Payment In Blood (6 page)

L
EFT WITH THIS
group of la-de-da suspects, so atypical of what one usually came across in a murder investigation, Barbara Havers was only too delighted to make her own assessments of their potential guilt. She had the time to do so as Lady Helen returned to Rhys Davies-Jones and exchanged a few quiet words with him beneath the general din of expostulations and imprecations that followed Lynley’s departure.

They were quite the lot, Barbara decided. Chic and well tailored and divinely turned out. With the exception of Lady Helen, they were a veritable advertisement for how to dress for a murder. And how to act once the police arrive: righteous indignation, calls for solicitors, nasty remarks. So far, they were living up to her every expectation. At any moment, no doubt one of them would mention a close connection with his MP, an intimacy with Mrs. Thatcher, or a notable figure on his family tree. They were all the same, such swells, such toffs.

All but that one pinch-faced woman who had managed to shrink her considerable frame into an ill-shaped heap on the settee, as far away as possible from the man with whom she shared it.
Elizabeth Rintoul
, Barbara thought.
Lady
Elizabeth Rintoul, to be exact. Lord Stinhurst’s only daughter.

She was acting as if the man seated next to her carried a particularly virulent strain of disease. Cringed into a corner of the couch, she held a navy cardigan closed at her throat and pressed both arms tightly, painfully to her sides. Her feet were planted on the floor in front of her, shod in the kind of flat-soled, plain black shoes that are generally labelled
sensible
. They stuck out like angular blobs of oil from beneath an unappealing black flannel skirt. Lint dotted it liberally. She added nothing whatsoever to the conversation going on about her. But something in her posture suggested bones that were brittle and about to break.

“Elizabeth, dear,” murmured the woman opposite her. She wore the kind of meaningful, ingratiating smile one directs to a recalcitrant child misbehaving before company. Obviously, this was Mum, Barbara decided, Lady Stinhurst herself, dressed in a fawn-coloured twinset and amber beads, ankles neatly crossed and hands folded in her lap. “Perhaps Mr. Vinney’s drink could be replenished.”

Elizabeth Rintoul’s dull eyes moved to her mother. “Perhaps,” she responded. She made the word sound foul.

Casting a pleading glance at her husband as if for support, Lady Stinhurst persisted. She had a gentle, uncertain voice, the sort one expects from maiden ladies not accustomed to speaking to children. She lifted a hand nervously to hair that was expertly coloured and styled to fight off the reality of fast-encroaching old age. “You see, darling, we’ve been sitting so long now and I really don’t believe Mr. Vinney’s had anything at all since half past two.”

It was far more than a hint. It was a blatant suggestion. The bar was just across the room and Elizabeth was to wait upon Mr. Vinney like a debutante with her very first beau. The directions were clear enough. But Elizabeth wasn’t about to follow them. Instead, contempt flashed across her features, and she dropped her eyes to a magazine in her lap. She mouthed a singularly unladylike response, one word only. Her mother could not possibly misread or misunderstand it.

Barbara watched the exchange between them with some fascination. The Lady Elizabeth looked well over thirty years old—probably skating closer to forty. She was hardly of an age to need a prod from Mum in the man department. But prod was certainly what Mum had in mind. In fact, in spite of Elizabeth’s unveiled hostility, Lady Stinhurst made a movement that looked very much as if she intended to shove Elizabeth in the direction of Mr. Vinney’s arms.

Not that Jeremy Vinney himself appeared willing. Next to Elizabeth,
The Times
journalist was doing his best to ignore the conversation entirely. He probed at his pipe with a stainless steel tool and eavesdropped unashamedly on what Joanna Ellacourt was saying at her end of the room. She was angry and making no secret about the fact.

“She’s made wonderful fools of us all, hasn’t she? What a lark for her! What a bloody good laugh!” the actress cast a scathing look at Irene Sinclair, who still sat in her low chair far away from the rest of them, as if her sister’s death somehow had served to make her own presence unwelcome. “And who do
you
imagine benefits from last night’s little change in the script? Me? Not on your life! Well, I won’t stand for it, David. I damn well won’t stand for it.”

David Sydeham sounded conciliatory as he answered his wife. “Nothing’s settled yet, Jo. Far from it now. Once she changed the script, your contract may well have become void.”

“You
think
the contract is void. But you don’t have it here, do you? We can’t look at it, can we? You don’t know if it’s void at all. Yet you expect me to believe—to take your word after all that’s happened—that merely a change in characterisation makes a contract void? Pardon my disbelief, will you? Pardon my incredulous shriek of laughter. And give me another gin.
Now
.”

Sydeham wordlessly jerked his head at Robert Gabriel, who pushed a bottle of Beefeaters in his direction. It was two-thirds empty. Sydeham poured his wife a drink and returned the bottle to Gabriel, who grasped it and murmured with laughter catching at his voice:

“‘I have thee not and yet I see thee still…Come, let me clutch thee.’” Gabriel leered at Joanna and poured himself another drink. “Sweet shades of the regionals, Jo, m’love. Wasn’t that our first? Hmm, no, perhaps not.” He managed to make it sound more like a sexual encounter than a production of
Macbeth
.

Scores of her school chums had swooned over Gabriel’s Peter Pan good looks fifteen years ago, but Barbara had never been able to see his appeal. Nor, apparently, did Joanna Ellacourt. She favoured him with a smile that hurled daggers of an entirely different sort.

“Darling,” she responded, “how could I
ever
forget? You dropped ten lines in the middle of act two, and I carried you all the way to the end. Frankly, I’ve been waiting for those multitudinous seas to become incarnadine for the last seventeen years.”

Gabriel gave a snort of laughter. “West End Bitch,” he announced. “Ever true to form.”

“You’re drunk.”

Which was certainly more than halfway true. As if in response to this, Francesca Gerrard stood up uneasily, pushing herself away from the couch she was sharing with her brother, Lord Stinhurst. She seemed to want to take control of the situation, perhaps to act out the role of hotel proprietress in even so inconsequential a manner as she chose when she turned to Barbara.

“If we could have some coffee…” Her hand fluttered up to a collection of coloured beads which she wore across her chest like mail. Contact with them seemed to give her courage. She spoke again, with more authority. “We’d like some coffee. Will you arrange it?” When Barbara didn’t reply, she turned to Lord Stinhurst. “Stuart…”

He spoke. “I’d appreciate your arranging for a pot of coffee,” he said to Barbara. “Some of the party want sobering up.”

Barbara gave fleeting and delighted thought to how many opportunities she would ever have again to put an earl in his place.

“Sorry,” she replied tartly. And then she said to Lady Helen, “If you’ll come with me now, I should guess the inspector will want to see you first.”

L
ADY
H
ELEN
C
LYDE
felt more than a little numb as she fumbled her way across the library. She told herself that it was the lack of food, the endless and appalling day, the ghastly discomfort of sitting hour after hour in her nightclothes in a room that had continually alternated between subfreezing and claustrophobic. Reaching the doorway, she gathered the greatcoat about her with as much dignity as she could muster and stepped out into the hall. Sergeant Havers was an unacknowledged companion behind her.

“Are you quite all right, Helen?”

Gratefully, Lady Helen turned to see that St. James had waited for her. He stood in the shadows just outside the door. Lynley and Macaskin had already disappeared up the stairs.

She smoothed her hand against her hair in an attempt to arrange it but gave up the effort with a small, chagrined smile. “Can you possibly imagine what it’s been like to spend an entire day with a roomful of individuals who communicate directly with Thespis?” she asked St. James. “We’ve run the gamut since half past seven this morning. From rage to hysteria to grief to paranoia. Frankly, by noon, I would have sold my soul for just one of Hedda Gabler’s pistols.” She drew the greatcoat up to her throat and held it closed at her neck, stifling a shiver. “But I’m fine. At least, I think so.” Her eyes took in the stairs and then moved back to St. James. “Whatever’s wrong with Tommy?”

Behind her, Sergeant Havers moved with inexplicable sharpness, but it was a gesture Lady Helen couldn’t clearly see. St. James, she noted, took his time about replying, using a moment to brush at the leg of his trousers. There was nothing on them for his attention, however, and when he chose to speak, it was to ask a question of his own.

“What on earth are you doing here, Helen?”

She glanced back at the closed library door. “Rhys invited me. He was to direct Lord Stinhurst’s new production for the opening of the Agincourt Theatre, and this weekend was to be a run-through—a sort of preliminary reading of the new script.”

“Rhys?” St. James repeated.

“Rhys Davies-Jones. You don’t remember him? My sister used to see him. Years ago. Before he…” Lady Helen twisted a button at the throat of the greatcoat, hesitating, wondering how much to say. She settled on, “He’s been working in regional theatre over the past two years. This was to be his first London production since…
The Tempest
. Four years ago. We were there. Surely you remember.” She saw that he did.

“Lord,” St. James said with some reverence. “Was that Davies-Jones? I’d completely forgotten.”

Lady Helen wondered how that was even possible, for it was something she knew she could never forget: that awful night at the theatre when Rhys Davies-Jones, the director, had taken the stage himself and everyone had seen he was inches short of delirious. Shoving actors and actresses alike to one side, chasing demons only he could see, he had publicly ended his career with a vengeance. She could see it all still—the stage, the pandemonium, the devastation he had wrought upon himself and others. For it had been during the act 4 speech when his drunken frenzy broke into the lovely words, blotting out both his past and future in an instant, leaving, indeed, not a single rack behind.

“He spent four months in hospital after that. He’s quite …recovered now. I ran into him early last month in the Brompton Road. We had dinner and…well, ever since we’ve seen a good deal of each other.”

“His recovery must be complete indeed if he’s working with Stinhurst, Ellacourt, and Gabriel. Lofty company for—”

“A man of his reputation?” Lady Helen frowned down at the floor, touching her slippered foot delicately to one of the pegs that held the wood in place. “Yes, I suppose. But Joy Sinclair was his cousin. They were very close, and I think she saw the opportunity to give him a second chance in London theatre. She was instrumental in talking Lord Stinhurst into giving Rhys the contract.”

“She had influence with Stinhurst?”

“I’ve got the impression Joy had influence with everyone.”

“Meaning?”

Lady Helen hesitated. She was not a woman given to saying anything that might denigrate others, even in a murder investigation. Doing so now went against the grain, even with St. James, always a man she could trust implicitly, waiting for her answer. She gave it reluctantly, prefacing it with a quick look at Sergeant Havers to read her face for its degree of discretion.

“Apparently she had an affair with Robert Gabriel last year, Simon. They had a tremendous row about it only yesterday afternoon. Gabriel wanted Joy to tell his former wife that he slept with her just once. Joy refused. It…well, the row was heading towards violence when Rhys burst into Joy’s room and broke it up.”

St. James looked perplexed. “I don’t understand. Did Joy Sinclair know Robert Gabriel’s wife? Did she even know he was married?”

“Oh yes,” Lady Helen answered. “Robert Gabriel was married for nineteen years to Irene Sinclair. Joy’s sister.”

I
NSPECTOR
M
ACASKIN
unlocked the door and admitted Lynley and St. James into Joy Sinclair’s room. He felt for the wall switch, and two serpentine bronze ceiling fixtures spilled light down on the wealth of contradictions below. It was, Lynley saw, a beautiful room, the sort one expects the play’s star performer to be given, not its author. Expensively papered in green and yellow, it was furnished with a four-poster Victorian bed and nineteenth-century chest of drawers, wardrobe, and chairs. A comfortably faded Axminster carpet covered the oak floor, and the boards creaked with age when they walked across it.

Yet the room was still very much the scene of a brutal crime, and the frigid air was a rich effluvium of blood and destruction. The bed acted as centrepiece with its writhing confusion of blood-soaked linens and its single, deadly gash that spoke eloquently of the manner in which the woman had died. Donning latex gloves, the three men approached it with a fair degree of respect: Lynley taking in the room with a sweeping glance, Macaskin pocketing Francesca Gerrard’s master keys, and St. James scrutinising those scant feet and inches of horrifying catafalque as if they could reveal to him the identity of their maker.