Elizabeth George - Payment in Blood

Stinhurst did not reply to either of them. He looked and moved like a man ageing rapidly. Managing the stairs seemed to drain him of energy. He appeared to be wearing the very same suit, shirt, and tie that he’d had on yesterday, the charcoal jacket rumpled, its sleeves badly creased. As if he’d given up interest in his appearance entirely. Watching him, Irene wondered, with a chill, if he would even live to see this production open. When he took his chair, with a nod of acknowledgement towards Rhys Davies-Jones, the new reading began.

They were midway through the play when Irene allowed herself to drop off to sleep. The theatre was so warm, the atmosphere on the stage was so close, their voices rose and fell with such hypnotic rhythm that she found it easier than she had supposed it would be to let herself go. She stopped worrying about their willingness to believe in the role she was playing and became the actress she had been years ago, before Robert Gabriel had entered her life and undermined her confi dence with year after year of public and private humiliation.

She even felt herself beginning to dream when Joanna Ellacourt’s voice snapped angrily, “For God’s sake, would someone wake her up? I’ve no intention of trying to work my way through this with her sitting there like a drooling grandmother snoring at a kitchen fi re.”

“Renie?”

“Irene!”

She opened her eyes with a start, pleased to feel the rush of embarrassment sweep over her. “Did I drop off? I’m terribly sorry.”

“Late night, sweetie?” Joanna asked tartly.

“Yes, I’m afraid…I…” Irene swallowed, smiled flickeringly to mask pain, and said, “I spent most of the night going through Joy’s things in Hampstead.”

Stunned astonishment met this announcement. Irene felt pleased to see the effect her words had upon them, and for a moment she understood Jeremy Vinney’s anger. How easily indeed they had forgotten her sister, how conveniently their lives had moved on. But not without a stumbling block for someone, she thought, and began to construct it with every power available to her. She brought tears into her eyes.

“There were diaries, you see,” she said hollowly.

As if instinct alone told her that she was in the presence of a performance capable of upstaging her own, Joanna Ellacourt sought their attention again. “No doubt an account of Joy’s life makes absolutely fascinating reading,” she said. “But if you’re awake now, perhaps this play will be fascinating as well.”

Irene shook her head. She allowed her voice to raise a degree. “No, no, that isn’t it. You see, they weren’t hers. They had come by express yesterday, and when I opened them and found the note from the husband of that wretched woman who had written them-”

“For God’s sake, is this really necessary?” Joanna’s face was white with anger.

“-I started to read. I didn’t get very far, but I saw that they were what Joy had been waiting for to do her next book. The one she talked about just the other night in Scotland. And suddenly…I seemed to realise that she was really dead, that she wouldn’t ever be back.” Irene’s tears began to fall, becoming suddenly copious as she felt the fi rst swelling of genuine grief. Her next words only marginally touched upon the script that she and Sergeant Havers had so painstakingly prepared. She was rambling, she knew it, but the words had to be said. And nothing else mattered but saying them. “So she’ll never write it now. And I felt as if…with Hannah Darrow’s diaries sitting there in her house…I ought to write the book for her if only I could. As a means of saying that…in the end, I understood how it happened between them. I did understand. Oh, it hurt. God, it was agony all the same. But I understood. And I don’t think…She was always my sister. I never told her that. Oh God, I can’t go back there now that she’s dead!”

And then, having done it, she let herself weep, understanding at last the source of her tears, mourning the sister she had loved but forgiven too late, mourning the youth she had wasted in devotion to a man who fi nally meant nothing to her. She sobbed despairingly, for the years gone and the words unspoken, caring for nothing at last but this act of grief.

Across from her, Joanna Ellacourt spoke again. “This cuts it. Can’t any of you do something with her, or is she going to blubber for the rest of the day?” She turned to her husband. “David,” she insisted.

But Sydeham was gazing out into the theatre. “We’ve a visitor,” he said.

Their eyes followed his. Marguerite Rintoul, Countess of Stinhurst, was standing midway down the centre aisle.

SHE WAITED only as long as it took to close the door to her husband’s office. “Where were you last night, Stuart?” she demanded, doing nothing to hide the asperity in her voice as she pulled off her coat and gloves and threw them down on a chair.

It was a question which Lady Stinhurst knew quite well she would not have asked twenty-four hours ago. Then she would have accepted his absence in her usual, pathetically cringing fashion, hurt and wondering and afraid to know the truth. But now she was beyond that. Yesterday’s revelations in this room had combined with a long night of soulsearching to produce an anger so fi nely honed that it could not be blunted by any stony wall of protective and deliberate inattention.

Stinhurst went to his desk, sat behind it in the heavy leather chair.

“Sit down,” he said. His wife didn’t move.

“I asked you a question. I want an answer. Where were you last night? And please don’t ask me to believe that Scotland Yard kept you until nine this morning. I like to think I’m not that much of a fool.”

“I went to an hotel,” Stinhurst said.

“Not your club?”

“No. I wanted anonymity.”

“Something you couldn’t have at home, of course.”

For a moment, Stinhurst said nothing, fi ngering a letter opener that lay on his desk. Long and silver, it caught the light. “I found I couldn’t face you.”

Perhaps more than anything else, her reaction to that single sentence signalled the manner in which their relationship had changed. His voice was even, but brittle, as if the slightest provocation might cause him to break down. His skin was pallid, his eyes bloodshot and, when he placed the letter opener back on his desk, his wife saw that his hands trembled. And yet, she felt herself unmoved by all this, knowing perfectly well that its cause was not his concern for her welfare or the welfare of their daughter or even for himself, but concern over how he was going to keep the story about Geoffrey Rintoul’s despicable life and his violent death out of the newspapers. She had seen Jeremy Vinney herself in the back of the theatre. She knew why he was there. Her anger swelled anew.

“There I was at home, Stuart, patiently waiting as I always have done, worrying about you and what was happening at Scotland Yard. Hour after hour. I thought-I realised only later how foolish I was being-that somehow this tragedy might serve to bring us closer to each other. Imagine my thinking that, in spite of the story you produced about my ‘affair’ with your brother, we might still put this marriage of ours back together. But then you never even phoned, did you? And, like a fool, I waited and waited obediently. Until I fi nally saw that things are quite dead between us. They have been for years, of course, but I was far too afraid to face that. Until last night.”

Lord Stinhurst raised a hand as if in the hope of forestalling further words. “You do choose your moments, don’t you? This isn’t the time to discuss our marriage. I should think you’d see that if nothing else.”

Always, it was his voice of dismissal. So cold and final. So rigid with restraint. Odd, how it didn’t affect her one way or the other now. She smiled politely. “You’ve misunderstood. We aren’t discussing our marriage, Stuart. There’s nothing to discuss.”