“Then we’ll be off,” Macaskin said. “I’ll leave Constable Lonan with you and get back myself in the morning. I’ve a man ready to take Stinhurst to the station.”
“Leave him here.”
Macaskin opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, throwing protocol to the wind long enough to say, “As to those scripts, Inspector.”
“I’ll see to it,” Lynley said firmly. “Burning evidence isn’t murder. He can be dealt with when the time arrives.” He saw Sergeant Havers move in a recoiling motion, as if she wished to distance herself from what she saw as a poor decision.
For his part, Macaskin seemed to consider arguing the point and decided to let it go. His official good-night comprised the brusque words: “We’ve put your things in the northwest wing. You’re in with St. James. Next to Helen Clyde’s new room.”
Neither the political manoeuvring nor the sleeping arrangements of the police were of interest to the cook, who had remained in the doorway, eager to resolve the culinary dispute that had brought her to the sitting room in the first place. “Twinty minutes, Inspector.” She turned on her heel. “Bey on time.”
It was a fine point of conclusion. And that is how Macaskin used it.
RELEASED at last from their day’s confinement in the library, most of the group were still in the entrance hall when Lynley asked Joanna Ellacourt to step into the sitting room. His request, made so soon after his interview with her husband, reduced the small cluster of people to breath-holding suspense, as if they were waiting to see how the actress would respond. It was, after all, couched as a request. But none of them were foolish enough to believe that it was an invitation that might be politely rebuffed should Joanna choose to do so.
It looked as if she was considering that as a possibility, however, walking a quick line between outright refusal and hostile cooperation. The latter seemed ascendant, and as she approached the sitting-room door, Joanna gave vent to the umbrage she felt after a day of incarceration by favouring neither Lynley nor Havers with so much as a word before she passed in front of them and took a seat of her own choosing, the ladder-back chair by the fire that Sydeham had avoided and Stinhurst had only reluctantly occupied. Her choice of it was intriguing, revealing either a determination to see the interview through in the most forthright manner possible or a desire to choose a location where the benefits of firelight playing upon her skin and hair might distract an idle watcher at a crucial moment. Joanna Ellacourt knew how to play to an audience.
Looking at her, Lynley found it hard to believe that she was nearly forty years old. She looked ten years younger, possibly more, and in the forgiving light of the fire that warmed her skin to a translucent gold, Lynley found himself recalling his first sight of François Boucher’s Diana Resting, for the splendid glow of Joanna’s skin was the same, as were the delicate shades of colour across her cheeks and the fragile curve of her ear when she shook her hair back. She was absolutely beautiful, and had her eyes been brown instead of cornflower blue, she might herself have posed for Boucher’s painting.
No wonder Gabriel’s been after her, Lynley thought. He offered her a cigarette which she accepted. Her hand closed over his to steady the lighter’s flame with fingers that were long, very cool, flashing several diamond rings. It was a stagey sort of movement, intentionally seductive.
“Why did you argue with your husband last night?” he asked.
Joanna raised a well-shaped eyebrow and spent a moment taking in Sergeant Havers from head to toe, as if in an evaluation of the policewoman’s grubby skirt and sootstained sweater. “Because I’d grown tired of being on the receiving end of Robert Gabriel’s lust for the last six months,” she replied frankly, and paused as if in the expectation of a response—a nod of sympathy, perhaps, or a cluck of disapproval. When it became evident that none was forthcoming, she was forced to continue her story. Which she did, her voice a bit tight. “He had a nice hard-on every night in my last scene in Othello, Inspector. Just about the time he was supposed to smother me, he’d begin squirming about on the bed like a pubescent twelve-year-old who’s just discovered how much fun he can have with that sweet little sausage between his legs. I’d had it with him. I thought David understood as much. But apparently he didn’t. So he arranged a new contract, forcing me to work with Gabriel again.”
“You argued about the new play.”
“We argued about everything. The new play was just part of it.”
“And you objected to Irene Sinclair’s role as well.”
Joanna flicked cigarette ash onto the hearth. “As far as I was concerned, my husband couldn’t have manipulated this affair with more resounding idiocy. He put me in the position of having to fight off Robert Gabriel for the next twelve months at the same time as trying to keep Gabriel’s ex-wife from climbing up my back on the way to her new, superlunary career. I won’t lie to you, Inspector. I’m not at all sorry that this play of Joy’s is finished. You may say that’s an open admission of guilt if you like, but I’m not about to sit here and play the mourner over the death of a woman I scarcely knew. I suppose that gives me a motive to kill her, as well. But I can’t help that.”
“Your husband says that you were out of your room for part of last night.”
“So I had the opportunity to do Joy in? Yes, I suppose it looks that way.”
“Where did you go after your row in the gallery?”
“To our room, at first.”
“What time was this?”
“Shortly after eleven, I imagine. But I didn’t stay there. I knew David would be coming back, sorry about it all and eager to make it up in his usual fashion. And I wanted none of it. Or of him. So I went to the music room next to the gallery. There’s an ancient gramophone there and some even more ancient records. I played show tunes. Francesca Gerrard appears to be quite an Ethel Merman fan, by the way.”
“Would someone have heard you?”
“As corroboration, you mean?” She shook her head, apparently unconcerned by the fact that her alibi thus had absolutely no grounds for credibility. “The music room’s off by itself in the northeast corridor. I doubt anyone would have heard. Unless Elizabeth was doing her usual routine, snooping at doors. She seems to excel at it.”
Lynley let that one go by. “Who was in the reception area when you arrived yesterday?”
Joanna fingered a few strands of her firelit hair. “Aside from Francesca, I don’t recall anyone in particular.” Her brow furrowed thoughtfully. “Except Jeremy Vinney. He came to the drawing room door and said a few words. I do remember that.”
“Curious that Vinney’s presence sticks in your mind.”
“Not at all. Years ago he had a small part in a production I did in Norwich. And I remember thinking when I saw him yesterday that he has about as much stage presence now as he did then. Which is to say he has none. He’s always looked like someone who’s just dropped fifteen lines and can’t think how to ad-lib his way out of the mess. He couldn’t even manage to rhubarb successfully. Poor man. The stage was not his gift, I’m afraid. But then he’s awfully dumpy to play any significant role.”
“What time did you return to your room last night?”
“I’m really not certain, as I didn’t check the time. It’s not the sort of thing one does as a matter of course. I just played records until I was sufficiently cooled off.” She gazed at the fire. Her unruffled composure altered a degree as she ran a hand along the fine crease in her trousers. “No, that’s not quite true, is it? I wanted to make certain David had time to fall asleep. Face-saving, I suppose, although when I think about it now, why I wanted to give him a chance to save face is beyond me.”
“To save face?” Lynley queried.
Joanna smiled quickly, without apparent cause. It appeared to be a distraction, a way of automatically concentrating an audience’s attention on her beauty rather than the quality of her performance. “David is in the wrong about this entire contract situation with Robert Gabriel, Inspector. And had
I come back sooner, he would have wanted to put the anger between us at rest. But…” She looked away again, touching the tip of her tongue to her lips as if in the need to buy time. “I’m sorry. I just don’t think I can tell you after all. Silly of me, isn’t it? I suppose you might even want to arrest me. But there are some things…I know David wouldn’t have told you himself. But I couldn’t go back to our room until he was asleep. I just couldn’t. Please understand.”
Lynley knew she was asking for permission to cease talking, but he said nothing, merely waiting for her to continue. When she did so, she kept her face averted, and she drew on her cigarette several times before crushing it out altogether.
“David would have wanted to make it up. But he hasn’t been able to…for nearly two months now. Oh, he would have tried anyway. He’d have felt he owed me that. And if he failed, everything would have been that much worse between us. So I stayed out of the room until I thought he’d be asleep. Which he was. And I was glad of it.”
This was a fascinating piece of information, to be sure. It made the longevity of the Ellacourt-Sydeham marriage even more difficult to understand. As if in recognition of this fact, Joanna Ellacourt spoke again. Her voice became sharp, unclouded by either sentiment or regret.
“David’s my history, Inspector. I’m not ashamed to admit that he made me what I am. For twenty years he’s been my biggest supporter, my biggest critic, my best friend. One doesn’t throw that over simply because life gets a little inconvenient now and again.”
Her final statement declared marital loyalty more eloquently than anything Lynley had ever heard. Nonetheless, it was difficult for him to put aside David Sydeham’s evaluation of his wife. She was, indeed, one hell of an actress.
FRANCESCA GERRARD’S bedroom was tucked far away into the corner of the upper northeast corridor, where the hallway narrowed and an old disused harp, covered haphazardly, cast a Quasimodo shadow against the wall. No portraits hung here. No tapestries served as buffers against the cold. Here were no overt illustrations of comfort and security. Only monochromatic plaster, showing the tracery of age like fine webbing, and a paper-thin carpet running along the floor.
Casting a hasty look behind her, Elizabeth Rintoul slipped down this hallway and paused at her aunt’s door, listening intently. From the upper west corridor, she could hear the rumble of voices. But from inside the room there was nothing. She tapped her fingernails against the wood, a nervous movement that resembled the pecking of small birds. No one called entrance. She knocked again.
“Aunt Francie?” A whisper was all she was willing to risk. Again there was no response.
She knew her aunt was inside, for she’d seen her walk down this corridor not five minutes past when the police had finally unlocked all their rooms. So she tried the doorknob. It turned, feeling slippery under her sweaty hand.
Inside, the air held a smell of musty pomanders, sweetly suffocating face powder, pungent analgesic, and inexpensive cologne. The room’s furnishings acted as companion pieces to the bleak paucity of decoration in the corridor outside: a narrow bed, a single wardrobe and chest of drawers, a cheval glass that cast strange green reflections, distorted so that foreheads were bulbous and chins were too small.
Her aunt had not always used this as her bedroom. It was only after her husband’s death that she had moved to this part of the house, as if its inconvenience and inelegance were part of the process of mourning him. She appeared to be engaged in that process now, for she was sitting upright on the very edge of the bed, her attention given to a studio photograph of her husband that was hanging on the wall, the room’s sole decoration. It was a solemn picture, not at all the Uncle Phillip that Elizabeth remembered from her childhood, but undeniably the melancholy man he had become. After New Year’s Eve. After Uncle Geoffrey.
Elizabeth shut the door quietly behind her, but as the wood scraped against the strike plate, her aunt gave a choked, mewling gasp. She rose swiftly from the bed and spun, both hands raised in front of her like claws, as if in defence.
Elizabeth stiffened. How a gesture, so simple, could bring everything back, a memory suppressed and believed forgotten. A six-year-old girl, wandering happily out to the stable in Somerset; seeing the kitchen maids squatting to look through a fissure in the building’s stone wall where the mortar had worn away; hearing them whisper to her Come and see some nancy boys, luv; not knowing what it meant but eager—always so pathetically eager—to be friends; bending to the peephole and seeing two stable-boys, their clothes strewn carelessly round a stall, one of them on all fours and the other rearing and plunging and snorting behind him and both of their bodies sheened with a sweat that glistened like oil; frightened and recoiling from the sight only to hear the girls’ stifled laughter. Laughter at her. At her innocence and her blind naïveté. And wanting to strike out at them, to hurt them, to claw at their eyes. With hands just like Aunt Francie’s were now.
“Elizabeth!” Francesca dropped her arms. Her body sagged. “You startled me, my dear.”
Elizabeth watched her aunt warily, afraid to contend with any other memories that might be stirred by another inadvertent gesture. Francesca, she saw, had begun to make herself ready for dinner when her husband’s picture had drawn her into the reverie that Elizabeth had interrupted. Now she was peering at her reflection in the mirror as she ran a brush through her thinning grey hair. She smiled at Elizabeth, but her lips quivered to belie whatever air of tranquillity she was straining to project.
“As a girl, you know, I got used to looking in the mirror without seeing my own face. People say it can’t be done, but I mastered it. I can do my hair, my make-up, my earrings, anything. And I never have to see how homely I am.”
Elizabeth didn’t bother to offer a soothing denial. Denial was insult, for her aunt spoke the truth. She was homely and had always been so, burdened by a long, horsey face, a preponderance of teeth, and very little chin. Possessing a gangling body, she was all arms, legs, and elbows, the recipient of every genetic curse of the Rintoul family. Elizabeth had often thought that homeliness was the reason her aunt wore so much costume jewellery, as if it might somehow distract one’s attention from the gross misfortunes of her face and body.
“You mustn’t mind, Elizabeth,” Francesca was saying gently. “She means well. She does mean well. You mustn’t mind so awfully much.”
Elizabeth felt her throat close. How well her aunt knew her. How completely she had always understood. “‘Get Mr. Vinney a drink, darling…. His glass is almost empty.’” Bitterly, she mimicked her mother’s retiring voice. “I wanted to die. Even with the police. Even with Joy. She can’t stop. She won’t stop. It won’t ever end.”
“She wants your happiness, my dear. She sees it in marriage.”
“Like her own, you mean?” The words tasted like acid.
Her aunt frowned. She put her brush on the chest of drawers, placing her comb neatly across its bristles. “Have I shown you the photographs Gowan gave to me?” she asked brightly, pulling open the top drawer. It squeaked and stuck. “Silly dear boy. He saw a magazine with those before-and-after pictures and decided we’d do a set of the house. Of each room as we renovate it. And then perhaps we’ll display them all in the drawing room when everything’s done. Or perhaps an historian might find them of interest. Or we could always use them to…” She struggled with the drawer, but the wood was swollen with the winter damp.
Elizabeth watched her wordlessly. It was always the way within the circle of the family: unanswered questions, secrets, and withdrawal. They were all conspirators whose collusion insisted upon ignoring the past so that it would go away. Her father, her mother, Uncle Geoffrey, and Granda. And now Aunt Francie. Her loyalties, too, were to the ties of blood.
There was no point in staying in the room any longer. Only one thing needed to be said between them. Elizabeth steadied herself to say it.
“Aunt Francie. Please.”
Francesca looked up. She still held on to the drawer,
still pulled at it fruitlessly, without realising that she was only making its inutility even more pronounced.
“I wanted you to know,” Elizabeth said. “You need to know. I…I’m afraid I didn’t manage things properly at all last night.”
Francesca at last dropped her grip on the drawer. “In what way, my dear?”
“It’s just that…she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t even in her room. So I didn’t have a chance to talk to her at all, to give her your message.”
“It doesn’t matter, darling. You did your best, didn’t you? And at any rate, I—”
“No! Please!”
Her aunt’s voice—as always—was warm with compassion, with understanding how it felt to be barren of ability or talent or hope. In the face of this unconditional acceptance, Elizabeth felt the dry choking of fruitless tears. She couldn’t bear to weep—in either sorrow or pain—so she turned and left the room.
“BLUIDY THING!”
Gowan Kilbride had just about reached his point of no return in his ability to survive nonstop aggravation. The situation in the library had been bad enough, but afterwards it had grown worse with the knowledge, neither admitted to nor denied by the girl herself, that Mary Agnes had allowed Robert Gabriel the very liberties that were forbidden to Gowan’s own pleasure. And now, after all that, to be sent to the scullery by Mrs. Gerrard with directions to do something about the bloody boiler that hadn’t worked properly in fifty years…It was beyond a person’s ability to endure.
With a curse, he threw his spanner down onto the floor where it promptly chipped an old tile, bounced once, and slid under the fiery coils of the infernal water heater.
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” Gowan fumed with rising anger.
He squatted on the floor, poked about with his arm, and immediately burned himself on the metal underside of the boiler.
“Jesus flippin’ Christ!” he howled, throwing himself to one side and staring at the old mechanism as if it were a malevolent, living being. He kicked it viciously, kicked it again. He thought about Robert Gabriel with Mary Agnes and kicked it a third time, which dislodged one of the rusting pipes. Steaming water began to spray out in a hissing arc.
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