Payment In Blood (18 page)

Lynley moved sharply in his chair, but Macaskin and Havers were on their feet at once. That brought him to his senses. “Get him out of here,” he said.

B
ARBARA
H
AVERS
waited until Macaskin himself had ushered Davies-Jones from the room. She watched to ensure they were left in complete privacy before she cast a long, supplicating look in St. James’ direction. He joined her at the table with Lynley, who had put on his reading spectacles and was looking through Barbara’s notes. The room was taking on a more than lived-in look, with glasses, plates of half-eaten food, overfull ashtrays, and notebooks scattered about. The air smelled as if a contagion were alive in it.

“Sir.”

Lynley raised his head and Barbara saw with a wrench that he looked awful, fagged out, drawn through a wringer of his own devising.

“Let’s look at what we have,” she suggested.

Over the top of his spectacles, Lynley’s eyes went from Barbara to St. James. “We have a locked door,” he replied reasonably. “We have Francesca Gerrard locking it with the only key available besides the one across the room on the dressing table. We have a man in the next room with a clear means of access. Now we’re looking for a motive.”

No
, Barbara thought weakly. She kept her voice even and impartial. “You must admit that it’s purely coincidental that Helen’s room and Joy’s room adjoined each other. He
couldn’t
have known in advance about that.”

“Couldn’t he? A man with a self-professed interest in architecture? There are homes with adjoining rooms all over the country. It hardly takes a university degree to guess there would be two here. Or that Joy, after specifically requesting a room by Helen’s, would be given one of them. I imagine no one else was phoning Francesca Gerrard with special requests of that nature.”

Barbara refused to submit. “Francesca herself could have killed Joy as matters stand now, sir. She was in the room. She admits it. Or she could have given the key to her brother and let him do the job.”

“It always comes back to Lord Stinhurst for you, doesn’t it?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“And if you want to go with Stinhurst, what about Gowan’s death? Why did Stinhurst kill him?”

“I’m not arguing that it’s Stinhurst, sir,” Barbara said, trying to hold on to her patience, her temper, and her need to shout out Stinhurst’s motive until Lynley was forced to accept it. “For that matter, Irene Sinclair could have done it. Or Sydeham or Ellacourt, since they were both on their own. Or Jeremy Vinney. Joy was in his room earlier. Elizabeth told us as much. For all we know, he wanted Joy, got himself squarely rejected, went to her room and killed her in a fit of anger.”

“And how did he lock the door when he left?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he went out the window.”

“In a storm, Havers? You’re stretching it more than I am.” Lynley dropped her notes onto the table, removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes.

“I see that Davies-Jones had access, Inspector. I see that he had opportunity, as well. But Joy Sinclair’s play was to resurrect his career, wasn’t it? And he had no way of knowing for certain whether the play was finished just because Stinhurst withdrew his support. Someone else well might have financed it. So it seems to me that he’s the only person in the house with a solid motive for keeping the woman alive.”

St. James spoke. “No. There’s another, isn’t there, if it comes to regenerating dying careers? Her sister, Irene.”

“I
DID WONDER
when you would get to me.”

Irene Sinclair stepped back from the door. She walked to her bed and sat down, her shoulders slumped. In deference to the lateness of the hour, she had changed into her nightclothes, and like the woman itself, her garments were restrained. Flat-heeled slippers, a navy flannel dressing gown under which the high neck of a white nightdress rose and fell with her steady breathing. There was something, however, oddly impersonal about her clothing. It was serviceable, indeed, yet adhering strictly to a norm of perceived propriety, it was exceedingly chilling, as if designed and worn to hold life itself at bay. Lynley wondered if the woman ever slopped round the house in old blue jeans and a tattered jersey. Somehow, he doubted it.

Her resemblance to her sister was remarkable. In spite of the fact that he had observed Joy only through the photographs of her death, Lynley could easily recognise in Irene those features she had shared with her sister, features unaffected by the five or six years that separated them in age: prominent cheekbones, broad brow, the slight squaring of jawline. She was, he guessed, somewhere in her early forties, a statuesque woman with the sort of body other women long for and most men dream of taking into their beds. She had a face that might have belonged to Medea and black hair in which the grey was beginning to streak back dramatically from the left peak of her forehead. Any other woman, remotely insecure, would have coloured it long ago. Lynley wondered if the thought had even crossed Irene’s mind. He studied her wordlessly. Why on earth had Robert Gabriel ever found the need to stray?

“Someone has probably told you already that my sister and my husband had an affair last year, Inspector,” she began, keeping her voice low. “It’s no particular secret. So I don’t mourn her death as I ought to, as I probably shall eventually. It’s just that when your life’s been torn apart by two people you love, it’s difficult to forgive and forget. Joy didn’t need Robert, you see. I did. But she took him anyway. And that still hurts when I think of it, even now.”

“Was their affair over?” Lynley asked.

Irene’s attention drifted from Havers’ pencil to the floor. “Yes.” The single word had the distinct flavour of a lie, and she continued at once, as if to hide this fact. “I even knew when it started between them. One of those dinner parties where people have too much to drink and say things they wouldn’t otherwise say. That night Joy announced that she’d never had a man who’d been able to satisfy her in only one go. That, of course, was the sort of thing Robert would take as a personal challenge that had to be attended to without delay. Sometimes what hurts me the most is the fact that Joy didn’t love Robert. She never loved anyone at all after Alec Rintoul died.”

“Rintoul’s been a recurring theme this evening. Were they ever engaged?”

“Informally. Alec’s death changed Joy.”

“In what way?”

“How can I explain it?” she replied. “It was like a fire, a rampage. It was as if Joy decided that she would start living with a vengeance once Alec was gone. But not to enjoy herself. Rather, to destroy herself. And to take as many of us down with her as she could. It was a sickness with her. She went through men, one after another, Inspector. She devoured them. Rapaciously. Hatefully. As if no one could ever begin to make her forget Alec and she was daring each and every one of them to try.”

Lynley walked to the bed, placed the contents from Joy’s shoulder bag onto the counterpane. Irene considered the objects listlessly.

“Are these hers?” she asked.

He handed her Joy’s engagement calendar first. Irene seemed reluctant to take it, as if she would come across knowledge within it that she would rather not possess. However, she identified what notations she could: appointments with a publisher in Upper Grosvenor Street, the birthday of Irene’s daughter Sally, Joy’s self-imposed deadline for having three chapters of a book done.

Lynley pointed out the name scrawled across one entire week.
P. Green
. “Someone new in her life?”

“Peter, Paul, Philip? I don’t know, Inspector. She might have been going off on holiday with someone, but I couldn’t say. We didn’t speak to one another very often. And then, when we did, it was mostly business. She probably wouldn’t have told me about a new man in her life. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to know that she had one. That would have been more than typical of her. Really.” Disconsolately, Irene fingered one or two other items, the wallet, the matchbook, the chewing gum, the keys. She said nothing else.

Watching her, Lynley pressed the button on the small tape recorder. Irene shrank infinitesimally at the sound of her sister’s voice. He let the machine play. Through the cheerful comments, through the vibrant excitement, through the future plans. He couldn’t help thinking, as he listened to Joy Sinclair once again, that she didn’t sound at all like a woman bent upon destroying anyone. Halfway through it, Irene raised a hand to her eyes. She bent her head.

“Does any of that mean anything to you?” Lynley asked.

Irene shook her head blindly, a passionate movement, a second patent lie.

Lynley waited. She seemed to be attempting to withdraw from him, moving further into herself both physically and emotionally. Shrivelling up through a concerted act of will. “You can’t bury her this way, Irene,” he said quietly. “I know that you want to. I understand why. But you know if you try it, she’ll haunt you forever.” He saw her fingers tighten against her skull. The nails caught at her flesh. “You don’t have to forgive her for what she’s done to you. But don’t put yourself into a position of doing something for which you cannot forgive yourself.”

“I
can’t
help you.” Irene’s voice sounded distraught. “I’m not sorry my sister’s dead. So how can I help you? I can’t help myself.”

“You can help by telling me anything about this tape.” And ruthlessly, mercilessly, Lynley played it again, hating himself for doing so at the same time as he acknowledged it was part of the job, it had to be done. Still, at the end, there was no response from her. He rewound the tape, played it again. And then again.

Joy’s voice was like a fourth person in the room. She coaxed. She laughed. She tormented. She pleaded. And she broke her sister the fifth time through the tape, on the words, “For God’s sake, don’t let Mum forget Sally again this year.”

Irene snatched the recorder, shut it off with hands which fumbled on the buttons, and flung it back onto the bed as if touching it contaminated her.

“The
only
reason my mother ever remembered my daughter’s birthday is because Joy reminded her,” she cried. Her face bore the signs of anguish, but her eyes were dry. “And still I hated her! I hated my sister every minute and I wanted her to die! But not like this! Oh
God
, not like this! Have you any idea what it’s like to want a person dead more than anything in the world and then to have it happen? As if a mocking deity listened to your wishes and only granted the foulest ones you possess?”

Good God, the power of simple words. He knew. Of course, he knew. In the timely death of his own mother’s lover in Cornwall, in ways that Irene Sinclair could never hope to understand. “It sounds as if some of what she said was to be part of a new work. Do you recognise the place she’s describing? The decaying vegetables, the sound of frogs and pumps, the flat land?”

“No.”

“The circumstance of a winter storm?”

“No!”

“The man she mentions, John Darrow?”

Irene’s hair swung out in an arc as she turned her head away. At the sudden movement, Lynley said, “John Darrow. You recognise the name.”

“Last night at dinner. Joy talked about him. She said something about wining and dining a dreary man called John Darrow.”

“A new man she’s involved with?”

“No. No, I don’t think so. Someone—I think it was Lady Stinhurst—had asked her about her new book. And John Darrow came up. Joy was laughing the way she always did, making light of the difficulties she’s been having with the writing, saying something about information she needed and was trying to get. It involved this John Darrow. So I think he’s connected with the book somehow.”

“Book? Another play, you mean?”

Irene’s face clouded. “Play? No, you’ve misunderstood, Inspector. Aside from an early play six years ago and the new piece for Lord Stinhurst, my sister didn’t write for the theatre. She wrote books. She used to be a journalist, but then she took up documentary nonfiction. Her books are all about crimes. Real crimes. Murders, mostly. Didn’t you know that?”

Murders mostly. Real crimes
. Of course. Lynley stared at the little tape recorder, hardly daring to believe that the missing piece to the triangular puzzle of motive-means-opportunity would be given to him so easily. But there it was, what he had been seeking, what he had known instinctively he would find. A motive for murder. Still obscure, but merely waiting for the details to flesh it out into a coherent explanation. And the connection was there on the tape as well, in Joy Sinclair’s very last words: “…ask Rhys how best to approach him. He’s good with people.”

Lynley began replacing Joy’s belongings in the bag, feeling uplifted yet at the same time filled with a hard edge of anger at what had happened here last night, and at the price he was going to have to pay personally to see that justice was done.

At the door, with Havers already out in the corridor, he was stopped by Irene Sinclair’s last words. She stood near the bed, backed by inoffensive wallpaper and surrounded by a suitable bedroom suite. A comfortable room, a room that took no risks, threw out no challenges, made no demands. She looked trapped within it.