Elizabeth George - Payment in Blood

“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 fl at?”

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 fi nal 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 muffled 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 Institute, 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 grass stain made a cumulous 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 passion 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 God knows we can’t take Davies-Jones on the strength of his name in a fi fteenyear-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 assortment 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.