Payment In Blood

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley was not untouched by the man’s distress. He noticed, however, that Vinney had sidestepped his question. “Was Joy the one who actually arranged for you to be here? I know you did the phoning to Stinhurst, but did she smooth the way? Was it her idea?” When Vinney nodded, he asked, “Why?”

  “She said she was worried about how Stinhurst and the actors would receive the revisions she’d made to the play. She wanted a friend along, she said, for moral support should things not go her way. I’d been following the Agincourt renovation for months. It seemed reasonable that I might ask to be included in the setting-up of the play for its opening. So I came. To support her, as she asked. But I didn’t support her at all in the end, did I? She may as well have been here alone.”

  “I saw your name in her engagement book.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised. We met for lunch regularly. We’ve done so for years.”

  “At these meetings, did she tell you anything about this weekend? What it would be like? What to expect?”

  “Just that it was a read-through and that I might find it an interesting story.”

  “The play itself?”

  Vinney didn’t answer at first. His vision appeared fixed on nothing. When he replied, however, his voice sounded thoughtful, as if he’d been struck by an idea unconsidered before. “Joy said she wanted me to think about writing an early article on the play. It would be a piece about the stars, the plot, perhaps the format she was using. Coming here would give me an idea about how the play would be staged. But I…I could easily have got that information in London, couldn’t I? We see…saw…each other often enough. So could she…could she have been worried that something like this might happen to her, Inspector? Good God, could she have hoped I’d see to it that the truth were told?”

  Lynley commented upon neither the man’s apparent belief in the inability of the police to ferret out the truth nor the egotistical likelihood of a single journalist’s being able to do it for them. Nonetheless, he catalogued the fact that Vinney’s remark was astonishingly close to Lord Stinhurst’s own assessment of the columnist’s presence.

  “Are you saying she was concerned about her safety?”

  “She didn’t say that,” Vinney admitted honestly. “And she didn’t act concerned.”

  “Why was she in your room the other night?”

  “She said she was too keyed up to sleep. She’d had it out with Stinhurst and went to her room. But she felt restless, so she came to mine. To talk.”

  “What time was this?”

  “A bit after midnight. Perhaps a quarter past.”

  “What did she talk about?”

  “The play at first. How she was bound and determined to see to it that it was produced, with or without Stinhurst. And then about Alec Rintoul. And Robert Gabriel. And Irene. She felt rotten about everything that had happened to Irene, you know. She…she was desperate for her sister to get back with Gabriel. That’s why she wanted Irene in the play. She thought if the two of them were thrown together enough, nature would take its course. She said she wanted Irene’s forgiveness and knew she couldn’t have it. But more than that, I think she wanted to forgive herself. And she couldn’t do that as long as Gabriel and her sister were apart.”

  It was a glib enough recital, seemingly straightforward. Yet Lynley’s instincts told him there was more to be said about Joy’s nocturnal visit to Vinney’s room.

  “You make her sound rather saintly.”

  Vinney shook his head in denial. “She wasn’t a saint. But she was a decent friend.”

  “What time did Elizabeth Rintoul come to your room with the necklace?”

  Vinney brushed the snow from the Morris’ roof before answering. “Not long after Joy came in. I…Joy didn’t want to talk to her. She expected it would be another row about the play. So I kept Elizabeth out. I only opened the door a crack; she couldn’t see inside. So when I wouldn’t invite her in, of course she assumed Joy was in my bed. That’s fairly typical of her. Elizabeth can’t conceive that members of the opposite sex might just be friends. With her, a conversation with a man is an access route to some sort of sexual encounter. It’s rather sad, I think.”

  “When did Joy leave your room?”

  “Shortly before one.”

  “Did anyone see her leave?”

  “There was no one about. I don’t think anyone saw her, unless Elizabeth was peering out her door somehow. Or maybe Gabriel. My room was between both of theirs.”

  “Did you see Joy to her room?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Then she might not have gone there at once. If, as you said, she thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

  “Where else would she go?” Understanding swept across his face. “To meet someone? No. She wasn’t interested in any of these people.”

  “If, as you say, Joy Sinclair was merely your friend, how can you be certain that she didn’t share something more than friendship with someone else? With one of the other men here this weekend. Or one of the women, perhaps.”

  At the second suggestion, Vinney’s face clouded. He blinked and looked away. “There were no lies between us, Inspector. She knew everything. I knew everything. Surely she would have told me if…” He stopped, sighing, rubbing the back of his gloved hand wearily across his forehead. “May I be off? What else is there to say? Joy was my friend. And now she’s dead.” Vinney spoke as if there were a connection between the last two ideas.

  Lynley couldn’t help wondering if there was. Curious about the man and his relationship with Joy Sinclair, he chose another subject.

  “What can you tell me about a man called John Darrow?”

  Vinney dropped his hand. “Darrow?” he repeated blankly. “Nothing. Should I know who he is?”

  “Joy did. Evidently. Irene said she even mentioned him at dinner, perhaps in reference to her new book. What can you tell me about it?” Lynley watched Vinney’s face, waiting to see a flicker of recognition from the man with whom Joy had ostensibly shared everything.

  “Nothing.” He appeared embarrassed about this apparent contradiction in what he had previously said. “She didn’t talk about her work. There was nothing.”

  “I see.” Lynley nodded thoughtfully. The other man shifted his weight back and forth on his feet. He played his keys from one hand to the other. “Joy carried a tape recorder in her shoulder bag. Did you know?”

  “She used it whenever a thought struck her. I knew that.”

  “She made reference to you on it, asking herself why she was in such a lather over you. Why might she have said that?”

  “In a lather over me?” His voice rose incredulously.

  “‘Jeremy. Jeremy. Oh Lord, why be in such a lather over him? It’s hardly a lifetime proposition.’ Those were her words. Can you shed light on them?”

  Vinney’s face was tranquil enough, but the unrest in his eyes betrayed him. “No. I can’t. I can’t think what she meant. We didn’t have that sort of friendship. At least not on my side. Not at all.”

  Six denials. Lynley knew his man well enough to discern the fact that his last remarks had deliberately misdirected the conversation. Vinney wasn’t a good liar. But he was skilled in seizing the moment and using it cleverly. He’d just done so. But why?

  “I won’t keep you any longer, Mr. Vinney,” Lynley concluded. “No doubt you’re anxious to get back to London.”

  Vinney looked as if he wanted to say more, but instead he got into the Morris and switched on its ignition. At first the car made that rolling sound that comes from an engine unwilling to start. But then it coughed and fired into life, releasing exhaust fumes dyspeptically. Vinney cranked down the window while the front wipers worked to free the windscreen of snow.

  “She was my friend, Inspector. Just that. Nothing more.” He reversed the car. The tyres spun fiercely on a patch of ice before gaining hold on the gravel. He shot down the drive towards the road.

  Lynley watched Vinney’s departure, intrigued by th
e man’s compulsion to repeat that last remark, as if it contained an underlying meaning that a detective’s close scrutiny would instantly reveal. For some reason—perhaps because of the distant presence of Inverness—it took him back to Eton and a fifth form’s passionate debate over the obsessions and compulsions evidenced by Macbeth, that pricking of conscience spurring his tormented references to sleep once the deed was done. What need is going unfulfilled in the man despite his successful completion of the act that he thought would bring him joy? His pacing literature master would ask the question insistently, pointing at this boy or that for assessments, evaluations, speculations, defence. Needs drive compulsions. What need? What need? It was a very good question, Lynley decided.

  He felt for his cigarette case and started back across the drive just as Sergeant Havers and St. James came round the corner of the house. Snow clung to their trouser legs as if they’d been thrashing in it. Lady Helen was right behind them.

  For an awkward moment, the four of them stared at one another wordlessly. Then Lynley said, “Havers, put a call in to the Yard, will you? Let Webberly know we’re on our way back to London this morning.”

  Havers nodded, disappearing through the front door. With a quick glance from Lady Helen to Lynley, St. James did likewise.

  “Will you come back with us, Helen?” Lynley asked when they were alone. He put his cigarette case back into his pocket, unopened. “It’ll be a quicker trip for you. We’ve a helicopter waiting near Oban.”

  “I can’t, Tommy. You know that.”

  Her words were not unkind. But they were unmercifully final. There seemed to be nothing more for them to say to each other. Still, Lynley found himself struggling to break her reserve in some manner, no matter how shadowy or inconsequential. It was inconceivable that he should part from her this way. And that’s what he told her, before common sense or pride or stiff propriety could prevent him from doing so.

  “I can’t bear your going away from me like this, Helen.”

  She was caught before him in a streak of sunlight. It slanted through her hair, turning it the colour of a fine, old brandy. Just for a moment her lovely dark eyes held an unreadable emotion. Then it vanished.

  “I must go,” she said quietly, passed by him and entered the house.

  It’s like a death, Lynley thought. But without a proper burial, without a period of mourning, without an end to lamentation.

  IN HIS CLUTTERED London office, Superintendent Malcolm Webberly placed the telephone receiver back into its cradle.

  “That was Havers,” he said. In a characteristic gesture, he raked his right hand through his thinning, sandy hair and pulled on it roughly, as if to encourage his incipient baldness.

  Sir David Hillier, Chief Superintendent, did not move from the window where he had been standing for the last quarter hour, his eyes placidly evaluating the serried collection of buildings that composed the city skyline. As always, he was impeccably dressed, and his posture suggested a man at ease with success, comfortable with navigating the treacherous straits of political power. “And?” he asked.

  “They’re on their way back.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No. According to Havers, they’re tracking a lead to Hampstead. Apparently, Sinclair was working on a book there. At her home.”

  Hillier’s head turned slowly, but with the sun behind him his face was in shadow. “A book? In addition to the play?”

  “Havers wasn’t all too clear about it. However, I got the impression it was something that struck Lynley, something that he feels he must follow through.”

  Hillier smiled coolly at this. “Thank God for Inspector Lynley’s remarkably creative intuition.”

  “He’s my best man, David,” Webberly said bitterly.

  “And he’ll follow orders, of course. As will you.” Hillier turned back to his contemplation of the city.

  10

  IT WAS HALF past two when Lynley and Havers finally reached Joy Sinclair’s small corner house. Located in the fashionable Hampstead area of London, the white brick building was a testament to the author’s success. Its front window, hung with diaphanous ivory curtains, bowed out over a patch of garden where pruned rose bushes, dormant star jasmine, and tight-budded camellias grew. Two window boxes spilled ivy down the front and up the walls of the house, particularly near the doorway whose narrow shingled pediment was nearly lost beneath lush, bronze-veined leaves. Although the house faced Flask Walk, its garden entry was on Back Lane, a narrow cobbled avenue that climbed towards Heath Street a block away, where traffic moved smoothly, almost without sound.

  Followed by Havers, Lynley unhooked the wrought iron gate and crossed the flagstone pathway. The day was windless but the air was raw, and a watery winter sunshine caught upon the brass lighting fixture to the left of the door and upon the polished post slot at its centre.

  “Not bad digs,” Havers commented with grudging admiration. “Your basic bricked-in garden, your basic nineteenth-century lamp post, your basic tree-shaded street lined with your very basic BMWs.” She jerked a thumb at the house. “Must have set her back a few quid.”

  “From what Davies-Jones said about the terms of her will, I’ve the impression she could afford it,” Lynley replied. He unlocked the door and motioned Havers inside.

  They found themselves in a small anteroom, marble-tiled and unfurnished. A collection of several days’ letters lay scattered on the floor, pushed through the slot in the door by the postman. They were the kind of collection one might expect in the post of a successful author: five circulars, an electricity account, eleven letters addressed to Joy in care of her publisher and forwarded on, a telephone account, a number of small envelopes that looked like invitations, several business-size envelopes with a variety of return addresses. Lynley handed them to Havers.

  “Have a look through these, Sergeant.”

  She took them and they went on into the house, through an opaque glass door that led into a long hall. Here, two doors opened along the left wall and a staircase rose along the right. At the far end of the corridor, afternoon shadows filled what appeared to be the kitchen.

  Lynley and Havers entered the sitting room first. The room shone in a filtered gold light that fell in three oblique shafts through a large bay window across a carpet the colour of mushrooms, which had the look and smell of having been newly laid. But there was very little else to reveal the personality of the house’s owner, other than low-slung chairs grouped round calf-high tables that spoke of a penchant for modern design. This was affirmed by Joy Sinclair’s choice of art. Three oils after the fashion of Jackson Pollock leaned against one wall, waiting to be hung, and on one of the tables an angular marble sculpture stood, its subject indeterminate.

  Double doors on the eastern wall opened into the dining room. It too was furnished sparingly, with that same taste for the sleek paucity of modern design. Lynley walked to the set of four French doors behind the dining table, frowning at the simplicity of their locks and the ease of entry they would afford the least skilled burglar. Not, he admitted to himself, that Joy Sinclair had much here worth stealing, unless the market for Scandinavian furniture was booming or the paintings in the sitting room were the real thing.

  Sergeant Havers pulled out one of the dining chairs and sat down at the table, spreading the mail in front of her, pursing her lips thoughtfully. She began slitting it open. “Popular lady. Must be a dozen different invitations in here.”

  “Hmm.” Lynley looked out at the brick-walled back garden, a square not much larger than the area required to hold one thin ash tree, a circlet of ground beneath it for planting flowers, and a patch of lawn covered by a thin layer of snow. He went on into the kitchen.

  The pervasive feeling of anonymous ownership here was much the same as in the other two rooms. Black-fronted appliances broke into a long row of white cabinets, a scrubbed pine breakfast table with two chairs stood against one wall, and bright splashes of primary colour had strategic places th
roughout the room: a red cushion here, a blue tea kettle there, a yellow apron on a hook behind the door. Lynley leaned against the counter and studied it all. Houses always had a way of revealing their owners to him, but this house had a look of deliberate artificiality, something created by an interior designer who had been given free rein by a woman absolutely uninterested in her personal environment. The result was a tasteful showpiece of restrained success. But it told him nothing.

  “Horrendous telephone bill,” Havers called from the dining room. “Looks like she spent most of her time chatting it up with half a dozen chums round the world. She seems to have asked for a print out of her calls.”

  “Such as?”

  “Seven calls to New York, four to Somerset, six to Wales and…let me see…ten to Suffolk. All very brief save for two longer ones.”

  “Made at the same time of day? Made one after another?”

  “No, over five days. Last month. Interspersed with the calls to Wales.”

  “Check on all the numbers.” Lynley started down the hall towards the stairs as Havers slit open another envelope.

  “Here’s something, sir.” She read out to him, “‘Joy, You’ve answered none of my calls nor any of my letters. I shall expect to hear from you by Friday or the matter will have to be turned over to our legal department. Edna.’”

  Lynley paused, his foot on the first step. “Her publisher?”

  “Her editor. And it’s on publishing house stationery. Sounds like trouble, doesn’t it?”

  Lynley reflected on earlier information: the reference on the tape recording to putting Edna off, the crossed-out appointments on Upper Grosvenor Street in Joy’s engagement calendar.