Payment In Blood

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley heard the admission with disbelief. What had it been like for her, going to him, soothing his fear, smelling those unmistakable odours of intercourse, dressing him in the very same clothes he had torn from his body in haste to make love to another woman? “I’m trying to understand why you still feel loyalty to a man like this, a man who went so far as to deceive you with your very own sister.” Even as he spoke, he considered his words, considered how Irene had attempted to spare Robert Gabriel tonight, and thought back to what had been said about the night Joy Sinclair died. He saw the pattern clearly enough. “You’ve not told me everything about the night your sister died either. Even in that, you’re protecting him. Why, Irene?”

  Her eyes closed briefly. “He’s the father of my children,” she replied with simple dignity.

  “Protecting him protects them?”

  “Ultimately. Yes.”

  John Darrow himself could not have said it better. But Lynley knew how to direct the conversation. Teddy Darrow had shown him.

  “Children generally discover the worst there is to know about their parents, no matter how one longs to protect them. Your silence now does nothing but serve to protect your sister’s killer.”

  “He didn’t. He couldn’t! I can’t believe that of Robert. Nearly anything else, God knows. But not that.”

  Lynley leaned towards her and covered her cold hands with his own. “You’ve been thinking he killed your sister. And saying nothing about your suspicions has been your way of protecting your children, sparing them the public humiliation of having a murderer for a father.”

  “He couldn’t. Not that.”

  “Yet you think he did. Why?”

  Sergeant Havers spoke. “If Gabriel didn’t kill your sister, what you tell us can only help him.”

  Irene shook her head. Her eyes were hollows of terrible fear. “Not this. It can’t.” She looked at each one of them, her fingers digging into the worn surface of her handbag. She was like a fugitive, determined to escape but recognising the futility of further flight. When she began to speak at last, her body shuddered as if an illness had taken her. As, in a way, it had. “My sister was with Robert that night in his room. I heard them. I’d gone to him. Like a fool…God, why am I such a pathetic fool? He and I had been in the library together earlier, after the read-through, and there was a moment then when I thought that we might really go back to the way things had been between us. We’d been talking about our children, about…our lives in the past. So later, I went to Robert’s room, meaning to…Oh God, I don’t know what I meant to do.” She ran a hand back through her dark hair, gripping it hard at the scalp as if she wanted the pain. “How much more of a fool can I possibly be in one lifetime? I almost walked in on my sister and Robert for a second time. And the funny part—it’s almost hysterical when one really thinks about it—is that he was saying exactly the same thing that he had been saying to Joy that day in Hampstead when I found them together. ‘Come on, baby. Come on, Joy. Come on! Come on!’ And grunting and grunting and grunting like a bull.”

  Lynley heard her words, recognising the kaleidoscopic effect they had on the case. They threw everything into a new perspective. “What time was this?”

  “Late. Long after one. Perhaps nearly two. I don’t actually know.”

  “But you heard him? You’re certain of that?”

  “Oh, yes. I heard him.” She bent her head in shame.

  Yet after that, Lynley thought, she would still seek to protect the man. That kind of undeserved, selfless devotion was beyond his comprehension. He avoided trying to deal with it by asking her something altogether different. “Do you remember where you were in March of 1973?”

  She did not seem to take in the question at once. “In 1973? I was…surely I was at home in London. Caring for James. Our son. He was born that January, and I’d taken some time off.”

  “But Gabriel wasn’t home?”

  She pondered this. “No, I don’t think he was. I think he was appearing in the regionals then. Why? What does that have to do with all this?”

  Everything, Lynley thought. He put all his resources into compelling her to listen and understand his next words. “Your sister was getting ready to write a book about a murder that occurred in March of 1973. Whoever committed that murder also killed Joy and Gowan Kilbride. The evidence we have is virtually useless, Irene. And I’m afraid we need you if we’re to bring this creature to any kind of justice.”

  Her eyes begged him for the truth. “Is it Robert?”

  “I don’t think so. Inspite of everything you’ve told us, I simply don’t see how he could have managed to get the key to her room.”

  “But if he was with her that night, she could have given it to him!”

  That was a possibility, Lynley acknowledged. How to explain it? And then how to align it with what the forensic report revealed about Joy Sinclair? And how to tell Irene that even if, by helping the police, she proved her husband innocent, she would only be proving her own cousin Rhys guilty?

  “Will you help us?” he asked.

  Lynley saw her struggle with the decision and knew exactly the dilemma she faced. It all came down to a simple choice: her continued protection of Robert Gabriel for the sake of their children, or her active involvement in a scheme that might bring her sister’s killer to justice. To choose the former, she faced the uncertainty of never knowing whether she was protecting a man who was truly innocent or guilty. To choose the latter, however, she in effect committed herself to an act of forgiveness, a posthumous absolution of her sister’s sin against her.

  Thus, it was a choice between the living and the dead wherein the living promised only a continuation of lies and the dead promised the peace of mind that comes from a dissolution of rancour and a getting on with life. On the surface, it appeared to be no choice at all. But Lynley knew too well that decisions governed by the heart could be wildly irrational. He only hoped Irene had grown to see that her marriage to Gabriel had been infected with the disease of his infidelities, and that her sister had played only a small and unhappy role in a drama of demise that had been grinding itself out for years.

  Irene moved. Her fingers left damp marks on her leather handbag. Her voice caught, then held. “I’ll help you. What do I have to do?”

  “Spend tonight at your sister’s home in Hampstead. Sergeant Havers will go with you.”

  16

  WHEN DEBORAH ST. JAMES answered the door to Lynley’s knock the next morning at half past ten, her unruly hair and the stained apron she wore over her threadbare jeans and plaid shirt told him he had interrupted her in the midst of her work. Still, her face lit when she saw him.

  “A diversion,” she said. “Thank God! I’ve spent the last two hours working in the darkroom with nothing but Peach and Alaska for company. They’re sweet as far as dogs and cats go, but not much for conversation. Simon’s right there in the lab, of course, but his entertainment value plunges to nothing when he’s concentrating on science. I’m so glad you’ve come. Perhaps you can rout him out for morning coffee.” She waited until he had removed overcoat and muffler before she touched his shoulder lightly and said, “Are you quite all right, Tommy? Is there anything…? You see, they’ve told me a bit about it and…You don’t look well. Are you sleeping at all? Have you eaten? Should I ask Dad…? Would you like…?” She bit her lip. “Why do I always babble like an idiot?”

  Lynley smiled affectionately at her jumble of words, gently pushed one of her fallen curls back behind her ear, and followed her to the stairs. She was continuing to speak.

  “Simon’s had a phone call from Jeremy Vinney. It’s put him into one of those long, mysterious contemplations of his. And then Helen rang not five minutes later.”

  Below her, Lynley hesitated. “Helen’s not here today?” In spite of his tone, which he had endeavoured to keep guarded, he saw that Deborah read through the question easily. Her green eyes softened.

  “No. She’s not here, Tommy. That’s why yo
u’ve come, isn’t it?” Without waiting for his answer, she said kindly, “Do come up and talk to Simon. He knows Helen better than anyone, after all.”

  St. James met them at the door to his laboratory, an old copy of Simpson’s Forensic Medicine in one hand and a particularly grisly-looking anatomical specimen in the other: a human finger preserved in formaldehyde.

  “Are you rehearsing a production of Titus Andronicus?” Deborah asked with a laugh. She took the jar and the book from her husband, brushed a kiss against his cheek, and said, “Here’s Tommy, my love.”

  Lynley spoke to St. James without preamble. He wanted his questions to sound purely professional, a natural extension of the case. He knew he failed miserably. “St. James, where’s Helen? I’ve been phoning her since last night. I stopped by her flat this morning. What’s happened to her? What’s she told you?”

  He followed his friend into the lab and waited impatiently for a response. St. James typed a quick notation into his word processor, saying nothing. Lynley knew the other man well enough not to push for an answer when none was forthcoming. He bit back his misgivings, waited, and let his eyes roam round the room in which Helen spent so much of her time.

  The laboratory had been St. James’ sanctuary for years, a scientific haven of computers, laser printers, microscopes, culture ovens, shelves of specimens, walls of graphs and charts, and in one corner a video screen on which microscopic samples of blood or hair or skin or fibre could be enlarged. This last modernity was a recent addition to the lab, and Lynley recalled the laughter with which Helen had described St. James’ attempts to teach her how it worked just three weeks past. Hopeless, Tommy darling. A video camera hooked into a microscope! Can you imagine my dismay? My God, all this computer-age wizardry! I’ve only just recently come to understand how to boil a cup of water in a microwave oven. Untrue, of course. But he’d laughed all the same, immediately freed of whatever cares the day had heaped upon him. That was Helen’s special gift.

  He had to know. “What’s happened to her? What’s she told you?”

  St. James added another notation to the word processor, examined the consequent changes in a graph on the screen, and shut down the unit. “Only what you told her,” he replied in a voice that was perfectly detached. “Nothing more, I’m afraid.”

  Lynley knew how to interpret that careful tone, but for the moment he refused to engage in the discussion that St. James’ words encouraged. Instead he temporised with, “Deborah’s told me Vinney phoned you.”

  “Indeed.” St. James swung around on his stool, pushed himself off it awkwardly, and walked to a well-ordered counter where five microscopes were lined up, three in use. “Apparently, no newspapers are picking up the story of the Sinclair death. According to Vinney, he turned in an article about it this morning only to have it rejected by his editor.”

  “Vinney’s the drama critic, after all,” Lynley noted.

  “Yes, but when he phoned round to see if any of his colleagues were working on the murder, he discovered that not one had been assigned to the story. It’s been killed from higher up. For the time being, according to what he’s been told. Until there’s an arrest. He was in a fair state, to say the least.” St. James looked up from a pile of slides he was organising. “He’s after the Geoffrey Rintoul story, Tommy. And a connection between that and Joy Sinclair’s death. I don’t think he plans to rest until he has something in print.”

  “He’ll never see it happen. In the first place, there’s not one accessible shred of evidence against Geoffrey Rintoul. In the second place, the principals are dead. And without damned solid evidence, no newspaper in the country is going to take on so potentially libelous a story against so distinguished a family as Stinhurst’s.” Lynley felt suddenly restless, needing movement, so he walked the length of the room to the windows and looked down at the garden far below. Like everything else, it was covered with last night’s snow, but he saw that all the plants had been wrapped in burlap and that breadcrumbs were spread out neatly on the top of the garden wall. Deborah’s loving hand, he thought.

  “Irene Sinclair believes that Joy went to Robert Gabriel’s room the night she died,” he said and sketched out the story that Irene had related to him. “She told me last night. She’d been holding it back, hoping to protect Gabriel.”

  “Then Joy saw both Gabriel and Vinney during the night?”

  Lynley shook his head. “I don’t see how it’s possible. She can’t have been with Gabriel. At least not in bed with him.” He related the autopsy information from Strathclyde CID.

  “Perhaps the Strathclyde team have made a mistake,” St. James noted.

  Lynley smiled at the idea. “With Macaskin as their DI? What do you think the likelihood of that is? Certainly nothing I’d want to make book on. Last night when Irene told me, I thought at first that she had been mistaken in what she heard.”

  “Gabriel with someone else?”

  “That’s what I thought. That Irene had only assumed it was Joy. Or perhaps assumed the worst about what was going on between Joy and Gabriel in the room. But then I thought that she might very well have been lying to me, to implicate Gabriel in Joy’s death, all the time protesting that she wants to protect him for her children’s sake.”

  “A fine revenge, that,” Deborah noted from the doorway of her darkroom where she stood listening, with a string of negatives in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other.

  St. James crisscrossed the stack of slides absently. “It is indeed. Clever as well. We know from Elizabeth Rintoul that Joy Sinclair was in Vinney’s room. So there’s corroboration, if Elizabeth’s to be trusted. But who’s to corroborate Irene’s claim that Joy was also with her husband? Gabriel? Of course not. He’ll deny it hotly. And no one else heard it. So it’s left to us to decide whether to believe the philandering husband or the long-suffering wife.” He looked at Lynley. “Are you still certain about Davies-Jones?”

  Lynley turned back to the window. St. James’ question brought back with stinging clarity the report he had received from Constable Nkata just three hours before, immediately after the constable’s night of trailing Davies-Jones. The information had been simple enough. After leaving Helen’s flat, he had gone into the off-licence, where he purchased four bottles of liquor. Nkata was completely certain of the number, for following the purchase, Davies-Jones had begun to walk. Although the temperature had been well below freezing, he appeared to notice neither that nor the snow that continued to fall. Instead, he had kept up a brutal pace along the Brompton Road, circling Hyde Park, making his way up to Baker Street, and ultimately ending at his own flat in St. John’s Wood. It had taken over two hours. And as Davies-Jones walked, he twisted off the cap of one bottle after another. But in lieu of a swig of the liquid inside, he had rhythmically, savagely, dashed the contents out into the street. Until he’d gone through all four bottles, Nkata had said, shaking his head at the waste of fine liquor.

  Now Lynley thought again about Davies-Jones’ behaviour and concentrated on what it implied: a man who had overcome alcoholism, who was fighting for a chance to put his career and his life back together. A man rigidly determined not to be defeated by anything, least of all by his past.

  “He’s the killer,” Lynley said.

  IRENE SINCLAIR knew it had to be the performance of her career, knew she had to gauge the proper moment without a single cue from anyone to tell her when it had arrived. There would be neither an entrance nor an instance of supreme drama when every eye was focussed on her. She would have to forego both of those pleasures for the theatre of the real. And it began after the company’s lunch break when she and Jeremy Vinney arrived at the Agincourt Theatre simultaneously.

  She was alighting from a cab just as Vinney dodged through the heavy traffic to cross the street from the café. A horn sounded its warning, and Irene looked up. Vinney was carrying his overcoat rather than wearing it, and seeing this, she wondered if his departure from the café had been prompted hastily by her
own arrival. The journalist verified this himself with his first words. They were tinged with what sounded like malicious excitement.

  “Someone got to Gabriel last night, I understand.”

  Irene stopped, her hand on the theatre door. Her fingers were curled tightly round its handle, and even through her gloves she could feel the sharp stab of icy metal. There didn’t seem to be a point to questioning how Vinney had come upon the news. Robert had managed to get himself to the theatre this morning for the second reading, in spite of taped ribs, a black eye, and five stitches in his jaw. The news of his beating had travelled through the building within minutes of his arrival. And although cast members, crew, designers, and production assistants had smote the air with their hot exclamations of outrage, any one of them could have surreptitiously phoned Vinney with the story. Especially if any of them felt the need to engineer a spate of embarrassing public notoriety that would enable them to settle a private score or two with Robert Gabriel.

  “Are you asking me about this for publication?” Irene asked. Hugging herself against the cold, she entered the theatre. Vinney followed. No one appeared to be about. The building was hushed. Only the persistent odour of burnt tobacco gave evidence that the actors and staff had been meeting all that morning.

  “What did he tell you about it? And no, this isn’t for publication.”

  “Then why are you here?” She kept her brisk pace towards the auditorium with Vinney dogging her stubbornly. He caught her arm and stopped her just short of the heavy, oak doors.

  “Because your sister was my friend. Because I can’t get a single word from anyone at the Met in spite of their long afternoon with our melancholy Lord Stinhurst. Because I couldn’t get Stinhurst on the phone last night and I’ve an editor who says I can’t write a syllable about any of this until we’ve some sort of miraculous clearance from above to do so. Everything about the mess stinks to heaven. Or doesn’t that concern you, Irene?” His fingers dug into her arm.