Payment In Blood Part 2

"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 gla.s.s 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" fas.h.i.+on 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 a.s.sistance 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 gla.s.ses 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 floor 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.sembled report from one of his folders and pa.s.sed 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 a.n.a.lysed 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 office."

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 a.s.sistance 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 pa.s.sed 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-fifty when Mary Agnes Campbell found the body and seven-ten when someone finally managed to get round to phoning the police?"

3.

THE ROAD TO Westerbrae was poorly maintained. In the summer, negotiating its switchbacks, its potholes, its steep climbs to moors and quick descents to dales would be difficult enough. In the winter, it was h.e.l.l. Even with Constable Lonan at the wheel of Strathclyde CID's Land Rover, well equipped to handle the perilous conditions, they did not arrive at the house until nearly dusk, emerging from the woods and swinging through the final curve on a sheet office that caused Lonan and Macaskin to curse fervently in unison. As a result, the constable took the final forty yards at a respectable crawl and switched off the ignition at last with undisguised relief.

In front of them, the building loomed like a gothic nightmare on the landscape, completely unilluminated and deadly quiet. Constructed entirely of grey granite in the fas.h.i.+on of a pre-Victorian hunting lodge, it shot out wings, sprouted chimneys, and managed to look menacing in spite of the snow that mounded like fresh clotted cream on its roof. It had peculiar crow-stepped gables shaped from smaller granite blocks stacked in a staggered fas.h.i.+on. Behind one of these, the curious architectural appendage of a slate-roofed tower was tucked into the abutment of two wings of the house, its deeply recessed windows bare of covering and without light. A white Doric-columned portico sheltered the front door, and over it trailing wisps of a now leafless vine made an heroic effort to climb to the roof. The entire structure combined the fancies of three periods of architecture and at least as many cultures. And as Lynley evaluated it, he thought that it hardly had the potential to be Macaskin's romantic spot for newlyweds.

The drive they parked on was well channelled and gouged, evidence of the number of vehicles that had come and gone during the day. But at this hour, Westerbrae may well have been deserted. Even the snow surrounding it was pristine and untouched across the lawn and down the slope to the loch.

For a moment no one stirred. Then Macaskin, casting a glance over his shoulder at the London group, shoved open the door, and fresh air a.s.saulted them. It was glacial. They climbed out reluctantly.

A nasty wind was gusting off the water a short distance away, an unforgiving reminder of how far north Loch Achiemore and Wester-brae really were. It blew numbingly from the Arctic, stinging cheeks and piercing lungs and carrying with it the flavour of nearby pines and the faint musk of peat fires burning in the surrounding countryside. Huddling into themselves for protection against it, they crossed the drive quickly. Macaskin pounded on the door.

Two of his men had been left behind that morning, and one admitted them into the house. He was a freckled constable with monstrously large hands and a bulky, muscled body that strained against the b.u.t.tons of his uniform. Carrying a tray covered by the sort of insubstantial sandwiches that usually decorate plates at tea, he was chewing ravenously, like an overlarge waif who has not seen food in many days and may very well not see it again for days more. He beckoned them into the great hall and thudded the door closed behind them, swallowing.

"Cuik arrived thirty minutes back," he explained hurriedly to Macaskin, who was eying him with a disapproval that thinned his lips. "I was juist takin' this in tae them. Dinna seem they should gae much longer wi'out fude."

Macaskin's expression withered the man to silence. Dismay stained his cheeks, and he s.h.i.+fted from one foot to the other, as if unsure about what he should do to explain himself further to his superior.

"Where are they?" Lynley's glance took in the hall, noting its hand-moulded panelling and its immense, unlit chandelier. The floor was bare, recently refinished, and even more recently marred by a wide stain that pooled across it and dripped like treacle down one of the walls. All the doors leading off the hall were closed, and the only light came from the reception desk tucked under the stairs. Apparently the constable had made this his duty post that day, for it was littered with teacups and magazines.

"Library," Macaskin answered. His eyes darted suspiciously to his man, as if the courtesy of supplying the suspects with food may well have led to other courtesies which he would live to regret. "They've been in there since we left this morning, Euan?"

At this the young constable grinned. "Aye. Wi' brief visits tae the tollet down the northe'st corridor. Two minutes, unlocked door, maiself or Will'am richt awside." He went on as Macaskin led the others across the hall. "Th' one is still in a fair rage, Inspector. Not used tae spendin' the day 'n her nichtgawn, I should guess."

It was, Lynley quickly discovered, a more than accurate description of Lady Helen Clyde's state of mind. When Inspector Macaskin unlocked and pushed open the library door, she was the first one on her feet, and whatever had been simmering on the back burner of her self-control was clearly about to boil over. She took three steps forward, her slippers moving soundlessly on what looked like-but could not possibly have been-an Aubusson carpet.

"Now you listen to me. I absolutely insist..." Her words were hot with fury, but they iced over into mute astonishment when she saw the new arrivals.

Whatever Lynley might have thought he would feel at this first sight of Lady Helen, he was not prepared for tenderness. Yet it overcame him in an unexpected rush. She looked so pathetic. She was wearing a man's greatcoat over her dressing gown and slippers. The cuffs had been folded back, but there was nothing at all to be done about the garment's length or about its wide shoulders, so it hung on her baggily, dangling to her ankles. Her usually smooth, chestnut hair was dishevelled, she wore absolutely no make-up, and in the half-light of the room she looked like one of f.a.gin's boys, all of twelve years old and badly in need of rescue.

It pa.s.sed through Lynley's mind that this was probably the first time he had ever seen Helen at a loss for words, and he said to her drily, "You always did know how to dress for an occasion."

"Tommy," Lady Helen replied. A hand went to her hair in a gesture that was born more of confusion than self-consciousness. She added, inanely, "You're not in Cornwall."

"Indeed. I'm not in Cornwall."

That brief exchange charged those a.s.sembled in the library into furious action. They had been fairly spread out across the room, seated near the fire, standing by the bar, gathered in a collection of chairs under the gla.s.s-fronted bookshelves. But now nearly everyone began to move-and to shout-at once. Voices came from all directions with no desire for answer, merely a need to give vent to wrath. It was instantaneous pandemonium.

"My solicitor shall hear-"

"b.l.o.o.d.y police kept us locked-"

"...the most outrageous behaviour I've ever seen!"

"We're supposed to be living in a civilised-"

"...no wonder to me that the country's gone to h.e.l.l!"

Unmoved by their anger, Lynley pa.s.sed his eyes over them and made a quick survey of the room. The heavy rose curtains were drawn and only two lamps had been lit, but there was quite enough light for him to study the company as they continued to make vociferous demands, which he continued to ignore.

He recognised the princ.i.p.al players in the drama, mostly by their relative proximity to what was clearly the main attraction and dominant force in the room: Britain's foremost actress, Joanna Ellacourt. She was standing by the bar, a wintry blonde beauty whose white angora sweater and matching wool trousers seemed to emphasise the temperature of disdain with which she greeted the arrival of the police. As if in the expectation of meeting some need of hers, at Joanna's elbow stood a brawny, older man, with heavy-lidded eyes and coa.r.s.e, greying hair-no doubt her husband, David Sydeham. Only two steps away on Joanna's other side, her leading man turned abruptly back to a drink that he was nursing at the bar. Robert Gabriel was either not interested in the newcomers or eager not to be seen until properly fortified for the encounter. And in front of Gabriel, having risen quickly from the couch on which he had been sitting, Stuart Rintoul, Lord Stinhurst, studied Lynley intently as if with the purpose of casting him in some future production.

There were others in the room whose ident.i.ties Lynley could only guess at for the moment: two older women near the fire, most likely Lord Stinhurst's wife and his sister, Francesca Gerrard; an angry-faced, pudgy man somewhere in his thirties who smoked a pipe, wore newish tweeds, and seemed to be the journalist Jeremy Vinney; sharing a settee with him, an exceedingly ill-dressed, unattractive middle-aged spinster type whose extreme lankiness if not her resemblance to Lord Stinhurst indicated that she had to be his daughter; the two teenagers employed at the hotel, together at the furthest corner of the room; and in a low chair nearly obscured by shadows, a black-haired woman who raised a haunted face to Lynley, hollow-cheeked, dark-eyed, with an undercurrent of pa.s.sion held in savagely tight rein. Irene Sinclair, Lynley guessed, the victim's sister.

But none of these was the one person Lynley was looking for, and he pa.s.sed his eyes over the group once again until he found the director of the play, recognising him from the olive skin, black hair, and sombre eyes of the Welsh. Rhys Davies-Jones was standing by the chair that Lady Helen had just vacated. He had moved when she did, as if to prevent her from confronting the police alone. He stopped, however, when it became apparent to everyone that this particular policeman was no stranger to Lady Helen Clyde.

Across the width of the room and through the gulf created by the conflict of their cultures, Lynley looked at Davies-Jones, feeling an aversion take hold of him, one so strong that it seemed a physical illness. Helen's lover, he thought, and then more fiercely to convince himself of the fact's grim immutability: This is Helen's lover.

No man could have looked less likely for the role. The Welshman was at least ten years Helen's senior, quite possibly more. With curly hair going to grey at the temples and a thin weathered face, he was wiry and fit like his Celtic ancestors. Also like them, he was neither tall nor handsome. His features were sharp and stony. But Lynley could not deny that the look of the man spoke of both intelligence and inner strength, qualities that Helen would recognise-and value-beyond any others.

"Sergeant Havers," Lynley's voice cut through the continued protestations, eliminating them abruptly, "take Lady Helen to her room and allow her to get dressed. Where are the keys?"

Wide-eyed and white-faced, a young girl came forward. Mary Agnes Campbell, finder of the body. She held out a silver tray on which someone had deposited all of the hotel keys, but her hands were shaking, so the tray and its contents jangled discordantly. Lynley's eyes took it in, then moved to the a.s.sembled company.

"I locked all the rooms and collected the keys immediately after she...the body was discovered this morning." Lord Stinhurst resumed his seat by the fire, a couch which he was sharing with one of the two older women. Her hand groped for his, and their fingers intertwined. "I'm not certain what the procedure is in a case like this," Stinhurst concluded, in explanation, "but that seemed the best."

When Lynley looked less than willing to receive this bit of news with appreciation, Macaskin interjected, "Everyone was in the drawing room when we arrived this morning. His lords.h.i.+p had done us the service of locking them in."

"How helpful of Lord Stinhurst." It was Sergeant Havers, speaking in a voice so polite that it sounded like steel.

"Find your key, Helen," Lynley said. Her eyes had never left his face since he'd first spoken to her. He could feel them on him now, her gaze warm, like a touch. "The rest of you may be expected to be inconvenienced awhile longer."

Into the storm of fresh protests that greeted this remark, Lady Helen started to respond, but Joanna Ellacourt expertly wrested the stage from her by crossing the room to Lynley. The lighting became her, and Joanna walked like a woman who knew how to use the moment. Her long, unpinned hair moved like sun-shot silk upon her shoulders.

"Inspector," she murmured, motioning gracefully towards the door, "I feel I may ask you...if it's not too much. I should be only too grateful to be given just a few moments to myself. Somewhere. Out of here. In my own room, perhaps, but if that's not possible, just in any room. Anywhere. With a single chair on which I could sit and ponder and gather my wits once again. Five minutes only. If you would be so good as to see to it for me, I should feel in your debt. After this dreadful day."

Her performance was lovely, Blanche Dubois in Scotland. But Lynley had no intention of acting the part of her gentleman from Dallas.

"I'm sorry," he replied, "I'm afraid you shall have to rely on the kindness of strangers other than myself." And then he repeated, "Find your key, Helen."

Lady Helen made a gesture Lynley recognised, a prelude to speaking. He turned away. "We'll be in the Sinclair room," he said to Havers. "Let me know when she's dressed. Constable Lonan, see that the rest of them stay here for now."

Angry voices swelled again. Lynley ignored them and left the room. St. James and Macaskin followed.

LEFT WITH THIS group of la-de-da suspects, so atypical of what one usually came across in a murder investigation, Barbara Havers was only too delighted to make her own a.s.sessments of their potential guilt. She had the time to do so as Lady Helen returned to Rhys Davies-Jones and exchanged a few quiet words with him beneath the general din of expostulations and imprecations that followed Lynley's departure.

They were quite the lot, Barbara decided. Chic and well tailored and divinely turned out. With the exception of Lady Helen, they were a veritable advertis.e.m.e.nt for how to dress for a murder. And how to act once the police arrive: righteous indignation, calls for solicitors, nasty remarks. So far, they were living up to her every expectation. At any moment, no doubt one of them would mention a close connection with his MP, an intimacy with Mrs. Thatcher, or a notable figure on his family tree. They were all the same, such swells, such toffs.

All but that one pinch-faced woman who had managed to shrink her considerable frame into an ill-shaped heap on the settee, as far away as possible from the man with whom she shared it. Elizabeth Rintoul, Barbara thought. Lady Elizabeth Rintoul, to be exact. Lord Stinhurst's only daughter.

She was acting as if the man seated next to her carried a particularly virulent strain of disease. Cringed into a corner of the couch, she held a navy cardigan closed at her throat and pressed both arms tightly, painfully to her sides. Her feet were planted on the floor in front of her, shod in the kind of flat-soled, plain black shoes that are generally labelled sensible. They stuck out like angular blobs of oil from beneath an unappealing black flannel skirt. Lint dotted it liberally. She added nothing whatsoever to the conversation going on about her. But something in her posture suggested bones that were brittle and about to break.

"Elizabeth, dear," murmured the woman opposite her. She wore the kind of meaningful, ingratiating smile one directs to a recalcitrant child misbehaving before company. Obviously, this was Mum, Barbara decided, Lady Stinhurst herself, dressed in a fawncoloured twinset and amber beads, ankles neatly crossed and hands folded in her lap. "Perhaps Mr. Vinney's drink could be replenished."

Elizabeth Rintoul's dull eyes moved to her mother. "Perhaps," she responded. She made the word sound foul.

Casting a pleading glance at her husband as if for support, Lady Stinhurst persisted. She had a gentle, uncertain voice, the sort one expects from maiden ladies not accustomed to speaking to children. She lifted a hand nervously to hair that was expertly coloured and styled to fight off the reality of fast-encroaching old age. "You see, darling, we've been sitting so long now and I really don't believe Mr. Vinney's had anything at all since half past two."

It was far more than a hint. It was a blatant suggestion. The bar was just across the room and Elizabeth was to wait upon Mr. Vinney like a debutante with her very first beau. The directions were clear enough. But Elizabeth wasn't about to follow them. Instead, contempt flashed across her features, and she dropped her eyes to a magazine in her lap. She mouthed a singularly unladylike response, one word only. Her mother could not possibly misread or misunderstand it.

Barbara watched the exchange between them with some fascination. The Lady Elizabeth looked well over thirty years old-probably skating closer to forty. She was hardly of an age to need a prod from Mum in the man department. But prod was certainly what Mum had in mind. In fact, in spite of Elizabeth's unveiled hostility, Lady Stinhurst made a movement that looked very much as if she intended to shove Elizabeth in the direction of Mr. Vinney's arms.

Not that Jeremy Vinney himself appeared willing. Next to Elizabeth, The Times journalist was doing his best to ignore the conversation entirely. He probed at his pipe with a stainless steel tool and eavesdropped unashamedly on what Joanna Ellacourt was saying at her end of the room. She was angry and making no secret about the fact.

"She's made wonderful fools of us all, hasn't she? What a lark for her! What a b.l.o.o.d.y good laugh!" the actress cast a scathing look at Irene Sinclair, who still sat in her low chair far away from the rest of them, as if her sister's death somehow had served to make her own presence unwelcome. "And who do you imagine benefits from last night's little change in the script? Me? Not on your life! Well, I won't stand for it, David. I d.a.m.n well won't stand for it."

David Sydeham sounded conciliatory as he answered his wife. "Nothing's settled yet, Jo. Far from it now. Once she changed the script, your contract may well have become void."

"You think the contract is void. But you don't have it here, do you? We can't look at it, can we? You don't know if it's void at all. Yet you expect me to believe-to take your word after all that's happened-that merely a change in characterisation makes a contract void? Pardon my disbelief, will you? Pardon my incredulous shriek of laughter. And give me another gin. Now."

Sydeham wordlessly jerked his head at Robert Gabriel, who pushed a bottle of Beefeaters in his direction. It was two-thirds empty. Sydeham poured his wife a drink and returned the bottle to Gabriel, who grasped it and murmured with laughter catching at his voice: "'I have thee not and yet I see thee still... Come, let me clutch thee.'" Gabriel leered at Joanna and poured himself another drink. "Sweet shades of the regionals, Jo, m'love. Wasn't that our first? Hmm, no, perhaps not." He managed to make it sound more like a s.e.xual encounter than a production of Macbeth.

Scores of her school chums had swooned over Gabriel's Peter Pan good looks fifteen years ago, but Barbara had never been able to see his appeal. Nor, apparently, did Joanna Ellacourt. She favoured him with a smile that hurled daggers of an entirely different sort.

"Darling," she responded, "how could I ever forget? You dropped ten lines in the middle of act two, and I carried you all the way to the end. Frankly, I've been waiting for those mult.i.tudinous seas to become incarnadine for the last seventeen years."

Gabriel gave a snort of laughter. "West End b.i.t.c.h," he announced. "Ever true to form."