Payment in Blood

11

PORTHILL GREEN was a village that looked as if it had grown, like an unnatural protuberance, out of the peat-rich earth of the East Anglian Fens. Close to the centre of a rough triangle created by the Suffolk and Cambridgeshire towns of Brandon, Mildenhall, and Ely, the village was not a great deal more than the intersection of three narrow lanes that wound through fi elds of sugar beets, traversing chalky brown canals by means of bridges barely the width of a single car. It sat in a landscape largely given over to the colours grey, brown, and green-from the cheerless winter sky, to the loamy fi elds dotted irregularly by patchy snow, to the vegetation that bordered the lanes in thick abundance.

The village possessed little to recommend itself. Nine buildings of knapped flint and four of plaster, carelessly half-timbered in a drunken pattern, lined the high street. Those that were places of business announced that fact with signs of chipped and sooty paint. A lone petrol station, with pumps that appeared to be fabricated largely from rust and glass, stood sentry on the outskirts of the village. And at the end of the high street, marked by a weather-smoothed Celtic cross, lay a circle of dirty snow under which no doubt grew the grass for which the village was named.

Lynley parked here, for the green lay directly across from Wine’s the Plough, a building no different from any of the other sagging structures on the street. He examined it while next to him Sergeant Havers buttoned her coat beneath her chin and gathered her notebook and shoulder bag.

Lynley could see that, originally, the pub had simply been called The Plough, and that on either side of its name had been fi xed the words Wines and Liquors. The latter had fallen off sometime in the past, however, leaving merely a dark patch on the wall where the word had once been, the shape of its letters still legible. Rather than replace Liquors, or even repaint the building for that matter, to the first word had been added an apostrophe by means of a tin mug nailed into the plaster. Thus the building was renamed, no doubt to someone’s amusement.

“It’s the same village, Sergeant,” Lynley said after a cursory examination through the windscreen. Aside from a liver-coloured mongrel sniffing along an ill-formed hedge, the place might have been abandoned.

“Same as what, sir?”

“As that drawing posted in Joy Sinclair’s study. The petrol station, the greengrocers. There’s the cottage set back behind the church as well. She’d been here long enough to become familiar with the place. I’ve no doubt someone will remember her. You take care of the high while I have a word with John Darrow.”

Havers reached for the door handle with a sigh of resignation. “Always the footwork,” she groused.

“Good exercise to clear your head after last night.”

She looked at him blankly. “Last night?”

“Dinner, film? The chap from the supermarket?”

“Oh, that,” Havers said, fidgeting in her seat. “Believe me, it was very forgettable, sir.” She got out of the car, letting in a gust of air that commingled the faint odours of the sea, dead fish, and rotting debris, and strode over to the first building, disappearing behind its weathered black door.

By pub hours it was early yet, the drive from London having taken them less than two hours, so Lynley was not surprised to fi nd the door locked when he tried to enter Wine’s the Plough across the street. He stepped back from the building and looked above to what seemed to be a flat, but his observation gained him nothing. Limp curtains served as a barrier against prying eyes. No one was about at all, and there was no automobile or motorbike to indicate that the building was currently under anyone’s ownership. Nonetheless, when Lynley peered through the grimy windows of the pub itself, a missing slat in one of the shutters revealed a light shining in a far doorway that appeared to lead to the building’s cellar stairs.

He returned to the door and knocked upon it soundly. Within moments, he heard heavy footsteps. They trudged to the door.

“Not opened,” a man’s gravelly voice said behind it.

“Mr. Darrow?”

“Aye.”

“Would you open the door please?”

“Y’r business is?”

“Scotland Yard CID.”

That got a reaction, although not much of one. The door was unbolted and held open a mere six or seven inches. “All’s in order in here.” Eyes the shape and size of hazel nuts, the colour of a brown gone bad with yellow, dropped to the identification that Lynley held.

“May I come in?”

Darrow didn’t look up as he considered the request and the limited responses available to him. “Not about Teddy, is it?”

“Your son? No, it’s nothing to do with him.”

Apparently satisfied, the man held the door open wider, stepped back, and admitted Lynley into the pub. It was a humble establishment, in keeping with the village it served. Its sole decoration appeared to be a variety of unlit signs behind and above the Formica-topped bar, identifying the liquors sold on the premises. There was very little furniture: half a dozen small tables surrounded by stools and a bench running beneath the front windows. This was padded, but the cushion was sun-bleached from its original red to rusty pink, and dark stains patterned it. A stinging burnt smell tinctured the air, a combination of cigarette smoke, a dead fire in a blackened fi replace, and windows too long closed against the winter weather.

Darrow positioned himself behind the bar, perhaps with the intention of treating Lynley like a customer in spite of the hour and his police identification. For his part, Lynley followed suit in front of it although it meant standing and he would much rather have conducted this interview at one of the tables.

Darrow, he guessed, was in his mid-forties, a rough-looking man who projected a decided air of suppressed violence. He was built like a boxer, squat, with long, powerful limbs, a barrel chest, and incongruously small, well-shaped ears which lay flat against his skull. His clothes suited him. They suggested a man able to make the transition from publican to brawler in the time it would take to ball up a fist. He wore a wool shirt, with cuffs turned up to reveal hirsute arms, and a pair of loose-fitting trousers for ease of movement. Evaluating all this, Lynley doubted that any fi st fi ghts broke out in Wine’s the Plough unless Darrow himself provoked them.

He had in his pocket the jacket of Death in Darkness, which he had taken from Joy Sinclair’s study. Removing it, he folded it so that the author’s smiling photograph was facing up. “Do you know this woman?” he asked.

Recognition flickered unmistakably in Darrow’s eyes. “I know her. What of it?”

“She was murdered three nights ago.”

“I was here three nights ago,” Darrow replied. His tone was surly. “Saturday’s my busiest. Anyone in the village’ll tell you as much.”

It wasn’t at all the reaction Lynley had been expecting. Perhaps surprise, perhaps confusion, perhaps reserve. But a refl ex denial of culpability? That was unusual, to say the least.

“She’s been here to see you,” Lynley stated. “She telephoned this pub ten times in the last month.”

“What of it?”

“I expect you to tell me that.”

The publican seemed to be evaluating the even quality of Lynley’s voice. He appeared disconcerted that his show of belligerent uncooperation produced virtually no reaction in the London detective. “I was having none of her,” he said. “She wanted to write a fl ipping book.”

“About Hannah?” Lynley asked.

The tightening of Darrow’s jaw tensed every muscle in his face. “Aye. Hannah.” He went to an upturned bottle of Bushmill’s Black Label and pushed a glass against its spigot. He drained the whisky, not in a single gulp but in two or three slow swallows, all taken with his back to Lynley. “Have one?” he asked, drawing himself another.

“No.”

The man nodded, drank again. “She came out of nowhere,” he said. “Bringing a clutch of newspaper clippings about this and that book that she’d written, and going on about awards she’d received and…I don’t know what else.

And she plain expected me to give her Hannah and be thankful for the attention. Well, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t having it. And I wasn’t having my Teddy exposed to that kind of muck. It’s bad enough with his mum doing herself in and providing the local ladies with gossip till he was ten years old. I wasn’t about to have it start again. Raking it all up. Upsetting the lad.”

“Hannah was your wife?”

“Aye. My wife.”

“How did Joy Sinclair happen to know about her?”

“Claimed she’d been studying up on suicides for nine or ten months to find one she thought interesting, and she’d read of Hannah’s. Caught her eye, she said.” His voice was sour. “Can you credit that, man? Caught her eye. Han wasn’t a person to her. She was a piece of meat. So I told her to fuck herself. In just those words.”

“Ten telephone calls suggests that she was rather persistent.”

Darrow snorted. “Made no difference. She was getting nowhere. Teddy was too young to know what had happened. So she couldn’t talk to him. And she was getting nothing from me.”

“May I take it that without your cooperation, there could be no book?”

“Aye. No book. Nothing. And that’s the way it was going to stay.”

“When she came to see you, was she alone?”

“Aye.”

“Never anyone with her? Perhaps someone waiting out in the car?”

Darrow’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. They darted to the windows and back. “What d’you mean?”

It had seemed a straightforward question to Lynley. He wondered if Darrow was temporising. “Did she come with a companion?”

“She was always alone.”

“Your wife killed herself in 1973, didn’t she? Did Joy Sinclair ever give you any indication why a suicide that long ago was of interest to her?”

Darrow’s face darkened. His lips curled with loathing. “She liked the chair, Inspector. She was good enough to tell me that. She liked the bleeding chair.”

“The chair?”

“Right. Han lost a shoe when she kicked over the chair. And the woman fancied that. She called it…poignant.” He turned back to the Bushmill’s. “Begging your pardon if I don’t particularly care that someone murdered the bitch.”

ST. JAMES and his wife were both working at their respective interests on the top fl oor of their house, St. James in his forensic laboratory and Deborah in her developing room that adjoined it. The door between the two was open, and looking up from the report that he was compiling for the defence team in an upcoming trial, St. James engaged in a moment of simple pleasure, watching his wife. She was frowning over a collection of her photographs, a pencil stuck behind one ear and a mass of curly hair drawn back from her face with a set of combs.The light above glittered against her head like a halo. Much of the rest of her was in shadow.

“Hopeless. Pathetic,” she murmured, scribbling on the back of one picture and tossing another into a rubbish box at her feet. “Blasted light…God in heaven, Deborah, where did you learn the basic elements of composition!… Oh Lord, this is even worse!”

St. James laughed at that. Deborah looked up. “Sorry,” she said. “Am I distracting you?”

“You always distract me, my love. Far too much, I’m afraid. And especially when I’ve been away from you for twenty-four hours or more.”

A faint colour rose in her cheeks. “Well, after a year, I’m glad to hear there’s a bit of romance left between us. I…silly though, isn’t it? Were you really only gone one night to Scotland? I missed you, Simon. I fi nd that I don’t care for going to bed without you any longer.” Her blush deepened when St. James got down from his tall stool and crossed the lab to join her in the semi-darkness of the developing room. “No, my love…I really didn’t mean…Simon, we’ll get no work done like this,” she said in insincere protest when he took her into his arms.

St. James laughed quietly, said, “Well, we’ll get other things done, won’t we?” and kissed her. A long moment later, he murmured appreciatively against her mouth, “Lord. Yes. Far more important things, I think.”

They parted guiltily at the sound of Cotter’s voice. He was pounding up the stairway, talking several volumes louder than he usually did.

“Just up ’ere, they both are,” he boomed. “Workin’ in the lab, I should guess. Deb’s got ’er snaps out and Mr. St. James is doin’ a report o’ some sort. ’Tis just up above. Not a bit of a climb. We’ll be there in a tick.”

This last pronouncement was made louder than all the others. Deborah laughed when she heard it. “I never know whether to be appalled or amused by my father,” she whispered. “How can he possibly be wise to what we’re up to all the time?”

“He sees the way I look at you, and that’s evidence enough. Believe me, your father knows exactly what I have on my mind.” St. James dutifully returned to his lab and was writing away upon his report when Cotter appeared at the door with Jeremy Vinney behind him.

“’Ere you are,” Cotter said expansively. “Bit of a climb that, isn’t it?” He cast a look here and there as if to make certain he hadn’t caught his daughter and her husband in fl agrante delicto.

Vinney betrayed no surprise at the stentorian manner in which Cotter had heralded his arrival. Rather he came forward, a manila folder in one hand. His portly face bore the signs and shadows of fatigue, and on his jaw-line ran a thin line of whiskers that he’d missed in shaving. He had not as yet bothered to take off his overcoat.

“I think I have what you need,” he said to St. James as Cotter directed an affectionate scowl at his daughter’s impish smile before departing. “Perhaps a bit more. The fellow who covered Geoffrey Rintoul’s inquest in sixty-three is one of our senior editors now, so we rooted through his files this morning and came up with three photographs and a set of old notes. They’re hardly legible since they were done in pencil, but we might be able to make something out of them.” He gave St. James a look that endeavoured to read beneath the surface. “Did Stinhurst kill Joy? Is that where you’re heading?”

The question was a logical conclusion to everything that had gone before, and not an unreasonable one for the journalist to ask. But St. James was not unaware of what it implied. Vinney played a triple role in the drama that had occurred at Westerbrae, as newsman, friend of deceased, and suspect. It was to his advantage to have that last entitlement removed entirely in the eyes of the police, to see that suspicion passed on to someone else. And after a show of fine, journalistic cooperation, what better person to see that it was done than St. James himself, known to be Lynley’s friend? He answered Vinney cautiously.

“There’s merely a small oddity about Geoffrey Rintoul’s death that has us intrigued.”

If the journalist was disappointed with the obliquity of the reply, he was careful not to show it. “Yes. I see.” He shrugged out of his overcoat and accepted the introduction to St. James’ wife. Placing the manila folder onto the lab table, he drew out its contents, a sheaf of papers and three tattered pictures. When he spoke again, it was with professional formality. “The inquest notes are quite complete. Our man was hoping for a feature on it, considering Geoffrey Rintoul’s distinguished past, so he was careful about the details. I think you can rely on his accuracy.”

The notes were written on yellow paper which did not make the faded pencil any easier to read. “It says something about an argument,” St. James remarked, looking them over.

Vinney drew a lab stool over to the table. “The testimony of the family was fairly straightforward at the inquest. Old Lord Stinhurst-Francis Rintoul, the present earl’s father-said there had been quite a row before Geoffrey took off that New Year’s Eve.”

“A row? About what?” St. James scanned for the details as Vinney supplied them.

“Apparently a semi-drunken spat that started delving into the family history.”

That was very close to what Lynley had reported of his conversation with the current earl. But it was hard for St. James to believe that old Lord Stinhurst would have discussed his two sons’ love triangle before a coroner’s jury. Family loyalty would have precluded that. “Did he give any specifi cs?”

“Yes.” Vinney pointed to a section midway down the page. “Apparently Geoffrey was hot to get back to London and decided to take off that night in spite of the storm. His father testified that he didn’t want him to go. Because of the weather. Because he hadn’t seen much of Geoffrey for the past six months and wanted to keep him there while he could. Evidently, their recent relationship hadn’t been smooth, and the old earl saw this New Year’s gathering as a way to heal the breach between them.”

“What sort of breach?”

“I gathered that the earl had taken Geoffrey under considerable fire for not marrying. I suppose he wanted Geoffrey to feel duty bound to shore up the ancestral house. At any rate, that was what was at the heart of the trouble in their relationship.” Vinney studied the notes before he went on delicately, as if he had come to understand how important a show of impartiality might be when discussing the Rintoul family. “I do get the impression that the old man was used to having things his way. So when Geoffrey decided to return to London, his father lost his temper and the argument grew from there.”

“Is there any indication why Geoffrey wanted to return to London? A woman friend that his father wouldn’t have approved of? Or perhaps a relationship with a man that he wanted to keep under wraps?”

There was an odd, unaccountable hesitation, as if Vinney were trying to read St. James’ words for an additional meaning. He cleared his throat. “There’s nothing to indicate that. No one ever came forward to claim an illicit relationship with him. And consider the tabloids. If someone had been involved with Geoffrey Rintoul on the side, he or she would probably have come forward and sold the story for a good deal of money once he was dead. God knows that’s the way things were happening in the early sixties, with call girls servicing what seemed like half the top ministers in the government. You remember Christine Keeler’s tales about John Profumo. That set the Tories reeling. So it does seem that if someone Geoffrey Rintoul was involved with needed the money, he or she would merely have followed in Keeler’s footsteps.”

St. James responded pensively. “There is something in what you’re saying, isn’t there? Perhaps more than we realise. John Profumo was state secretary for war. Geoffrey Rintoul worked for the Ministry of Defence. Rintoul’s death and inquest were in January, the very same month that John Profumo’s sexual relationship with Keeler was brewing in the press. Is there some sort of connection between these people and Geoffrey Rintoul that we’re failing to see?”

Vinney seemed to warm to the plural pronoun. “I wanted to think so. But if any call girl had been involved with Rintoul, why would she have held her tongue when the tabloids were willing to pay a fortune for a juicy story about someone in government?”

“Perhaps it wasn’t a call girl at all. Perhaps Rintoul was involved with someone who didn’t need the money and certainly wouldn’t have benefitted from the disclosure.”

“A married woman?”

Once again they were back to Lord Stinhurst’s original story about his brother and his wife. St. James pushed past it. “And the testimony of the others?”

“They all supported the old earl’s story of the argument, Geoffrey going off in a rage, and the accident on the switchback. There was something rather odd, however. The body was badly burned, so they had to send to London for X rays and dental charts to use in the formal identification. Geoffrey’s physician, a man called Sir Andrew Higgins, brought them personally. He did the examination along with Strathclyde’s pathologist.”

“Unusual but not out of the range of belief.”

“That’s not it.” Vinney shook his head. “Sir Andrew was a longtime school friend of Geoffrey’s father. They’d been at Harrow and Cambridge together. They were in the same London club. He died in 1970.”

St. James supplied his own conclusion to this new revelation. Sir Andrew may have hidden what needed to be hidden. He may have brought forth only what needed to be brought forth. Yet, all the disjointed pieces of information considered, the time period-January 1963-struck St. James as the most relevant item. He couldn’t have said why. He reached for the photographs.

The first was of a group of black-garbed people about to climb into a row of parked limousines. St. James recognised most of them. Francesca Gerrard clinging to the arm of a middle-aged man, presumably her husband Phillip; Stuart and Marguerite Rintoul bending over to speak to two bewildered children, obviously Elizabeth and her older brother Alec; several people forming a conversational circle on the steps of the building in the background, their faces blurry. The second picture was of the accident site with its scar of burnt land. Standing next to it was a roughly dressed farmer, a border collie at his side. Hugh Kilbride, Gowan’s father, St. James speculated, the first on the scene. The last picture was of a group leaving a building, most likely the site of the inquest itself. Once again, St. James recognised the people he had met at Westerbrae. But this photograph contained several unfamiliar faces.

“Who are these people? Do you know?”

Vinney pointed as he spoke. “Sir Andrew Higgins is directly behind the old Earl of Stinhurst. Next to him is the family solicitor. You know the others, I presume.”

“Save this man,” St. James said. “Who is he?” The man in question was behind and to the right of the old Earl of Stinhurst, his head turned in conversation to Stuart Rintoul, who listened, frowning, one hand pulling at his chin.

“Not a clue,” Vinney said. “The chap who took the notes for the story might know, but I didn’t think to ask him. Shall I take them back and have a go?”

St. James thought about it. “Perhaps,” he said slowly, and then turned to the darkroom. “Deborah, will you have a look at these please?” His wife joined them at the table, gazing over St. James’ shoulder at the photographs. After giving her a moment to evaluate them, St. James said, “Can you do a set of enlargements from this last one? Individual pictures of each person, mostly each face?”

She nodded. “They’d be quite grainy, of course, certainly not the best quality, but recognisable. Shall I set up to do it?”

“Please, yes.” St. James looked at Vinney. “We shall have to see what our current Lord Stinhurst has to say about these.”

THE POLICE in Mildenhall had conducted the investigation into Hannah Darrow’s suicide. Raymond Plater, the investigating offi cer, was, in fact, now the town’s chief constable. He was a man who wore authority like a suit of clothes into which he had grown more and more comfortable with the passage of time. So he was not the least concerned to have Scotland Yard CID popping up on his doorstep to talk about a case fifteen years closed.

“I remember it, all right,” he said, leading Lynley and Havers into his well-appointed office. He adjusted beige venetian blinds in a manner of proud ownership, then picked up a telephone, dialled three numbers, and said, “Plater here. Will you bring me the fi le on Darrow, Hannah. D-a-r-r-o-w. It’ll be in 1973… A closed case…Right.” He swivelled his chair to a table behind his desk and tossed back over his shoulder, “Coffee?”

When the other two accepted his offer, Plater did the honours with an effi cient-looking coffee maker, passing steaming mugs over to them along with milk and sugar. He himself drank appreciatively, yet with remarkable delicacy for a man so energetic and so fi erce of feature. With its implacable jaw and clear Nordic eyes, his face reflected the savage Viking warriors from whom he no doubt had taken his blood.

“You’re not the first to come asking about the Darrow woman,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

“The writer Joy Sinclair was here,” Lynley responded, and to Plater’s quickly cocked head, added, “She was murdered this past weekend in Scotland.”

The chief constable’s adjustment in position indicated his interest. “Is there a connection?”

“Merely a gut feeling at the moment. Did Sinclair come to you alone?”

“Yes. Persistent she was, too. Arrived without an appointment, and as she wasn’t a member of the Force, there was a bit of a wait.” Plater smiled. “Just over two hours, as I recall. But she put in the time, so I went ahead and saw her. This was…sometime early last month.”

“What did she want?”

“Conversation mostly. A look at what we had on the Darrow woman. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have made it available to anyone, but she had two letters of introduction, one from a Welsh chief constable she’d worked with on a book and another from a detective superintendent somewhere in the south. Devon, perhaps. Beyond that, she’d an impressive list of credentials-at least two Silver Daggers, I recall-that she wasn’t above showing off to convince me she wasn’t hanging about the entrance hall in the hope of an hour’s natter.”

A deferential knock upon the door heralded a young constable who handed his chief a thick folder and made himself scarce. Plater opened the folder and drew out a stack of police photographs.

They were, Lynley saw, standard crime-scene work. Starkly black and white, they still depicted death with grim attention to detail, going so far as to include an elongated shadow cast by the hanging body of Hannah Darrow. There was little else to see. The room was virtually unfurnished, with an open-beam ceiling, a floor of wide but badly pitted planks, and rough-hewn wooden walls. These appeared to be curved, small four-paned windows their only decoration. A plain cane-seated chair lay on its side beneath the body, and one of her shoes had fallen off and rested against a rung. She had not used rope, but rather what appeared to be a dark scarf, attached to a hook in a ceiling beam, and her head hung forward with long blonde hair curtaining the worst distortion of her face.

Lynley scrutinised the photographs, one after another, feeling a twinge of uncertainty. He handed them to Havers and watched as she sorted through them, but she returned them to Plater without remark.

“Where were the photographs taken?” he asked the chief constable.

“She was found in a mill out on Mildenhall Fen, about a mile from the village.”

“Is the mill still there?”

Plater shook his head. “Torn down three or four years past, I’m afraid. Not that it would do you too much good to see it. Although,” his voice was momentarily reflective, “the Sinclair woman asked to see it as well.”

“Did she?” Lynley asked thoughtfully. He wondered about that request and considered what John Darrow had told him: Joy had taken ten months to find the death she wanted to write about. “Are you absolutely certain this was a suicide?” he asked the chief constable.

In answer, Plater riffled through the fi le. He brought out a single piece of notebook paper. Torn in several places, it bore the trace of creases from having been crumpled and then pressed in among other papers to smooth it out. Lynley scanned the few words, written in a large, childish script with rounded letters and tiny circles used in place of periods and dots.

I must go, it’s time…There’s a tree that’s dead, but it goes on swaying in the wind with the others. So it seems to me that if I die, I’ll still have a part in life, one way or another. Goodbye, my darling.

“Pretty straightforward, that,” Plater commented.

“Where was this found?”

“On the kitchen table at her home. With the pen right beside it, Inspector.”

“Who found it?”

“Her husband. Evidently, she was supposed to help him in the pub that night. When she didn’t show up, he went upstairs to their fl at. He saw the note, panicked, ran out looking for her. When he couldn’t find her, he came back, closed the pub, and got up a group of men for a proper search. She was found in the mill,” Plater referred to the file, “shortly after midnight.”

“Who found her?”

“Her husband. Accompanied,” he noted hastily when he saw Lynley start to speak, “by two blokes from the village who were no particular friends of his.” Plater smiled affably. “I expect you’re thinking what we all thought at first, Inspector. That Darrow lured his wife out to the mill, strung her up, and fashioned the note himself. But we checked on that angle. The note’s genuine enough. Our writing people verify that. And although both their prints were on the paper-Hannah’s and her husband’s-his are explained away easily enough. He’d picked up the paper from the kitchen table where she’d left it for him. Hardly questionable behaviour under the circumstances. Besides, Hannah Darrow was wearing plenty of ballast that night to make certain she did the job right and proper. She had on two wool coats and two heavy sweaters. And you can’t tell me her husband talked her into going for an evening stroll all done up like that.”

THE AGINCOURT THEATRE was tucked between two far more impressive structures on a narrow street off Shaftesbury Avenue. To its left was the Royal Standard Hotel, complete with a uniformed doorman who scowled at pedestrians and traffic alike. To its right was the Museum of Theatrical History, its front windows filled with a dazzling display of Elizabethan costumes, weaponry, and props. Sandwiched between these two, the Agincourt had the appearance of neglect and disrepair, qualities disproved the moment one walked through its doors.

When Lady Helen Clyde entered shortly before noon, she paused in surprise. The last time she had seen a production here the building had been under different ownership, and although its former gloomy Victorian interior had possessed a certain Dickensian charm, Lord Stinhurst’s renovation was breathtaking. She had read about it in the paper, of course, but nothing had prepared her for such a metamorphosis. Stinhurst had given both architects and designers free rein in orchestrating the theatre’s improvements. Following a noholds-barred philosophy of interior design, they had gutted the building completely, achieving light and space through their creation of an entrance that soared with three full floors of open balconies, and through their use of colours that contrasted sharply with the soot-covered exterior which the building presented to the street. Admiring the wealth of creativity that had altered the theatre, Lady Helen allowed herself to forget some of the trepidation with which she had been anticipating her coming interview.

With Sergeant Havers and St. James, she had gone over the details until nearly midnight. Together, the three of them had explored every avenue of approach for this visit to the Agincourt. Since Havers was unable to get to the theatre without Lynley’s knowledge and do the job properly under the aegis of the police, it was left to the devices of either Lady Helen or St. James to encourage Lord Stinhurst’s secretary to talk about the telephone calls which her employer claimed she had placed for him on the morning that Joy Sinclair’s body was found.

Their late night discussion ended with a consensus that Lady Helen was the likeliest one among them to encourage an offering of confidences from anyone. All that had sounded reasonable enough at midnight-even a bit complimentary if one wanted to take it that way-but it was far from reassuring right now with the Agincourt’s offices a mere ten steps away and Stinhurst’s secretary waiting unwittingly in one of them.

“Helen? Have you come to join the newest fray?”

Rhys Davies-Jones was standing at the auditorium door, a mug in his hand. Lady Helen smiled and joined him at the bar where coffee was brewing noisily, emitting a pungent smell that was in large part chicory.

“Worst coffee in the world,” Davies-Jones acknowledged. “But one develops a taste for it over time. Will you have some?” When she declined, he poured himself a mug. The liquid was black, resembling overused motor oil.

“What newest fray?” she asked him.

“Perhaps fray isn’t the best choice of words,” he admitted. “It’s more like political manoeuvring among our tender players for the best part in Stinhurst’s new production. With the only difficulty being that the play hasn’t been decided upon yet. So you can well imagine the jockeying for position that’s been going on for the last two hours.”

“New production?” Lady Helen asked. “You don’t mean that Lord Stinhurst intends to go on with a play after what’s happened to Joy and Gowan?”

“He has no choice, Helen. We’re all of us under contract to him. The theatre’s due to open in less than eight weeks. It’s a new production or he loses his shirt. I can’t say he’s at all happy about it, however. And he’s going to be a good sight unhappier the moment the press start storming him about what happened to Joy. I can’t think why the media haven’t picked up on the story.” He touched Lady Helen’s hand lightly where it lay on the bar. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

She hadn’t thought she would see him, hadn’t considered what she might say if she did. Unprepared for his question, she answered with the first thing that came into her mind, not even thinking for the moment about why she was lying.

“Actually, no. I found myself in the neighbourhood. I thought you might be here, so I took the chance of dropping in.”

His eyes remained perfectly steady on her own, but they managed to convey how ridiculous her story sounded. He was not the kind of man who wanted his ego massaged by an attractive woman seeking him out. Nor was she the kind of woman who would ever do so. He knew that quite well.

“Right. Yes, I see.” He studied his coffee, moved the mug from one hand to the other. When he spoke again, it was with an altered tone, one deliberately light and unaffected. “Come into the auditorium then. There’s not much to see since we’ve got virtually nothing at all done. But there have been sparks aplenty. Joanna’s been harassing David Sydeham all morning with an endless list of complaints that she wants him to handle, and Gabriel’s been attempting to pour oil on their troubled waters. He’s managed to alienate nearly everyone present, but most particularly Irene. The meeting may well turn into a brawl, yet it does have some amusement value. Will you join us?”

After the manufactured excuse for her presence at the theatre, Lady Helen knew she could hardly refuse. So she followed him into the dark auditorium and took a seat in the very last row. He smiled at her politely and began to walk towards the brightly lit stage where the players, Lord Stinhurst, and several other people were gathered round a table, their voices raised in discussion.

“Rhys,” she called. When he turned back to her, she said, “May I see you tonight?”

It was part contrition and part desire. But which was the greater and more pressing, she could not have said. She knew only that she couldn’t leave him today on a lie.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t, Helen. I’ve a meeting with Stuart…Lord Stinhurst about the new production.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. I wasn’t thinking. Then perhaps sometime…”

“Tomorrow night? For dinner, if you’re free. If that’s what you want.”

“I…yes. Yes, it’s what I want. Truly.”

He stood in shadow, so she could not see his face. She could only hear his words and the fragile core of tenderness behind them. The timbre of his voice told her the cost of his speaking at all. “Helen. I woke up this morning knowing with perfect certainty that I love you. So much. God help me, but I don’t understand why no other moment in my life has ever been quite as frightening.”

“Rhys-”

“No. Please. Tell me tomorrow.” He turned decisively and walked down the aisle, up the steps to join the others.

Left alone, Lady Helen forced her eyes to remain on the stage, but her thoughts would not. Instead, they attached themselves stubbornly to a reflection on loyalty. If this encounter with Rhys were a test of her devotion to him, she saw that, without even thinking, she had failed it miserably. And she wondered if that momentary failure meant the very worst, if in her heart she questioned what Rhys had really done two nights ago while she was asleep at Westerbrae. The very thought was devastating. She despised herself.

Getting to her feet, she returned to the entrance hall and approached the offi ce doors. She decided against an elaborate fabrication. She would face Stinhurst’s secretary with the truth.

That commitment to honesty would, in this case, be a wise decision.

“IT’S THE CHAIR, Havers,” Lynley was saying once again, possibly for the fourth or fifth time.

The afternoon was growing unbearably cold. A frigid wind had swept in from The Wash and was tearing across the Fens, unbroken by woodland or hills. Lynley made the turn back towards Porthill Green just as Barbara concluded her third examination of the suicide photographs and replaced them in the Darrow file that Chief Constable Plater had loaned them.

She shook her head inwardly. As far as she could tell, the case he was building was more than tenuous; it was virtually nonexistent. “I don’t see how you can possibly reach any viable conclusion from looking at a picture of a chair,” she said.

“Then you look at it again. If she hanged herself, how would she tip the chair onto its side? It couldn’t have been done. She could have kicked at the back of it, or even turned it sideways and still kicked at the back of it. But in either case, the chair would have fallen onto its back, not onto its side. The only way for the chair to end up in that position at Hannah Darrow’s own doing would be if she had twisted her foot into the space between the seat and the back and actually tried to toss the thing.”

“It could have happened. She was missing a shoe,” Barbara reminded him.

“Indeed. But she was missing her right shoe, Havers. And if you look again, you’ll see that the chair was tipped over to her left.”

Barbara saw that he was determined to win her to his way of thinking. There seemed little point to a further protest. Nonetheless, she felt compelled to argue. “So what you’re saying is that Joy Sinclair, in innocently researching a book about a suicide, fell upon a murder instead. How? Out of all the suicides in the country, how could she possibly have stumbled onto one that was a murder? Good God, what do you think the odds are for doing that?”

“But consider why she was attracted to Hannah Darrow’s death in the fi rst place, Havers. Look at all the oddities involved that would have made it stand out glaringly in comparison to any others she looked at. The location: the Fens. A system of canals, periodic fl oods, land reclaimed from the sea. All the natural characteristics that have made it the inspiration of everyone from Dickens to Dorothy Sayers. How did Joy describe it on her tape? ‘The sound of frogs and pumps, the unremittingly flat land.’ Then there’s the site of the suicide: an old abandoned mill. The bizarre clothing she was wearing: two wool coats over two wool sweaters. And then the inconsistency that surely must have struck Joy the moment she saw those police photos: the position of that chair.”

“If it is an inconsistency, how do you explain the fact that Plater himself overlooked it during the investigation? He doesn’t exactly seem to be your bumbling Lestrade type.”

“By the time Plater got there, all the men from the pub had been searching for Hannah, all of them convinced that they were looking for a suicide. And when they found her and telephoned for the police, they reported a suicide. Plater was predisposed to believe that’s exactly what he was looking at when he got to the mill. So he’d lost objectivity before he ever saw the body. And he was given fairly convincing evidence that Hannah Darrow had indeed intended to kill herself when she left her fl at. The note.”

“But you heard Plater say it was genuine enough.”

“Of course it’s genuine,” Lynley said. “I’m certain it’s her handwriting.”

“Then how do you explain-”

“Good God, Havers, look at the thing. Is there a single misspelled word in it? Is there a point of punctuation that she even missed?”

Barbara took it out, glanced at it, turned to Lynley. “Are you trying to say that this is something Hannah Darrow copied? Why? Was she practising her handwriting? Acting out of sheer boredom? Life in Porthill Green looks like it might be less than ducky, but I don’t exactly see a village girl whiling away her time by improving her script. And even if she did, are you going to argue that Darrow found this note somewhere and realised how he could use it? That he had the foresight to stow it away until the time was right? That he put it out on the kitchen table? That he…what? Killed his wife? How? When? And how did he get her to wear all those clothes? And even if he managed it all without raising anyone’s suspicion, how on earth is he connected to Westerbrae and Joy Sinclair’s death?”

“Through the telephone calls,” Lynley said. “Wales and Suffolk over and over. Joy Sinclair innocently telling her cousin Rhys Davies-Jones about her frustrations in dealing with John Darrow, not to mention her budding suspicions about Hannah’s death. And Davies-Jones biding his time, suggesting that Joy arrange to have a room next to Helen, then fi nishing her off the moment he saw his chance.”

Barbara heard him, incredulous. Once again she saw how he was turning and interpreting all the facts skillfully, using only what he needed to take him closer to an arrest of Davies-Jones. “Why?” she demanded in exasperation.

“Because there’s a connection between Darrow and Davies-Jones. I don’t know what it is yet. Perhaps an old relationship. Perhaps a debt to be paid. Perhaps mutual knowledge. But whatever it is, we’re getting closer to fi nding it.”