Elizabeth George - Payment in Blood

“Aside from the changes Joy had made to the script, did anything else strike you that might have led up to the row last night?” he asked.

Lady Helen considered the hours she had spent with the group from London prior to the turmoil in the sitting room. “I couldn’t say for certain. But I do think everyone’s nerves were strung.”

“Whose in particular?”

“Joanna Ellacourt’s, for one. From what I could gather at cocktails last night, she was already a bit overwrought by the thought that Joy might be writing a play that was going to be a vehicle to resurrect her sister’s career.”

“That would certainly have bothered her, wouldn’t it?”

Lady Helen nodded. “Besides the opening of the new Agincourt Theatre, the production was to celebrate Joanna’s twentieth year on the stage, Simon, so its focus was supposed to be on her, not on Irene Sinclair. But I got the impression that she didn’t think it would be.” Lady Helen explained the brief scene she had witnessed in the drawing room last night, when the company had gathered before dinner. Lord Stinhurst had been standing near the piano with Rhys Davies-Jones, fl ipping through a set of designs for costumes, when Joanna Ellacourt joined them, slinking across the room in a semi-bodiceless coruscating gown that gave new definition to dressing for dinner. She had taken up the drawings for her own perusal, but her face revealed in an instant how she felt about what she saw.

“Joanna didn’t like Irene Sinclair’s costumes,” St. James guessed.

“She claimed that every one of them showed Irene off…like a vamp, I think she said. She crumpled the drawings up, told Lord Stinhurst that his costume people would have to redesign if he wanted her in the play, and threw them all on the fire. She was absolutely livid, and I think that once she began reading the play in the sitting room, she saw in Joy’s changes that her worst fears were confi rmed, and that’s why she threw down the script and left. And Joy…well, I couldn’t help feeling that she enjoyed the sensation and the disruption she was causing.”

“What was she like, Helen?”

It wasn’t an easy question to answer. Physically, Joy Sinclair had been striking. Not beautiful, Lady Helen explained, she looked like a gypsy, with olive skin and black eyes, possessing the sort of features that belong on a Roman coin, finely boned, chiselled, and stamped with both intelligence and strength. She was a woman who radiated sensuality and life. Even a quick impatient gesture to her earlobe to remove an earring somehow could become a movement fraught with promise.

“Promise for whom?” St. James asked.

“That’s hard to say. But I should guess that Jeremy Vinney was the most interested man here. He jumped up to join her the moment she came into the drawing room last eve-ning-she was the last to arrive-and he stuck right to her side at dinner as well.”

“Were they lovers?”

“She didn’t act as if there was anything between them other than friendship. He mentioned having tried to reach her on the telephone and leaving a dozen or so messages on her answering machine over the past week. And she just laughed and said that she was terribly sorry he’d gone ignored but she wasn’t even listening to her answering machine because she was six months overdue on a book she had contracted with her publisher, so she didn’t want to feel guilty by listening to the messages asking her where it was.”

“A book?” St. James asked. “She was writing both a book and a play?”

Lady Helen laughed regretfully. “Incredible, wasn’t she? And to think that I feel industrious if I manage to answer a letter within fi ve months of receiving it.”

“She sounds like a woman who might well inspire jealousy.”

“Perhaps. But I think it was more that she alienated people unconsciously.” Lady Helen told him of Joy’s light-hearted comments during cocktails about a Reingale painting that hung over the fireplace in the drawing room. It was a depiction of a white-gowned Regency woman, surrounded by her two children and a frisky terrier who nosed at a ball. “She said she’d never forgotten that painting, that as a child visiting Westerbrae, she’d liked to imagine herself as that Reingale woman, safe and secure and admired, with two perfect children to adore her. She said something like, what more could one ask for than that and isn’t it strange how life turns out. Her sister was sitting right below the painting as she spoke, and I remember noticing how Irene began to fl ush horribly, like a rash was spreading up her neck and across her face.”

“Why?”

“Well, of course, Irene had once been all those things, hadn’t she? Safe and secure, with a husband and two children. And then Joy had come along and destroyed it all.”

St. James looked sceptical. “How can you be sure that Irene Sinclair was reacting to what her sister had said?”

“I can’t, of course. I know that. Except at dinner, when Joy and Jeremy Vinney were talking together and Joy was making all sorts of amusing comments about her new book, entertaining the whole table with stories about some man she’d been trying to interview in the Fens, Irene…” Lady Helen hesitated. It was difficult to put into words the chilling effect Irene Sinclair’s behaviour had had upon her. “Irene was sitting quite still, staring at the candles on the table and she…it was rather dreadful, Simon. She drove the tines of her fork right into her thumb. But I don’t think she felt a thing.”

ST. JAMES reflected upon the tops of his shoes. They were smudged with dried mud from the drive, and he bent to wipe them off. “Then Joanna Ellacourt must have been wrong about Irene’s role in this changed version of the play.

Why would Joy Sinclair be writing for her sister if she continued to alienate her at every juncture?”

“As I said, I think the alienation was unconscious. And as for the play, perhaps Joy felt guilty. After all, she had destroyed her sister’s marriage. She couldn’t give that back to her. But she could give her back her career.”

“But in a play with Robert Gabriel? After a messy divorce that Joy herself had likely helped cause? Doesn’t that smack of sadism to you?”

“Not if no one else in London was willing to give Irene a chance, Simon. Evidently, she’s been out of circulation for a good many years. This may well have been her only opportunity for a second go on stage.”

“Tell me about the play.”

As Lady Helen recalled, Joy Sinclair’s description of the new version of the play- prior to the actors’ actually seeing it-had been deliberately provocative. When asked about it by Francesca Gerrard, she had smiled up and down the length of the dining table and said, “It takes place in a house much like this. In the dead of winter, with ice sheeting the road and not a soul in miles and no way to escape. It’s about a family. And a man who dies, and the people who had to kill him. And why. Especially why.” Lady Helen had expected to hear wolves howling next.

“It sounds as if she intended that as a message for someone.”

“It does, doesn’t it? And then when we were all gathered in the sitting room and she began going over the changes in the plot, she said much the same thing.”

The plot concerned itself with a family and their thwarted New Year’s Eve celebration. According to Joy, the oldest brother was a man possessed of a terrible secret, a secret that was about to rip apart the fabric of everyone’s life.

“And then they began to read,” Lady Helen said. “I wish I had paid more attention to what they were reading, but it was so stuffy in the sitting room-no, it was more like a pan of water about to come to a boil-that I didn’t really follow much of what they had to say. All I remember for a certainty is that just before Francesca Gerrard went a bit mad, the older brother in the story-Lord Stinhurst was reading the part since it hadn’t been cast yet- had just received a telephone call. He decided that he had to leave at once, saying that after twenty-seven years, he wasn’t about to become another vassal. I’m fairly certain those were the words. And that’s when Francesca leaped to her feet and the evening collapsed.”