Payment in Blood

2

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Thomas Lynley received the message shortly before ten that morning. He had gone out to Castle Sennen Farm for a look at their new livestock and was on his way back in the estate Land Rover when his brother intercepted him, hailing him from horseback as he reined in a heaving bay whose breath steamed from fl aring nostrils. It was bitterly cold, far more so than was normal in Cornwall even at this time of year, and Lynley’s eyes narrowed against it defensively as he lowered the Rover’s window. “You’ve a message from London,” Peter Lynley shouted, wrapping the reins expertly round his hand. The mare tossed her head, sidestepping deliberately close to the dry-stone wall that served as border between field and road. “Superintendent Webberly. Something about Strathclyde CID. He wants you to phone him as soon as you can.”

“That’s all?”

The bay danced in a circle as if trying to rid herself of the burden on her back, and Peter laughed at the challenge to his authority. They battled for a moment, each determined to dominate the other, but Peter controlled the reins with a hand that knew instinctively when to let the horse feel the bit and when it would be an infringement on the animal’s spirit to do so. He whipped her round in the fallow field, as if to circle had been an agreed-upon idea between them, and brought her chest forward to the frostrimed wall.

“Hodge took the call.” Peter grinned. “You know the sort of thing. ‘Scotland Yard for his lordship. Shall I go or you?’ Oozing disapproval from every pore as he spoke.”

“Nothing’s changed there,” was Lynley’s response. Having been in his family’s employ for over thirty years, the old butler had for the last twelve refused to come to terms with what he stubbornly referred to as “his lordship’s whimsy,” as if at any moment Lynley might come to his senses, see the light, and begin to live in its radiance in a manner to which Hodge fervently hoped he would become accustomed-in Cornwall, at Howenstow, as far as possible from New Scotland Yard. “What did Hodge tell him?”

“Probably that you were engaged in receiving obsequious servilities from your tenants. You know. ‘His lordship is out on the land at the moment.’” Peter did a fair imitation of the butler’s funereal tones. Both brothers laughed. “Do you want to ride back? It’s faster than the Rover.”

“Thanks, no. I’m afraid I’ve grown far too attached to my neck.” Lynley put the car noisily in gear. Startled, the horse reared and plunged to one side, ignoring bit, rein, and heels in her desire to be off. Hooves clashed against rocks, whinny changed to a rolling-eyed call of fear. Lynley said nothing as he watched his brother struggle with the animal, knowing it was useless to ask him to be careful. The immediacy of danger and the fact that a wrong move could mean a broken bone were what attracted Peter to the horse in the fi rst place.

As it was, Peter flung back his head in exhilaration. He’d come without a hat, and his hair shone in the winter sunlight, close-cropped to his skull like a golden cap. His hands were work-hardened, and even in winter his skin retained its tan, coloured by the months that he spent toiling in the southwestern sun. He was vibrantly alive, inordinately youthful. Watching him, Lynley felt decades more than ten years his senior.

“Hey, Saffron!” Peter shouted, wheeled the horse away from the wall, and, with a wave, shot off across the field. He would indeed reach Howenstow long before his brother.

When horse and rider had disappeared through a windbreak of sycamores at the far side of the field, Lynley pressed down on the accelerator, muttered in exasperation as the old car slipped momentarily out of gear, and hobbled his way back down the narrow lane.

LYNLEY PLACED his call to London from the small alcove off the drawing room. It was his personal sanctuary, built directly over the entrance porch of his family’s home and furnished at the turn of the century by his grandfather, a man with an acute understanding of what made life bearable. An undersized mahogany desk sat beneath two narrow mullioned windows. Bookshelves held a variety of entertaining volumes and several bound decades of Punch. An ormolu clock ticked on the overmantel of the fireplace, near which a comfortable reading chair was drawn. It had always been an altogether welcoming site at the end of a tiring day.

Waiting for Webberly’s secretary to track down the superintendent and wondering what both of them were doing at New Scotland Yard on a winter weekend, Lynley gazed out the window at the expansive garden below. His mother was there, a tall slim fi gure buttoned into a heavy pea jacket with an American baseball cap covering her sandy hair. She was involved in a discussion with one of the gardeners, a fact which prevented her from noticing that her retriever had fallen upon a glove she had dropped and was treating it as a midmorning snack. Lynley smiled as his mother caught sight of the dog. She shrieked and wrestled the glove away.

When Webberly’s voice crackled over the line, it sounded as if he had come to the phone on a run. “We’ve a dicey situation,” the superintendent announced with no prefatory remarks. “Some Drury Laners, a corpse, and the local police acting as if it’s an outbreak of the bubonic plague. They put in a call to their local CID, Strathclyde. Strathclyde won’t touch it. It’s ours.”

“Strathclyde?” Lynley repeated blankly. “But that’s in Scotland.”

He was stating the obvious to his commanding officer. Scotland had its own police force. Rarely did they call for assistance from the Yard. Even when they did so, the complexities of Scottish law made it difficult for the London police to work there effectively and impossible for them to take part in any subsequent court prosecutions. Something wasn’t right. Lynley felt suspicion nag, but he temporised with:

“Isn’t there someone else on call this weekend?” He knew that Webberly would supply the rest of the details attendant to that remark: it was the fourth time in five months that he had called Lynley back to duty in the middle of his time off.

“I know, I know,” Webberly responded brusquely. “But this can’t be helped. We’ll sort it all out when it’s over.”

“When what’s over?”

“It’s one hell of a mess.” Webberly’s voice faded as someone else in his London offi ce began to speak, tersely and at considerable length.

Lynley recognised that rumbling baritone. It belonged to Sir David Hillier, chief superintendent. Something was in the wind, indeed. As he listened, straining to catch Hillier’s words, the two men apparently reached some sort of decision, for Webberly went on in a more confi dential tone, as if he were speaking on an unsafe line and were wary of listeners.

“As I said, it’s dicey. Stuart Rintoul, Lord Stinhurst, is involved. Do you know him?”

“Stinhurst. The producer?”

“The same. Midas of the Stage.”

Lynley smiled at the epithet. It was very apt. Lord Stinhurst had made his reputation in London theatre by financing one successful show after another. A man with a keen sense of what the public would love and a willingness to take enormous risks with his money, he had a singular ability to recognise new talent, to cull prize-winning scripts from the chaff of mundanity that passed across his desk every day. His latest challenge, as anyone who read The Times could report, had been the acquisition and renovation of London ’s derelict Agincourt Theatre, a project into which Lord Stinhurst had invested well over a million pounds. The new Agincourt was scheduled to open in purported triumph in just two months. With that hovering so near in the future, it seemed inconceivable to Lynley that Stinhurst would leave London for even a short holiday. He was a single-minded perfectionist, a man in his seventies who had not taken any time off in years. It was part of his legend. So what was he doing in Scotland?

Webberly went on, as if answering Lynley’s unasked question. “Apparently Stinhurst took a group up there to do some work on a script that was supposed to take the city by storm when the Agincourt opens. And they’ve a newspaperman with them-some chap from The Times. Drama critic, I think. Apparently he’s been reporting on the Agincourt story from day one. But from what I was told this morning, right now he’s frothing at the mouth to get to a telephone before we can get up there and muzzle him.”

“Why?” Lynley asked and in a moment knew that Webberly had been saving the juiciest item for last.

“Because Joanna Ellacourt and Robert Gabriel are to be the stars of Lord Stinhurst’s new production. And they’re in Scotland as well.”

Lynley could not suppress a low whistle of surprise. Joanna Ellacourt and Robert Gabriel. These were nobility of the theatre indeed, the two most sought-after actors in the country at the moment. In their years of partnership, Ellacourt and Gabriel had electrifi ed the stage in everything from Shakespeare to Stop-pard to O’Neill. Although they worked apart as often as they appeared together, it was when they took the stage as a couple that the magic occurred. And then the newspaper notices were always the same. Chemistry, wit, hot-wired sexual tension that an audience can feel. Most recently, Lynley recalled, in Othello, a Hay-market production that had run to sell-out crowds for months before fi nally closing just three weeks ago.

“Who’s been killed?” Lynley asked.

“The author of the new play. Some up-andcomer, evidently. A woman. Name of…” There was a rustle of paper. “Joy Sinclair.” Webberly harrumphed, always prelude to an unpleasant piece of news. It came with his next statement. “They’ve moved the body, I’m afraid.”

“Damn and blast!” Lynley muttered. It would contaminate the murder scene, making his job more diffi cult.

“I know. I know. But it can’t be helped now, can it? At any rate, Sergeant Havers will meet you at Heathrow. I’ve put you both on the one o’clock to Edinburgh.”

“Havers won’t work for this, sir. I’ll need St. James if they’ve moved the body.”

“St. James isn’t Yard any longer, Inspector. I can’t push that through on such short notice. If you want to take a forensic specialist, use one of our own men, not St. James.”

Lynley was quite ready to parry the fi nality of that decision, intuitively comprehending why he had been called in on the case rather than any other DI who would be on duty this weekend. Stuart Rintoul, the Earl of Stinhurst, was obviously under suspicion for this murder, but they wanted the kind of kid-glove handling that would be guaranteed by the presence of the eighth Earl of Asherton, Lynley himself. Peer speaking to peer in just-oneof-us-boys fashion, probing delicately for the truth. That was all well and good, but as far as Lynley was concerned, if Webberly was going to play fast and loose with the duty roster in order to orchestrate a meeting between Lords Stinhurst and Asherton, he was not about to make his own job more difficult by having Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers along, chomping at the bit to be the first from her grammar school to slap handcuffs on an earl.

To Sergeant Havers, life’s central problems-from the crisis in the economy to the rise in sexual diseases-all sprang from the class system, fully blown and developed, a bit like Athena from the head of Zeus. The entire subject of class, in fact, was the sorest of tender spots between them and it had proved to be the foundation, the structure, and the fi nial of every verbal battle Lynley had engaged in with her during the fifteen months that Havers had been assigned as his partner.

“This case doesn’t speak to Havers’ particular strengths,” Lynley said reasonably. “Any objectivity she has will be shot to hell the minute she learns that Lord Stinhurst might be involved.”

“She’s grown past that. And if she hasn’t, it’s time she did if she wants to get anywhere with you.”

Lynley shuddered at the thought that the superintendent might be implying that he and Sergeant Havers were about to become a permanent team, joined in a wedlock of careers he would never be able to escape. He looked for a way to use his superior’s decision about Havers as part of a compromise that would meet his own needs. He found it by playing to a previous comment.

“If that’s your decision, sir,” he said equably. “But as to the complications attached to the removal of the body, St. James has more crime-scene experience than anyone currently on staff. You know better than I that he was our best crime-scene man then and…”

“Our best crime-scene man now. I know the standard line, Inspector. But we’ve a time problem here. St. James can’t possibly be given-” A short bark of conversation from Chief Superintendent Hillier interrupted in the background. It was immediately muffl ed, no doubt by Webberly’s hand over the mouthpiece. After a moment, the superintendent said, “All right. St. James has approval. Just get going, get up there and see to the mess.” He coughed, cleared his throat, and fi nished with, “I’m not any happier than you are about this, Tommy.”

Webberly rang off at once, allowing no time for either further discussion or questions. It was only when he was holding the dead telephone in his hand that Lynley had a moment to consider two curious details inherent to the conversation. He had been told virtually nothing about the crime, and for the fi rst time in their twelve years of association, the superintendent had called Lynley by his Christian name. An odd cause for unease, to be sure. Yet he found himself wondering for the briefest of moments what was really at the root of this murder in Scotland.

WHEN HE left both alcove and drawing room- on his way to his own suite of rooms in Howenstow’s east wing-the name fi nally struck Lynley. Joy Sinclair. He had seen it somewhere. And not all that long ago. He paused in the corridor next to a fruitwood mule chest and gazed, unfocussed, at the porcelain bowl on its top. Sinclair. Sinclair. It seemed so familiar, so within his grasp.The bowl’s delicate pattern of blue against white blurred in his vision, the figures overlapping, crossing, inverting…

Inverting. Back to front. Playing with words. It hadn’t been Joy Sinclair he had seen, but Sinclair’s Joy, a headline in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. It had been an obvious aren’t-we-clever inversion that was followed by the teasing phrase: “A score with Darkness and on to bigger things.”

He remembered thinking that the headline made her sound like a blind athlete on her way to the Olympics. And aside from the fact that he’d read far enough into the article to discover that she was no athlete but rather an author whose first play had been well received by critics and audiences seeking respite from London’s usual glitzy fare, and whose second play would open the Agincourt Theatre, he had learned nothing else. For a call from Scotland Yard had sent him to Hyde Park and a fi veyear-old girl’s naked body, shoved in among the bushes beneath the Serpentine Bridge.

Little wonder he’d not remembered Sinclair’s name until this moment. The devastating sight of Megan Walsham, the knowledge of what she’d suffered before she died, had driven every other thought from his mind for weeks. He’d moved through time in a fury, sleeping, eating, and drinking his need to fi nd Megan’s killer…and then arresting the child’s maternal uncle…and then having to tell her distraught mother who was responsible for the rape and mutilation and murder of her youngest child.

He had just come off that case, in fact. Bone-weary from long days and longer nights, yearning for rest, for a spiritual ablution to wash the filth of murder and inhumanity from his soul.

It was not to be. At least neither here nor now. He sighed, rapped his fingers sharply against the chest, and went to pack.

DETECTIVE CONSTABLE Kevin Lonan loathed drinking his tea from a flask. It always developed a repulsive film that reminded him of bath scum. For that reason, when circumstances required him to pour his longed-for afternoon cuppa from a dented Thermos resurrected from a cobwebbed corner of the Strathclyde CID office, he gagged down only a mouthful before dumping the rest out onto the meagre strip of tarmac that comprised the local airfield. Grimacing, wiping his mouth on the back of his gloved hand, he beat his arms to improve his circulation. Unlike yesterday, the sun was out, glittering like a false promise of spring against the plump drifts of snow, but still the temperature was well below freezing. And the thick bank of clouds riding down from the north promised another storm. If the party from Scotland Yard was to put in an appearance, they had better be fl aming quick about it, Lonan thought morosely.

As if in response, the steady throb of rotor blades cut through the air from the east. A moment later, a Royal Scottish Police helicopter came into view. It circled Ardmucknish Bay in a tentative survey of what the ground afforded as a landing site, then slowly touched down on a square in the tarmac that a wheezing snowplough had cleared for it thirty minutes earlier. Its rotor blades kept spinning, sending up minor snow flurries from the drifts that bordered the airfield. The noise was teeth-jarring.

The helicopter’s passenger door was shoved open by a short, plump fi gure, muffl ed like a mummy from head to toe in what looked like someone’s old brown carpeting. Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lonan decided. She threw down the steps the way one would fl ing a rope ladder over the side of a tree house, pitched out three pieces of luggage, which hit the ground with a thud, and plopped herself after them. A man followed her. He was very tall, very blond, his head bare to the cold, a well-cut cashmere overcoat, a muffl er, and gloves his only capitulation to the subfreezing temperature. He would be Inspector Lynley, Lonan thought, the object of Strathclyde CID’s particular interest at the moment, considering how his arrival had been manipulated by London from beginning to end. Lonan watched him exchanging a few words with the other officer. She gestured towards the van, and Lonan expected them at that point to join him. Instead, however, they both turned to the helicopter’s steps where a third person was slowly negotiating his descent, one made awkward and diffi cult by the heavy brace he wore upon his left leg. Like the blond, he also had no hat, and his black hair-curly, far too long, and wildly ungovernable-blew about his pale face. His features were sharp, excessively angular. He had the look of a man who never missed a detail.

At this unexpected arrival, Constable Lonan mouthed unspoken words of awe and wondered if Detective Inspector Macaskin had been given the news. London was sending in the heavy artillery: forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James. The constable pushed himself off the side of the van and marched eagerly to the helicopter, where the arrivals were folding the steps back inside and gathering their belongings.

“Have you ever given thought to the fact that there might be something breakable in my suitcase, Havers?” Lynley was asking.

“Packing on-the-job drinks?” was her tart reply. “If you’ve brought your own whisky, more the fool you. That’s a bit like taking coals to Newcastle, wouldn’t you say?”

“That has the sound of a line you’ve been waiting to use for months.” Lynley gave a wave and a nod of thanks to the helicopter’s pilot as Lonan joined them.

When the introductions were made, Lonan blurted out, “I heard you speak once in Glasgow,” as he shook St. James’ hand. Even inside the glove, Lonan could sense how thin it was, yet it gripped his own with surprising strength. “It was the lecture on the Cradley murders.”

“Ah, yes. Putting a man behind bars on the strength of his pubic hair,” Sergeant Havers murmured.

“Which is, if nothing else, metaphorically unsound,” Lynley added.

It was obvious that St. James was accustomed to the verbal sparring of his two companions, for he merely smiled and said, “We were lucky to have it. God knows we had nothing else but a set of teeth prints gone bad on the corpse.”

Lonan itched to discuss all the quixotic convolutions of that case with the man who four years ago had unravelled them before an astounded jury. However, as he was winding himself up to hurl a dagger-like insight, he remembered Detective Inspector Macaskin, who was awaiting their arrival at the police station, no doubt with his usual brand of tense, hall-pacing impatience.

“Van’s over here” replaced his scintillating observation about the distortion of teeth marks kept preserved on fl esh in formaldehyde. He jerked his head towards the police vehicle, and, as they gave their attention to it, his features settled into a non-verbal apology. He hadn’t thought there would be three of them.

Nor had he thought they would bring St. James. Had he known, he would have insisted upon driving something more suitable in which to fetch them, perhaps Inspector Macaskin’s new Volvo which, if nothing else, had a front and rear seat and a heater that worked. The vehicle he was leading them towards had only two front seats-both belching forth stuffing and springs-and a single folding chair that was wedged in the back among two crime-scene kits, three lengths of rope, several folded tarpaulins, a ladder, a toolbox, and a pile of greasy rags. It was an embarrassment. Yet, if the trio from London noticed, they didn’t comment. They merely arranged themselves logically with St. James in the front and the two others riding in the rear, Lynley taking the chair at Sergeant Havers’ insistence.

“Wouldn’t want you to get your pretty topcoat dirty,” she said, before fl opping down on the tarpaulins, where she unwound a good thirty inches of muffler from her face.

Lonan took the opportunity of getting a better look at Sergeant Havers when she did so. Homely sort, he thought, surveying her snubby features, heavy brows, and round cheeks. She certainly hadn’t got herself into this kind of exalted company on her looks. He decided that she had to be some sort of criminological wunderkind, and he gave serious consideration to watching her every move.

“Thank you, Havers,” Lynley was responding placidly. “God knows a spot of grease would reduce me to uselessness in less than a minute.”

Havers snorted. “Let’s have a fag on it, then.”

Lynley obliged by producing a gold cigarette case, which he handed to her, following it with a silver lighter. Lonan’s heart sank. Smokers, he thought, and resigned himself to a bout of stinging eyes and clogged sinuses. Havers did not light up, however, because hearing their conversation, St. James opened his window and let in a sharp waft of freezing air, which struck her right in the face.

“Enough. I get the picture,” Havers groused. She pocketed six cigarettes unashamedly and gave the case back to Lynley. “Has St. James always been this subtle?”

“Since the day he was born,” Lynley replied.

Lonan started the van with a lurch, and they headed towards the CID office in Oban.

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Ian Macaskin of Strathclyde CID was driven in life by a single fuel: pride. It took a number of distinct and unrelated forms, the first being familial. He liked people to know that he had beaten the odds. Married at twenty to a seventeen-year-old girl, he had stayed married to her for the next twenty-seven years, had raised two sons, had seen them through university and on to careers, one a veterinarian and the other a marine biolo-gist.Then there was physical pride.At fi ve feet nine inches tall, he weighed no more than he had as a twenty-one-year-old constable. His body was trim and fit from rowing back and forth across the Sound of Kerrera every night in the summer and doing much the same on a rowing machine he kept in his sitting room all winter long. Although his hair was completely grey and had been for the last ten years, it was still thick, shining like silver in the fl uorescent lights of the police station. And that same police station was his last source of pride. In his career, he had never once closed a case without making an arrest, and he expended considerable energy making certain that his men could say the same about themselves. He operated a tight investigations unit in which his officers ran every detail to ground like hounds after a fox. He saw to that. As a result, he was omnipresent in the office. Nervous energy personifi ed, he bit his fi ngernails down to the quick, sucking on breath mints or chewing gum or eating sacks of potato crisps in an effort to break himself of this single bad habit.

Inspector Macaskin met the London party not in his office but in a conference room, a ten-by-fifteen-foot cubicle with uncomfortable furniture, inadequate lighting, and poor ventilation. He had chosen it deliberately.

He was not at all happy with the way this case was beginning. Macaskin liked to pigeonhole, liked to have everything put in its proper place with no muss and no fuss. Each person involved was supposed to act out his appropriate role. Victims die, police question, suspects answer, and crime-scene men collect. But right from the beginning, aside from the victim, who was cooperatively inanimate, the suspects had been doing the questioning and the police had been answering. As for the evidence, that was something else entirely.

“Explain that to me again.” Inspector Lynley’s voice was even, but it carried a deadly tone that told Macaskin that Lynley had not been made party to the peculiar circumstances that surrounded his assignment to this case. That was good. It made Macaskin decide to like the Scotland Yard detective right on the spot.

They had shed their outer garments and were sitting round the pine conference table, all save Lynley, who was on his feet, his hands in his pockets and something dangerous simmering behind his eyes.

Macaskin was only too happy to go over the story again. “Hadn’t been at Westerbrae thirty minutes this morning before there was a message to phone my people at CID. Chief Constable informed me that Scotland Yard would be handling the case. That’s all. Couldn’t get another word out of him. Just instructions to leave men at the house, come back here and wait for you. Way I see it is that some highbrow at your end made the decision that this would be a Yard operation. He gave our chief constable the word and, to keep things on the up and up, we cooperatively put in a ‘call for help.’ You’re it.”

Lynley and St. James exchanged unreadable glances. The latter spoke. “But why did you move the body?”

“Part of the order,” Macaskin answered. “Blasted strange, if you ask me. Seal the rooms, pick up the package and bring her in for autopsy after our medical examiner did us his usual honour of proclaiming her dead on the scene.”

“A bit of divide and conquer,” Sergeant Havers remarked.

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?” Lynley replied. “Strathclyde deals with the physical evidence, London deals with the suspects. And if someone somewhere gets lucky and we fail to communicate properly, everything gets swept under the nearest rug.”

“But whose rug?”

“Yes. That is the question, isn’t it?” Lynley stared down at the conference table, at the stains created by myriad coffee rings that looped across its surface. “What exactly happened?” he asked Macaskin.

“The girl, Mary Agnes Campbell, found the body at six-fifty this morning. We were called at seven-ten. We got out there at nine.”

“Nearly two hours?”

Lonan answered. “Storm last night closed the roads down, Inspector. Westerbrae’s fi ve miles from the nearest village, and none of the roads were ploughed yet.”

“Why in God’s name did a group from London come to such a remote location?”

“Francesca Gerrard-widowed lady, the owner of Westerbrae-is Lord Stinhurst’s sister,” Macaskin explained. “Evidently she’s had some big plans of turning her estate into a posh country hotel. It sits right on Loch Achiemore, and I suppose she envisaged it as quite the romantic holiday destination. Place for newlyweds. You know the sort of thing.” Macaskin grimaced, decided that he sounded more like an advertising agent than a policeman, and finished hastily with, “She’s done a bit of redecorating and, from what I could gather this morning, Stinhurst brought his people up here to give her a chance to work out the kinks in her operation before she actually opened to the public.”

“What about the victim, Joy Sinclair? Do you have anything much on her?”

Macaskin folded his arms, scowled, and wished he had been able to wrest more information from the group at Westerbrae before he had been ordered to leave. “Little enough. Author of the play they’d come to work on this weekend. A lady of some letters, from what I could gather from Vinney.”

“Vinney?”

“Newspaperman. Jeremy Vinney, drama critic for the Times. Seems to have been fairly thick with Sinclair. And more broken up about her death than anyone else, from what I could tell. Odd, too, when you think about it.”

“Why?”

“Because her sister’s there as well. But while Vinney was demanding an arrest that very minute, Irene Sinclair had absolutely nothing to say. Didn’t even ask how her sister had been done in. Didn’t care, if you ask me.”

“Odd indeed,” Lynley remarked.

St. James stirred. “Did you say there’s more than one room involved?”

Macaskin nodded. He went over to a second table which abutted the wall and picked up several folders and a roll of paper. The latter he smoothed out on the tabletop, revealing a more than adequate floor plan of the house. It was extraordinarily detailed, considering the time constraints that had been put upon him at Westerbrae this morning, and Macaskin smiled at his finished work with real pleasure. Weighing it down at either end with the folders, he gestured to the right.

“Victim’s room is on the east side of the house.” He opened one of the folders and glanced at his notes before continuing. “One side of her was the room belonging to Joanna Ellacourt and her husband…David Sydeham. Other side was a young woman…here it is. Lady Helen Clyde. It’s this second room that’s been sealed off.” He looked up in time to see the surprise on all three of the London faces. “You know these people?”

“Just Lady Helen Clyde. She works with me,” St. James replied. He looked at Lynley. “Did you know Helen was coming to Scotland, Tommy? I thought she’d planned to go to Cornwall with you.”

“She begged off the trip last Monday night, so I went alone.” Lynley looked at the fl oor plan, touching his fingers meditatively to it. “Why has Helen’s room been sealed?”

“It adjoins the victim’s room,” Macaskin answered.

“Now there’s a piece of luck,” St. James said with a smile. “Leave it to our Helen to get herself booked right next door to a murder. We’ll want to talk to her at once.”

Macaskin frowned at this and leaned forward, placing himself squarely between the two men to get their attention with a physical intrusion before he went on with a verbal one. “Inspector,” he said, “about Lady Helen Clyde.” Something in his voice arrested the other two men’s conversation. Warily, they looked at each other as Macaskin added grimly, “About her room.”

“What about it?”

“It appears to be the means of access.”

LYNLEY WAS STILL trying to understand what Helen was doing with a group of actors in Scotland when Inspector Macaskin imparted this new piece of information.

“What makes you think that?” he asked at last, although his mind was taken up mostly with his last conversation with Helen, less than a week ago in his library in London. She’d been wearing the loveliest jade-coloured wool, had tasted his new Spanish sherry- laughing and chatting in that light-hearted way of hers-and had rushed off promptly to meet someone for dinner. Who? he wondered now. She hadn’t said. He hadn’t asked.

Macaskin, he noted, was watching him like a man who had things on his mind and was merely waiting for the right opportunity to trot them all out.

“Because the victim’s hall door was locked,” Macaskin replied. “When Mary Agnes tried to rouse her without success this morning, she had to use the master keys-”

“Where are they kept?”

“In the office.” Macaskin pointed to the map. “Lower floor, northwest wing.” He continued. “She unlocked the door and found the body.”

“Who has access to these master keys? Is there another set of them?”

“Only one set. Just Francesca Gerrard and the girl, Mary Agnes, use them. They were kept locked in the bottom drawer of Mrs. Gerrard’s desk. Only she and the Campbell girl have keys to get into it.”

“No one else?” Lynley asked.

Macaskin looked thoughtfully down at the plan, moving his eyes along the lower northwest corridor of the house. It was part of a quadrangle, possibly an addition to the original building, and it grew out of the great hall not far from the stairway. He pointed to the first room in the corridor.

“There’s Gowan Kilbride,” he said pensively. “A kind of jack-of-all-trades. He could have got to the keys had he known they were there.”

“Did he know?”

“It’s possible. I gather that Gowan’s duties don’t generally range to the upper floors of the house, so he’d have no need of the master keys. But he might have known about them had Mary Agnes told him where they were.”

“And might she have done so?”

Macaskin shrugged. “Perhaps. They’re teenagers, aren’t they? Teenagers sometimes try to impress each other all sorts of silly ways. Especially if there’s an attraction between them.”

“Did Mary Agnes say if the master keys were in their normal place this morning? Had they been disturbed?”

“Apparently not, since the desk was locked as usual. But it’s not the kind of thing the girl is likely to have noticed. She unlocked the desk, reached into the drawer for the keys. Whether they were in the exact spot she had last left them, she doesn’t know, since the last time she put them in the desk she merely dropped them inside without a second thought.”

Lynley marvelled at the amount of information Macaskin had been able to gather in his restricted time at the house. He eyed the man with growing respect. “These people all knew each other, didn’t they? So why was Joy Sinclair’s door locked?”

“Argie-bargie last nicht,” Lonan put in from his chair in the corner.

“An argument? What sort?”

Macaskin shot the constable an aggrieved look, apparently for lapsing into colloquialism, something that his men were obviously not supposed to do. He said, apologetically, “That’s all we managed to get from Gowan Kilbride this morning before Mrs. Gerrard strong-armed him away with the order to wait for Scotland Yard. Just that there was some sort of row involving the lot of them. Seems some china was broken in the midst of it, and there was an accident in the great hall with liquor. One of my men found bits and pieces of broken porcelain and glass thrown into the rubbish. Some Waterford also. It looks like quite a set-to.”

“Involving Helen as well?” St. James didn’t wait for an answer. “How well does she know these people, Tommy?”

Lynley shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know she knew them at all.”

“She didn’t tell you-”

“She begged off Cornwall with other plans, St. James. She didn’t tell me what they were. And I didn’t ask.” Lynley looked up to see the change in Macaskin’s expression, a sudden movement of his eyes and lips, nearly imperceptible. “What is it?”

Macaskin seemed to give pause to think before he reached for a folder, flipped it open, and drew out a slip of paper. It was not a report but a message, the kind that gives information in “eyes only” fashion from one professional to another. “Fingerprints,” he explained. “On the key that locked the door adjoining Helen Clyde’s and the victim’s rooms.” As if in the knowledge that he was dancing his way down a very fine line between disobeying his own chief constable’s orders to leave everything to the Yard and giving a brother officer what assistance he could, Macaskin added, “Appreciate it if you’d make no mention of hearing this from me when you write your report, but once we saw that the door between those two rooms was our access route, we brought its key back here for testing on the sly and compared the prints on it with some we lifted from water glasses in the other rooms.”

“The other rooms?” Lynley asked. “So they’re not Helen’s prints on the key?”

Macaskin shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was tellingly noncommittal. “No. They belong to the director of the play. A Welshman, bloke called Rhys Davies-Jones.”

Lynley did not respond immediately. Rather, after a moment, he said, “Then Helen and Davies-Jones must have exchanged rooms last night.”

Across from him, he saw Sergeant Havers wince, but she didn’t look at him. Instead, she ran one stubby finger along the edge of the table and kept her eyes on St. James. “Inspector-” she began in a careful voice, but Macaskin interrupted her.

“No. According to Mary Agnes Campbell, no one at all spent the night in Davies-Jones’ room.”

“Then where on earth did Helen-” Lynley stopped, feeling the grip of something awful take him, like the onslaught of an illness that swept right through his skin. “Oh,” he said, and then, “Sorry. Don’t know what I was thinking about.” He fixed his eyes on the fl oor plan intently.

As he did so, he heard Sergeant Havers mutter a brooding oath. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the six cigarettes she had taken from him in the van. One was broken, so she tossed it in the rubbish and picked another. “Have a smoke, sir,” she sighed.

ONE CIGARETTE, Lynley found, did not do much to ameliorate the situation. You have no hold on Helen, he told himself roughly. Just friendship, just history, just years of shared laugh-ter.And nothing else. She was his amusing companion, his confidante, his friend. But never his lover. They had both been too careful, too wary for that, too much on guard ever to become entangled with each other.

“Have you started the autopsy?” he asked Macaskin.

Clearly, this was the question the Scot had been awaiting ever since their arrival. With the kind of undisguised flourish typical of magicians on the stage, he removed several copies of a perfectly assembled report from one of his folders and passed them out, indicating the most pertinent piece of information: the victim had been stabbed with an eighteen-inch-long Highland dagger that had pierced her neck and severed her carotid artery. She had bled to death.

“We’ve not done the complete postmortem, however,” Macaskin added regretfully.

Lynley turned to St. James. “Would she have been able to make any noise?”

“Not from this kind of wound. Burbles at best, I should guess. Nothing that anyone could have heard in another room.” His eyes went down the page. “Have you managed a drug screen?” he asked Macaskin.

The inspector was ready. “Page three. Negative. She was clean. No barbiturates, no amphetamines, no toxins.”

“You’ve set the time of death between two and six?”

“That’s the preliminary. We’ve not analysed the intestines yet. But our man’s given us fibres in the wound. Leather and rabbit fur.”

“The killer was wearing gloves?”

“That’s our guess. But they’ve not been found and we had no time to search for much of anything before we got the message to come back here. All we can say is that the fur and leather didn’t come from the weapon. Nothing came from the weapon, in fact, save the victim’s blood. The handle was wiped clean.”

Sergeant Havers flipped through her copy of the report and tossed it on to the table. “Eighteen-inch dagger,” she said slowly. “Where does one find something like that?”

“In Scotland?” Macaskin seemed surprised by her ignorance. “In every house, I should say. There was a time when no Scotsman ever went out without a dirk strapped to his hip. In this particular house,” he pointed to the dining room on the floor plan, “there’s a display of them on the wall. Hand-carved hilts, tips like rapiers. Real museum pieces. Murder weapon appears to have been taken from there.”

“According to your plan, where does Mary Agnes sleep?”

“A room in the northwest corridor, between Gowan’s room and Mrs. Gerrard’s offi ce.”

St. James was making notes in the margin of his report as the inspector talked. “What about movement on the victim’s part?” he asked. “The wound isn’t immediately fatal. Was there any evidence that she tried to seek help?”

Macaskin pursed his lips and shook his head. “Couldn’t have happened. Impossible.”

“Why?”

Macaskin opened his last folder and took out a stack of photographs. “The knife impaled her to the mattress,” he said bluntly. “She couldn’t go anywhere, I’m afraid.” He dropped the pictures on to the table. They were large, eight by ten, and in glossy colour. Lynley picked them up.

He was used to looking at death. He had seen it manifested in every way imaginable throughout his years with the Yard. But never had he seen it brought about with such studied brutality.

The killer had driven the dirk in right up to its hilt, as if propelled by an atavistic rage that had wanted more than the mere obliteration of Joy Sinclair. She lay with her eyes open, but their colour was changed and obscured by the settled stare of death. As he looked at the woman, Lynley wondered how long she had lived once the knife was driven into her throat.

He wondered if she had known at all what had happened to her in the instant it took the killer to plunge the knife home. Had shock overcome her at once with its blessing of oblivion? Or had she lain, helpless, waiting for both unconsciousness and death?

It was a horrible crime, a crime whose enormity delineated itself in the saturated mattress that drank the woman’s blood, in her outstretched hand that reached for assistance that would never come, in her parted lips and soundless cry. There is, Lynley thought, no crime so execrable as murder. It contaminates and pollutes, and no life it touches, no matter how tangentially, can ever be the same.

He passed the photographs to St. James and looked at Macaskin. “Now,” he said, “shall we consider the intriguing question of what happened at Westerbrae between six-fi fty when Mary Agnes Campbell found the body and seven-ten when someone finally managed to get round to phoning the police?”