?” Lynley was studying the ashtray, the cigarette butts that littered it and the ashes that dusted the tabletop in mourning, grey mixed with black.

“I heard someone in the drawing room and went in to see who it was.”

“Why?”

Lady Helen considered lying, manufacturing an amusing description of herself governed by curiosity, prowling about the house like a youthful Miss Marple. She chose the truth instead.

“Actually, Tommy, I’d been looking for Rhys.”

“Ah. Disappeared, had he?”

She bristled at Lynley’s tone. “Everyone had disappeared.” She saw that St. James had finished his perusal of the room. He took a seat in the armchair near the door and leaned back against it, listening. Lady Helen knew he would take no notes. But he would remember every word.

“Was Davies-Jones in the drawing room?”

“No. Lady Stinhurst—Marguerite Rintoul—was there. And Jeremy Vinney. Perhaps he’d caught the scent of a story that he wanted to write for his newspaper because he seemed to be trying to question her about what had happened. With no success. I spoke to her as well because…frankly, she seemed to be in some sort of stupor. She did talk to me briefly. And strangely enough, she said something very similar to what Francesca had said earlier to Lord Stinhurst in the sitting room. ‘Stop her.’ Or something like that.”

“Her? Joy?”

“Or perhaps Elizabeth, her daughter. I’d just mentioned Elizabeth. I think I’d said, ‘Shall I fetch Elizabeth for you?’”

As she spoke, feeling very much a potential suspect being interrogated by the police, Lady Helen became aware of other sounds in the house: the steady scratching of Sergeant Havers’ pencil upon her notebook paper; doors being unlocked at the other end of the corridor; the voice of Macaskin directing a search; and below in the library, upon the opening and closing of the door, angry shouting. Two men. She couldn’t identify them.

“What time did you come to your room last night, Helen?”

“It must have been half past twelve. I didn’t notice.”

“What did you do when you got here?”

“I got undressed, got ready for bed, read for a time.”

“And then?”

Lady Helen made no immediate reply. She was watching Lynley’s face, completely free to do so since he would not meet her eyes. His features in repose had always combined every classical beauty possible in a man, but as he continued to ask his questions, Lady Helen saw those features begin to take on a grim impenetrability that she had never seen before and could not have guessed that he even possessed. Confronted with it, she felt entirely cut off from him for the very first time in their long and close friendship, and in a desire to put an end to this division, she reached a hand forward, not with the intention of touching him but in a miming of contact where contact apparently would not be allowed. When he did not respond with anything that could have been taken for acknowledgement, she felt compelled to speak honestly.

“You seem terribly angry, Tommy. Please. Tell me. What is it?”

Lynley’s right fist clenched and unclenched in a movement so quick that it looked like a reflex. “When did you start smoking?”

At that, Lady Helen heard the abrupt cessation of Sergeant Havers’ writing. She saw, past Lynley, St. James’ movement in his chair. And she knew that, for some reason, her question had allowed Lynley to reach a decision, one that advanced him from police work into a new arena altogether, an arena not at all governed by the manuals, codes, and procedures that formed the rigid boundaries of his job.

“You know I don’t smoke.” She withdrew her hand.

“What did you hear last night?” Lynley asked. “Joy Sinclair was murdered between two and six in the morning.”

“Nothing, I’m afraid. It was terribly windy, enough to rattle the windows. That must have drowned out any noise from her room. If there was any noise.”

“And, of course, even if it hadn’t been windy, you weren’t alone, were you? You were…distracted, I should guess.”

“You’re right. I wasn’t alone.” She saw the muscles tighten at Lynley’s mouth. Otherwise, he was motionless.

“What time did Davies-Jones come to your room?”

“At one.”

“And he left?”

“Shortly after five.”

“You saw a watch.”

“He woke me. He was dressed. I asked the time. He told me.”

“And between one and five, Helen?”

Lady Helen felt a quick surge of disbelief. “What is it exactly that you want to know?”

“I want to know what happened in this room between one and five. To use your own word: exactly.” His voice was ice.

Past the wretchedness she felt at the question itself, at the brutal intrusion into her life and the implied assumption that she would be only too willing to answer it, Lady Helen saw Sergeant Havers’ mouth drop open. She closed it quickly enough, however, when Lynley’s frosty glance swept over her.

“Why are you asking me this?” Lady Helen asked Lynley.

“Would you like a solicitor to explain exactly what I can and cannot ask in a murder investigation? We can telephone for one if you think it’s necessary.”

This wasn’t her friend, Lady Helen thought bleakly. This wasn’t her laughing companion of more than a decade. This was a Tommy she didn’t know, a man to whom she could give no rational response. In his presence, a tumult of emotions argued for precedence within her: anger, anguish, desolation. Lady Helen felt them attack like an onslaught, not one after another but all at once. They gripped her with punishing, unforgiving force, and when she was able to speak, her words struggled desperately for indifference.

“Rhys brought me cognac.” She indicated the bottle on the table. “We talked.”

“Did you drink?”

“No. I’d had some earlier. I wanted none.”

“Did he have any?”

“No. He…isn’t able to drink.”

Lynley looked towards Havers. “Tell Macaskin’s men to check the bottle.”

Lady Helen read the thought behind the order. “It’s sealed!”

“No. I’m afraid it isn’t.” Lynley took Havers’ pencil and applied it to the foil at the top of the cognac. It came off effortlessly, as if it had once been removed and then reapplied to wear the guise of a closure.

Lady Helen felt ill. “What are you saying? That Rhys brought something with him this weekend to drug me? So that he could safely get away with murdering Joy Sinclair—my God, his own
cousin—
and have me as an alibi for his innocence? Is that what you think?”

“You said you talked, Helen. Am I to understand that, having refused his offer of a drink of whatever is in this bottle, you spent the remainder of the night in scintillating conversation together?”

His refusal to answer her question, his rigid adherence to the formality of police interrogation when it served his needs, his casual decision to fix blame upon a man and then bend the facts to fit it, outraged her. Carefully, deliberately, giving each separate syllable its own private position in the balance on which she measured the gravity of what he was doing to their friendship, she replied.

“No. Of course there’s more, Tommy. He made love to me. We slept. And then, much later, I made love to him.”

Whatever she had hoped for, Lynley showed absolutely no reaction to her words. Suddenly the smell of burnt tobacco from the ashtray was overwhelming. She wanted to fling it from sight. She wanted to fling it at him.

“That’s all?” he asked. “He didn’t leave you during the night? He didn’t get out of bed?”

He was too damnably quick for her. When she couldn’t keep the answer off her face, he said, “Ah. Yes. He did get out of bed. What time please, Helen?”

She looked down at her hands. “I don’t know.”

“Had you been asleep?”

“Yes.”

“What awakened you?”

“A noise. I think it was a match. He was smoking, standing by the table.”

“Dressed?”

“No.”

“Just smoking?”

She hesitated momentarily. “Yes. Smoking. Yes.”

“But you noticed something more, didn’t you?”

“No. It’s just that…” He was dragging words from her. He was compelling her to say things that belonged unspoken.

“That what? You noticed something about him, something not quite right?”

“No.
No
.” And then Lynley’s eyes—shrewd, brown, insistent—held her own. “I went to him and his skin was damp.”

“Damp? He’d bathed?”

“No. Salty. He was…his shoulders…perspiring. And it was so cold in here.”

Lynley looked automatically to Joy Sinclair’s room. Lady Helen continued.

“Don’t you see, Tommy? It was the cognac. He wanted it. He was desperate. It’s like an illness. It had nothing at all to do with Joy.”

She might not have spoken, for Lynley was clearly following his own line of thought. “How many cigarettes did he have, Helen?”

“Five. Six. What you see here.”

He was designing a pattern. Lady Helen could see it. If Rhys Davies-Jones had taken the time to smoke the six cigarettes that lay crushed in the ashtray, if she had not awakened until he was smoking the very last one, what else might he have done? Never mind the fact that she knew perfectly well how he had spent the time while she slept: fighting off legions of demons and ghouls that had drawn him to the bottle of cognac like a man with an unquenchable thirst. In Lynley’s mind, he had used the time to unlock the door, murder his cousin, and return, his body broken out with the sweat of apprehension. Lady Helen read all of that in the stillness—like a void—that followed her sentence.

“He wanted a drink,” she said simply. “But he can’t drink. So he smoked. That’s all.”

“I see. May I assume he’s an alcoholic?”

Her throat felt numb.
It’s only a word
, Rhys would have said with his gentle smile.
A word alone has no power, Helen
. “Yes.”

“So he got out of bed, and you never awakened. He smoked five or six cigarettes, and you never awakened.”

“And you want to add that he unlocked the door to murder Joy Sinclair and I never awakened, don’t you?”

“His prints are on the key, Helen.”

“Yes, they are! I’ve no doubt of it! He locked the door before he took me to bed. Or are you going to say that was part of his plan? To make certain I saw him lock the door so I could explain away his fingerprints later? Is that how you have it worked out?”

“It’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?”

She drew in a broken breath. “What a rotten thing to say!”

“You slept through his getting out of bed, you slept through his smoking one cigarette after another. Are you going to try to argue now that, in reality, you’re a light sleeper, that you would have known had Davies-Jones left your room?”

“I would have known!”

Lynley looked over his shoulder. “St. James?” he asked evenly. And those two words took the entire affair out of the realm of control.

Lady Helen sprang to her feet. Her chair toppled over. Her hand came down brutally against Lynley’s face. It was a blow of lightning swiftness, driven by the power of her rage.

“You filthy bastard!” she cried and headed for the door.

“Stay where you are,” Lynley ordered.

She whirled and faced him. “Arrest me, Inspector.” She left the room, slamming the door behind her.

St. James followed her at once.

4

B
ARBARA
H
AVERS
closed her notebook. It was a studied movement, one that bought her time while she thought. Across from her, Lynley felt in the breast pocket of his jacket. Although colour still splodged his face where Lady Helen had struck him, his hands were quite steady. He brought out his cigarette case and lighter, used them both and handed them over. Barbara did likewise although after inhaling once, she grimaced and crushed out the cigarette.

Not a woman who ever spent a great deal of time analysing 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 assigned 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 dispassionate 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.

I
N 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 Wellingtons, 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 whore,” 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 hit 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 cocktails 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 cocktails 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.”