Payment In Blood (40 page)

A trick of lighting made her seem insubstantial, as if she were fading from him, the way an image on a photograph does over time. The soft brown eyes, the arch of brow, the gentle curve of cheek and lips, the frankly stubborn chin—all these became less definite as the hours passed. And as he sat opposite her, with Sergeant Havers making a third of their triangle of anticipation, he felt a yearning for her that he had never known before, having nothing at all to do with sex and everything to do with the soul’s calling out to a spirit kindred and essential to the completion of one’s own. He felt as if he had been travelling a great distance, only to arrive where he had started, only to know the place truly and for the very first time.

Yet all along he had the distinct sensation of being too late.

The radio crackled to life at ten past two. “Company, Inspector. Coming down Flask Walk…Keeping hard to the shadows…Oh, very nice technique, that…An eye out for coppers…Dark clothes, dark knit cap, collar on the coat pulled up…Stopped now. Three doors down from the nest.” There was a pause of several minutes’ duration. Then the whispered monologue began again. “Crossed the street for another look…Continuing the approach…Crossing over again towards Back Lane…This is our baby, Inspector. No one walks this way down a street at two in the morning in this kind of weather…. Giving it over. I’ve lost sight…. Turned down Back Lane.”

Another voice picked it up, said only, “Suspect approaching the garden wall…pulling something down over the face…running a hand along the bricks…”

Lynley switched off the radio. He moved noiselessly into the deepest shadows of the dining room. Sergeant Havers followed. Behind them, Lady Helen stood.

At first Lynley saw nothing beyond the dining room doors. And then a black shape appeared against the inky sky as the intruder’s body rose to the top of the garden wall. A leg swung to the inside, then another. Then a soft thud as he hit the ground. No face was visible, which at first seemed impossible since there was light enough from both stars and the street lamps on Back Lane to illuminate the snow, the sketching of the tree against it, the contrast of mortar against the brick wall, even to a certain extent the interior of the house. But then Lynley saw that the man was wearing a ski mask. And suddenly he was so much less of an intruder, so much more of a killer.

“Helen, go back in the sitting room,” Lynley breathed. But she did not move. He looked over his shoulder to see that her wide eyes were fixed upon the figure in the garden, upon his stealthy progress to the door. Her fist was raised, clenched to her lips.

And then the unbelievable happened.

As he mounted the four steps, reached a hand out to try the door, Lady Helen cried frantically, “No! Oh God, Rhys!”

And chaos erupted.

Outside, the figure froze only for an instant before he bolted for the wall and took it in a single leap.

“Jesus Christ!” Sergeant Havers shouted and headed for the dining room doors, flinging them open, letting in a rush of freezing night air.

Lynley felt immobilised by the force of disbelief at what Helen had done. She
couldn’t
have…She hadn’t meant…She would never…She was coming towards him in the darkness.

“Tommy,
please…
”

Her shattered voice brought him to his senses abruptly. Shoving her to one side, he dashed for the radio and said tersely, “We’ve lost him.” That done, he ran for the front door, raced outside, insensible to the sound of pursuit behind him.

“Up towards the high street!” a voice shouted from above the bookstore across the street as Lynley tore past.

He did not need to hear it. Ahead of him, he saw the black shape running, heard the frantic pounding of his footsteps on the pavement, saw him slip on a patch of ice, right himself, and run on. He was not bothering to seek the safety of the shadows. Instead he dashed down the middle of the street, flashing in and out of the light from the street lamps. The sound of his flight thundered on the night air.

A few steps behind him, Lynley heard Sergeant Havers. She was running at full speed, cursing Lady Helen violently with every foul word she knew.

“Police!” The two constables from the van had exploded round the corner, coming up quickly behind them.

Ahead, their quarry burst onto Heath Street, one of the larger arteries of Hampstead Village. The headlamps of an oncoming car trapped him like an animal. Tyres screeched, a horn honked wildly. A large Mercedes skidded to a stop inches from his thighs. But he did not run on. Instead, he whirled, lunging for the door. Even at the distance of half a block, Lynley could hear the terrified screaming from inside the car.

“You! Stop!” Another constable charged round the corner from the high street, less than thirty yards from the Mercedes. At the shout, however, the black-garbed figure spun to the right and continued his flight up the hill.

But the pause at the car had cost him time and distance, and Lynley was gaining on him, was close enough to hear the roaring of his lungs as he surged towards a narrow stone stairway that led to the hillside and the neighbourhood above. He took the steps three at a time, stopping at the top where a metal basket of empty milk bottles stood outside the shadowed arch of a front door. Grabbing this, he hurled it down the steps in his wake before running on, but the shattering glass served only to frighten several neighbourhood dogs who set up a tremendous howling. Lights went on in the buildings that lined the stairs, making Lynley’s going easier and the broken glass nothing to contend with at all.

At the top of the stairs, the street was sided by enormous beech and sycamore trees that filled it with looming shadows. Lynley paused there, listening against the night wind and the howling animals for the sound of flight, looking for movement in the darkness. Havers came up next to him, still cursing as she gasped for breath.

“Where’s he—”

Lynley heard it first, coming from his left. The dull thud against metal as the runner—his vision impaired by the ski mask—fell against a dustbin. It was all Lynley needed.

“He’s heading for the church!” He spun Havers back to the stairs. “Go for the others,” he ordered. “Tell them to head him off at St. John’s! Now!”

Lynley didn’t wait to see if she would obey. The pounding footsteps ahead of him drew him back into the chase, across Holly Hill to a narrow street where he saw in a moment of triumph that every advantage was going to be his. A series of high walls along one side, an open green on the other. The street offered absolutely no protection. In an instant he saw his man some forty yards ahead, turning into a gateway that was open in the wall. When he reached the gate himself, he saw that the snow had gone uncleared in the drive, that elongated footprints led across a broad lawn into a garden. There, a struggling form battled a hedge of holly, his clothes snagging on the spiny leaves. He gave a raw cry of pain. A dog began to bark furiously. Floodlights switched on. On the high street below, the sirens started, grew maddeningly loud as the police cars approached.

This last seemed to give the man the rush of adrenaline he needed to free himself from the bushes. As Lynley closed in, he cast a wild glance towards him, gauged his proximity, and tore himself from the plants’ painful embrace. He fell to his knees—free—on the other side of the hedge, scrambled back up, ran on. Lynley spun in the other direction, saw a second gate in the wall, and ploughed his way to it through the snow at the cost of at least thirty seconds. He threw himself into the street.

To his right, St. John’s Church loomed beyond a low brick wall. There, a shadow moved, crouched, leaped, and was over it. Lynley ran on.

He took the wall easily himself, landing in the snow. In an instant he saw a figure moving swiftly to his left, heading for the graveyard. The sound of sirens grew nearer, the sound of tyres against wet pavement echoed and shrieked.

Lynley fought his way through a snowdrift up to his knees, gained hold on a spot of cleared pavement. Ahead, the dark shape began dodging through the graves.

It was the kind of mistake Lynley had been waiting for. The snow was deeper in the graveyard, some tombstones were buried completely. Within moments, he heard the other man thrashing frantically as he crashed into markers, trying to make his way across to the far wall and the street beyond it.

Nearby, the sirens stopped, the blue lights flashed and twirled, and police began to swarm over the wall. They were carrying torches which they shone on the snow, white light arcing out to catch the runner in its glare. But it also served to illuminate the graves distinctly, and he picked up his pace, dodging sarcophagi and monuments, as he headed for the wall.

Lynley stuck to the cleared path which wound through the trees, thickly planted pines that spread their needles on the pavement, providing a rough surface for his shoes against the ice. He gained time from ease of movement here, precious seconds that he used to locate his man.

He was perhaps twenty feet from the wall. To his left two constables were fighting their way through the snow. Behind him, Havers was on his path through the graves. To his right was Lynley, on a dead run. There was no escape. Yet, with a savage cry that seemed to signal a final surge of strength, he made a leap upwards. But Lynley was on him too quickly.

The man whirled, swung wildly. Lynley loosened his grasp to dodge the punch, giving the other a second’s opportunity to climb the wall. He made his vault, caught at the top, gripped fiercely, lifted his body, began to go over.

But Lynley countered. Grabbing at his black sweater, he pulled him back, locked his arm round the man’s neck, and flung him into the snow. He stood panting above him as Havers arrived at his side, wheezing like a distance runner. The two constables ploughed their way up and one of them managed to say, “You’re done for, son,” before he gave way to a fit of coughing.

Lynley reached forward, yanked the man to his feet, pulled off his ski mask, jerked him into the torchlight.

It was David Sydeham.

17

“J
OY’S DOOR
wasn’t locked,” Sydeham said.

They sat at a metal-legged table in one of the interrogation rooms at New Scotland Yard. It was a room designed to allow no escape, bearing not a single decorative appointment that might give flight even to imagination. Sydeham did not look at any of them as he spoke, not at Lynley, who sat across from him and worked to draw together all the details of the case; not at Sergeant Havers, who for once took no notes but merely interjected questions to add to their body of knowledge; not at the yawning shorthand typist—a twenty-two-year veteran of police work who recorded everything with an expression of boredom that suggested she had already heard every entanglement possible in the kinds of human relationships that end in violence. Faced with the three of them, Sydeham had turned his body to give them the benefit of his profile. His eyes were on a corner of the room where a dead moth lay, and he stared at it as if seeing there a re-creation of the past days of violence.

His voice sounded nothing more than monumentally weary. It was half past three. “I’d got the dirk earlier when I went down to the library for the whisky. It was easy enough to pull it off the dining room wall, go through the kitchen, up the back stairs, and along to my room. And then, of course, all I had to do was wait.”

“Did you know that your wife was with Robert Gabriel?”

Sydeham moved his eyes to the Rolex whose gold casing glittered in a half-crescent beneath his black sweater. Caressingly, he rotated a finger round its face. His hands were quite large, but without callosity, unexposed to labour. They didn’t look at all like the hands of a killer.

“It didn’t take long to work it out, Inspector,” he finally replied. “As Joanna herself would no doubt point out, I had wanted her together with Gabriel, and she was just giving me what I wanted. Theatre of the real in spades. It was an expert revenge, wasn’t it? Of course, I wasn’t sure at first that she was actually with him. I thought—perhaps I hoped—she’d gone somewhere else in the house to sulk. But I suppose I really knew that’s not at all her style. And at any rate, Gabriel was fairly forthright about his conquest of my wife the other day at the Agincourt. But then, it isn’t the kind of thing he’d be likely to keep quiet about, is it?”

“You assaulted him in his dressing room the other night?”

Sydeham smiled bleakly. “It was the only part of this bloody mess that I truly enjoyed. I don’t like other men stuffing my wife, Inspector, whether she’s a willing participant or not.”

“But you’re more than willing to have another man’s wife, if it comes down to it.”

“Ah. Hannah Darrow. I had a feeling that little minx would do me in, in the end.” Sydeham reached for a Styrofoam cup of coffee on the table before him. His nails made crescent patterns upon it. “When Joy talked at dinner about her new book, she mentioned the diaries she was trying to get off John Darrow, and I could see fairly well how everything was going to come down. She didn’t seem the sort to give up just because Darrow said no once. She hadn’t got to where she was in her career by shrinking away from a challenge, had she? So when she talked about the diaries, I knew it was just a matter of time before she had them. And I didn’t know what Hannah had written so I couldn’t take the chance.”

“What happened that night with Hannah Darrow?”

Sydeham brought his eyes to Lynley. “We met at the mill. She was some forty minutes late, and I’d begun to think—to hope, actually—that she wasn’t coming. But she showed up at the last in her usual fashion, hot to make love right there on the floor. But I…I put her off. I’d brought her a scarf she’d seen in a boutique in Norwich. And I insisted she let me put it on her right then.” He watched his hands continue their play on the white cup, fingers pressing upon its rim. “It was easy enough. I was kissing her when I tightened the knot.”

Lynley thought about the innocent references he had been too blind to see earlier in Hannah’s diary and took a calculated gamble with, “I’m surprised you didn’t have her one last time right there in the mill, if that’s what she wanted.”

The payoff he was looking for came without a pause. “I’d lost the touch with her. Each time we met, it was becoming more difficult.” Sydeham laughed shortly, an expression of contempt that was self-directed. “It was going to be Joanna all over again.”

“The beautiful woman who rises to fame, who’s the object of every man’s steamy fantasy, whose own husband can’t service her the way she wants.”

“I’d say you’ve got the picture, Inspector. Nicely put.”

“Yet you’ve stayed with Joanna all these years.”

“She’s the one thing in my life that I did completely right. My unmitigated success. One doesn’t let something like that go easily, and as for me, I’d never have considered it. I couldn’t let her go. Hannah merely came along at a bad time for Jo and me. Things had been…off between us for about three weeks. She’d been thinking of signing on with a London agent and I felt a bit left out in the cold. Useless. That must have been what started my…trouble. Then when Hannah came along, I felt like a new man for a month or two. Every time I saw her, I had her. Sometimes two or three times in a single evening. Christ. It was like being reborn.”

“Until she wanted to become an actress like your wife?”

“And then it was history repeating itself. Yes.”

“But why on earth kill her? Why not just break it off?”

“She’d found my London address. It was bad enough when she showed up at the theatre one evening when Jo and I were setting off with the London agent. After that happened, I knew if I left her behind in the Fens, she’d show up one day at our flat. I would have lost Joanna. There simply didn’t seem to be another choice.”

“And Gowan Kilbride? Where did he fit in?”

Sydeham placed his coffee cup back onto the table, its rim caved in all around, entirely useless now. “He knew about the gloves, Inspector.”

T
HEY COMPLETED
their preliminary interview with David Sydeham at five-fifteen in the morning and staggered, red-eyed, out into the corridor where Sydeham was led to a telephone to make a call to his wife. Lynley watched him go, feeling caught in a flood of pity for the man. This surprised him, for justice
was
being served by the arrest. Yet he knew that the effect of the murders—that stone thrown into a pond whose surface cannot remain unchanged by the intrusion—had only just begun for everyone. He turned away.

There were other things to contend with, among them the press, finally eager for a statement, materialising from nowhere, shouting questions, demanding interviews.

He pushed past them, crumpled into nothing a message from Superintendent Webberly that was pressed into his hand. Nearly blind with exhaustion, he made his way towards the lift, caught up at last in only one conscious thought: to find Helen. In only one conscious need: to sleep.

He found his way home like an automaton and fell onto his bed fully clothed. He did not awaken when Denton came in, removed his shoes, and covered him with a blanket. He did not awaken until the afternoon.

“I
T WAS HER EYESIGHT
,” Lynley said. “I noticed nearly everything else in Hannah Darrow’s diaries save the reference to the fact that she hadn’t worn her spectacles to that second play, so she couldn’t see the stage clearly. She only
thought
Sydeham was one of the actors because he came out the stage door at the end of the performance. And of course, I was too blinded by Davies-Jones’ role in
The Three Sisters
to realise what it meant that Joanna Ellacourt had been in the same scene from which the suicide note was drawn. Sydeham would know any scene Joanna was in, probably better than the actors themselves. He helped her with her lines. I heard him doing that myself at the Agincourt.”

“Did Joanna Ellacourt know her husband was the killer?” St. James asked.

Lynley shook his head, taking the proffered cup of tea from Deborah with a faint smile. The three of them sat in St. James’ study, dividing their attention among cakes and sandwiches, tarts and tea. A misty shaft of late afternoon sunlight struck the window and reflected against a mound of snow on the ledge outside. Some distance away, rush-hour traffic on the Embankment began its noisy crawl towards the suburbs.

“She’d been told by Mary Agnes Campbell—as had they all—that Joy’s bedroom door was locked,” he responded. “Like me, she thought Davies-Jones was the killer. What she didn’t know—what no one knew until late yesterday afternoon—was that Joy’s door hadn’t been locked all night. It was only locked once Francesca Gerrard went into the room to look for her necklace at three-fifteen, found Joy dead, and, assuming her brother had done it, went down to her office for the keys and locked the door in an attempt to protect him. I should have heard the lie when she told me the pearls were on the chest of drawers by the door. Why would Joy have put them there when the rest of her jewellery was on the dressing table on the other side of the room? I’d seen that myself.”

St. James selected another sandwich. “Would it have made a difference had Macaskin managed to reach you before you left for Hampstead yesterday?”

“What could he have told me? Only that Francesca Gerrard had confessed to him that she lied to us at Westerbrae about the door being locked. I don’t know whether I would have had the common sense to put that together with a number of facts that I had been choosing to ignore. The fact that Robert Gabriel had a woman with him in his bedroom; the fact that Sydeham
admitted
that Joanna had not been with him for some hours the night Joy died; the fact that
Jo
and
Joy
are two easy names to confuse, especially for a man like Gabriel, who pursued women tirelessly and took as many to bed as he could manage.”

“So that’s what Irene Sinclair heard.” St. James moved in his chair to a more comfortable position, grimacing as the lower part of his leg brace caught against the piping on the ottoman’s edge. He disengaged it with an irritable grunt. “But why Joanna Ellacourt? She’s not made it a secret that she loathes Gabriel. Or was that dramatic loathing part of the ploy?”

“She loathed Sydeham more than Gabriel that night, because he’d got her into Joy’s play in the first place. She felt he’d betrayed her. She wanted to hurt him. So she went to Gabriel’s bedroom at half past eleven and waited there, to take her revenge on her husband in coin that he would well understand. But what she didn’t realise was that, in going to Gabriel, she’d given Sydeham the opportunity he had been looking for ever since Joy made the remark about John Darrow at dinner.”

“I suppose Hannah Darrow didn’t know that Sydeham was married.”

Lynley shook his head. “Evidently not. She’d only seen them once together and even then another man was with them. All she knew was that Sydeham had access to drama coaches and voice coaches and everything else that went into success. As far as Hannah was concerned, Sydeham was the key to her new life. And for a time, she was
his
key to a sexual prowess he had been lacking.”

“Do you suppose Joy Sinclair knew about Sydeham’s involvement with Hannah Darrow?” St. James asked.

“She hadn’t got that far in her research. And John Darrow was determined she never would. She merely made an innocent remark at dinner. But Sydeham couldn’t afford to take a chance. So he killed her. And of course, Irene’s references to the diaries at the theatre yesterday were what took him to Hampstead last night.”

Deborah had been listening quietly, but now she spoke, perplexed. “Didn’t he take a terrible chance when he killed Joy Sinclair, Tommy? Couldn’t his wife have returned to their room at any moment and found him gone? Couldn’t he have run into someone in the hall?”

Lynley shrugged. “He was fairly sure where Joanna was after all, Deb. And he knew Robert Gabriel well enough to believe that Gabriel would keep her with him as long as he could possibly continue to demonstrate his virility. Everyone else in the house was easily accounted for. So once he heard Joy return from Vinney’s room shortly before one, all he had to do was wait a bit for her to fall asleep.”

Deborah was caught on an earlier thought. “But his own
wife…
” she murmured, looking pained.

“I should guess that Sydeham was willing to let Gabriel have his wife once or twice if he could get away with murder. But he wasn’t willing to let the man boast about it in front of the company. So he waited until Gabriel was alone at the theatre. Then he caught him in his dressing room.”

“I wonder if Gabriel knew who was beating him,” St. James mused.

“As far as Gabriel was concerned, it probably could have been any number of men. And he was lucky it wasn’t. Anyone else might have killed him. Sydeham didn’t want to do that.”

“Why not?” Deborah asked. “After what happened between Gabriel and Joanna, I should think Sydeham would be more than happy to see him dead.”

“Sydeham was nobody’s fool. The last thing he wanted to do was narrow my field of suspects.” Lynley shook his head. His next words reflected the shame he felt. “Of course, what he didn’t know was that I had sufficiently narrowed it myself already. A field of one. Havers said it best. Police work to be proud of.”