Elizabeth George - Payment in Blood

“Vassal?” St. James repeated blankly.

She nodded. “Odd, isn’t it? Of course, since the play had nothing to do with feudalism, I thought it was something wildly avant-garde, with me just too dim to understand what it meant.”

“But they understood?”

“Lord Stinhurst, his wife, Francesca Gerrard, and Elizabeth. Decidedly. But I do think, aside from their irritation at the late changes in the script, everyone else was as confused as I was.” Lady Helen ran her fingers unconsciously round the top of the boot she still held. “Altogether, I had the impression that the play was supposed to serve a noble purpose that didn’t quite come off. A noble purpose for everyone. It was to honour Stinhurst’s achievement vis-à-vis the renovated Agincourt, it was to celebrate Joanna Ellacourt’s career on the stage, it was to bring Irene Sinclair back into the theatre, it was to get Rhys back into directing a major production in London. Perhaps Joy even intended a part for Jeremy Vinney as well. Someone mentioned that he’d started out as an actor before turning to dramatic criticism, and frankly, other than to continue following the Agincourt story, there doesn’t seem to be any other real reason for him to have come to the read-through. So you see,” she concluded with an urgency in her voice that she could not hide from him, “it doesn’t seem reasonable that any of those people would have murdered Joy, does it?”

St. James smiled at her fondly. “Especially Rhys.” His words were exceptionally gentle.

Lady Helen met his eyes, saw the kindness and compassion behind them, felt she couldn’t bear it, and looked away. Yet she knew that, above all people, he was the single person who would understand. So she spoke. “Last night with Rhys. It was…the fi rst time in years that I felt so loved, Simon. For what I am, for my faults and my virtues, for my past and my future. I haven’t had that with a man since…” She hesitated, then finished what needed to be said. “Since I had it with you. And I never expected to have it again. That was to be my punishment, you see. For what happened between us all those years ago. I deserved it.”

St. James shook his head sharply, without reply. After a moment he said, “If you concentrate, Helen, are you certain you heard nothing last night?”

Lady Helen answered his question with one of her own. “The first time you made love to Deborah, what else did you notice besides her?”

“You’re right, of course. The house could have burned to the ground for all I would have known. Or cared, for that matter.” He got to his feet, hung his coat back on the peg, and held out his hand for hers. When she gave it to him, his brow furrowed. “My God, what have you done to yourself?” he asked.

“Done?”

“Your hand, Helen.”

Her eyes dropped, and she saw that her fi ngers had somehow become laced with blood, black with it underneath her fi ngernails. She started at the sight.

“Where…I don’t…”

More blood, she saw, smeared along the side of her skirt, drying to brown on the wool. She looked for the source, spied the boot she had been holding, and picked it up, examining the sticky substance round its top, black upon black in the dull light of the storage area. Wordlessly, she handed it to St. James.

He upended the boot on the bench, thumped it soundly against the wood, and dislodged a large glove, at one time leather and fur but now nothing more than a pulpy mass of Joy Sinclair’s blood. Not yet dried, not yet done for.

HALF THE SIZE of the library, the Westerbrae sitting room to the left of the wide baronial stairway seemed to Lynley an odd choice of locations for any large group to meet in.Yet it was still set up for the reading of Joy Sinclair’s play, with a concentric arrangement of tables and chairs at the room’s centre for the actors, and peripheral observation points along its walls for everyone else. Even the scent in the room bore witness to last night’s ill-fated gathering: tobacco, burnt matches, coffee dregs, and brandy.

When Lord Stinhurst entered under the watchful eye of Sergeant Havers, Lynley directed him to sit in an unwelcoming ladder-back chair near the fireplace. A coal fire burned in the small grate there, cutting the chill in the room. Outside the closed door, the scene-of-crime men from Strathclyde CID were making an unusually noisy arrival.

Stinhurst took his designated seat cooperatively, crossing one well-tailored leg over the other, refusing a cigarette. He was impeccably dressed, the personification of weekend-inthe-country. Yet, in spite of his movements, which carried the assurance of a man used to the stage, used to being under the eyes of hundreds of people at once, he looked physically drained, whether from exhaustion or from the effort of holding together the women in his family during this time of crisis, Lynley could not have said. But he took the opportunity of observing the man while Sergeant Havers leafed through the pages of her notebook.

Cary Grant, Lynley thought in summation of Stinhurst’s general appearance and liked the comparison. Although Stinhurst was in his seventies, his face had lost none of the extraordinarily handsome, strong-jawed force of its youth, and his hair, shafted obliquely by the amiable low light of the room, was variations on silver, roughly textured and full as it had always been. With a body on which there was no spare flesh, Stinhurst belied the term old age , living proof that relentless industry was the key to youth.

Yet, underneath this pleasant, surface perfection, Lynley sensed strong undercurrents being mastered, and he decided that control was the key to understanding the man. He appeared to excel at maintaining it: over his body, over his emotions, over his mind. This last was acutely alive and, as far as Lynley could tell, perfectly capable of deciding how best to tamper with a mountain of evidence. At the moment, Lord Stinhurst manifested only one sign of agitation in the face of this interview, pressing together the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in repeated, forceful spasms. The flesh under the nails alternately whitened and blushed as circulation was interrupted and then restored. Lynley found the gesture interesting and wondered if Stinhurst’s body would continue to reveal his increasing tension.

“You look a great deal like your father,” Stinhurst said. “But I suppose you hear that frequently.”

Lynley saw Havers’ head come up with a snap. “Generally not, in my line of work,” he replied. “I’d like you to explain why you’ve burnt Joy Sinclair’s scripts.”

If Stinhurst was disconcerted by Lynley’s unwillingness to recognise any bond between them, he did not show it. Rather, he said, “Without the sergeant, please.”

Gripping her pencil more firmly, Havers regarded the older man with eyes narrowed in contempt at his lord-of-the-manor dismissal of her. She waited for Lynley’s response and flashed a brief, satisfied smile when he said firmly, “That’s not possible.” Hearing that, she settled back into her chair.

Stinhurst didn’t move. He had not, in fact, even glanced at Sergeant Havers before he requested her removal. He merely said, “I have to insist, Thomas.”

The use of his given name was a stimulus that brought back to Lynley not only Havers’ angry challenge to treat Lord Stinhurst with an iron glove, but also the trepidation he had earlier felt about his assignment to this case. It set off every alarm.

“That’s not one of your rights, I’m afraid.”

“My…rights?” Stinhurst offered the smile of a card-player with a winning hand. “This entire fantasy that says I have to speak with you is just that, Thomas. A fantasy. We don’t have that kind of legal system. You and I both know it. The sergeant goes or we wait for my solicitor. From London.”