Payment in Blood

5

GOWAN KILBRIDE was in a new kind of agony. It began the moment Constable Lonan opened the library door and called out that the London police wanted to speak with Mary Agnes. It increased in intensity when Mary Agnes jumped to her feet, displaying an undisguised eagerness for the encounter. And it reached its zenith with the knowledge that for the past fi fteen minutes she had been gone from his sight and his determined-if hardly adequate-protection. Worse still, she was now under the sure, the entirely adequate, the decidedly masculine protection of New Scotland Yard.

Which was the source of the problem.

Once the police group from London-but most particularly the tall, blond detective who appeared to be in charge-had left the library after their brief encounter with Lady Helen Clyde, Mary Agnes had turned to Gowan, her eyes ablaze. “He’s haiven,” she had breathed.

That remark boded ill, but, like a fool for love, Gowan had been willing to take the conversation further.

“Haiven?” he’d asked irritably.

“Tha’ policeman!” And then Mary Agnes had gone on rhapsodically to catalogue Inspector Lynley’s virtues. Gowan felt them tattooed into his brain. Hair like Anthony Andrews, a nose like Charles Dance, eyes like Ben Cross, and a smile like Sting. No matter that the man had not bothered to smile once. Mary Agnes was perfectly capable of filling in details when necessary.

It had been bad enough to be in fruitless competition with Jeremy Irons. But now Gowan saw that he had the entire front line of Britain ’s theatrical performers to contend with, all embodied in a single man. He ground his teeth bitterly and writhed in discomfort.

He was sitting in a cretonne-covered chair whose material felt like a stiff second skin after so many hours. Next to him-moved carefully out of everyone’s way only a quarter hour into their group incarceration-Mrs. Gerrard’s treasured Cary Globe rested on an impossibly ornate, gilded stand. Gowan stared at it morosely. He felt like kicking it over. Better yet, he felt like heaving it through the window. He was desperate for escape.

He tried to quell the need by forcing himself to consider the library’s charms, but he found there were none. The white plaster octagons on the ceiling needed paint, as did the garlands that ornamented their centres. Years of coal fires and cigarette smoke had taken their toll, and what looked like deep shadows in the nooks and crannies of the raised decoration was really soot, the kind of grime that promised a miserable two weeks or more of work in the coming months. The bookshelves, too, spoke of added misery. They held hundreds of volumes-perhaps even thousands-bound in leather and, behind the glass, all smelling equally of dust and disuse. Another job of cleaning and drying and repairing and…Where was Mary Agnes? He had to find her. He had to get out.

Near him, a woman’s voice rose in a tear-filled plea. “My God, please! I can’t stand this another moment!”

Within the last weeks, Gowan had developed a mild dislike of actors in general. But in the past nine hours, he had found he’d developed a hardy loathing of one group in the very particular.

“David, I’ve reached my breaking point. Can’t you do something to get us out of here?” Joanna Ellacourt was wringing her hands as she spoke to her husband, pacing the fl oor and smoking. Which, Gowan thought, she’d been doing all day. The room smelled like a smouldering rubbish heap largely because of her. And it was interesting to note that she had only reached this newest level of nervous agitation when Lady Helen Clyde reentered the room and promised the possibility of attention being directed somewhere other than upon the great star herself.

From his wing chair, David Sydeham’s hooded eyes followed his wife’s slim fi gure. “What would you have me do, Jo? Batter down the door and club that constable over the head? We’re at their mercy, ma belle.”

“Sit, Jo darling.” Robert Gabriel extended a well-tended hand to her, beckoning her to join him on the couch by the fire. The coals there had burned down to small grey lumps speckled with glowing rose. “You’re doing nothing more than unstringing your nerves. Which is exactly what the police would like you to do, would like all of us to do, in fact. It makes their job easier.”

“And you’re hell-bent on not doing that, I dare say,” Jeremy Vinney put in just a pitch above sotto voce.

Gabriel’s temper flared. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Vinney ignored him, struck a match, and applied it to his pipe.

“I asked you a question!”

“And I’m choosing not to answer it.”

“Why, you miserable-”

“We all know Gabriel had a row with Joy yesterday,” Rhys Davies-Jones said reasonably. He was sitting furthest from the bar, in a chair next to the window whose curtains he had recently pulled back. Black night yawned through the glass. “I don’t think any of us need make veiled references to it in the hope that the police will get the point.”

“Get the point?” Robert Gabriel’s voice held the cutting edge of his ire. “Nice of you to have me fingered for the murder, Rhys, but I’m afraid it won’t wash. Not a bit of it.”

“Why? Have you an alibi?” David Sydeham asked. “The way it looks to me, you’re one of the very few people at significant risk, Gabriel. Unless, of course, you can produce a second party with whom you spent the night.” He smiled sardonically. “What about the little girl? Is that what Mary Agnes is up to right now, trotting out stories about your technique? That must be keeping the coppers on the edge of their seats, all right. An intimate description of what it’s like for a woman to have you between her legs. Or was Joy’s play heading us towards that kind of revelation last night?”

Gabriel surged to his feet, knocking against a brass floor lamp. Its arc of light fl ashed wildly round the room. “I bloody well ought to-”

“Stop it!” Joanna Ellacourt put her hands over her ears. “I can’t stand it! Stop!”

But it was too late. The quick exchange of words had struck Gowan like fists. He leaped out of his chair. In four steps he made it across the room to Gabriel and furiously whipped the actor around to face him.

“Damn ye tae hell!” he shouted. “Did ye titch Mary Agnes?”

But the answer didn’t interest him. Seeing Gabriel’s face, Gowan needed no response.

They were a match for size, but the boy’s fury made him stronger. It crested within him, fi ring him to fight. His single punch put Gabriel flat on the floor, and he fell upon him, one hand at the man’s throat, the other solidly delivering nasty and well-placed blows to his face.

“Wha’ did ye dae tae Mary Agnes?” Gowan roared as he struck.

“Jesus God!”

“Stop him!”

Fragile composure-that thin shell of civility-disintegrated into uproar. Limbs fl ailed viciously. Hoarse cries charged the air. Glassware smashed onto the hearth. Feet kicked and jolted abandoned furniture to one side. Gowan’s arm encircled Gabriel’s neck, and he dragged the man, panting and sobbing, to the fi re.

“Tell me!” Gowan forced Gabriel’s handsome face, now twisted with pain, over the fender, within an inch of the coals. “Tell me, ye bystart!”

“Rhys!” Irene Sinclair backed stiffl y into her chair, her face ashen. “Stop him! Stop him!”

Davies-Jones and Sydeham climbed past the overturned furniture and the frozen fi gures of Lady Stinhurst and Francesca Gerrard, who cowered together like two versions of Lot ’s wife. They reached Gowan and Gabriel, struggled uselessly to haul them apart. But Gowan held the actor in a grip made unbreakable by the force of his passion.

“Don’t believe him, Gowan,” Davies-Jones said urgently into the boy’s ear. He gripped his shoulder hard, jerking him to sensibility. “Don’t lose yourself like this. Let him be, lad. Enough.”

Somehow the words-and the implication of complete understanding behind them- reached past Gowan’s red tide of anger. Releasing Robert Gabriel, he tore himself away from Davies-Jones and fell to his side on the floor, gasping convulsively.

He realised, of course, the gravity of what he had done, the fact that he would lose his job-and Mary Agnes-because of it. But beyond the enormity of his behaviour, it was the torment of loving and being unloved in return that drove the threat from him, entirely blind to the impact it might have on others in the room, seeking only to wound as he had been wounded.

“I know bluidy all! An’ I’ll tell the police! An’ ye’ll pay!”

“Gowan!” Francesca Gerrard cried out in horror.

“Better speak now, lad,” Davies-Jones said. “Don’t be a fool to talk like that when there’s a killer in the room.”

Elizabeth Rintoul had not moved once during the altercation. Now she stirred, as if from a deep sleep. “No. Not here. Father’s gone to the sitting room, hasn’t he?”

“I SHOULD GUESS you see Marguerite as she is now, a sixty-nine-year-old woman very much near the end of her resources. But at thirty-four, when all this occurred, she was lovely. Lively. And eager-so eager to live.”

Restlessly, Lord Stinhurst had gone to a different chair, not one of those in the centre of the room, but one on its perimeter, well out of the light. He sat forward in it, leaning his arms on his knees, and he studied the fl oral carpet as he talked, as if its muted arabesque pattern held answers for him. His voice was toneless. It was the voice of a man giving a recitation that had to be got through with no expenditure of emotion.

“She and my brother Geoffrey fell in love shortly after the war.”

Lynley said nothing. But he wondered how, even at a distance of thirty-six years, any man could speak of such a monumental act of disloyalty with so little affect. Stinhurst’s lack of emotion spoke of a man who was dead inside, who could no longer afford to let himself be touched, who single-mindedly pursued excellence in his career so that he never had to face the agony rife in his personal life.

“Geoff had been decorated numerous times. He came back from the war a hero. I suppose it was natural that Marguerite was attracted to him. Everyone was. He had a way about him…an air.” Stinhurst paused refl ectively. His hands sought each other and pressed hard together.

“You served in the war as well?” Lynley asked.

“Yes. But not like Geoffrey. Not with his flair, not with his devotion. My brother was like a fire. He blazed through life. And like a fire, he attracted lesser creatures to him, weaker creatures. Moths. Marguerite was one of them. Elizabeth was conceived on a trip that Marguerite made alone to my family’s home in Somerset. It was during the summer and I’d been gone two months, travelling from spot to spot in order to direct regional theatre. Marguerite had wanted to come with me, but frankly, I felt I would be burdened with her, with having to…keep her entertained. I thought,” he didn’t bother to disguise his self-contempt, “that she would be in the way. My wife was no fool, Thomas. She still isn’t, for that matter. She could read my reluctance to have her about, so she stopped badgering me to take her. I ought to have realised what that meant, but I was too much caught up in the theatre to understand that Marguerite was making arrangements of her own. I didn’t know at the time that she went to Geoffrey. I only knew at the end of the summer that she was pregnant. She would never tell me whose child it was.”

That Lady Stinhurst had refused her husband this knowledge made perfect sense to Lynley. But that Stinhurst, in the face of it, had carried on with the marriage made no sense at all. “Why did you not divorce her?

Messy as it would have been, surely you would have gleaned some peace of mind.”

“Because of Alec,” Stinhurst replied. “Our son. As you said yourself, a divorce like that would have been messy. More than messy. At that time it would have produced an attendant scandal that, God knows, would have spread across the front page of every newspaper for months. I couldn’t let Alec be tormented like that. I wouldn’t. He meant too much to me. More, I suppose, than my marriage itself.”

“Last night Joy accused you of killing Alec.”

A weary smile touched Stinhurst’s lips, comprising equal parts sorrow and resignation. “Alec…my son was in the RAF. His plane went down in a test flight over the Orkney Islands in 1978. Into…” Stinhurst blinked quickly and made a change in his position. “Into the North Sea.”

“Joy knew that?”

“Of course. But she was in love with Alec. They wanted to marry. She was devastated by his death.”

“You opposed the marriage?”

“I wasn’t delighted by it. But I didn’t actively oppose it. I merely suggested that they wait until Alec had done his time in the military.”

It was a decidedly odd choice of words. “Done his time?”

“Every man in my family has gone into the military. When that pattern has been in motion for three hundred years, one doesn’t want one’s son to be the first Rintoul to break it.” For the first time Stinhurst’s voice was clouded by a wisp of emotion. “But Alec didn’t want to do it, Thomas. He wanted to study history, to marry Joy, to write, and perhaps teach at university. And I-blind fool of a patriot with more love for my family tree than for my own son-I gave him no peace until I’d persuaded him to do his duty. He chose the Royal Air Force. I think he believed it would take him farthest from conflict.” Stinhurst looked up quickly and commented as if in defence of his son, “It wasn’t danger he was afraid of. He merely couldn’t stomach war. Not an unnatural reaction from a decent historian.”

“Did Alec know about the affair his mother and uncle had?”

Stinhurst lowered his head again. The conversation appeared to be ageing him, diminishing the very last of his resources. It was a remarkable change in such an otherwise youthful man. “I thought not. I hoped not. But now I know, according to what Joy said last night, he did.”

So the wasted years, the entire charade- performed to protect Alec-had been for nothing. Stinhurst’s next words echoed Lynley’s thought.

“I’ve always been so blasted civilised. I wasn’t about to become Chillingsworth to Marguerite’s Hester Prynne. So we lived the charade of Elizabeth ’s being my daughter until New Year’s Eve of 1962.”

“What happened?”

“I discovered the truth. It was a chance remark, a slip of the tongue that effectively put my brother Geoffrey in Somerset instead of London where he was supposed to be that particular summer. Then I knew. But I suppose I had always suspected as much.”

Stinhurst stood abruptly. He walked to the fireplace, threw several lumps of coal onto the blaze, and watched the flames take them. Lynley waited, wondering if the activity was part of the man’s need to quell emotion or to conceal his past.

“There was…I’m afraid we had a terrible fight. Not an argument. A physical fi ght. It was here at Westerbrae. Phillip Gerrard, my sister’s husband, put an end to it. But Geoffrey got the worst of it. He left shortly after midnight.”

“Was he fit to leave?”

“I suppose he thought he was. God knows, I didn’t try to stop him. Marguerite tried, but he wouldn’t have her near him. He tore out of here in a passionate frenzy, and less than fi ve minutes later he was killed on the switchback just below Hillview Farm. He hit ice, missed the turn. The car flipped over. He broke his neck. He was…burned.”

They were silent. A piece of coal tumbled to the hearth and singed the edge of the carpet. The air became scented with the acrid odour of burnt wool. Stinhurst swept the ember back to the grate and finished his story.

“Joy Sinclair was here at Westerbrae that night. She’d come up for the holidays. She was one of Elizabeth ’s school friends. She must have heard bits and pieces of the argument and put them all together. God knows, she always had a passion for setting the record straight. And what better way to get her vengeance upon me for inadvertently causing Alec’s death?”

“But that was ten years ago. Why would she wait so long for her revenge?”

“Who was Joy Sinclair ten years ago? How could she have taken revenge then-a twentyfive-year-old woman merely at the start of her career? Who would have listened to her? She was no one. But now-an award-winning author with a reputation for accuracy-now she could command an audience that would listen. And how cleverly she did it after all, writing one play in London but bringing a different play here to Westerbrae. With no one the wiser until we actually began the reading last night. With a journalist present to pick out the most lubricious of the facts. Of course, it didn’t get quite as far as Joy had hoped it would. Francesca’s reaction put an end to the reading long before the worst of the details in our sordid little family saga came to light. And now an end has been put to the play as well.”

Lynley marvelled at the man’s words, at the bald indication of culpability they contained. Surely Stinhurst understood to what degree they blackened him?

“You must see how bad it looks that you burned those scripts,” Lynley said.

Stinhurst’s gaze dropped to the fi re momentarily. A shadow moved against his brow, etched darkness on his cheek. “It can’t be helped, Thomas. I had to protect Marguerite and Elizabeth. God knows, I owe them that much. Especially Elizabeth. They’re my family.” His eyes met Lynley’s, flat and opaque with a full generation of pain. “I should think that you, of all people, would understand how much a man’s family means to him.”

And the hell of it was that he did understand. Completely.

For the first time Lynley noticed the Briar Rose paper on the walls of the sitting room. It was, he realised, the very same paper that hung in his mother’s day room at Howenstow, the very same paper that no doubt hung on the walls of day rooms and morning rooms and sitting rooms of countless great houses throughout the country. Late Victorian, it had a distracting pattern of dull yellow roses battling with leaves that, with age and smoke, had become more grey than green.

Without preliminary observation, Lynley could have closed his eyes and described the rest of the room, so similar was it to his mother’s in Cornwall: a fireplace of iron and marble and oak, two pieces of porcelain on each end of the mantel, a walnut longcase clock in one corner, one small case of favourite books. And always the photographs, on a satinwood table within the window’s embrasure.

Even here, he could see the similarities. How generic their pictorial family histories really were.

So he understood. Good God, how he understood. The concerns of family, the duty and devotion to having been born with a particular blend of blood in his veins, had been effectively haunting Lynley for most of his thirty-four years. The ties of blood constrained him; they thwarted his desires; they bound him to tradition and demanded his adherence to a life that was claustrophobic. Yet there was no escape. For even if one gave up titles and land, one did not give up roots. One did not give up blood.

THE WESTERBRAE dining room offered the kind of lighting guaranteed to take ten years off anyone’s age. Brass sconces on the panelled walls managed this, aided by candelabra spaced evenly along the gleaming surface of the lengthy mahogany table. Barbara Havers stood at one end of this, Inspector Macaskin’s floor plan of the house spread out in front of her. She was comparing it to her notes, her eyes screwed up against the smoke from a cigarette which she held between her lips, its ash amazingly long, as if she were attempting a world-record length. Nearby, whistling “Memories” with the sort of passionate conviction that would have done Betty Buckley proud, one of Macaskin’s crime-scene men was dusting for prints on an ornamental circle of Scottish dirks that hung on the wall above the sideboard. They were part of a larger display of halberds and muskets and Lochaber axes, all equally eager to be lethal.

Squinting down at the floor plan, Barbara tried to reconcile what Gowan Kilbride had told her with what she wanted to believe about the facts in the case. It wasn’t easy going. It strained credibility. She was relieved when the sound of footsteps in the hall gave her an excuse to devote her attention to something else. She looked up, dislodging the tobacco soot down the front of her crewneck sweater.

Irritably, she brushed at it, leaving a smudge of grey like a thumb print on the wool.

Lynley came in. Avoiding the print man, he nodded towards a far door. Barbara picked up her notebook and followed him through the warming room, the china room, and into the kitchen. It was fragrant with the odours of meat seasoned with rosemary, with tomatoes simmering in some kind of sauce on the stove. At a centralised worktable, a harried woman bent over a cutting board, chopping potatoes into mince-like pieces with a particularly deadly looking knife. She was costumed entirely in white from head to toe, an effect that gave her more the look of a scientist than of a cook.

“Folks do hae t’ eat their dinner,” she explained tersely when she saw Barbara and Lynley, although the way she wielded the implement looked more like self-defence than preparing a meal.

Barbara heard Lynley murmur an appropriate culinary response before he walked on, leading her through another door at the far corner of the kitchen and down three steps into the scullery. This room was cramped and poorly lit, but it had the combined virtues of privacy and heat, the latter emanating from an enormous old boiler that wheezed noisily in one corner of the room and dripped rusty water onto the cracked tile fl oor. The atmosphere was not unlike a steam bath, overhung with an almost imperceptible miasma of mildew and wet wood. Just behind the boiler, the back stairs led to the upper floor of the house.

“What did Gowan and Mary Agnes have to say?” Lynley asked when he had shut the door behind them.

Barbara went to the sink, extinguished her cigarette under the tap, and tossed it into the rubbish. She shoved her short brown hair behind her ears and stopped to pick a piece of tobacco off her tongue before giving her attention to her notebook. She was displeased with Lynley and troubled by the fact that she couldn’t quite decide why. Whether it was for dismissing her from the sitting room earlier, or for the way she anticipated he would react to her notes, she didn’t know. But whatever the source of her aggravation, she felt it like a splinter. Until it worked its way out into the open, the skin that housed it would fester.

“Gowan,” she said briefl y, leaning against the warped wooden counter. It was wet from a recent washing, and she felt a ridge of damp seep through her clothes. She moved away. “It seems he had a rather nasty clash with Robert Gabriel in the library just before he and I met. That may well have gone far in lubricating his tongue.”

“What sort of clash?”

“A quick brawl in which our silken Mr. Gabriel apparently got himself hammered. Gowan made sure I knew about that, as well as about the row he overheard between Gabriel and Joy Sinclair yesterday afternoon. They’d had an affair, it seems, and Gabriel was hot to have Joy tell his former wife-Irene Sinclair, as a matter of fact, Joy’s sister-that he only bedded Joy once.”

“Why?”

“I’ve the impression Robert Gabriel very much wants Irene Sinclair back and that he thought Joy could help him in his reconciliation if she’d only tell Irene that their fl ing was strictly a one-time encounter. But Joy refused to do so. She said she wouldn’t deal in lies.”

“Lies?”

“Yes. Evidently theirs wasn’t a one-time encounter at all because, according to Gowan, when Joy refused to co-operate, Gabriel said something to her like,” Barbara consulted her notes, “‘You little hypocrite. For one entire year you screw me in every bug-infested rat hole in London and now you stand there and tell me you don’t deal in lies!’ And they continued to argue until Gabriel finally went after her. He had her down on the fl oor, in fact, when Rhys Davies-Jones managed to get in and separate them. Gowan was bringing someone’s luggage up the stairs when all this was going on. He got quite an eyeful of everything because Davies-Jones left the door open when he burst into Joy’s room.”

“What set Gowan and Gabriel off in the library?”

“A remark someone made-Sydeham, I think-about Mary Agnes Campbell, alluding to her being Gabriel’s alibi for last night.”

“How much truth is there to that?”

Barbara considered the question for a moment before answering. “It’s hard to tell. Mary Agnes seems rather smitten with the theatre. She’s attractive, has a nice body…” Barbara shook her head. “Inspector, that man must be a good twenty-five years her senior. I can see why he might want to dandle her, but I can’t see for a moment why she’d go along with the idea. Unless, of course…” She thought about the possibilities, intrigued to find that there was one that actually worked.

“Havers?”

“Hmm? Well, Robert Gabriel might have looked like her ticket to a new life. You know the sort of thing. The star-struck girl meets the established actor, sees the kind of life he can offer her, and gives herself to him in the hope he’ll take her with him when he leaves.”

“Did you ask her about it?”

“I wasn’t able to. I didn’t hear about the row between Gowan and Gabriel until after I’d spoken to Mary Agnes. I’ve not got back to her yet.” And that was because of what Gowan had said, because of what she knew Lynley would make of the boy’s information.

He seemed to read her mind. “What was Gowan able to tell you about last night?”

“He saw a lot after the read-through broke up because he had to clean up a mess of liqueurs that he’d dropped in the great hall when Francesca Gerrard banged into him as she left the sitting room. It took him nearly an hour. Even with Helen’s help, by the way.”

Lynley ignored the final reference, saying only, “And?”

Barbara knew what Lynley wanted, but she delayed a bit by focussing on the minor players in the drama, whose comings and goings Gowan had remembered in astonishing detail. Lady Stinhurst, clad in black, wandering aimlessly between drawing room, dining room, sitting room, and great hall until after midnight when her husband came from above stairs to fetch her; Jeremy Vinney finding excuses to follow Lady Stinhurst, murmuring questions which she steadfastly ignored; Joanna Ellacourt, storming down an upstairs corridor in a violent fit of temper after a loud argument with her husband; Irene Sinclair and Robert Gabriel closeting themselves in the library. The house had eventually fallen into relative calm at about half past twelve.

Barbara heard Lynley say with his usual perspicacity, “But that’s not all Gowan saw, I imagine.”

Her teeth pulled at the inside of her lower lip. “No, that’s not all. Later, after he’d gone to bed, he heard footsteps in the corridor outside his door. He’s right on the corner, where the lower northwest wing meets the great hall. He’s not certain of the time except that it was well after half past twelve. Close to one, he thinks. He was curious because of all the excitement in the evening. So he got out of bed, cracked his door, and listened.”

“And?”

“More footsteps. And then a door opened and closed.” Barbara wasn’t particularly eager to relate the rest of Gowan’s tale, and she knew her face reflected that reluctance. Nonetheless, she plodded forward and completed the story, relating how Gowan had left his room, gone to the end of the corridor, and peered out into the great hall. It was dark-he’d shut off the lights himself just minutes before-but the exterior estate lights managed to provide a faint illumination.

Barbara saw from the swift change of Lynley’s expression that he read what was coming. “He saw Davies-Jones,” he said.

“Yes. But he was coming out of the library, not the dining room where the dirks are, Inspector. He had a bottle. It must have been the cognac he took up to Helen.” She waited for Lynley to offer the inevitable, the conclusion she had already worked out for herself. A trip to pick up a dirk in the dining room was every bit as convenient as one to pick up cognac thirty feet away in the library. And always there remained the fact that Joy Sinclair’s hall door had been locked.

However, Lynley merely said, “What else?”

“Nothing. Davies-Jones went upstairs.”

Lynley nodded grimly. “Let’s do so ourselves.”

He led Barbara towards the back stairway. Narrow, uncarpeted, lit only by two unshaded bulbs, and entirely devoid of decoration, it would take them to the west wing of the house.

“What about Mary Agnes?” Lynley asked as they climbed.

“She didn’t hear a sound during the night according to the statement I had from her prior to this new Gabriel-twist. Just the wind, she said. But of course, she may well have heard that from Gabriel’s room, not her own. However, there was one curious item, and I think you need to hear it.” She waited until Lynley paused and turned on the stair above her. Near his left hand, a largish stain marred the wall, much the shape of Australia. It looked like a patch of damp. “Immediately after she found the body this morning, Mary Agnes went for Francesca Gerrard. They fetched Lord Stinhurst together. He went into Joy’s room, came out a moment later, and ordered Mary Agnes to go back to her own room and wait for Mrs. Gerrard to come for her.”

“I’m not certain I see your point, Sergeant.”

“My point is that Francesca Gerrard didn’t come back to fetch Mary Agnes from her room for the next twenty minutes. And only then did Lord Stinhurst tell Mary Agnes to begin waking the household and telling them to come to the drawing room. In the meantime, he placed some phone calls from Francesca’s office-it’s next to Mary Agnes’ bedroom, so she could hear his voice. And, Inspector, he received two calls as well.”

When Lynley didn’t react to this piece of information, Barbara felt her earlier irritation begin to bite. “Sir, you’ve not forgotten Lord Stinhurst, have you? You know who he is: the man who ought to be on his way to the police station right now for destruction of evidence, interfering with the police, and murder.”

“That’s a bit premature,” Lynley remarked.

His calm rubbed the sore of Barbara’s irritation.

“Is it?” she demanded. “And at what point did you make that fi ne decision?”

“I’ve heard nothing so far to convince me that Lord Stinhurst murdered Joy Sinclair.” Lynley’s voice was a model of patience. “But even if I thought that he might have done so, I’m not about to arrest a man on the strength of his having burned a stack of scripts.”

“What?” Barbara’s own voice rasped. “You’ve made your decision about Stinhurst already, haven’t you? Based on one conversation with a man who spent the fi rst ten years of his career on the bloody stage and no doubt turned in his finest performance right here tonight, explaining himself away to you! That’s rich, Inspector. Police work you can be proud of!”

“Havers,” Lynley said quietly, “step back in line.”

He was pulling rank. Barbara heard the warning. She knew she ought to back down, but she wasn’t about to at a moment when she was so completely in the right. “What did he tell you that has you so convinced of his innocence, Inspector? That he and Daddy were school chums at Eton? That he’d like to see more of you round the London club? Or better yet, that his destroying evidence had nothing at all to do with the murder and you can trust him to tell you the truth about it since he’s a real gent, just like you!”

“There’s more involved than that,” Lynley said, “and I’m not about to discuss it-”

“With the likes of me! Oh, rot!” she finished.

“Get that blasted chip off your shoulder and you might find yourself a person that other people want to confide in,” Lynley snapped. But he spun from Barbara quickly and didn’t move on.

She could tell that he regretted his loss of control at once. She had pushed him to it, wanting his anger to bubble and boil over just as her own had done earlier when he had locked her out of the sitting room. But she saw quite clearly how little ground she would gain in his estimation with this sort of manipulative behaviour. She berated herself for her temperamental stupidity. After a moment, she spoke.

“Sorry,” she said wretchedly. “I was off, Inspector. Out of line. Again.”

Lynley didn’t immediately respond. They stood on the stairs, caught by a tension that seemed painfully immutable, each involved in a separate misery. Lynley appeared to rouse himself only with an effort.

“We make an arrest on the strength of evidence, Barbara.”

She nodded calmly, her brief passion spent. “I know that, sir. But I think…” He wouldn’t want to hear it. He would hate her. She plunged on. “I think you’re ignoring the obvious so that you can head directly towards Davies-Jones, not on the strength of evidence at all, but on the strength of something else that… perhaps you’re afraid to admit.”

“That isn’t the case,” Lynley replied. He continued up the stairs.

At the top, Barbara identified each room for him as they passed it: Gabriel’s the closest to the rear stairway, then Vinney’s, Elizabeth Rintoul’s, and Irene Sinclair’s. Across the hall from this last was Rhys Davies-Jones’ room, where the west corridor turned right, widened, and led into the main body of the house. All the doors here were locked, and as they walked along the hallway where portraits displayed several generations of sombre-faced Gerrard ancestors and delicately worked sconces intermittently cast half-circles of light on the pale walls, St. James met them, handing Lynley a plastic bag.

“Helen and I found this stuffed into one of the boots downstairs,” he said. “According to David Sydeham, it’s his.”