Elizabeth George - Payment in Blood

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.