Payment In Blood

by Elizabeth George

  “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.”

  ST. JAMES reflected upon the tops of his shoes. They were smudged with dried mud from the drive, and he bent to wipe them off. “Then Joanna Ellacourt must have been wrong about Irene’s role in this changed version of the play. Why would Joy Sinclair be writing for her sister if she continued to alienate her at every juncture?”

  “As I said, I think the alienation was unconscious. And as for the play, perhaps Joy felt guilty. After all, she had destroyed her sister’s marriage. She couldn’t give that back to her. But she could give her back her career.”

  “But in a play with Robert Gabriel? After a messy divorce that Joy herself had likely helped cause? Doesn’t that smack of sadism to you?”

  “Not if no one else in London was willing to give Irene a chance, Simon. Evidently, she’s been out of circulation for a good many years. This may well have been her only opportunity for a second go on stage.”

  “Tell me about the play.”

  As Lady Helen recalled, Joy Sinclair’s description of the new version of the play—prior to the actors’ actually seeing it—had been deliberately provocative. When asked about it by Francesca Gerrard, she had smiled up and down the length of the dining table and said, “It takes place in a house much like this. In the dead of winter, with ice sheeting the road and not a soul in miles and no way to escape. It’s about a family. And a man who dies, and the people who had to kill him. And why. Especially why.” Lady Helen had expected to hear wolves howling next.

  “It sounds as if she intended that as a message for someone.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? And then when we were all gathered in the sitting room and she began going over the changes in the plot, she said much the same thing.”

  The plot concerned itself with a family and their thwarted New Year’s Eve celebration. According to Joy, the oldest brother was a man possessed of a terrible secret, a secret that was about to rip apart the fabric of everyone’s life.

  “And then they began to read,” Lady Helen said. “I wish I had paid more attention to what they were reading, but it was so stuffy in the sitting room—no, it was more like a pan of water about to come to a boil—that I didn’t really follow much of what they had to say. All I remember for a certainty is that just before Francesca Gerrard went a bit mad, the older brother in the story—Lord Stinhurst was reading the part since it hadn’t been cast yet—had just received a telephone call. He decided that he had to leave at once, saying that after twenty-seven years, he wasn’t about to become another vassal. I’m fairly certain those were the words. And that’s when Francesca leaped to her feet and the evening collapsed.”

  “Vassal?” St. James repeated blankly.

  She nodded. “Odd, isn’t it? Of course, since the play had nothing to do with feudalism, I thought it was something wildly avant-garde, with me just too dim to understand what it meant.”

  “But they understood?”

  “Lord Stinhurst, his wife, Francesca Gerrard, and Elizabeth. Decidedly. But I do think, aside from their irritation at the late changes in the script, everyone else was as confused as I was.” Lady Helen ran her fingers unconsciously round the top of the boot she still held. “Altogether, I had the impression that the play was supposed to serve a noble purpose that didn’t quite come off. A noble purpose for everyone. It was to honour Stinhurst’s achievement vis-à-vis the renovated Agincourt, it was to celebrate Joanna Ellacourt’s career on the stage, it was to bring Irene Sinclair back into the theatre, it was to get Rhys back into directing a major production in London. Perhaps Joy even intended a part for Jeremy Vinney as well. Someone mentioned that he’d started out as an actor before turning to dramatic criticism, and frankly, other than to continue following the Agincourt story, there doesn’t seem to be any other real reason for him to have come to the read-through. So you see,” she concluded with an urgency in her voice that she could not hide from him, “it doesn’t seem reasonable that any of those people would have murdered Joy, does it?”

  St. James smiled at her fondly. “Especially Rhys.” His words were exceptionally gentle.

  Lady Helen met his eyes, saw the kindness and compassion behind them, felt she couldn’t bear it, and looked away. Yet she knew that, above all people, he was the single person who would understand. So she spoke. “Last night with Rhys. It was…the first time in years that I felt so loved, Simon. For what I am, for my faults and my virtues, for my past and my future. I haven’t had that with a man since…” She hesitated, then finished what needed to be said. “Since I had it with you. And I never expected to have it again. That was to be my punishment, you see. For what happened between us all those years ago. I deserved it.”

  St. James shook his head sharply, without reply. After a moment he said, “If you concentrate, Helen, are you certain you heard nothing last night?”

  Lady Helen answered his question with one of her own. “The first time you made love to Deborah, what else did you notice besides her?”

  “You’re right, of course. The house could have burned to the ground for all I would have known. Or cared, for that matter.” He got to his feet, hung his coat back on the peg, and held out his hand for hers. When she gave it to him, his brow
furrowed. “My God, what have you done to yourself?” he asked.

  “Done?”

  “Your hand, Helen.”

  Her eyes dropped, and she saw that her fingers had somehow become laced with blood, black with it underneath her fingernails. She started at the sight.

  “Where…I don’t…”

  More blood, she saw, smeared along the side of her skirt, drying to brown on the wool. She looked for the source, spied the boot she had been holding, and picked it up, examining the sticky substance round its top, black upon black in the dull light of the storage area. Wordlessly, she handed it to St. James.

  He upended the boot on the bench, thumped it soundly against the wood, and dislodged a large glove, at one time leather and fur but now nothing more than a pulpy mass of Joy Sinclair’s blood. Not yet dried, not yet done for.

  HALF THE SIZE of the library, the Westerbrae sitting room to the left of the wide baronial stairway seemed to Lynley an odd choice of locations for any large group to meet in. Yet it was still set up for the reading of Joy Sinclair’s play, with a concentric arrangement of tables and chairs at the room’s centre for the actors, and peripheral observation points along its walls for everyone else. Even the scent in the room bore witness to last night’s ill-fated gathering: tobacco, burnt matches, coffee dregs, and brandy.

  When Lord Stinhurst entered under the watchful eye of Sergeant Havers, Lynley directed him to sit in an unwelcoming ladder-back chair near the fireplace. A coal fire burned in the small grate there, cutting the chill in the room. Outside the closed door, the scene-of-crime men from Strathclyde CID were making an unusually noisy arrival.

  Stinhurst took his designated seat cooperatively, crossing one well-tailored leg over the other, refusing a cigarette. He was impeccably dressed, the personification of weekend-in-the-country. Yet, in spite of his movements, which carried the assurance of a man used to the stage, used to being under the eyes of hundreds of people at once, he looked physically drained, whether from exhaustion or from the effort of holding together the women in his family during this time of crisis, Lynley could not have said. But he took the opportunity of observing the man while Sergeant Havers leafed through the pages of her notebook.

  Cary Grant, Lynley thought in summation of Stinhurst’s general appearance and liked the comparison. Although Stinhurst was in his seventies, his face had lost none of the extraordinarily handsome, strong-jawed force of its youth, and his hair, shafted obliquely by the amiable low light of the room, was variations on silver, roughly textured and full as it had always been. With a body on which there was no spare flesh, Stinhurst belied the term old age, living proof that relentless industry was the key to youth.

  Yet, underneath this pleasant, surface perfection, Lynley sensed strong undercurrents being mastered, and he decided that control was the key to understanding the man. He appeared to excel at maintaining it: over his body, over his emotions, over his mind. This last was acutely alive and, as far as Lynley could tell, perfectly capable of deciding how best to tamper with a mountain of evidence. At the moment, Lord Stinhurst manifested only one sign of agitation in the face of this interview, pressing together the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in repeated, forceful spasms. The flesh under the nails alternately whitened and blushed as circulation was interrupted and then restored. Lynley found the gesture interesting and wondered if Stinhurst’s body would continue to reveal his increasing tension.

  “You look a great deal like your father,” Stinhurst said. “But I suppose you hear that frequently.”

  Lynley saw Havers’ head come up with a snap. “Generally not, in my line of work,” he replied. “I’d like you to explain why you’ve burnt Joy Sinclair’s scripts.”

  If Stinhurst was disconcerted by Lynley’s unwillingness to recognise any bond between them, he did not show it. Rather, he said, “Without the sergeant, please.”

  Gripping her pencil more firmly, Havers regarded the older man with eyes narrowed in contempt at his lord-of-the-manor dismissal of her. She waited for Lynley’s response and flashed a brief, satisfied smile when he said firmly, “That’s not possible.” Hearing that, she settled back into her chair.

  Stinhurst didn’t move. He had not, in fact, even glanced at Sergeant Havers before he requested her removal. He merely said, “I have to insist, Thomas.”

  The use of his given name was a stimulus that brought back to Lynley not only Havers’ angry challenge to treat Lord Stinhurst with an iron glove, but also the trepidation he had earlier felt about his assignment to this case. It set off every alarm.

  “That’s not one of your rights, I’m afraid.”

  “My…rights?” Stinhurst offered the smile of a card-player with a winning hand. “This entire fantasy that says I have to speak with you is just that, Thomas. A fantasy. We don’t have that kind of legal system. You and I both know it. The sergeant goes or we wait for my solicitor. From London.”

  Stinhurst might have been mildly disciplining a fractious child. But there was absolute reality behind his words, and in the space of time that it had taken to hear them, Lynley saw the alternatives, a legal minuet with the man’s attorney or a momentary compromise that could well be used to purchase some truth. It had to be done.

  “Step outside, Sergeant,” he told Havers, his eyes unwavering from the other man.

  “Inspector…” Her voice was unbearably restrained.

  “See to Gowan Kilbride and Mary Agnes Campbell,” Lynley went on. “It will save us some time.”

  Havers drew a tense breath. “May I speak to you outside, please?”

  Lynley allowed her that much, following her into the great hall and closing the door behind them. Havers gave rapid scrutiny to the left and right, wary of listeners. When she spoke, her voice was a whisper, fierce and angry.

  “What the hell are you doing, Inspector? You can’t question him alone. Let’s chat about the procedure you’ve been so bloody fond of throwing in my face these last fifteen months.”

  Lynley felt unmoved by her quick flare of passion. “As far as I’m concerned, Sergeant, Webberly threw procedure out the window the moment he got us involved in this case without a formal request from Strathclyde CID. I’m not about to spend time agonising over it now.”

  “But you’ve got to have a witness! You’ve got to have the notes! What’s the point of questioning him if you’ve nothing written down to use against…” Sudden comprehension dawned on her face. “Unless, of course, you know right now that you intend to believe every blessed word his sweet lordship has to say!”

  Lynley had worked with the sergeant long enough to know when a conversational skirmish was about to escalate into verbal warfare. He cut her off.

  “At some point, Barbara, you’re going to have to decide whether an uncontrollable factor such as a person’s birth is reason enough to distrust him.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m supposed to trust Stinhurst? He’s destroyed a stack of evidence, he’s sitting smack in the middle of a murder, he’s refusing to cooperate. And I’m supposed to trust him?”

  “I wasn’t talking about Stinhurst. I was talking about myself.”

  She gaped at him, speechless. He turned back to the door, pausing with his hand on the knob.

  “I want you to see to Gowan and Mary Agnes. I want notes. I want them precise. Use Constable Lonan to assist. Is that clear?”

  Havers shot him a look that would have withered flowers. “Perfectly…sir.” Slamming her notebook shut, she stalked off.

  When Lynley returned to the sitting room, he saw that Stinhurst had adjusted to the new conditions, his shoulders and spine releasing their wire-tight grip on his posture. He seemed suddenly less unyielding and far more vulnerable. His eyes, the colour of fog, focussed on Lynley. They were unreadable.

  “Thank you, Thomas.”

  This easy shift in persona—a chameleon passage from hauteur to gratitude—was a glaring reminder to Lynley that Stinhurst’s lifeblood flowed not through his
veins but through the aisles of the theatre.

  “As to the scripts,” Lynley said.

  “This murder has nothing to do with Joy Sinclair’s play.” Lord Stinhurst gave his attention not to Lynley but to the shattered front of the curio cabinet next to the door. He left his chair and went to it, retrieving the disembodied head of a Dresden shepherdess from the remaining crumble of broken porcelain that still lay inside, heaped upon the bottom shelf. He carried it back to his seat.

  “I don’t imagine Francie yet realises that she broke this piece last night,” he remarked. “It’ll be a blow. Our older brother gave it to her. They were very close.”

  Lynley wasn’t about to play hunt the thimble through the man’s family history. “If Mary Agnes Campbell found the body at six-fifty this morning, why did the police not log your call until seven-ten? Why did it take twenty minutes for you to phone for help?”

  “I wasn’t even aware until this moment that twenty minutes had elapsed,” Stinhurst replied.

  Lynley wondered how long he had rehearsed that response. It was clever enough, the type of nonanswer to which no further comment or accusation could be attached.

  “Then why don’t you tell me exactly what happened this morning,” he said with deliberate courtesy. “Perhaps we can account for the twenty minutes that way.”

  “Mary Agnes found the…Joy. She went immediately for my sister, Francesca. Francesca came for me.” Lord Stinhurst seemed to be ready for Lynley’s next thought, for he went on to say, “My sister was panicked. She was terrified. I don’t imagine she thought to phone the police herself. She’d always depended upon her husband Phillip to be the master of any unpleasant situation. As a widow, she merely turned that dependence on me. That’s not abnormal, Thomas.”

  “And that’s all?”

  Stinhurst’s eyes were on the porcelain head he held gingerly in his palm. “I told Mary Agnes to gather everyone into the drawing room.”