Payment In Blood Part 25

She giggled, took his hand, and placed it on her melonsized breast. Even at her age, it was beginning to sag, the result of her eschewing undergarments. "Can't, luv. Me 'usband's on the road tonight. But 'e'll be back tomorrow."

Gabriel sat up with a jerk. "Your husband? Christ! Why didn't you tell me you were married?"

Lynette giggled again, squirming into her jeans. "Didn't ask, did you? 'E drives a lorry, gone at least three nights a week. So..."

G.o.d, a lorry driver! Twelve or thirteen stone of muscle with the IQ of a good-sized vegetable marrow.

"Listen, Lynette," Gabriel said hastily, "let's cool this thing off, shall we? I don't want to come between you and your husband."

He felt rather than saw her careless shrug. She pulled on her jersey and shook back her hair. Again, he caught its odour. Again, he tried not to breathe.

"'E's a bit thick," she confided. "'E'll never know. There's nothing to worry about as long as I'm there when 'e wants me."

"Still and all," Gabriel said, unconvinced.

She patted his cheek. "Well, you jus' let me know if you want another tumble. You aren't 'alf bad. A bit slow, is all, but I s'pose that's due to your age, isn't it?"

"My age," he repeated.

"Sure," she said cheerfully. "When a bloke gets along in years, things take a bit of time to heat up, don't they? I understand." She scrambled on the floor. "Seen my 'and-bag? Oh, 'ere it is. I'm off then. P'raps we'll 'ave a go on Sunday? My Jim'll be back on the road by then." That being her sole form of farewell, she made her way to the door and left him in the dark.

My age, he thought, and he could hear his mother's cackle of ironic laughter. She would light one of her foul Turkish cigarettes, regard him speculatively, and try to keep her face vacant. It was her a.n.a.lyst's expression. He hated her when she wore it, cursing himself for having been born to a Freudian. What we're dealing with, she would say, is typical in a man your age, Robert. Midlife crisis, the sudden realisation of impending old age, the questioning of life's purpose, the search for renewal. Coupled with your over-active libido, this propels you to seek new ways of defining yourself. Always s.e.xual, I'm afraid. That appears to be your dilemma. Which is unfortunate for your wife, as she seems to be the only steadying influence available to you. But you are afraid of Irene, aren't you? She's always been too much woman for you to cope with. She made demands on you, didn't she? Demands of adulthood that you simply couldn't face. So you sought out her sister-to punish Irene and to keep yourself feeling young. But you couldn't have everything, lad. People who want everything generally end up with nothing.

And the most painful fact was that it was true. All of it. Gabriel groaned, sat up, began the search for his clothes. The dressing-room door opened.

He had only time to look in that direction, to see a thick shape against the additional darkness of the hallway outside his door. He had only a moment to think, Someone's shut off all the corridor lights, before a figure stormed across the room.

Gabriel smelled whisky, cigarettes, the acrid stench of perspiration. And then a rain of blows fell, on his face, against his chest, savagely pounding into his ribs. He heard, rather than felt, the cracking of bones. He tasted blood and ate the torn tissue in his mouth where his cheek was driven into his teeth.

His a.s.sailant grunted with effort, spewed spittle with rage, and finally rasped on the fourth vicious blow between Gabriel's legs, "Keep your soddin' piece in your trousers from now on, man."

Gabriel thought only, Absolutely no teenagers next time, before he lost consciousness.

LYNLEY REPLACED the telephone and looked at Barbara. "No answer," he said. Barbara saw the muscle in his cheek contract. "What time did Nkata first phone in?"

"A quarter past eight," she replied.

"Where was Davies-Jones?"

"He'd gone into an off-licence near Kensington Station. Nkata was in a call box outside."

"And he was alone? He hadn't taken Helen with him? You're certain of that?"

"He was alone, sir."

"But you spoke to her, Havers? You did speak to Helen after Davies-Jones left her flat?"

Barbara nodded, feeling a growing concern for him that she would have rather lived without. He looked completely worn out. "She phoned me, sir. Right after he'd left."

"Saying?"

Barbara patiently repeated what she had told him once already. "Only that he'd gone. I did try to keep her on the line for thirty minutes when I first phoned, just as you asked. But she wouldn't have it, Inspector. She only said that she'd got company and could she telephone me later. And that was it. I don't think she wanted my help, frankly." Barbara watched the play of anxiety cross Lynley's face. She finished by saying: "I think she wanted to handle it alone, sir. Perhaps...well, perhaps she doesn't see him as a killer yet."

Lynley cleared his throat. "No. She understands." He pulled Barbara's notes across his desk towards him. They contained two sets of data, the results of her interrogation of Stinhurst and the final information from Inspector Macaskin at Strathclyde CID. He put on his spectacles and gave himself over to reading. Outside his office, night subdued the normal jangle of noises in the department. Only the occasional ringing of a telephone, the quick raising of a voice, the congenial burst of laughter told them that they were not alone. Beyond, snow m.u.f.fled the sounds of the city.

Barbara sat opposite him, holding Hannah Darrow's diary in one hand and the playbill from The Three Sisters in the other. She had read them both, but she was waiting for his reaction to the material she had prepared for him during his absence in East Anglia and his entanglement in traffic on the way back to London.

He was, she saw, frowning as he read and looking as if the past few days had made demands upon him that were scarring their way into his very flesh. She averted her eyes and made an exercise out of considering his office, pondering the ways it reflected the dichotomy of his character. Its shelves of books bowed to the proprieties of his job. There were legal volumes, forensic texts, commentaries upon the judges' rules, and several works from the Policy Studies Inst.i.tute, evaluating the effectiveness of the Metropolitan Police. They composed a fairly standard collection for a man whose interest was well focussed on his career. But the office walls inadvertently cut through this persona of professionalism and revealed a second Lynley, one whose nature was filled with convolutions. Little enough hung there: two lithographs from America's Southwest that spoke of an abiding love of tranquillity, and a single photograph that disclosed what had lain long at the heart of the man.

It was of St. James, an old picture taken prior to the accident that had cost him the use of his leg. Barbara noticed the overtly innocuous details: how St. James stood, his arms crossed, leaning against a cricket bat; how the left knee of his white flannels bore a large, jagged tear; how a gra.s.s stain made a c.u.mulous shadow on his hip; how he laughed unrestrainedly and with perfect joy. Summer past, Barbara thought. Summer dead forever. She knew quite well why the photograph hung there. She moved her eyes away from it.

Lynley's head was bent, supported by his hand. He rubbed three fingers across his brow. It was some minutes before he looked up, removed his spectacles, and met her gaze. "We've nothing here for an arrest," he said, gesturing at the information from Macaskin.

Barbara hesitated. His pa.s.sion on the telephone earlier that evening had so nearly convinced her of her own error in seeking an arrest of Lord Stinhurst that even now she thought twice before pointing out the obvious. But there was no need to do so, for he went on to speak of it himself.

"And G.o.d knows we can't take Davies-Jones on the strength of his name in a fifteenyear-old playbill. We may as well arrest any one of them if that's all the evidence we have."

"But Lord Stinhurst burnt the scripts at Westerbrae," Barbara pointed out. "There's still that."

"If you want to argue that he killed Joy to keep her silent about his brother, yes. There is still that," Lynley agreed. "But I don't see it that way, Havers. The worst Stinhurst really faced was familial humiliation if the entire story about Geoffrey Rintoul became known through Joy's play. But Hannah Darrow's killer faced exposure, trial, imprisonment if she wrote her book. Now, which motive seems more logical to you?"

"Perhaps..." Barbara knew she had to suggest this carefully, "we've a double motive. But a single killer."

"Stinhurst again?"

"He did direct The Three Sisters in Norwich, Inspector. He could be the man Hannah Darrow met. And he could have gotten the key to Joy's bedroom door from Francesca."

"Look at the facts that you've forgotten, Havers. Everything about Geoffrey Rintoul had been removed from Joy's study. But everything related to Hannah Darrow-everything that led us right to her death in 1973-was left in plain sight."

"Of course, sir. But Stinhurst could hardly have asked the boys at MI5 to collect everything about Hannah Darrow as well. That hardly applied to the government's concern, did it? It wasn't exactly an Official Secret. And besides, how could he have known what she had gathered on Hannah Darrow? She merely mentioned John Darrow at dinner that night. Unless Stinhurst-all right, unless the kill-er-had actually been inside Joy's study prior to the weekend, how would he know for sure what material she had managed to gather? Or managed not to gather, for that matter."

Lynley stared past her, his face telling her that he was caught up in a sudden thought. "You've given me an idea, Havers." He tapped his fingers against the top of his desk. His eyes dropped to the journal in Barbara's hand. "I think we've a way to manage it all without a single thing from Strathclyde CID," he said at last. "But we'll need Irene Sinclair."

"Irene Sinclair?"

He nodded thoughtfully. "She's our best hope. She was the only one of them not in The Three Sisters in 1973."

DIRECTED BY a neighbour who had been drawn into staying with and calming her children, they found Irene Sinclair not at her home in Bloomsbury but in the waiting area of the emergency room at the nearby University College Hospital. When they walked in, she jumped to her feet.

"He asked for no police!" she cried out frantically. "How did you...what are you...? Did the doctor phone you?"

"We've been to your home." Lynley drew her to one of the couches that lined the walls. The room was inordinately crowded, filled with an a.s.sortment of illnesses and accidents manifesting themselves in selected cries and groans and retchings. That pharmaceutical smell so typical of hospitals hung heavily in the air. "What's happened?"

Irene shook her head blindly, sinking onto the couch, cradling her cheek with her hand. "Robert's been beaten. At the theatre."

"At this time of night? What was he doing there?"

"Going over his lines. We've a second reading tomorrow morning and he said that he wanted a feeling for how he sounded on the stage."

Lynley saw that she didn't believe the story herself. "Was he on the stage when he was attacked?"

"No, he'd gone to his dressing room for something to drink. Someone switched off the lights and came upon him there. Afterwards, he managed to get to a phone. Mine was the only number he could remember." This last statement had the ring of excusing her presence.

"Not the emergency number?"

"He didn't want the police." She looked at them anxiously. "But I'm glad you've come. Perhaps you can talk some sense into him. It's only too clear that he was meant to be the next victim!"

Lynley drew up an uncomfortable plastic chair to s.h.i.+eld her from the stares of the curious. Havers did likewise.

"Why?" Lynley asked.

Irene's face looked strained, as if the question confused her. But something told Lynley it was part of a performance designed specifically and spontaneously for him. "What do you mean? What else could it be? He's been beaten b.l.o.o.d.y. Two of his ribs are cracked, his eyes are blackened, he's lost a tooth. Who else could be responsible?"

"It's not the way our killer's been working, though, is it?" Lynley pointed out. "We've a man, perhaps a woman, who uses a knife, not fists. It doesn't really look as if anyone intended to kill him."

"Then what else could it be? What are you saying?" She drew her body straight to ask the question, as if an offence had been given and would not be brooked without some form of protest.

"I think you know the answer to that. I imagine you've not told me everything about tonight. You're protecting him. Why? What on earth has he done to deserve this kind of devotion? He's hurt you in every possible way. He's treated you with a contempt that he hasn't bothered to hide from anyone. Irene, listen to me-"

She held up a hand and her agonised voice told him her brief performance was at an end. "Please. All right. That's more than enough. He'd had a woman. I don't know who she was. He wouldn't say. When I got there, he was still...he hadn't..." She stumbled for the words. "He couldn't manage his clothes."

Lynley heard the admission with disbelief. What had it been like for her, going to him, soothing his fear, smelling those unmistakable odours of intercourse, dressing him in the very same clothes he had torn from his body in haste to make love to another woman? "I'm trying to understand why you still feel loyalty to a man like this, a man who went so far as to deceive you with your very own sister." Even as he spoke, he considered his words, considered how Irene had attempted to spare Robert Gabriel tonight, and thought back to what had been said about the night Joy Sinclair died. He saw the pattern clearly enough. "You've not told me everything about the night your sister died either. Even in that, you're protecting him. Why, Irene?"

Her eyes closed briefly. "He's the father of my children," she replied with simple dignity.

"Protecting him protects them?"

"Ultimately. Yes."

John Darrow himself could not have said it better. But Lynley knew how to direct the conversation. Teddy Darrow had shown him.

"Children generally discover the worst there is to know about their parents, no matter how one longs to protect them. Your silence now does nothing but serve to protect your sister's killer."

"He didn't. He couldn't! I can't believe that of Robert. Nearly anything else, G.o.d knows. But not that."

Lynley leaned towards her and covered her cold hands with his own. "You've been thinking he killed your sister. And saying nothing about your suspicions has been your way of protecting your children, sparing them the public humiliation of having a murderer for a father."

"He couldn't. Not that."

"Yet you think he did. Why?"

Sergeant Havers spoke. "If Gabriel didn't kill your sister, what you tell us can only help him."

Irene shook her head. Her eyes were hollows of terrible fear. "Not this. It can't." She looked at each one of them, her fingers digging into the worn surface of her handbag. She was like a fugitive, determined to escape but recognising the futility of further flight. When she began to speak at last, her body shuddered as if an illness had taken her. As, in a way, it had. "My sister was with Robert that night in his room. I heard them. I'd gone to him. Like a fool...G.o.d, why am I such a pathetic fool? He and I had been in the library together earlier, after the read-through, and there was a moment then when I thought that we might really go back to the way things had been between us. We'd been talking about our children, about...our lives in the past. So later, I went to Robert's room, meaning to...Oh G.o.d, I don't know what I meant to do." She ran a hand back through her dark hair, gripping it hard at the scalp as if she wanted the pain. "How much more of a fool can I possibly be in one lifetime? I almost walked in on my sister and Robert for a second time. And the funny part-it's almost hysterical when one really thinks about it-is that he was saying exactly the same thing that he had been saying to Joy that day in Hampstead when I found them together. 'Come on, baby. Come on, Joy. Come on! Come on!' And grunting and grunting and grunting like a bull."

Lynley heard her words, recognising the kaleidoscopic effect they had on the case. They threw everything into a new perspective. "What time was this?"

"Late. Long after one. Perhaps nearly two. I don't actually know."

"But you heard him? You're certain of that?"

"Oh, yes. I heard him." She bent her head in shame.

Yet after that, Lynley thought, she would still seek to protect the man. That kind of undeserved, selfless devotion was beyond his comprehension. He avoided trying to deal with it by asking her something altogether different. "Do you remember where you were in March of 1973?"

She did not seem to take in the question at once. "In 1973? I was...surely I was at home in London. Caring for James. Our son. He was born that January, and I'd taken some time off."

"But Gabriel wasn't home?"

She pondered this. "No, I don't think he was. I think he was appearing in the regionals then. Why? What does that have to do with all this?"

Everything, Lynley thought. He put all his resources into compelling her to listen and understand his next words. "Your sister was getting ready to write a book about a murder that occurred in March of 1973. Whoever committed that murder also killed Joy and Gowan Kilbride. The evidence we have is virtually useless, Irene. And I'm afraid we need you if we're to bring this creature to any kind of justice."

Her eyes begged him for the truth. "Is it Robert?"

"I don't think so. Inspite of everything you've told us, I simply don't see how he could have managed to get the key to her room."

"But if he was with her that night, she could have given it to him!"

That was a possibility, Lynley acknowledged. How to explain it? And then how to align it with what the forensic report revealed about Joy Sinclair? And how to tell Irene that even if, by helping the police, she proved her husband innocent, she would only be proving her own cousin Rhys guilty?

"Will you help us?" he asked.

Lynley saw her struggle with the decision and knew exactly the dilemma she faced. It all came down to a simple choice: her continued protection of Robert Gabriel for the sake of their children, or her active involvement in a scheme that might bring her sister's killer to justice. To choose the former, she faced the uncertainty of never knowing whether she was protecting a man who was truly innocent or guilty. To choose the latter, however, she in effect committed herself to an act of forgiveness, a posthumous absolution of her sister's sin against her.

Thus, it was a choice between the living and the dead wherein the living promised only a continuation of lies and the dead promised the peace of mind that comes from a dissolution of rancour and a getting on with life. On the surface, it appeared to be no choice at all. But Lynley knew too well that decisions governed by the heart could be wildly irrational. He only hoped Irene had grown to see that her marriage to Gabriel had been infected with the disease of his infidelities, and that her sister had played only a small and unhappy role in a drama of demise that had been grinding itself out for years.

Irene moved. Her fingers left damp marks on her leather handbag. Her voice caught, then held. "I'll help you. What do I have to do?"

"Spend tonight at your sister's home in Hampstead. Sergeant Havers will go with you."

16.

WHEN DEBORAH ST. JAMES answered the door to Lynley's knock the next morning at half past ten, her unruly hair and the stained ap.r.o.n she wore over her threadbare jeans and plaid s.h.i.+rt told him he had interrupted her in the midst of her work. Still, her face lit when she saw him.

"A diversion," she said. "Thank G.o.d! I've spent the last two hours working in the darkroom with nothing but Peach and Alaska for company. They're sweet as far as dogs and cats go, but not much for conversation. Simon's right there in the lab, of course, but his entertainment value plunges to nothing when he's concentrating on science. I'm so glad you've come. Perhaps you can rout him out for morning coffee." She waited until he had removed overcoat and m.u.f.fler before she touched his shoulder lightly and said, "Are you quite all right, Tommy? Is there anything...? You see, they've told me a bit about it and...You don't look well. Are you sleeping at all? Have you eaten? Should I ask Dad...? Would you like...?" She bit her lip. "Why do I always babble like an idiot?"

Lynley smiled affectionately at her jumble of words, gently pushed one of her fallen curls back behind her ear, and followed her to the stairs. She was continuing to speak.

"Simon's had a phone call from Jeremy Vinney. It's put him into one of those long, mysterious contemplations of his. And then Helen rang not five minutes later."

Below her, Lynley hesitated. "Helen's not here today?" Inspite of his tone, which he had endeavoured to keep guarded, he saw that Deborah read through the question easily. Her green eyes softened.