Payment In Blood

by Elizabeth George

  “Once we discovered exactly who Willingate is, the message began to make more sense,” Barbara continued. She felt a sense of urgency, a need to convince. “He seemed to be telling Willingate that the fact that Geoffrey Rintoul had been a mole had surfaced for the second time, the first time being on that New Year’s Eve of 1962. So Willingate was to telephone Westerbrae to assist with a problem. The problem being Joy Sinclair’s death and the script she was writing that exposed all the details of Geoffrey’s unsavoury past.”

  Lynley nodded.

  Barbara went on. “Of course, Lord Stinhurst couldn’t telephone Willingate himself, could he? Any research into the Westerbrae telephone records would have shown us that call. So he placed the one call to his secretary. She did the rest. And Willingate, understanding the message, did telephone him, sir. Twice, I should guess. Remember? Mary Agnes told me she heard two calls come in. They had to be from Willingate. One to find out what in God’s name had happened. And the second to tell Stinhurst what he’d managed to set up with Scotland Yard.”

  “Remember as well,” St. James said, “that according to Inspector Macaskin, Strathclyde CID never requested the Yard’s assistance in the case at all. They were merely informed that the Yard would take over. It seems likely that Willingate arranged all that, telephoning someone in high command at the Yard to set the investigation up and then getting back to Stinhurst with the details of who the investigating officer would be. No doubt Stinhurst was more than ready for your appearance on the scene, Tommy. And he had all day to plan out a story that you, a fellow peer, would be likely to believe. It had to be a personal story, one that, as a gentleman, you would be unlikely to repeat. What better choice than his wife’s allegedly illegitimate child? It was insidiously clever. He simply didn’t take into account that you would confide in me. Nor that I—not very much of a gentleman myself, I’m afraid—would break your confidence. And I’m sorry I did that. Had there been any other way, I’d have said nothing. I hope you believe me.”

  St. James’ last remark bore the sound of conclusion. But after it, Lynley merely reached for the brandy. He poured himself more and passed the decanter on to St. James. His hands did not shake, his face did not change. Outside, a horn honked twice on Eaton Terrace. An answering shout rose from a house nearby.

  Feeling a rising need to force him into taking a position, Barbara spoke. “The question we were trying to answer on the way here, sir, is why the government would involve themselves in a case like this now. And the answer seems to be that in 1963 they engaged in a cover-up of Rintoul’s activities—probably using the Official Secrets Act—in order to spare the prime minister the embarrassment of having a Soviet spy discovered in the high reaches of government so soon upon the heels of the Vassall situation and the Profumo scandal. Since Geoffrey Rintoul was dead, he could do the Defence Ministry no further damage. He could only be of damage to the prime minister himself if the news of his activities leaked. So they kept that from happening. And now, they’d apparently prefer not to have that old cover-up exposed. I suppose it would be rather embarrassing for them. Or maybe they’ve debts to be paid to the Rintoul family and this is how they’re paying them. At any rate, they’ve covered up again. Only…” Barbara paused, wondering how he would take the final bit of information, knowing only that in spite of their rows and the often insurmountable differences between them, she couldn’t be the one to give him such pain.

  Lynley took the opportunity himself. “I was to do it for them,” he said hollowly. “And Webberly knew it. Right from the beginning.”

  In the devastation behind the words, Barbara recognised what Lynley was thinking—that this situation proved he was merely an expendable object to his superiors at the Met; that his was not a career with either value or distinction, so that if it were destroyed by the exposure of his even unconscious attempt to cover up the trail of Stinhurst’s guilt in a murder investigation, there would be no real loss to anyone when he was dismissed. Never mind the fact that none of this was true. Barbara knew even a moment’s belief in it would corrosively erode his pride.

  In the past fifteen months, she had loved and hated and come to understand him. But never before had she perceived that his aristocratic background was a source of anguish to him, a burden of family and blood that he managed to carry with an unassuming dignity, even in the moments when he most longed to shrug it off.

  “How could Joy Sinclair have known all this?” Lynley asked. His face was impeccably, painfully controlled.

  “Lord Stinhurst told you that himself. She was there the night Geoffrey died.”

  “And I didn’t even notice that there was nothing about Joy’s play in her study.” Lynley’s voice was heavy with reproach. “Christ, what kind of police work is that?”

  “The gentlemen from MI5 don’t leave calling cards when they’ve searched a house, Tommy,” St. James said. “There was no evidence of a search. You couldn’t have known they had been there. And after all, you hadn’t gone looking for information about the play.”

  “All the same, I shouldn’t have been blind to its absence.” He smiled grimly at Barbara. “Good work, Sergeant. I can’t think where we’d be if I hadn’t had you along.”

  Lynley’s praise brought Barbara no joy. Never had she felt so completely wretched about having been in the right. “What shall we…?” She hesitated, unwilling to take any more authority from him.

  Lynley got to his feet. “We’ll go for Stinhurst in the morning,” he said. “I should like the rest of the night to think about what needs to be done.”

  Barbara knew what he really meant: to think about what he himself was going to do, faced with the knowledge of how Scotland Yard had used him. She wanted to say something to lighten the blow. She wanted to say that in spite of the plan to make him instrumental in a cover-up, it hadn’t come off; they had proved themselves superior to it. But she knew that he would see through the words to the truth beneath them. She had proved herself superior to it. She had saved him from his own black folly.

  With nothing more to be said, they began putting on their coats, pulling on gloves, adjusting hats and mufflers. The atmosphere was fraught with words needing to be spoken. Lynley took his time about replacing the brandy decanter, gathering the small crystal balloon glasses onto a tray, turning out the lights in the room. He followed them into the hall.

  Lady Helen was standing in a pool of light near the door. She had said nothing for an hour, and now she spoke tentatively as he came to join them. “Tommy…”

  “Meet me at the theatre at nine, Sergeant,” Lynley said abruptly. “Have a constable with you to take Stinhurst in.”

  If she had not already realised how inconsequential her triumph really was in this game of detection, that brief exchange would have illustrated the point for Barbara with rare lucidity. She saw the gulf widen between Lynley and Lady Helen, felt its painful impassability like a physical wound. She said only, “Yes, sir,” and reached for the door.

  “Tommy, you can’t ignore me any longer,” Lady Helen insisted.

  Lynley looked at her then for the first time since St. James had begun speaking in the drawing room. “I was wrong about him, Helen. But you need to know the worst of my sin. I wanted to be right.”

  He nodded good night and left them.

  WEDNESDAY DAWNED under a leaden sky, the coldest day yet. The snow along the pavement had developed a hard, thin crust, grimy from soot and the exhaust of the city traffic.

  When Lynley pulled up in front of the Agincourt Theatre at eight forty-five, Sergeant Havers was already waiting in front of it, bundled up to her eyebrows in her usual unbecoming brown wool, with a young police constable at her side. Lynley noted grimly that Havers had put some considerable thought into her selection of a constable, choosing the one least likely to be cowed by Stinhurst’s title and wealth: Winston Nkata. Once a mainstay of the Brixton Warriors—one of the city’s most violent black gangs—the twenty-five-year-old Nkata, through the patient in
tercession and continuing friendship of three hard-nosed officers in A7 Branch, was now an aspirant to the highest reaches of CID. Living proof, he liked to say, that if they can’t arrest you, they’ll damn well convert you.

  He flashed Lynley one of his high-voltage smiles. “’Spector,” he called, “why you never drive that baby in my neighbourhood? We like to burn pieces that nice.”

  “The next riot, let me know,” Lynley responded drily.

  “Next riot, we send out invitations, man. Make sure everybody have a chance to be there.”

  “Ah. Yes. Bring your own brick.”

  The black man threw back his head and laughed unrestrainedly as Lynley joined them on the pavement. “I like you, ’Spector,” he said. “Give me your home address. I think I got to marry your sister.”

  Lynley smiled. “You’re too good for her, Nkata. Not to mention about sixteen years too young. But if you behave yourself this morning, I’m sure we can come to a suitable arrangement.” He looked at Havers. “Has Stinhurst arrived yet?”

  She nodded. “Ten minutes ago.” In answer to his unasked question, she replied, “He didn’t see us. We were having coffee across the way. He had his wife with him, Inspector.”

  “That,” Lynley said, “is a stroke of luck. Let’s go in.”

  Inside, the theatre buzzed with the activity attendant to a new production. The auditorium doors were open; conversation and laughter mixed with the noise of a crew at work, taking measurements for a set. Production assistants hurried by with clipboards in their hands and pencils behind their ears. In a corner by the bar, a publicist and a designer held a huddle over a large sheet of paper onto which the latter was sketching advertising draughts. It was altogether a place of creativity, humming with excitement, but this morning Lynley did not find himself at all regretful that he would be the instrument of bringing all these people’s pleasure to an end. As would be the case once Stinhurst faced arrest.

  They were walking towards the door to the production offices at the far side of the building when Lord Stinhurst came out of it, followed by his wife. Lady Stinhurst was speaking in an agitated rush, twisting a large diamond ring on her finger. She stopped everything—ring-twisting, speaking, walking—when she saw the police.

  Stinhurst was cooperative enough when Lynley requested a private place to talk. “Come into my office,” he said. “Shall my wife…” He hesitated meaningfully.

  Lynley, however, had already decided exactly how Lady Stinhurst’s presence could be turned to his advantage. Part of him—the better part, he thought—wanted to let her go in peace, and shrank from making her a chessman in the game of fact and fiction. But the other part of him needed her as a tool of blackmail. And he hated that part of himself, even as he knew he would use her.

  “I’d like Lady Stinhurst there as well,” he said briefly.

  With Constable Nkata posted outside the door and instructions to Stinhurst’s secretary to put no calls through that were not for the police, Lynley and Havers joined Lord Stinhurst and his wife in the producer’s office. It was a room much like the man himself, coldly decorated in black and grey, fitted out with a compulsively neat hardwood desk and luxuriously upholstered wingback chairs, the air holding an almost imperceptible odour of pipe tobacco. The walls were hung with tastefully framed posters of former Stinhurst productions, proclamations of over thirty years of success: Henry V, London; The Three Sisters, Norwich; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Keswick; A Doll’s House, London; Private Lives, Exeter; Equus, Brighton; Amadeus, London. At one side of the room were grouped a conference table and chairs. Lynley directed them towards these, unwilling to allow Stinhurst the comfort and command of facing the police across the width of his polished desk.

  As Havers rooted for her notebook, Lynley took out the photographs of the inquest as well as the enlargements which Deborah St. James had made. He laid them out on the table wordlessly. If everything St. James had said was true, Stinhurst had no doubt telephoned Sir Kenneth Willingate yesterday afternoon. He would be well fortified for this coming interview. Through a long, sleepless night Lynley had carefully reviewed the various ways he might head off another well-crafted set of lies. He had come to the realisation that Stinhurst did have at least one Achilles’ heel. Lynley aimed his first remark in its direction.

  “Jeremy Vinney knows the entire story, Lord Stinhurst. I don’t know whether he’ll write it since for the moment he has no hard evidence to back it up. But I have no doubt that he intends to start looking for that evidence.” Lynley straightened the photographs with deliberate attention. “So you can tell me another lie. Or we can explore in detail the one you created for me this past weekend at Westerbrae. Or you can tell the truth. But let me point out to you that had you told me the truth about your brother in the first place, it would probably have gone no further than St. James, in whom I confided. But because you lied to me, and because that lie didn’t fit in with your brother’s grave in Scotland, Sergeant Havers knows about Geoffrey, as does St. James, as does Lady Helen Clyde, as does Jeremy Vinney. As will everyone with access to my report at Scotland Yard once I file it.” Lynley saw Stinhurst’s eyes go to his wife. “So what’s it to be?” he asked, relaxing into his chair. “Shall we talk about that summer thirty-six years ago when your brother Geoffrey was in Somerset and you travelled the country in the regionals and your wife—”

  “Enough,” Stinhurst said. He smiled icily. “Hoist with my own petard, Inspector? Bravo.”

  Lady Stinhurst’s hands writhed in her lap. “Stuart, what is all this? What have you told them?”

  The question could not have come at a better time. Lynley waited for the man’s response. After a long and thoughtful perusal of the police, Stinhurst turned to his wife and began to speak. However, when he did so, it was to prove beyond a doubt that he was a master player in the game of disarmament and surprise.

  “I told him you and Geoffrey were lovers,” he said. “I claimed that Elizabeth was your child, and that Joy Sinclair’s play was about your affair. I told them that she had revised her play without my knowledge to revenge herself upon us for Alec’s death. God forgive me, at least that last part was true enough. I’m sorry.”

  Lady Stinhurst sat in uncomprehending silence, her mouth contorting with words that would not emerge. One side of her face seemed to collapse with the effort. Finally she managed, “Geoff? You never thought that Geoffrey and I…oh my God, Stuart!”

  Stinhurst started to reach towards his wife, but she cried out involuntarily and shrank from the gesture. He withdrew fractionally, leaving his hand lying on the table between them. The fingers curled, then tightened into the palm.

  “No, of course not. But I needed to tell them something. I needed…I had to keep them away from Geoff.”

  “You needed to tell them…But he’s dead.” Her face transformed with growing revulsion as she took in the enormity of what her husband had done. “Geoff’s dead. And I’m not. Stuart, I’m not! You made a whore out of me to protect a dead man! You sacrificed me! My God! How could you have done that?”

  Stinhurst shook his head. His words were laboured. “Not a dead man. Not dead at all. But alive and in this room. Forgive me if you can. I was a coward, first, last, and always. I was only trying to protect myself.”

  “From what? You’ve done nothing! Stuart, for God’s sake. You did nothing that night! How can you say—”

  “It isn’t true. I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Tell me what? Tell me now!”

  Stinhurst stared long at his wife, as if he were trying to summon courage from an examination of her face. “I was the one who gave Geoff over to the government. All of you learned the worst about him on that New Year’s Eve. But I…God help me, I’d known he was a Soviet agent since 1949.”

  STINHURST HELD himself perfectly still as he spoke, perhaps in the belief that a single movement would cause the floodgates to open and the accumulated anguish of thirty-nine years to come pouring out. His voice was m
atter-of-fact, and although his eyes became increasingly red-rimmed, he shed no tears. Lynley found himself wondering if Stinhurst was even capable of weeping after so many years of deceit.

  “I knew that Geoff was a Marxist when we were at Cambridge. He made no secret of it, and frankly, I took it as a bit of a lark, something he would outgrow in time. And if he didn’t, I thought what a laugh it would be to have the future Earl of Stinhurst committed to the workers’ struggle to change the tide of history. What I didn’t know was that his proclivities had been duly noted, and that he had been seduced into espionage while he was still a student.”

  “Seduced?” Lynley asked.

  “It is a process of seduction,” Stinhurst replied. “A combination of flattery and cajolery, making the student believe he plays an important role in the scheme of change.”

  “How did you come to know this?”

  “I discovered it quite by chance, after the war when we were all in Somerset. It was the weekend my son Alec was born. I’d gone out looking for Geoff directly after I’d seen Marguerite and the baby. It was…” He smiled at his wife for the first and only time. Her face did not register a single response. “A son. I was so happy. I wanted Geoff to know. So I went out looking and found him in one of our boyhood haunts, an abandoned cottage in the Quantock Hills. Apparently he’d felt that Somerset was safe.”

  “He was meeting someone?”

  Stinhurst nodded. “I probably would have thought it was only a farmer, but earlier that weekend I’d seen Geoff working in the study on some government papers, the sort that are stamped confidential in garish letters across the front. I thought nothing of it at the time, just that he’d brought work home. His briefcase was on the desk, and he was putting a document into a manila envelope. Not an estate envelope, nor a government one. I remember that distinctly. But I thought nothing of it until I came upon him in the cottage and saw him pass that same envelope to the man he was meeting. I’ve often thought that had I arrived a minute sooner—a minute later—I might well have assumed his companion was indeed a Somerset farmer. But as it was, once I saw the envelope change hands, I guessed the worst. Of course, for a moment I tried to tell myself that it was all a coincidence, that the envelope could not possibly be the same one I had seen in the study. But if it was only an innocent exchange of information that I’d witnessed—all legal and aboveboard—why arrange for it to take place in the Quantock Hills, in the middle of nowhere?”