Elizabeth George - Payment in Blood

“Not the emergency number?”

“He didn’t want the police.” She looked at them anxiously. “But I’m glad you’ve come. Perhaps you can talk some sense into him. It’s only too clear that he was meant to be the next victim!”

Lynley drew up an uncomfortable plastic chair to shield her from the stares of the curious. Havers did likewise.

“Why?” Lynley asked.

Irene’s face looked strained, as if the question confused her. But something told Lynley it was part of a performance designed specifi cally and spontaneously for him. “What do you mean? What else could it be? He’s been beaten bloody. Two of his ribs are cracked, his eyes are blackened, he’s lost a tooth. Who else could be responsible?”

“It’s not the way our killer’s been working, though, is it?” Lynley pointed out. “We’ve a man, perhaps a woman, who uses a knife, not fists. It doesn’t really look as if anyone intended to kill him.”

“Then what else could it be? What are you saying?” She drew her body straight to ask the question, as if an offence had been given and would not be brooked without some form of protest.

“I think you know the answer to that. I imagine you’ve not told me everything about tonight. You’re protecting him. Why? What on earth has he done to deserve this kind of devotion? He’s hurt you in every possible way. He’s treated you with a contempt that he hasn’t bothered to hide from anyone. Irene, listen to me-”

She held up a hand and her agonised voice told him her brief performance was at an end. “Please. All right. That’s more than enough. He’d had a woman. I don’t know who she was. He wouldn’t say. When I got there, he was still…he hadn’t…” She stumbled for the words. “He couldn’t manage his clothes.”

Lynley heard the admission with disbelief. What had it been like for her, going to him, soothing his fear, smelling those unmistakable odours of intercourse, dressing him in the very same clothes he had torn from his body in haste to make love to another woman? “I’m trying to understand why you still feel loyalty to a man like this, a man who went so far as to deceive you with your very own sister.” Even as he spoke, he considered his words, considered how Irene had attempted to spare Robert Gabriel tonight, and thought back to what had been said about the night Joy Sinclair died. He saw the pattern clearly enough. “You’ve not told me everything about the night your sister died either. Even in that, you’re protecting him. Why , Irene?”

Her eyes closed briefly. “He’s the father of my children,” she replied with simple dignity.

“Protecting him protects them?”

“Ultimately. Yes.”

John Darrow himself could not have said it better. But Lynley knew how to direct the conversation. Teddy Darrow had shown him.

“Children generally discover the worst there is to know about their parents, no matter how one longs to protect them. Your silence now does nothing but serve to protect your sister’s killer.”

“He didn’t . He couldn’t! I can’t believe that of Robert. Nearly anything else, God knows. But not that.”

Lynley leaned towards her and covered her cold hands with his own. “You’ve been thinking he killed your sister. And saying nothing about your suspicions has been your way of protecting your children, sparing them the public humiliation of having a murderer for a father.”

“He couldn’t . Not that.”

“Yet you think he did. Why? ”

Sergeant Havers spoke. “If Gabriel didn’t kill your sister, what you tell us can only help him.”

Irene shook her head. Her eyes were hollows of terrible fear. “Not this. It can’t .” She looked at each one of them, her fi ngers digging into the worn surface of her handbag. She was like a fugitive, determined to escape but recognising the futility of further flight. When she began to speak at last, her body shuddered as if an illness had taken her. As, in a way, it had. “My sister was with Robert that night in his room. I heard them. I’d gone to him. Like a fool…God, why am I such a pathetic fool? He and I had been in the library together earlier, after the read-through, and there was a moment then when I thought that we might really go back to the way things had been between us. We’d been talking about our children, about…our lives in the past. So later, I went to Robert’s room, meaning to…Oh God, I don’t know what I meant to do.” She ran a hand back through her dark hair, gripping it hard at the scalp as if she wanted the pain. “How much more of a fool can I possibly be in one lifetime? I almost walked in on my sister and Robert for a second time. And the funny part-it’s almost hysterical when one really thinks about it-is that he was saying exactly the same thing that he had been saying to Joy that day in Hampstead when I found them together. ‘Come on, baby. Come on, Joy. Come on! Come on !’ And grunting and grunting and grunting like a bull.”

Lynley heard her words, recognising the kaleidoscopic effect they had on the case. They threw everything into a new perspective. “What time was this?”

“Late. Long after one. Perhaps nearly two. I don’t actually know.”

“But you heard him? You’re certain of that?”

“Oh, yes. I heard him.” She bent her head in shame.

Yet after that, Lynley thought, she would still seek to protect the man. That kind of undeserved, selfless devotion was beyond his comprehension. He avoided trying to deal with it by asking her something altogether different. “Do you remember where you were in March of 1973?”

She did not seem to take in the question at once. “In 1973? I was…surely I was at home in London. Caring for James. Our son. He was born that January, and I’d taken some time off.”

“But Gabriel wasn’t home?”

She pondered this. “No, I don’t think he was. I think he was appearing in the regionals then. Why? What does that have to do with all this?”

Everything , Lynley thought. He put all his resources into compelling her to listen and understand his next words. “Your sister was getting ready to write a book about a murder that occurred in March of 1973. Whoever committed that murder also killed Joy and Gowan Kilbride. The evidence we have is virtually useless, Irene. And I’m afraid we need you if we’re to bring this creature to any kind of justice.”

Her eyes begged him for the truth. “Is it Robert?”

“I don’t think so. Inspite of everything you’ve told us, I simply don’t see how he could have managed to get the key to her room.”

“But if he was with her that night, she could have given it to him!”

That was a possibility, Lynley acknowledged. How to explain it? And then how to align it with what the forensic report revealed about Joy Sinclair? And how to tell Irene that even if, by helping the police, she proved her husband innocent, she would only be proving her own cousin Rhys guilty?

“Will you help us?” he asked.

Lynley saw her struggle with the decision and knew exactly the dilemma she faced. It all came down to a simple choice: her continued protection of Robert Gabriel for the sake of their children, or her active involvement in a scheme that might bring her sister’s killer to justice. To choose the former, she faced the uncertainty of never knowing whether she was protecting a man who was truly innocent or guilty. To choose the latter, however, she in effect committed herself to an act of forgiveness, a posthumous absolution of her sister’s sin against her.

Thus, it was a choice between the living and the dead wherein the living promised only a continuation of lies and the dead promised the peace of mind that comes from a dissolution of rancour and a getting on with life. On the surface, it appeared to be no choice at all. But Lynley knew too well that decisions governed by the heart could be wildly irrational. He only hoped Irene had grown to see that her marriage to Gabriel had been infected with the disease of his infidelities, and that her sister had played only a small and unhappy role in a drama of demise that had been grinding itself out for years.