“Only because you were asleep,” Lynley said.
“That reply came too readily. I expect you've used it a bit more often than I'd like to know.” She padded across the room to him, looked over his shoulder, placing one slender cool hand on the back of his neck. “Ah. I see.”
“A little light reading with dinner, Helen. Nothing more than that.”
“Hmm. Yes. She's beautiful, isn't she?”
“She? Oh. Ophelia, you mean? I hadn't really noticed.” He flipped the programme closed and took his wife's hand, pressing her palm against his mouth.
“You make a poor liar.” Helen kissed his forehead, disengaged her hand from his, and went to the refrigerator, where she took out a bottle of Evian. She leaned against the work top as she drank, watching him fondly over the top of her glass. “You look ghastly,” she noted. “Have you eaten today? No. Don't answer. That's your first decent meal since breakfast, isn't it?”
“Am I meant to answer or not?” he asked reasonably.
“Never mind. I can read it all over your face. Why is it, darling, that you can forget to eat for sixteen hours while I can't manage to put food from my mind for ten simple minutes?”
“It's the contrast between pure and impure hearts.”
“Now, that's a new slant on gluttony.”
Lynley chuckled. He rose. He went to her and took her into his arms. She smelled of citrus and sleep, and her hair was as soft as a breeze when he bent his head to press his cheek against it. “I'm glad I woke you,” he murmured, and he settled into their embrace, finding within it enormous comfort.
“I wasn't asleep.”
“No?”
“No. Just making an attempt but not getting very far with it, I'm afraid.”
“That's not like you.”
“It isn't. I know.”
“Something's on your mind, then.” He released her and looked down at her, smoothing her hair away from her face. Her dark eyes met his and he made a study of them: what they revealed and what they tried to hide. “Tell me.”
She touched his lips with the tips of her fingers. “I do love you,” she said. “Much more than when I married you. More, even, than I loved you the first time you took me to bed.”
“I'm glad of it. But something tells me that's not what's on your mind.”
“No. That's not what's been on my mind. But it's late, Tommy. And you're far too exhausted for conversation. Let's go to bed.”
He wanted to do so. Nothing sounded better than sinking his head into a plump down pillow and seeking the soothing oblivion of sleep with his wife, warm and comforting, by his side. But something in Helen's expression told him that would not be the wisest course to take at the moment. There were times when women said one thing when they meant another, and this appeared to be one of those times. He said, half truth and half lie, “I am done in. But we've not talked properly today, and I won't be able to sleep till we do.”
“Really?”
“You know how I am.”
She searched his face and seemed satisfied with what she saw. She said, “It's really nothing much. Mental gymnastics, I suppose. I've been thinking all day about the lengths people go to when they want to avoid confronting something.”
A shudder passed through him.
“What?” she asked.
“Someone walking on my grave. What brought all this up?”
“The wallpaper.”
“Wallpaper?”
“For the spare rooms. You remember. I narrowed the choices down to six—which seemed quite admirable, considering what a muddle I was in about having to choose in the first place—and I spent all afternoon pondering them. I pinned them to the walls. I set furniture in front of them. I hung pictures round them. And still, I couldn't make up my mind.”
“Because you were thinking of this other?” he asked. “About people not confronting what they need to confront?”
“No. That's just it. I was consumed with wallpaper. And making a decision about it—or, rather, finding myself incapable of making a decision—became a metaphor for living my life. Do you see?”
Lynley didn't. He was too wrung out to see anything at all. But he nodded, looked pensive, and hoped that would do.
“You would have chosen and had done with it. But I couldn't do that, no matter how hard I tried. Why? I finally asked myself. And the answer was so simple: because of who I am. Because of who I was moulded to be. From the day of my birth to the morning of my wedding.”
Lynley blinked. “Who you were moulded to be?”
“Your wife,” she said. “Or the wife of someone exactly like you. There were five of us and each of us—every one of us, Tommy—was assigned a role. One moment we were safe in our mother's womb and the next we were in our father's arms and he was looking down at us, saying, ‘Hmmm. Wife of a count, I think.’ Or ‘I dare say she'll do as the next Princess of Wales.’ And once we knew what role he'd assigned us, we played along. Oh, we didn't have to, of course. And God knows neither Penelope nor Iris danced to the music he'd written for them. But the other three—Cybele, Daphne, and I—why, the three of us were nothing more than warm clay in his hands. And once I realised that, Tommy, I had to take the next step. I had to ask why.”
“Why you were warm clay.”
“Yes. Why. And when I asked that question and took a hard look at the answer, what do you expect it was?”
His head was spinning and his eyes burned with fatigue. Lynley said, reasonably enough, he thought, “Helen, what does this have to do with wallpaper?” and knew a moment later he'd failed her in some way.
She released herself from his embrace. “Never mind. This isn't the moment. I knew that. I can see you're exhausted. Let's just go to bed.”
He tried to regroup. “No. I want to hear this. I admit that I'm tired. And I got lost following all the dancing warm clay But I want to talk. And to listen. And to know …” To know what? he wondered. He couldn't have said.
She frowned at him, a clear warning sign that he should have heeded and did not. “What? Dancing warm clay? What are you talking about?”
“I'm talking about nothing. It was stupid. I'm an idiot. Forget it. Please. Come back. I want to hold you.”
“No. Explain what you meant.”
“Helen, it was nothing. It was just an inanity.”
“Just an inanity rising from my conversation.”
He sighed. “I'm sorry. You're right. I'm done in. When I get like this, I say things without thinking. You said that two of your sisters didn't dance to his tune while the rest of you did, which made you warm clay. I took that and wondered how warm clay could dance to his music and … Sorry. It was a stupid remark. I'm not thinking right.”
“And I'm not thinking at all,” she said. “Which, I suppose, shouldn't come as a surprise to either of us. But that's what you wanted, isn't it?”
“What?”
“A wife who couldn't think.”
He felt slapped. “Helen, that's not only bloody nonsense. It's an insult to us both.” He went to the table for his plate and cutlery, which he carried to the sink. He rinsed them, spent far too much time watching the water swirl round the drain, and finally said on a sigh, “Damn.” He turned to her. “I'm sorry, darling. I don't want us to be at odds with each other.”
Her face softened. “We aren't,” she said.
He went back to her, pulled her to him once again. “Then what?” he asked.
“I'm at odds with myself.”
CHAPTER 24
rying to pin down the individual whom Terry Cole had gone to see at King-Ryder Productions hadn't been as easy as Barbara Havers anticipated after her conversation with Neil Sitwell, even with the list of employees in her possession. Not only were there three dozen of them listed, but on a Saturday night most of those three dozen had not been at home. They were, after all, theatre people. And theatre people—so she discovered—were not in the habit of vegetating blissfully under their own roofs when they could be out on th
e town. So it had been after two in the morning before she'd tracked down Terry Coles contact at 31-32 Soho Square: Matthew King-Ryder, son of the deceased founder of the theatrical production company.
He'd agreed to see her—”after nine, if you don't mind. I'm completely fagged out”—at his home in Baker Street.
It was half past nine when Barbara found the address that had been listed along with Matthew King-Ryder's name and phone number. It was a mansion block, she saw, one of those enormous brick Victorian structures that—at the end of the nineteenth century—had signaled an alteration in lifestyle from the spacious and gracious to the more understated and the somewhat confined.
Relatively speaking, of course. Compared to Barbara's hovel, King-Ryder's flat was a virtual palace, although it did appear to be one of those ill-thought-out conversions of a larger flat in which cross-ventilation and natural lighting had been sacrificed to the cause of lining someone's pockets with monthly rental payments.
Or such was Barbara's assessment of the flat when Matthew King-Ryder admitted her to it. He asked her to “excuse the mess, please. I'm getting ready to move house,” in reference to a pile of rubbish and bin bags waiting for the mansion block's cleaners outside his front door, and he led her down a short and badly lit corridor to a sitting room. There, gaping cardboard boxes displayed books, trophies, and various ornaments indifferently wrapped in newspaper, and framed photographs and theatrical posters leaned in stacks against the walls, waiting for a similar disposition. “I'm finally entering the world of property ownership,” King-Ryder confided. “I've got enough for the house, but not enough for the house and the removal men. So it's a bit of a do-it-myself job. Hence the mess. Sorry. Here. Have a seat.” He swept a stack of theatre programmes to the floor. “Would you like a coffee? I was just about to make some for myself.”
“Sure,” Barbara said.
He went to the kitchen which lay just beyond a dining nook. A hatch had been crafted into one of the walls, and he spoke through this casually as he dumped a measure of coffee beans into a grinder. “I'll be south of the river, which won't be as convenient for getting to the West End. But it's a house, not a flat. And it has a decent garden and, more important, it's freehold. And it's mine.” He canted his head and grinned in her direction. “Sorry. I'm rather excited. Thirty-three and I've finally got a mortgage. Who knows? It'll probably be marriage next. I like it strong. The coffee, that is. 'S that okay with you?”
Strong was fine by her, Barbara told him. The more caffeine the better, as far as she was concerned. Idly, she flipped through one of the stacks of framed photos near to her chair as she waited. Most of them depicted the same familiar individual posing through the years alongside a score of even more familiar theatrical faces.
“This your dad?” Barbara called out conversationally—albeit unnecessarily—over the gravely roar of the coffee grinder.
King-Ryder glanced through the hatch and saw what she was doing. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. That's my dad.”
The two men looked very little alike. Matthew had been blessed with all the physical advantages that nature had denied his father. While father had been short and froglike of face with the exophthalmic eyes of a thyroid patient, the jowls of a ban viveur, and the facial warts of a fairy-tale villain, son had been blessed with greater stature, with an aristocratic nose, and with the sort of skin, eyes, and mouth that women would pay plastic surgeons handsomely to possess.
“You didn't look much alike,” Barbara said. “You and your dad.”
From the kitchen Matthew shot her a regretful smile. “No. He wasn't much to look at, was he? And he knew it, unfortunately. Took a lot of bullying when he was a boy. I think that's why he kept going after new women through the years: to prove something to himself.”
“Too bad about his death. I was sorry to hear … well, you know.” Barbara felt uncomfortable. What did one say about a suicide, after all?
Matthew nodded but made no reply. He went back to his coffee making, and Barbara went back to the pictures. She saw that only one of them featured father and son together: an ancient school photo in which a small Matthew stood with a trophy in his hand and an enraptured smile like a blaze on his face while his father held a rolled-up programme of some kind and frowned with an inner preoccupation. Matthew was proudly clad in athletics kit, a leather strap diagonally bisecting his torso in the fashion of a soldier from World War I. David was clad in his own version of uniform, a business suit that spoke of a score of important meetings he was missing.
“He doesn't look too happy in this shot,” Barbara noted, removing the picture from the stack and studying it.
“Oh. That. Sports day at school. Dad really hated it. He was about as athletic as an ox. But Mum was good at pushing the guilt buttons when she could get him on the phone, so he generally showed up. But he didn't much like it. And he was good at letting one know when he didn't much like doing what he was doing. Typical artist, he was.”
“That must have hurt.”
“Not really. They were divorced by then—my parents—so my sister and I took what we could get of his time.”
“Where is she now?”
“Isadora? She does costume design. For the RSC mostly.”
“You've both followed in his footsteps, then.”
“Isadora more than me. Like Dad, she's on the creative end. I'm just a numbers cruncher.” He returned to the sitting room, bearing an old tin tray on which he'd placed mugs of coffee, a jug of milk, and some sugar cubes on a saucer. He balanced this on top of a stack of magazines that sat on an ottoman and went on to explain that he had been his late father's business manager and agent. He negotiated contracts, tracked royalty money from the numerous productions of his father's work all round the globe, sold rights to future productions of the plays, and kept his fingers on the pulse of expenditures when the company mounted a new pop opera in London.
“So your work doesn't end with your father's death.”
“No. Because his work—the music itself, that is—doesn't actually end, does it? As long as his operas are being mounted somewhere, my work will continue. Eventually, we'll reduce the staff at the production company, but someone will have to keep tabs on all the rights. And there'll always be the fund to look after as well.”
“The fund?”
Matthew plunked three sugar cubes into his mug and stirred it with a ceramic-handled spoon. His father, he explained, had established a foundation some years ago to fund creative artists. The money was used to send actors and musicians to school, to back new productions, to launch new plays by unknown playwrights, to support lyricists and composers who were just starting their careers. With David King-Ryder's death, all monies accrued from his work would go into that fund. Aside from a bequest to his fifth and final wife, the David King-Ryder Fund was the sole beneficiary of King-Ryder's will.
“I didn't know that,” Barbara said, impressed. “Generous bloke. Nice of him to give others a leg-up.”
“He was a decent man, my dad. He wasn't that much of a father when my sister and I were young, and he didn't believe in handouts or in coddling anyone. But he supported talent wherever he found it if the artist was willing to work. And that's a brilliant legacy, if you ask me.”
“Too bad, what happened. I mean … you know.”
“Thanks. It was … I still don't understand it.” Matthew examined the rim of his coffee mug. “What was so bloody strange was that he had a hit after all those rotten years. The audience went wild before the curtain call began, and he was there. He saw it. Even the critics were on their feet. So the reviews were going to be like a miracle. He had to have known.”
Barbara knew the story. Opening night of Hamlet. A brilliant success after years of failure. No note left behind to explain his actions, the composer/lyricist offed himself with a single shot to the head while his wife was having a bath in the very next room.
“You were close to your dad,” Barbara noted, seeing the grief still evident in M
atthew King-Ryder's expression.
“Not as a child or an adolescent. But in the final years I was. Yes. I was. But obviously, not close enough.” Matthew blinked and took a gulp of his coffee. “Right, then. Enough. You've come on business. You said you wanted to see me about Terence …. That boy in black who came to see me in Soho.”
“Yes. Terence Cole.” Barbara gave Matthew the facts in anticipation of his verifying them. “Neil Sitwell—he's the head muckety over at Bowers in Cork Street—said he sent him to you with a piece of handwritten music by Michael Chandler that he'd come across. He figured you'd know how Terry could contact the solicitors for the Chandler estate.”
Matthew frowned. “He did? That's extraordinary.”
“You wouldn't know how to contact those solicitors?” Barbara asked. That hardly seemed credible.
Matthew hastened to correct her. “Obviously, I know the Chandler solicitors. I know the Chandlers themselves, if it comes down to it. Michael had four children and they're all still in London. As is his widow. But the boy didn't mention Bowers when he came to see me. He didn't mention a Neil Sitwell either. And most important, he didn't mention any music.”
“He didn't? Then why did he ask to see you?”
“He said he'd heard about the Fund. Well, he would have done, wouldn't he, since it got a lot of press when Dad died. Cole hoped for patronage. He brought me some photos of his work.”
Barbara felt as if cobwebs were filling her skull, so unprepared had she been for this information. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I'm sure. He had a portfolio with him and I thought at first he was hoping for financial support while he studied to be a set or costume designer. Because, like I said, those are the people the Fund supports: artists who're connected with the theatre in one way or another. Not artists in general. But he didn't know this. Or he misunderstood. Or he'd misread the details somewhere … I don't know.”
“Did he show you what he had in the portfolio?”
“Pictures of his work, most of it pretty awful. Gardening tools bent this way and that. I don't know much about modern art, but from what I could see, I'd say he needed to think about another profession.”
In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner Page 50