Payment in Blood

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 fi ve minutes later.”

Below her, Lynley hesitated. “Helen’s not here today?” Inspite 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 you’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 fi ve 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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 fl at, 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 fi ne 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 verifi ed 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 fi ngers 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 fi ngers dug into her arm.

“What a filthy thing to say.”

“I come by it naturally. I get particularly filthy when people I care for are murdered and life just cranks on with merely a nod of acknowledgement to mark it.”

Sudden anger choked her. “And you think I don’t care about what happened to my sister?”

“I think you’re delighted as hell,” he replied. “The crowning glory would have been to be the one to plunge the knife yourself.”

Irene felt the cruel shock of his words, felt the colour drain from her face. “My God, that’s not true and you know it,” she said, hearing how close her voice was to breaking. She jerked away from him and dashed into the auditorium, only imperfectly aware of the fact that he followed her, that he took a seat in the darkness of the last row, like a lurking Nemesis, champion of the dead.

The confrontation with Vinney was exactly what she had not needed prior to meeting with the cast members again. She had hoped to use all of her lunch hour to reflect upon how she would perform the role that Sergeant Havers had schooled her for last night. Now, however, she felt her heart pounding, her palms sweating, and her mind taken up with a violent denial of Vinney’s fi nal accusation. It was not true. She swore that to herself again and again as she approached the empty stage. Yet the turmoil she felt would not be stilled by such a simple expedient as denial, and knowing how much rested on her ability to perform today, she fell back upon an old technique from drama school. She took her place at the single table in the centre of the stage, brought her folded hands to her forehead, and closed her eyes. Thus, it proved nothing at all for her to move into character a few moments later when she heard approaching footsteps and her cousin’s voice.

“Are you all right, Irene?” Rhys Davies-Jones asked.

She looked up, managing a weary smile. “Yes. Fine. A bit tired, I’m afraid.” That would be enough for now.

Others began to arrive. Irene heard rather than saw them, mentally ticking off each person’s entrance as she listened for signs of strain in their voices, signs of guilt, signs of increased anxiety. Robert Gabriel gingerly took his place next to her. He fingered his swollen face with a rueful smile.

“I’ve not had a chance to say thank you for last night,” he said in a tender voice. “I’m… well, I’m sorry about it, Renie. I’m most wretchedly sorry about everything, in fact. I would have said something when the doctors had finished with me, but you’d already gone. I rang you up, but James said you were at Joy’s in Hampstead.” He paused for a reflective moment. “Renie. I thought…I did hope we might-”

She cut him off. “No. There was a great deal of time for me to think last night, Robert. And I did that. Clearly. At last.”

Gabriel took in her tone and turned his head away. “I can guess what kind of thinking you accomplished at your sister’s,” he said with aggrieved fi nality.

The arrival of Joanna Ellacourt allowed Irene to avoid an answer. She swept up the aisle between her husband and Lord Stinhurst as David Sydeham was saying, “We want fi nal approval of all the costumes, Stuart. It’s not part of the original contract, I know. But considering everything that’s already happened, I think we’re within our rights to negotiate a new clause. Joanna feels-”

Joanna did not wait for her husband to argue the merits of their case. “I’d like the costumes to reflect who the starring role belongs to,” she said pointedly, with a cool glance at Irene.

Stinhurst did not reply to either of them. He looked and moved like a man ageing rapidly. Managing the stairs seemed to drain him of energy. He appeared to be wearing the very same suit, shirt, and tie that he’d had on yesterday, the charcoal jacket rumpled, its sleeves badly creased. As if he’d given up interest in his appearance entirely. Watching him, Irene wondered, with a chill, if he would even live to see this production open. When he took his chair, with a nod of acknowledgement towards Rhys Davies-Jones, the new reading began.

They were midway through the play when Irene allowed herself to drop off to sleep. The theatre was so warm, the atmosphere on the stage was so close, their voices rose and fell with such hypnotic rhythm that she found it easier than she had supposed it would be to let herself go. She stopped worrying about their willingness to believe in the role she was playing and became the actress she had been years ago, before Robert Gabriel had entered her life and undermined her confi dence with year after year of public and private humiliation.

She even felt herself beginning to dream when Joanna Ellacourt’s voice snapped angrily, “For God’s sake, would someone wake her up? I’ve no intention of trying to work my way through this with her sitting there like a drooling grandmother snoring at a kitchen fi re.”

“Renie?”

“Irene!”

She opened her eyes with a start, pleased to feel the rush of embarrassment sweep over her. “Did I drop off? I’m terribly sorry.”

“Late night, sweetie?” Joanna asked tartly.

“Yes, I’m afraid…I…” Irene swallowed, smiled flickeringly to mask pain, and said, “I spent most of the night going through Joy’s things in Hampstead.”

Stunned astonishment met this announcement. Irene felt pleased to see the effect her words had upon them, and for a moment she understood Jeremy Vinney’s anger. How easily indeed they had forgotten her sister, how conveniently their lives had moved on. But not without a stumbling block for someone, she thought, and began to construct it with every power available to her. She brought tears into her eyes.

“There were diaries, you see,” she said hollowly.

As if instinct alone told her that she was in the presence of a performance capable of upstaging her own, Joanna Ellacourt sought their attention again. “No doubt an account of Joy’s life makes absolutely fascinating reading,” she said. “But if you’re awake now, perhaps this play will be fascinating as well.”

Irene shook her head. She allowed her voice to raise a degree. “No, no, that isn’t it. You see, they weren’t hers. They had come by express yesterday, and when I opened them and found the note from the husband of that wretched woman who had written them-”

“For God’s sake, is this really necessary?” Joanna’s face was white with anger.

“-I started to read. I didn’t get very far, but I saw that they were what Joy had been waiting for to do her next book. The one she talked about just the other night in Scotland. And suddenly…I seemed to realise that she was really dead, that she wouldn’t ever be back.” Irene’s tears began to fall, becoming suddenly copious as she felt the fi rst swelling of genuine grief. Her next words only marginally touched upon the script that she and Sergeant Havers had so painstakingly prepared. She was rambling, she knew it, but the words had to be said. And nothing else mattered but saying them. “So she’ll never write it now. And I felt as if…with Hannah Darrow’s diaries sitting there in her house…I ought to write the book for her if only I could. As a means of saying that…in the end, I understood how it happened between them. I did understand. Oh, it hurt. God, it was agony all the same. But I understood. And I don’t think…She was always my sister. I never told her that. Oh God, I can’t go back there now that she’s dead!”

And then, having done it, she let herself weep, understanding at last the source of her tears, mourning the sister she had loved but forgiven too late, mourning the youth she had wasted in devotion to a man who fi nally meant nothing to her. She sobbed despairingly, for the years gone and the words unspoken, caring for nothing at last but this act of grief.

Across from her, Joanna Ellacourt spoke again. “This cuts it. Can’t any of you do something with her, or is she going to blubber for the rest of the day?” She turned to her husband. “David,” she insisted.

But Sydeham was gazing out into the theatre. “We’ve a visitor,” he said.

Their eyes followed his. Marguerite Rintoul, Countess of Stinhurst, was standing midway down the centre aisle.

SHE WAITED only as long as it took to close the door to her husband’s office. “Where were you last night, Stuart?” she demanded, doing nothing to hide the asperity in her voice as she pulled off her coat and gloves and threw them down on a chair.

It was a question which Lady Stinhurst knew quite well she would not have asked twenty-four hours ago. Then she would have accepted his absence in her usual, pathetically cringing fashion, hurt and wondering and afraid to know the truth. But now she was beyond that. Yesterday’s revelations in this room had combined with a long night of soulsearching to produce an anger so fi nely honed that it could not be blunted by any stony wall of protective and deliberate inattention.

Stinhurst went to his desk, sat behind it in the heavy leather chair.

“Sit down,” he said. His wife didn’t move.

“I asked you a question. I want an answer. Where were you last night? And please don’t ask me to believe that Scotland Yard kept you until nine this morning. I like to think I’m not that much of a fool.”

“I went to an hotel,” Stinhurst said.

“Not your club?”

“No. I wanted anonymity.”

“Something you couldn’t have at home, of course.”

For a moment, Stinhurst said nothing, fi ngering a letter opener that lay on his desk. Long and silver, it caught the light. “I found I couldn’t face you.”

Perhaps more than anything else, her reaction to that single sentence signalled the manner in which their relationship had changed. His voice was even, but brittle, as if the slightest provocation might cause him to break down. His skin was pallid, his eyes bloodshot and, when he placed the letter opener back on his desk, his wife saw that his hands trembled. And yet, she felt herself unmoved by all this, knowing perfectly well that its cause was not his concern for her welfare or the welfare of their daughter or even for himself, but concern over how he was going to keep the story about Geoffrey Rintoul’s despicable life and his violent death out of the newspapers. She had seen Jeremy Vinney herself in the back of the theatre. She knew why he was there. Her anger swelled anew.

“There I was at home, Stuart, patiently waiting as I always have done, worrying about you and what was happening at Scotland Yard. Hour after hour. I thought-I realised only later how foolish I was being-that somehow this tragedy might serve to bring us closer to each other. Imagine my thinking that, in spite of the story you produced about my ‘affair’ with your brother, we might still put this marriage of ours back together. But then you never even phoned, did you? And, like a fool, I waited and waited obediently. Until I fi nally saw that things are quite dead between us. They have been for years, of course, but I was far too afraid to face that. Until last night.”

Lord Stinhurst raised a hand as if in the hope of forestalling further words. “You do choose your moments, don’t you? This isn’t the time to discuss our marriage. I should think you’d see that if nothing else.”

Always, it was his voice of dismissal. So cold and final. So rigid with restraint. Odd, how it didn’t affect her one way or the other now. She smiled politely. “You’ve misunderstood. We aren’t discussing our marriage, Stuart. There’s nothing to discuss.”

“Then why-”

“I’ve told Elizabeth about her grandfather. I thought we might do it together last night. But when you didn’t come home, I told her myself.” She walked across the room to stand in front of his desk. She rested her knuckles against its pristine surface. Her fingers were newly bare of rings. He watched her but did not speak. “And do you know what she said when I told her that her beloved grandfather had killed her uncle Geoffrey, had snapped his handsome neck in two?”

Stinhurst shook his head. He lowered his eyes.

“She said, ‘Mummy, you’re standing in the way of the telly. Would you move, please?’ And I thought, isn’t that rich? All these years, dedicated to protecting the sacred memory of a grandfather she adored, have come down to this. Of course, I stepped out of her way at once. I’m like that, aren’t I? Always cooperative, eager to please. Always hoping things will turn out for the best if I ignore them long enough. I’m a shell of a person in a shell of a marriage, wandering round a fine house in Holland Park with every advantage save the one I’ve wanted so desperately all these years. Love.” Lady Stinhurst watched for a reaction on her husband’s face. There was nothing. She continued. “I knew then that I can’t save Elizabeth. She’s lived in a house of lies and half-truths for too many years. She can only save herself. As can I.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That I’m leaving you,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s permanent. I don’t have the bravado to claim that, I’m afraid. But I’m going to Somerset until I have everything sorted out in my mind, until I know what I want to do. And if it does become permanent, you’re not to worry. I don’t require much. Just a few rooms somewhere and a bit of peace and quiet.

No doubt we can work out an equitable settlement. But if not, our respective solicitors-”

Stinhurst swung his chair to one side. “Don’t do this to me. Not today. Please. Not on top of everything else.”

She gave a regretful laugh. “That’s really what it is, isn’t it? I’m about to cause you one more headache, just another inconvenience. Something else to have to explain away to Inspector Lynley, if it comes down to that. Well, I would have waited, but as I needed to talk to you anyway, now seemed as good a time as any to tell you everything.”

“Everything?” he asked dully.

“Yes. There’s one thing more before I’m on my way. Francesca telephoned this morning. She couldn’t bear it any longer, she said. Not after Gowan. She thought she would be able to. But Gowan was dear to her, and she couldn’t bear to think that she had made less of his life and his death by what she had done. She was willing to at first, for your sake, of course. But she found that she couldn’t keep up the pretence. So she plans to speak to Inspector Macaskin this afternoon.”

“What are you talking about?”

Lady Stinhurst pulled on her gloves, picked up her coat, preparatory to leaving. She took brief, hostile pleasure in her final remarks. “Francesca lied to the police about what she did, and what she saw, the night Joy Sinclair died.”

“I’VE BROUGHT Chinese food, Dad.” Barbara Havers popped her head into the sitting room. “But I shall have to ask you not to fi ght with Mum over the shrimp this time. Where is she?”

Her father sat before the television set, which was tuned deafeningly into BBC-1. The horizontal hold was slipping, and people’s heads were being cut off right at the eyebrows so that it looked a bit like a science fi ction show.

“Dad?” Barbara repeated. He gave no answer. She walked into the room, lowered the volume, and turned to him. He was asleep, his jaw slack, the tubes that fed him oxygen askew in his nostrils. Racing magazines covered the floor near his chair and a newspaper was opened over his knees. It was too hot in the room, in the entire house for that matter, and the musty smell of her parents’ ageing seemed to seep from the walls and the fl oor and the furniture. This mixed with a stronger, more recent scent of food overcooked and inedible.

Barbara’s movement made suffi cient noise to waken her father, and, seeing her, he smiled, showing teeth that were blackened, crooked, and in places altogether missing. “Barbie. Mussa dozed off.”

“Where’s Mum?”

Jimmy Havers blinked, adjusting the tubes in his nostrils and reaching for a handkerchief into which he coughed heavily. His breathing sounded like the bubbling of water. “Just next door. Mrs. Gustafson’s come down with fl u again and Mum’s taken her some soup.”

Knowing her mother’s questionable culinary talents, Barbara wondered briefly if Mrs. Gustafson’s condition would improve or worsen under her ministrations. Nonetheless, she was encouraged by the fact that her mother had ventured out of the house. It was the fi rst time she had done so in years.

“I’ve brought Chinese,” she told her father, indicating the sack she cradled in one arm. “I’m off again tonight, though. I’ve only half an hour to eat.”

Her father frowned. “Mum won’t like that, Barbie. Not one bit.”

“That’s why I’ve brought the food. Peace offering.” She went on to the kitchen at the back of the house.

Her heart sank at the sight of it. A dozen tins of soup were lined up near the sink with their lids gaping open and spoons stuck in them as if her mother had sampled each one before deciding which to offer their neighbour. Three had actually been heated, in separate pans which still stood on the stove with the fire left carelessly on beneath them and their contents burnt to nothing, sending up a scent of scalded vegetables and milk. Perilously near the flame, a package of biscuits lay open, spilling out its contents, its wrapper hastily torn away and part of it discarded on the fl oor.

“Oh hell,” Barbara said wearily, turning off the stove. She put her package down onto the kitchen table, next to her mother’s newest album of travel information. A glance told her that Brazil was this week’s destination, but she wasn’t interested in looking at the collection of brochures and photographs clipped from magazines. She rummaged beneath the sink for a rubbish sack and was dropping the tins of soup into it when the front door opened, hesitant steps teetered down the uncarpeted hall, and her mother appeared at the kitchen door, a badly scored plastic tray in her hands. Soup, biscuits, and a withered apple were all in place upon it.

“It went cold,” Mrs. Havers said, her colourless eyes trying to focus past her own confusion. She was wearing only an irregularly buttoned cardigan over her shabby housedress. “I didn’t think to cover the soup, lovey. And when I got there, her daughter had come to stay and said that Mrs. Gustafson didn’t want it.”

Barbara looked at the curious mixture and blessed Mrs. Gustafson’s daughter for her wisdom if not for her tact. The soup was a blend of everything on the stove, an unappealing concoction of split pea, clam chowder, and tomato with rice. Rapidly cooling in the night air, it had formed a puckered skin on the top so that it vaguely resembled coagulating blood. Her stomach churned uneasily at the sight.

“Well, no matter, Mum,” she said. “You thought about her, didn’t you? And Mrs. Gustafson will be sure to learn of that. You were neighbourly, weren’t you?”

Her mother smiled vacantly. “Yes. I was, wasn’t I?” She set the tray down on the very edge of the table. Barbara lunged forward to catch it before it toppled to the fl oor. “Have you seen Brazil, lovey?” Affectionately, Mrs. Havers fingered the tattered artifi cial leather cover of her album. “I did some more work on it today.”

“Yes. I had a quick glance.” Barbara continued sweeping things off the work top into the rubbish. The sink was piled with unwashed crockery. A faint odour of rot emanated from it, telling her that uneaten food was also buried somewhere beneath the mess. “I’ve brought Chinese,” she told her mother. “I’m off again in a bit, though.”

“Oh, lovey, no,” her mother responded. “In this cold? In the dark? I don’t think that’s wise, do you? Young ladies should not be on the streets alone at night.”

“Police business, Mum,” Barbara replied. She went to the cupboard and saw that only two clean plates were left. No matter, she thought. She would eat out of the cartons once her parents had taken their share.

She was setting the table as her mother puttered uselessly in her wake when the front doorbell rang. They looked at each other.

Her mother’s face clouded. “You don’t suppose that’s…No, I know. Tony won’t come back, will he? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“He’s dead, Mum,” Barbara replied fi rmly. “Put the kettle on for tea. I’ll get the door.”

The bell rang a second time before she had a chance to answer it. Muttering impatiently, flipping on the exterior light, she pulled the door open to see, unbelievably, Lady Helen Clyde standing on the front step. She was dressed completely in black from head to toe, and that should have served as warning enough for Barbara. But at the moment, all she could contemplate was the horrifying thought that, unless this was a nightmare from which she could mercifully awaken, she was going to have to ask the other woman into the house.

The youngest daughter of the tenth Earl of Hesfield, child of a Surrey great house, denizen of one of the most fashionable districts in London. Come to this netherworld of Acton’s worst neighbourhood…for what? Barbara gaped at her wordlessly, looked for a car in the street, and saw Lady Helen’s red Mini parked several doors down. She heard her mother’s nervous whimper some distance behind her.

“Lovey? Who is it? It’s not…”

“No, Mum. It’s fine. Don’t worry,” she called back over her shoulder.

“Forgive me, Barbara,” Lady Helen said. “If there had been any other way, I would have taken it.”

The words brought Barbara back to herself. She held the door open. “Come in.”

When Lady Helen passed her and stood in the hall, Barbara felt herself looking at her home involuntarily, seeing it as the other woman must see it, as a place where lunacy and poverty whirled wildly hand in hand. The worn linoleum on the floor unwashed for months at a time, tracked with footprints and puddles of melted snow; the faded wallpaper peeling away at the corners with a damp patch growing mouldy near the door; the battered stairway with hooks along the wall on which ragged coats hung carelessly, some unworn for years; the old rattan umbrella rack, with great gaping holes in its sides where wet umbrellas had eaten through the palm over time; the odours of burnt food and age and neglect.

My bedroom’s not like this! she wanted to shout. But I can’t keep up with them and pay the bills and cook the meals and see that they clean themselves!

But she said nothing. She merely waited for Lady Helen to speak, feeling a hot tide of shame wash over her when her father shambled to the door of the sitting room in his baggy trousers and stained grey shirt, pulling his oxygen along behind him in its trolley.

“This is my father,” Barbara said and, when her mother peeped out of the kitchen like a frightened mouse, “and my mother.”

Lady Helen went to Jimmy Havers, extending her hand. “I’m Helen Clyde,” she said, and looking into the kitchen, “I’ve interrupted your dinner, haven’t I, Mrs. Havers?”

Jimmy Havers smiled expansively. “Chinese tonight,” he said. “We’ve enough if you want a bite, don’t we, Barbie?”

At another time, Barbara might have taken grim amusement from the thought of Lady Helen Clyde eating Chinese food out of cartons, sitting at the kitchen table and chatting with her mother about the trips to Brazil and Turkey and Greece that occupied the inner reaches of her madness. But now she only felt weak with the humiliation of discovery, with the knowledge that Lady Helen might somehow betray her circumstances to Lynley.

“Thank you,” Lady Helen was replying graciously. “But I’m not at all hungry.” She smiled at Barbara, but it was at best only an unsteady effort.

Seeing this, Barbara realised that whatever her own state was in the face of this visit, Lady Helen’s was worse. Thus, she spoke kindly. “Let me just get them started eating, Helen. The sitting room’s over there if you don’t mind a rather large sort of mess.”

Without waiting to see how Lady Helen might react to her first sight of the sitting room, with its ancient creaking furniture and general air of decay, Barbara ushered her father into the kitchen. She took a moment to soothe her mother’s querulous fears about their unexpected visitor, dishing out rice, fried shrimp, sesame chicken, and oyster beef as she considered why the other woman had appeared on her doorstep. She didn’t want to think that Lady Helen might already be aware of the machinery set in progress for tonight’s arrest. She didn’t want to think that the potential arrest might be the reason for this visit in the first place. Yet, all the time she knew in her heart that there could be no other reason. She and Lady Helen Clyde did not exactly travel in the same circle of friends. This was hardly an impulsive social call.

When Barbara joined her in the sitting room a few minutes later, Lady Helen did not leave her long in suspense. She was sitting on the edge of the sagging, artifi cial horsehair couch, her eyes on the wall opposite where a single photograph of Barbara’s younger brother hung among ten rectangles of darker wallpaper, remnants of a previous collection of memorabilia devoted to his passing. As soon as Barbara entered the room, Lady Helen got to her feet.

“I’m coming with you tonight.” She made a small, embarrassed movement with her hands. “I’d have liked to put that more politely, but there doesn’t seem to be a point, does there?”

There also seemed to be no point to lying. “How did you find out?” Barbara asked.

“I telephoned Tommy about an hour ago. Denton told me he was on a surveillance tonight. Tommy generally doesn’t do surveillance, does he? So I assumed the rest.” She gestured again, with an unhappy smile. “Had I known where the surveillance was to be, I simply would have gone there myself. But I didn’t know. Denton didn’t know. There was no one at the Yard who could or would tell me. So I came to you. And I will follow you there if you don’t let me come with you.” She lowered her voice. “I’m terribly sorry. I know what kind of position this puts you in. I know how angry Tommy will be. With both of us.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

Lady Helen’s eyes moved back to the photograph of Barbara’s brother. It was an old school picture, not very well taken, but it depicted Tony the way Barbara liked to remember him, laughing, showing a missing front tooth, a face freckled and elfish, a mop of hair.

“After…everything that’s happened, I must be there,” Lady Helen said. “It’s a conclusion. I need it. And it seems that the only way I can bring it to an end for myself-the only way I can forgive myself for having been such a blundering fool-is to be there when you take him.” Lady Helen looked back at her. She was, Barbara saw, terribly pale. She looked frail and unwell. “How can I tell you how it feels to know that he used me? To know how I turned on Tommy when all he wanted to do was to show me the truth?”

“We phoned you last night. The inspector has been trying to reach you all day. He’s half-mad with worry.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t…I couldn’t face him.”

“Forgive me for saying so,” Barbara said hesitantly, “but I don’t think the inspector’s taken any pleasure at all from being in the right in this case. Not at your expense.”

She did not go on to mention her afternoon meeting with Lynley, his restless pacing as he set up the surveillance team, his continuous telephone calls to Lady Helen’s flat, to her family’s home in Surrey, to the St. James house. She did not go on to mention his black brooding as the afternoon wore on, or how he jumped for the telephone each time it rang, or how his voice maintained an indifference that was contravened by the tension in his face.

“Will you let me come with you?” Lady Helen asked.

Barbara knew the question was a mere formality. “I don’t see how I can stop you,” she replied.

LYNLEY HAD BEEN at Joy Sinclair’s home in Hampstead since half past four.The members of the surveillance team had arrived not long after, establishing themselves in prearranged locations, two in a dirty van with a fl at tyre parked midway down Flask Walk, another above the bookstore on the corner of Back Lane, another in an herb store, still another on the high street with a view towards the underground station. Lynley himself was in the house, not far from the most logical means of access: the dining-room doors that faced the back garden. He sat in one of the low chairs in the unlit sitting room, monitoring the conversation that came spitting through the radio from his men on the outside.

It was just after eight when the van team announced, “Havers on the lower end of Flask Walk, sir. She’s not alone.”

Perplexed, Lynley got to his feet, went to the front door, and cracked it open just as Sergeant Havers and Lady Helen passed under a street lamp, their faces exposed in its eerie amber glow. After a quick survey of the street, they hurried into the front garden and through the door.

“What in God’s name-” Lynley began hotly once he’d shut the door behind him and they stood in a circle of darkness within the hall.

“I gave her no choice, Tommy,” Lady Helen said. “Denton told me you were on a surveillance. I put the rest together and went to Sergeant Havers’ house.”

“I won’t have you here. Damn it all, anything could happen.” Lynley walked into the sitting room where the radio was, picked it up, and began to speak. “I’m going to need a man here to-”

“No! Don’t do this to me!” Lady Helen reached out desperately but did not touch him. “I did just what you asked of me last night. I did everything you asked. So let me be here now. I need to be, Tommy. I won’t get in your way. I promise. I swear it. Just let me end this the way I need to. Please.” He felt suddenly torn by irrational indecision. He knew what he had to do. He knew what was right. She no more belonged here than caught up in the middle of a public brawl. Words came to his lips-appropriate and dutiful-but before he could say them, she spoke in a manner that struck him to the quick. “Let me get over Rhys the best way I know how. I beg it of you, Tommy.”

“Inspector?” a voice crackled from the radio.

Lynley’s own voice was harsh. “It’s all right. Maintain your positions.”

“Thank you,” Lady Helen whispered.

He couldn’t reply. All he could think of was the single most telling remark she had made. I did everything you asked. Remembering her final words to him last night, he couldn’t bear the thought of what that meant. Unable to respond, he moved past her into a dim corner of the dining room, flicked the curtains a scant inch to view Back Lane, saw nothing, and returned. Their long waiting together began.

FOR THE NEXT six hours, Lady Helen was as good as her word. She did not move from the chair she had taken in the sitting room. She did not speak. There were times when Lynley thought she was asleep, but he could not see her face clearly. It was merely a ghostly blur under the black bandana she wore.

A trick of lighting made her seem insubstantial, as if she were fading from him, the way an image on a photograph does over time.

The soft brown eyes, the arch of brow, the gentle curve of cheek and lips, the frankly stubborn chin-all these became less defi nite as the hours passed. And as he sat opposite her, with Sergeant Havers making a third of their triangle of anticipation, he felt a yearning for her that he had never known before, having nothing at all to do with sex and everything to do with the soul’s calling out to a spirit kindred and essential to the completion of one’s own. He felt as if he had been travelling a great distance, only to arrive where he had started, only to know the place truly and for the very fi rst time.

Yet all along he had the distinct sensation of being too late.

The radio crackled to life at ten past two. “Company, Inspector. Coming down Flask Walk…Keeping hard to the shadows…Oh, very nice technique, that…An eye out for cop-pers…Dark clothes, dark knit cap, collar on the coat pulled up…Stopped now. Three doors down from the nest.” There was a pause of several minutes’ duration. Then the whispered monologue began again. “Crossed the street for another look…Continuing the approach… Crossing over again towards Back Lane…This is our baby, Inspector. No one walks this way down a street at two in the morning in this kind of weather… Giving it over. I’ve lost sight… Turned down Back Lane.”

Another voice picked it up, said only, “Suspect approaching the garden wall…pulling something down over the face…running a hand along the bricks…”

Lynley switched off the radio. He moved noiselessly into the deepest shadows of the dining room. Sergeant Havers followed. Behind them, Lady Helen stood.

At first Lynley saw nothing beyond the dining room doors. And then a black shape appeared against the inky sky as the intruder’s body rose to the top of the garden wall. A leg swung to the inside, then another. Then a soft thud as he hit the ground. No face was visible, which at first seemed impossible since there was light enough from both stars and the street lamps on Back Lane to illuminate the snow, the sketching of the tree against it, the contrast of mortar against the brick wall, even to a certain extent the interior of the house. But then Lynley saw that the man was wearing a ski mask. And suddenly he was so much less of an intruder, so much more of a killer.

“Helen, go back in the sitting room,” Lynley breathed. But she did not move. He looked over his shoulder to see that her wide eyes were fixed upon the figure in the garden, upon his stealthy progress to the door. Her fi st was raised, clenched to her lips.

And then the unbelievable happened.

As he mounted the four steps, reached a hand out to try the door, Lady Helen cried frantically, “No! Oh God, Rhys!”

And chaos erupted.

Outside, the figure froze only for an instant before he bolted for the wall and took it in a single leap.

“Jesus Christ!” Sergeant Havers shouted and headed for the dining room doors, fl inging them open, letting in a rush of freezing night air.

Lynley felt immobilised by the force of disbelief at what Helen had done. She couldn’t have…She hadn’t meant…She would never… She was coming towards him in the darkness.

“Tommy, please…”

Her shattered voice brought him to his senses abruptly. Shoving her to one side, he dashed for the radio and said tersely, “We’ve lost him.” That done, he ran for the front door, raced outside, insensible to the sound of pursuit behind him.

“Up towards the high street!” a voice shouted from above the bookstore across the street as Lynley tore past.

He did not need to hear it. Ahead of him, he saw the black shape running, heard the frantic pounding of his footsteps on the pavement, saw him slip on a patch of ice, right himself, and run on. He was not bothering to seek the safety of the shadows. Instead he dashed down the middle of the street, flashing in and out of the light from the street lamps. The sound of his flight thundered on the night air.

A few steps behind him, Lynley heard Sergeant Havers. She was running at full speed, cursing Lady Helen violently with every foul word she knew.

“Police!” The two constables from the van had exploded round the corner, coming up quickly behind them.

Ahead, their quarry burst onto Heath Street, one of the larger arteries of Hampstead Village. The headlamps of an oncoming car trapped him like an animal. Tyres screeched, a horn honked wildly. A large Mercedes skidded to a stop inches from his thighs. But he did not run on. Instead, he whirled, lunging for the door. Even at the distance of half a block, Lynley could hear the terrifi ed screaming from inside the car.

“You! Stop!” Another constable charged round the corner from the high street, less than thirty yards from the Mercedes. At the shout, however, the black-garbed fi gure spun to the right and continued his flight up the hill.

But the pause at the car had cost him time and distance, and Lynley was gaining on him, was close enough to hear the roaring of his lungs as he surged towards a narrow stone stairway that led to the hillside and the neighbourhood above. He took the steps three at a time, stopping at the top where a metal basket of empty milk bottles stood outside the shadowed arch of a front door. Grabbing this, he hurled it down the steps in his wake before running on, but the shattering glass served only to frighten several neighbourhood dogs who set up a tremendous howling. Lights went on in the buildings that lined the stairs, making Lynley’s going easier and the broken glass nothing to contend with at all.

At the top of the stairs, the street was sided by enormous beech and sycamore trees that filled it with looming shadows. Lynley paused there, listening against the night wind and the howling animals for the sound of fl ight, looking for movement in the darkness. Havers came up next to him, still cursing as she gasped for breath.

“Where’s he-”

Lynley heard it first, coming from his left. The dull thud against metal as the runner- his vision impaired by the ski mask-fell against a dustbin. It was all Lynley needed.

“He’s heading for the church!” He spun Havers back to the stairs. “Go for the others,” he ordered. “Tell them to head him off at St. John’s! Now!”

Lynley didn’t wait to see if she would obey. The pounding footsteps ahead of him drew him back into the chase, across Holly Hill to a narrow street where he saw in a moment of triumph that every advantage was going to be his. A series of high walls along one side, an open green on the other. The street offered absolutely no protection. In an instant he saw his man some forty yards ahead, turning into a gateway that was open in the wall. When he reached the gate himself, he saw that the snow had gone uncleared in the drive, that elongated footprints led across a broad lawn into a garden. There, a struggling form battled a hedge of holly, his clothes snagging on the spiny leaves. He gave a raw cry of pain. A dog began to bark furiously. Floodlights switched on. On the high street below, the sirens started, grew maddeningly loud as the police cars approached.

This last seemed to give the man the rush of adrenaline he needed to free himself from the bushes. As Lynley closed in, he cast a wild glance towards him, gauged his proximity, and tore himself from the plants’ painful embrace. He fell to his knees-free-on the other side of the hedge, scrambled back up, ran on. Lynley spun in the other direction, saw a second gate in the wall, and ploughed his way to it through the snow at the cost of at least thirty seconds. He threw himself into the street.

To his right, St. John’s Church loomed beyond a low brick wall. There, a shadow moved, crouched, leaped, and was over it. Lynley ran on.

He took the wall easily himself, landing in the snow. In an instant he saw a fi gure moving swiftly to his left, heading for the graveyard. The sound of sirens grew nearer, the sound of tyres against wet pavement echoed and shrieked.

Lynley fought his way through a snowdrift up to his knees, gained hold on a spot of cleared pavement. Ahead, the dark shape began dodging through the graves.

It was the kind of mistake Lynley had been waiting for. The snow was deeper in the graveyard, some tombstones were buried completely. Within moments, he heard the other man thrashing frantically as he crashed into markers, trying to make his way across to the far wall and the street beyond it.

Nearby, the sirens stopped, the blue lights flashed and twirled, and police began to swarm over the wall. They were carrying torches which they shone on the snow, white light arcing out to catch the runner in its glare. But it also served to illuminate the graves distinctly, and he picked up his pace, dodging sarcophagi and monuments, as he headed for the wall.

Lynley stuck to the cleared path which wound through the trees, thickly planted pines that spread their needles on the pavement, providing a rough surface for his shoes against the ice. He gained time from ease of movement here, precious seconds that he used to locate his man.

He was perhaps twenty feet from the wall. To his left two constables were fi ghting their way through the snow. Behind him, Havers was on his path through the graves. To his right was Lynley, on a dead run. There was no escape. Yet, with a savage cry that seemed to signal a final surge of strength, he made a leap upwards. But Lynley was on him too quickly.

The man whirled, swung wildly. Lynley loosened his grasp to dodge the punch, giving the other a second’s opportunity to climb the wall. He made his vault, caught at the top, gripped fiercely, lifted his body, began to go over.

But Lynley countered. Grabbing at his black sweater, he pulled him back, locked his arm round the man’s neck, and flung him into the snow. He stood panting above him as Havers arrived at his side, wheezing like a distance runner. The two constables ploughed their way up and one of them managed to say, “You’re done for, son,” before he gave way to a fit of coughing.

Lynley reached forward, yanked the man to his feet, pulled off his ski mask, jerked him into the torchlight.

It was David Sydeham.