“I see. But interested in the Fens, was she? The plant life and such?”
The man’s lips moved in a quick snarl of contempt. “What d’you want with me, pommy boy? Have your say and get out.”
“She writes here about trees. And a tree that died but still sways in the wind. Rather poetic, wouldn’t you say? Even for a suicide message. What is this note really, Darrow? When did your wife write it? Why did she? Where did you find it?” There was no reply. Wordlessly, Darrow continued washing glasses. They clanked and scraped angrily against the metal pan. “On the night she died, you left the pub. Why?”
“I went looking for her. I’d been up to the flat, found that”—Darrow’s sharp nod indicated the note—“in the kitchen, went out to find her.”
“Where?”
“The village.”
“Knocking on doors? Looking in sheds? Searching through houses?”
“No. She wasn’t likely to kill herself in someone’s house now, was she?”
“And you knew for a certainty that she was going to kill herself?”
“It bloody well says that!”
“Indeed. Where did you look for her?”
“Here and there. I don’t remember. It’s fifteen years past. I didn’t heed it at the time. And it’s buried now. Am I clear on that, man? It’s buried.”
“It was buried,” Lynley acknowledged. “Quite successfully so, I should guess. But then Joy Sinclair came here and began an exhumation. And it looks very much as if someone was afraid of that. Why did she telephone you so many times, Darrow? What did she want?”
Darrow swung both arms up from the dishwater. Irately, he slammed them onto the bar. “I’ve told you! The bitch wanted to talk about Hannah, but I was having none of it. I didn’t want her raking up the past and mucking about with our lives. We’re over it. God damn you, we’re going to stay that way. Now, get out of here or make a fucking arrest.”
Regarding the other man calmly, Lynley made no reply, so the implication behind Darrow’s last statement grew with every moment. His face began to mottle. The veins in his arms seemed to swell.
“An arrest,” Lynley repeated. “Odd that you should suggest that, Mr. Darrow. Why on earth should I want to make an arrest for a suicide? Except we both know, don’t we, that this wasn’t a suicide. And I believe that Joy Sinclair’s mistake was telling you that it didn’t much look like a suicide to her.”
“Get out!” Darrow roared.
Lynley took his time about gathering the materials back into the folder. “We’ll be back,” he said pleasantly.
BY FOUR O’CLOCK that afternoon, the company assembled at the Agincourt Theatre had, after seven hours of politics and debate, settled on a playwright for the theatre’s opening production: Tennessee Williams, a revival piece. The play itself was still open to discussion.
From the back of the auditorium, St. James observed the group on the stage. They had narrowed the field down to the relative merits of three possibilities, and from what St. James could tell, things were swinging in Joanna Ellacourt’s direction. She was arguing strongly against A Streetcar Named Desire, her aversion to it rising, it seemed, out of a quick calculation of how much stage time Irene Sinclair would have if, however incongruously, she played Stella. There appeared to be no doubt at all as to the casting of Blanche Dubois.
Lord Stinhurst had been displaying a remarkable degree of patience for the quarter hour that St. James had been watching. In an unusual display of magnanimity, he had allowed all the players, the designers, the director, and the assistants to have their say about the crisis facing the company and the pressing need to get into production as soon as possible. Now, he got to his feet, kneading his fingers into the small of his back.
“You’ll have my decision tomorrow,” he told them. “We’ve been together long enough for now. Let’s meet again in the morning. At half past nine. Be ready to read.”
“No hints for us, Stuart?” Joanna Ellacourt asked, stretching languorously and leaning back in her chair so that her hair fell like a shimmering gold veil in the light. Next to her, Robert Gabriel affectionately ran three fingers down its length.
“None at all, I’m afraid,” Lord Stinhurst replied. “I’ve not quite made up my mind.”
Joanna smiled up at him, moving her shoulder to disengage Gabriel’s hand from her hair. “Tell me what I can do to persuade you to decide in my favour, darling.”
Gabriel gave a low, guttural laugh. “Take her up on it, Stuart. God knows our darling Jo excels at persuading.”
No one spoke for a moment in answer to that remark, fully laced though it was with innuendo. No one even moved at first, save for David Sydeham, who raised his head slowly from the script he was examining and levelled his eyes on the other man. His face was deadly, rife with hostility, but Gabriel did not seem the least affected.
Rhys Davies-Jones threw down his own script. “Christ, you’re an ass,” he said to Gabriel wearily.
“And I once thought Rhys and I would never agree upon anything,” Joanna added.
Irene Sinclair moved her chair back from the table. Harshly, it abraded the stage floor. “Right. Well. I’ll be off.” She spoke agreeably enough before making her exit down the main aisle of the theatre. But when she passed St. James, he saw how she was working to control her face, and he wondered how and why she had ever endured a marriage to Robert Gabriel.
While the other players, the assistants, and the designers began to drift off towards the wings, St. James got to his feet and went to the front of the auditorium. It was not overlarge, perhaps seating only five hundred people, and a grey haze of stale cigarette smoke hung over its open thrust stage. He mounted the steps.
“Have you a moment, Lord Stinhurst?”
Stinhurst was having a low-voiced conversation with a spindly young man who carried a clipboard and wrote with knotted concentration. “See to it that we’ve enough copies for tomorrow’s read-through,” he said in conclusion. Only then did he look up.
“So you lied to them about not having your mind made up,” St. James observed.
Stinhurst didn’t reply to this at once. Rather, he called out, “We’ve no need for all this light now, Donald,” and in answer the stage leaped with cavernous shadows. Only the table itself was illuminated. Stinhurst sat down at it, took out pipe and tobacco, and laid them both down.
“Sometimes it’s easier to lie,” he admitted. “I’m afraid it’s one of the behaviours a producer grows adept at over time. If you’ve ever been in the midst of a tug-of-war of creative egos, you’d know what I mean.”
“This seems to be a particularly inflammable group.”
“It’s understandable. They’ve been through a bit of hell these past three days.” Stinhurst packed his pipe. His shoulders were stiff, a marked contrast to the weariness of his voice and face. “I don’t imagine this is a social call, Mr. St. James.”
St. James handed him the stack of enlargements which Deborah had made from the photograph taken at Geoffrey Rintoul’s inquest. On each new photograph appeared a single face and occasionally part of a torso, but nothing else. There was nothing to indicate that the people had once all been part of one group. Deborah had been particularly careful about that.
“Will you identify these people for me?” St. James asked.
Stinhurst fingered through the lot, turning each one slowly, his pipe ignored. St. James could see the marked hesitation in his movements, and he wondered if the man would actually cooperate. Stinhurst was no doubt well aware of the fact that he was not obliged to reveal a thing. Nonetheless, he also appeared to know exactly how a refusal to respond would be interpreted by Lynley if he learned of it. So St. James only hoped that Stinhurst believed he was here in some official capacity at Lynley’s behest. After a thorough perusal, the man laid all the photographs out in a line and indicated each as he spoke.
“My father. My sister’s husband, Phillip Gerrard. My sister, Francesca. My wife, Marguerite. My father’s solicit
or—he died some years ago and I can’t remember his name at the moment. Our physician. Myself.”
Stinhurst had omitted the very man whose identity they needed. St. James pointed to the photograph he had laid next to that of his sister. “And this man in profile?”
Stinhurst’s brow creased. “I don’t know. I can’t say I’ve ever seen him before.”
“Odd,” St. James said.
“Why?”
“Because in the original photo from which all of these were taken, he’s talking to you. And for some reason you look in that picture as if you know him quite well.”
“Indeed. I may have at the time. But my brother’s inquest was twenty-five years ago. And at this distance, I don’t think I can be expected to remember everyone who was there.”
“That’s true,” St. James replied and considered the fascinating fact that he had not mentioned that the photographs were from Geoffrey Rintoul’s inquest at all.
Stinhurst was getting to his feet. “If there’s nothing else, Mr. St. James, I’ve things to see to before my day ends here.”
He did not look at the photographs again as he spoke, gathering pipe and tobacco, readying himself to leave. And that was so unlikely a human reaction. It was as if the man had to keep his eyes from them lest his face reveal more than he had been willing to say. One thing was a certainty, St. James concluded: Lord Stinhurst knew exactly who the man in the photograph was.
CERTAIN KINDS of lighting refuse to lie about the relentless, ineluctable process of ageing. They are entirely unforgiving, capable of exposing flaws and baring the truth. Direct sunlight, the harsh overhead fluorescent lights of a business establishment, the flood lights used to film without soft-focus filters—these are proficient at doing their worst. In her dressing room, Joanna Ellacourt’s make-up table appeared to have this sort of lighting as well. At least it did today.
The air was quite cool, the way she always liked it in order to keep the flowers fresh when they arrived from a score of admirers before her performances. There were no flowers now. Instead, the air held that combination of odours peculiar to every dressing room she had ever inhabited, the mingling scents of cold cream, astringent, and lotion that littered the tabletop. Joanna was only dimly aware of this scent as she stared unflinchingly at her reflection and forced her eyes to rest upon each telling harbinger of approaching middle age: the incipient wrinkles from nose to chin; the delicate webbing round her eyes; the first ringed indentations on her neck, prelude to the old-age cording that could never be disguised.
She smiled in self-mockery at the thought that she had escaped nearly everything that had constituted the psychological quicksand of her life. Her family’s grubby fiveroom council house in Nottingham; the sight of her father sitting daily in unshaven gloom at his window, a machinist on the dole whose dreams had died; the sound of her mother whining about the cold that persistently seeped through the poorly sealed windows, or the black and white telly whose knobs were broken off so that the sound remained at a constant nerve-shattering pitch; the future that each of her sisters had chosen, one that repeated the history of their parents’ marriage, an endless, bone-grinding repetition of producing babies at intervals of eighteen months and living without either hope or joy. She had escaped all that. But she could not escape that process of slow decomposition that awaits every man.
Like so many egocentric creatures whose beauty dominates the stage and the screen and the covers of countless magazines, she had thought for a time that she might elude it. She had, in fact, grown to believe that she would. For David had always allowed her to do so.
Her husband had been more than her liberation from the miseries of Nottingham. David had been the one true constant in a fickle world in which fame is ephemeral, in which the critics’ apotheosis of a new talent could mean the ruin of an established actress who has given her life to the stage. David knew all about that, knew how it frightened her, and through his continual support and love—in spite of her tantrums, her demands, her flirtations—he had assuaged her fears. Until Joy Sinclair’s play had come along, changing everything irrevocably between them.
Fixing her eyes on her reflection without really seeing it, Joanna felt the anger all over again. No longer the fire that had consumed her with such irrational, revenge-seeking intensity on Saturday night at Westerbrae, it had burned itself down to a glowing pilot, capable of igniting her central passion at the least provocation.
David had betrayed her. She forced herself to think of it again and again, lest the decades of their shared intimacy insinuate themselves into her consciousness and demand that she forgive him. She would never do so.
He had known how much she had depended upon Othello being the last time she performed with Robert Gabriel. He had known how much she despised Gabriel’s pursuit of her, flavoured with accidental encounters, casually inadvertent movements that grazed his hand across the very tips of her breasts, longing stage kisses in front of enormous audiences who grew to believe it was part of the show, private double-edged compliments attached to references to his sexual prowess.
“Like it or not, you and Gabriel have magic when you’re on the stage together,” David had said.
Not the least bit jealous, not the least bit concerned. She had always wondered why. Until now.
He had lied to her about Joy Sinclair’s play, telling her that Robert Gabriel’s participation was Stinhurst’s idea, telling her that Gabriel couldn’t possibly be dropped from the cast. But she knew the real truth although she couldn’t bear to face what it implied. To insist upon Gabriel’s being sacked would mean a decrease in revenues for the show itself, which would cut into her percentage—into David’s percentage. And David liked his money. His Lobb shoes, his Rolls, his home on Regent’s Park, his cottage in the country, his Savile Row wardrobe. If all this could be maintained, what did it matter that his wife would have to fight off Robert Gabriel’s sweaty advances for another year or so? She’d been doing it for more than a decade, after all.
When her dressing-room door opened, Joanna didn’t bother to turn from the make-up table, for the mirror provided a more than adequate view of the door. Even if this had not been the case, she knew who was entering. After all, she’d had twenty years of hearing them to recognise any one of her husband’s movements—his steady footsteps, the rasp of a match when he lit a cigarette, the rustle of cloth against his skin when he dressed, the slow relaxation of his muscles when he lay down to sleep. She could identify any and all of them; in the end they were so uniquely David.
But she was beyond considering any of that now. So she reached for hairbrush and hairpins, pushed her makeup case to one side, and began to see to her hair, counting the strokes from one to one hundred as if each took her further away from the long stretch of history she shared with David Sydeham.
He didn’t speak when he entered the room. He merely walked to the chaise as he always did. But this time he did not sit. Nor did he speak until she finally finished with her hair, dropped her brush to the table, and turned to look at him expressionlessly.
“I suppose I can rest a bit more easily if I simply know why you did it,” he said.
LADY HELEN arrived at the St. James home shortly before six that evening. She felt both discouraged and disheartened. Even a tray in St. James’ study, burdened with fresh scones, cream, tea, and sandwiches, did little to brighten her.
“You look as if you could do with a sherry,” St. James observed once she had removed her coat and gloves.
Lady Helen dug through her handbag for her notebook. “That sounds like exactly what I need,” she agreed heavily.
“No luck?” Deborah asked. She was sitting on the ottoman to the right of the hearth, sneaking an occasional bit of scone down to Peach, the scruffy little dachshund who waited patiently at her feet, occasionally testing the flavour of her ankle with a delicate and loving pink tongue. Nearby, the grey cat Alaska was curled happily onto a pile of papers in the centre of St. James’ desk. Althoug
h his eyes slitted open, he did not otherwise stir at Lady Helen’s entrance.
“It’s not exactly that,” she replied, gratefully accepting the glass of sherry which St. James brought her. “I’ve the information we want. It’s only that…”
“It doesn’t go far to helping Rhys,” St. James guessed.
She shot him a smile that she knew was at best only tremulous. His words pained her unaccountably, and feeling the force of a sudden wretchedness, she realised how she had been depending upon her interview with Lord Stinhurst’s secretary to attenuate everyone’s suspicion of Rhys. “No, it doesn’t help Rhys. It doesn’t do much of anything, I’m afraid.”
“Tell us,” St. James said.
There was, after all, so little to tell. Lord Stinhurst’s secretary had been willing enough to talk about the telephone calls she had placed for her employer, once she realised how essential those calls might be in exonerating him of any complicity in the death of Joy Sinclair. So she had spoken openly to Lady Helen, going so far as to produce the notebook into which she had jotted down the message that Stinhurst had wished her to repeat for every call she made. It was straightforward enough. “Am unavoidably delayed in Scotland due to an accident. Will be in touch the moment I’m available.”
Only one call differed from that repeated message, and although it was decidedly odd, it did not seem to wear the guise of guilt. “Resurfacing forces me to put you off a second time this month. Terribly sorry. Telephone me at Westerbrae if this presents a problem.”
“Resurfacing?” St. James repeated. “Odd choice of words. Are you certain about that, Helen?”
“Completely. Stinhurst’s secretary had written it down.”
“Some theatre term?” Deborah suggested.
St. James eased himself awkwardly into the chair near her. She moved on the ottoman to give him room for his leg. “Who received that last, Helen?”
Payment In Blood Page 25