Elizabeth George - Payment in Blood

“My point is that Francesca Gerrard didn’t come back to fetch Mary Agnes from her room for the next twenty minutes. And only then did Lord Stinhurst tell Mary Agnes to begin waking the household and telling them to come to the drawing room. In the meantime, he placed some phone calls from Francesca’s office-it’s next to Mary Agnes’ bedroom, so she could hear his voice. And, Inspector, he received two calls as well.”

When Lynley didn’t react to this piece of information, Barbara felt her earlier irritation begin to bite. “Sir, you’ve not forgotten Lord Stinhurst, have you? You know who he is: the man who ought to be on his way to the police station right now for destruction of evidence, interfering with the police, and murder.”

“That’s a bit premature,” Lynley remarked.

His calm rubbed the sore of Barbara’s irritation.

“Is it?” she demanded. “And at what point did you make that fi ne decision?”

“I’ve heard nothing so far to convince me that Lord Stinhurst murdered Joy Sinclair.” Lynley’s voice was a model of patience. “But even if I thought that he might have done so, I’m not about to arrest a man on the strength of his having burned a stack of scripts.”

“ What? ” Barbara’s own voice rasped. “You’ve made your decision about Stinhurst already, haven’t you? Based on one conversation with a man who spent the fi rst ten years of his career on the bloody stage and no doubt turned in his finest performance right here tonight, explaining himself away to you! That’s rich, Inspector. Police work you can be proud of!”

“Havers,” Lynley said quietly, “step back in line.”

He was pulling rank. Barbara heard the warning. She knew she ought to back down, but she wasn’t about to at a moment when she was so completely in the right. “What did he tell you that has you so convinced of his innocence, Inspector? That he and Daddy were school chums at Eton? That he’d like to see more of you round the London club? Or better yet, that his destroying evidence had nothing at all to do with the murder and you can trust him to tell you the truth about it since he’s a real gent, just like you!”

“There’s more involved than that,” Lynley said, “and I’m not about to discuss it-”

“With the likes of me! Oh, rot!” she finished.

“Get that blasted chip off your shoulder and you might find yourself a person that other people want to confide in,” Lynley snapped. But he spun from Barbara quickly and didn’t move on.

She could tell that he regretted his loss of control at once. She had pushed him to it, wanting his anger to bubble and boil over just as her own had done earlier when he had locked her out of the sitting room. But she saw quite clearly how little ground she would gain in his estimation with this sort of manipulative behaviour. She berated herself for her temperamental stupidity. After a moment, she spoke.

“Sorry,” she said wretchedly. “I was off, Inspector. Out of line. Again.”

Lynley didn’t immediately respond. They stood on the stairs, caught by a tension that seemed painfully immutable, each involved in a separate misery. Lynley appeared to rouse himself only with an effort.

“We make an arrest on the strength of evidence, Barbara.”

She nodded calmly, her brief passion spent. “I know that, sir. But I think…” He wouldn’t want to hear it. He would hate her. She plunged on. “I think you’re ignoring the obvious so that you can head directly towards Davies-Jones, not on the strength of evidence at all, but on the strength of something else that… perhaps you’re afraid to admit.”

“That isn’t the case,” Lynley replied. He continued up the stairs.

At the top, Barbara identified each room for him as they passed it: Gabriel’s the closest to the rear stairway, then Vinney’s, Elizabeth Rintoul’s, and Irene Sinclair’s. Across the hall from this last was Rhys Davies-Jones’ room, where the west corridor turned right, widened, and led into the main body of the house. All the doors here were locked, and as they walked along the hallway where portraits displayed several generations of sombre-faced Gerrard ancestors and delicately worked sconces intermittently cast half-circles of light on the pale walls, St. James met them, handing Lynley a plastic bag.

“Helen and I found this stuffed into one of the boots downstairs,” he said. “According to David Sydeham, it’s his.”

DAVID SYDEHAM did not look like the kind of man to whom a woman of Joanna Ellacourt’s fame and reputation would have stayed married for nearly two decades. Lynley knew the fairy-tale version of their relationship, the sort of romantic drivel that tabloids feed up for their customers to read on the underground during rush-hour commutes. It was fairly standard stuff, how a twenty-nine-year-old midland booking agent-the son of a country cleric-with little more than good looks and unshakeable self-confidence to recommend him, had discovered a nineteen-year-old Nottingham girl doing a tousle-haired Celia in a back-alley theatre; how he persuaded her to throw her lot in with his, rescuing her from the grim working-class environment into which she had been born; how he provided her with drama coaches and voice lessons; how he nurtured her career every step of the way until she emerged, as he had long known she would, the most sought-after actress in the country.

Twenty years later, Sydeham was still handsome enough in a sensual way, but it was a handsomeness gone to seed, a sensuality given sway too often with unfortunate consequences. His skin showed the inchoate signs of dissipation. There was rather too much flesh under his chin and a decided puffiness to his hands and face. Like the other men at Wester-brae, Sydeham had not been given the opportunity to shave that morning, and he looked even the worse for wear because of this. A substantial growth of beard shadowed his face, accenting the deep circles under his heavily lidded eyes. Still, he dressed with a remarkable instinct for making the best of what he had. Although his was the body of a bull, he encased it in jacket, shirt, and trousers that were obviously cut specifically to fit him. They had the look of money, as did his wristwatch and signet ring which fl ashed gold in the fi relight as he took a seat in the sitting room. Not a hard-backed chair, Lynley noted, but a comfortable armchair in the semi-darkness of the room’s periphery.

“I’m not entirely certain that I understand your function here this weekend,” Lynley said as Sergeant Havers closed the door and took her seat at the table.

“Or my function at all?” Sydeham’s face was bland.

It was an interesting point. “If you wish.”

“I manage my wife’s career. I see to her contracts, book her engagements, run interference for her when the pressure mounts. I read her scripts, coach her with her lines, manage her money.” Sydeham appeared to perceive a change in Lynley’s expression. “Yes,” he repeated, “I manage her money. All of it. And there’s quite a bit. She makes it, I invest it. So I’m a kept man, Inspector.” Upon this last remark, he smiled without the slightest trace of humour. His skin seemed thin enough when it came to the superficial inequities in his relationship with his wife.

“How well did you know Joy Sinclair?” Lynley asked.

“Do you mean did I kill her? I’d only met the woman at half past seven. And while Joanna wasn’t altogether happy with the manner in which Joy had taken to revising her play, I generally negotiate improvements with playwrights. I don’t kill them if I don’t like what they’ve written.”