Payment In Blood

by Elizabeth George

  “What did she want?”

  “Conversation mostly. A look at what we had on the Darrow woman. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have made it available to anyone, but she had two letters of introduction, one from a Welsh chief constable she’d worked with on a book and another from a detective superintendent somewhere in the south. Devon, perhaps. Beyond that, she’d an impressive list of credentials—at least two Silver Daggers, I recall—that she wasn’t above showing off to convince me she wasn’t hanging about the entrance hall in the hope of an hour’s natter.”

  A deferential knock upon the door heralded a young constable who handed his chief a thick folder and made himself scarce. Plater opened the folder and drew out a stack of police photographs.

  They were, Lynley saw, standard crime-scene work. Starkly black and white, they still depicted death with grim attention to detail, going so far as to include an elongated shadow cast by the hanging body of Hannah Darrow. There was little else to see. The room was virtually unfurnished, with an open-beam ceiling, a floor of wide but badly pitted planks, and rough-hewn wooden walls. These appeared to be curved, small four-paned windows their only decoration. A plain cane-seated chair lay on its side beneath the body, and one of her shoes had fallen off and rested against a rung. She had not used rope, but rather what appeared to be a dark scarf, attached to a hook in a ceiling beam, and her head hung forward with long blonde hair curtaining the worst distortion of her face.

  Lynley scrutinised the photographs, one after another, feeling a twinge of uncertainty. He handed them to Havers and watched as she sorted through them, but she returned them to Plater without remark.

  “Where were the photographs taken?” he asked the chief constable.

  “She was found in a mill out on Mildenhall Fen, about a mile from the village.”

  “Is the mill still there?”

  Plater shook his head. “Torn down three or four years past, I’m afraid. Not that it would do you too much good to see it. Although,” his voice was momentarily reflective, “the Sinclair woman asked to see it as well.”

  “Did she?” Lynley asked thoughtfully. He wondered about that request and considered what John Darrow had told him: Joy had taken ten months to find the death she wanted to write about. “Are you absolutely certain this was a suicide?” he asked the chief constable.

  In answer, Plater riffled through the file. He brought out a single piece of notebook paper. Torn in several places, it bore the trace of creases from having been crumpled and then pressed in among other papers to smooth it out. Lynley scanned the few words, written in a large, childish script with rounded letters and tiny circles used in place of periods and dots.

  I must go, it’s time…There’s a tree that’s dead, but it goes on swaying in the wind with the others. So it seems to me that if I die, I’ll still have a part in life, one way or another. Good-bye, my darling.

  “Pretty straightforward, that,” Plater commented.

  “Where was this found?”

  “On the kitchen table at her home. With the pen right beside it, Inspector.”

  “Who found it?”

  “Her husband. Evidently, she was supposed to help him in the pub that night. When she didn’t show up, he went upstairs to their flat. He saw the note, panicked, ran out looking for her. When he couldn’t find her, he came back, closed the pub, and got up a group of men for a proper search. She was found in the mill,” Plater referred to the file, “shortly after midnight.”

  “Who found her?”

  “Her husband. Accompanied,” he noted hastily when he saw Lynley start to speak, “by two blokes from the village who were no particular friends of his.” Plater smiled affably. “I expect you’re thinking what we all thought at first, Inspector. That Darrow lured his wife out to the mill, strung her up, and fashioned the note himself. But we checked on that angle. The note’s genuine enough. Our writing people verify that. And although both their prints were on the paper—Hannah’s and her husband’s—his are explained away easily enough. He’d picked up the paper from the kitchen table where she’d left it for him. Hardly questionable behaviour under the circumstances. Besides, Hannah Darrow was wearing plenty of ballast that night to make certain she did the job right and proper. She had on two wool coats and two heavy sweaters. And you can’t tell me her husband talked her into going for an evening stroll all done up like that.”

  THE AGINCOURT THEATRE was tucked between two far more impressive structures on a narrow street off Shaftesbury Avenue. To its left was the Royal Standard Hotel, complete with a uniformed doorman who scowled at pedestrians and traffic alike. To its right was the Museum of Theatrical History, its front windows filled with a dazzling display of Elizabethan costumes, weaponry, and props. Sandwiched between these two, the Agincourt had the appearance of neglect and disrepair, qualities disproved the moment one walked through its doors.

  When Lady Helen Clyde entered shortly before noon, she paused in surprise. The last time she had seen a production here the building had been under different ownership, and although its former gloomy Victorian interior had possessed a certain Dickensian charm, Lord Stinhurst’s renovation was breathtaking. She had read about it in the paper, of course, but nothing had prepared her for such a metamorphosis. Stinhurst had given both architects and designers free rein in orchestrating the theatre’s improvements. Following a no-holds-barred philosophy of interior design, they had gutted the building completely, achieving light and space through their creation of an entrance that soared with three full floors of open balconies, and through their use of colours that contrasted sharply with the soot-covered exterior which the building presented to the street. Admiring the wealth of creativity that had altered the theatre, Lady Helen allowed herself to forget some of the trepidation with which she had been anticipating her coming interview.

  With Sergeant Havers and St. James, she had gone over the details until nearly midnight. Together, the three of them had explored every avenue of approach for this visit to the Agincourt. Since Havers was unable to get to the theatre without Lynley’s knowledge and do the job properly under the aegis of the police, it was left to the devices of either Lady Helen or St. James to encourage Lord Stinhurst’s secretary to talk about the telephone calls which her employer claimed she had placed for him on the morning that Joy Sinclair’s body was found.

  Their late night discussion ended with a consensus that Lady Helen was the likeliest one among them to encourage an offering of confidences from anyone. All that had sounded reasonable enough at midnight—even a bit complimentary if one wanted to take it that way—but it was far from reassuring right now with the Agincourt’s offices a mere ten steps away and Stinhurst’s secretary waiting unwittingly in one of them.

  “Helen? Have you come to join the newest fray?”

  Rhys Davies-Jones was standing at the auditorium door, a mug in his hand. Lady Helen smiled and joined him at the bar where coffee was brewing noisily, emitting a pungent smell that was in large part chicory.

  “Worst coffee in the world,” Davies-Jones acknowledged. “But one develops a taste for it over time. Will you have some?” When she declined, he poured himself a mug. The liquid was black, resembling overused motor oil.

  “What newest fray?” she asked him.

  “Perhaps fray isn’t the best choice of words,” he admitted. “It’s more like political manoeuvring among our tender players for the best part in Stinhurst’s new production. With the only difficulty being that the play hasn’t been decided upon yet. So you can well imagine the jockeying for position that’s been going on for the last two hours.”

  “New production?” Lady Helen asked. “You don’t mean that Lord Stinhurst intends to go on with a play after what’s happened to Joy and Gowan?”

  “He has no choice, Helen. We’re all of us under contract to him. The theatre’s due to open in less than eight weeks. It’s a new production or he loses his shirt. I can’t say he’s at all happy about it, however. And he’s going to be a
good sight unhappier the moment the press start storming him about what happened to Joy. I can’t think why the media haven’t picked up on the story.” He touched Lady Helen’s hand lightly where it lay on the bar. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  She hadn’t thought she would see him, hadn’t considered what she might say if she did. Unprepared for his question, she answered with the first thing that came into her mind, not even thinking for the moment about why she was lying.

  “Actually, no. I found myself in the neighbourhood. I thought you might be here, so I took the chance of dropping in.”

  His eyes remained perfectly steady on her own, but they managed to convey how ridiculous her story sounded. He was not the kind of man who wanted his ego massaged by an attractive woman seeking him out. Nor was she the kind of woman who would ever do so. He knew that quite well.

  “Right. Yes, I see.” He studied his coffee, moved the mug from one hand to the other. When he spoke again, it was with an altered tone, one deliberately light and unaffected. “Come into the auditorium then. There’s not much to see since we’ve got virtually nothing at all done. But there have been sparks aplenty. Joanna’s been harassing David Sydeham all morning with an endless list of complaints that she wants him to handle, and Gabriel’s been attempting to pour oil on their troubled waters. He’s managed to alienate nearly everyone present, but most particularly Irene. The meeting may well turn into a brawl, yet it does have some amusement value. Will you join us?”

  After the manufactured excuse for her presence at the theatre, Lady Helen knew she could hardly refuse. So she followed him into the dark auditorium and took a seat in the very last row. He smiled at her politely and began to walk towards the brightly lit stage where the players, Lord Stinhurst, and several other people were gathered round a table, their voices raised in discussion.

  “Rhys,” she called. When he turned back to her, she said, “May I see you tonight?”

  It was part contrition and part desire. But which was the greater and more pressing, she could not have said. She knew only that she couldn’t leave him today on a lie.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t, Helen. I’ve a meeting with Stuart…Lord Stinhurst about the new production.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course. I wasn’t thinking. Then perhaps sometime…”

  “Tomorrow night? For dinner, if you’re free. If that’s what you want.”

  “I…yes. Yes, it’s what I want. Truly.”

  He stood in shadow, so she could not see his face. She could only hear his words and the fragile core of tenderness behind them. The timbre of his voice told her the cost of his speaking at all. “Helen. I woke up this morning knowing with perfect certainty that I love you. So much. God help me, but I don’t understand why no other moment in my life has ever been quite as frightening.”

  “Rhys—”

  “No. Please. Tell me tomorrow.” He turned decisively and walked down the aisle, up the steps to join the others.

  Left alone, Lady Helen forced her eyes to remain on the stage, but her thoughts would not. Instead, they attached themselves stubbornly to a reflection on loyalty. If this encounter with Rhys were a test of her devotion to him, she saw that, without even thinking, she had failed it miserably. And she wondered if that momentary failure meant the very worst, if in her heart she questioned what Rhys had really done two nights ago while she was asleep at Westerbrae. The very thought was devastating. She despised herself.

  Getting to her feet, she returned to the entrance hall and approached the office doors. She decided against an elaborate fabrication. She would face Stinhurst’s secretary with the truth.

  That commitment to honesty would, in this case, be a wise decision.

  “IT’S THE CHAIR, Havers,” Lynley was saying once again, possibly for the fourth or fifth time.

  The afternoon was growing unbearably cold. A frigid wind had swept in from The Wash and was tearing across the Fens, unbroken by woodland or hills. Lynley made the turn back towards Porthill Green just as Barbara concluded her third examination of the suicide photographs and replaced them in the Darrow file that Chief Constable Plater had loaned them.

  She shook her head inwardly. As far as she could tell, the case he was building was more than tenuous; it was virtually nonexistent. “I don’t see how you can possibly reach any viable conclusion from looking at a picture of a chair,” she said.

  “Then you look at it again. If she hanged herself, how would she tip the chair onto its side? It couldn’t have been done. She could have kicked at the back of it, or even turned it sideways and still kicked at the back of it. But in either case, the chair would have fallen onto its back, not onto its side. The only way for the chair to end up in that position at Hannah Darrow’s own doing would be if she had twisted her foot into the space between the seat and the back and actually tried to toss the thing.”

  “It could have happened. She was missing a shoe,” Barbara reminded him.

  “Indeed. But she was missing her right shoe, Havers. And if you look again, you’ll see that the chair was tipped over to her left.”

  Barbara saw that he was determined to win her to his way of thinking. There seemed little point to a further protest. Nonetheless, she felt compelled to argue. “So what you’re saying is that Joy Sinclair, in innocently researching a book about a suicide, fell upon a murder instead. How? Out of all the suicides in the country, how could she possibly have stumbled onto one that was a murder? Good God, what do you think the odds are for doing that?”

  “But consider why she was attracted to Hannah Darrow’s death in the first place, Havers. Look at all the oddities involved that would have made it stand out glaringly in comparison to any others she looked at. The location: the Fens. A system of canals, periodic floods, land reclaimed from the sea. All the natural characteristics that have made it the inspiration of everyone from Dickens to Dorothy Sayers. How did Joy describe it on her tape? ‘The sound of frogs and pumps, the unremittingly flat land.’ Then there’s the site of the suicide: an old abandoned mill. The bizarre clothing she was wearing: two wool coats over two wool sweaters. And then the inconsistency that surely must have struck Joy the moment she saw those police photos: the position of that chair.”

  “If it is an inconsistency, how do you explain the fact that Plater himself overlooked it during the investigation? He doesn’t exactly seem to be your bumbling Lestrade type.”

  “By the time Plater got there, all the men from the pub had been searching for Hannah, all of them convinced that they were looking for a suicide. And when they found her and telephoned for the police, they reported a suicide. Plater was predisposed to believe that’s exactly what he was looking at when he got to the mill. So he’d lost objectivity before he ever saw the body. And he was given fairly convincing evidence that Hannah Darrow had indeed intended to kill herself when she left her flat. The note.”

  “But you heard Plater say it was genuine enough.”

  “Of course it’s genuine,” Lynley said. “I’m certain it’s her handwriting.”

  “Then how do you explain—”

  “Good God, Havers, look at the thing. Is there a single misspelled word in it? Is there a point of punctuation that she even missed?”

  Barbara took it out, glanced at it, turned to Lynley. “Are you trying to say that this is something Hannah Darrow copied? Why? Was she practising her handwriting? Acting out of sheer boredom? Life in Porthill Green looks like it might be less than ducky, but I don’t exactly see a village girl whiling away her time by improving her script. And even if she did, are you going to argue that Darrow found this note somewhere and realised how he could use it? That he had the foresight to stow it away until the time was right? That he put it out on the kitchen table? That he…what? Killed his wife? How? When? And how did he get her to wear all those clothes? And even if he managed it all without raising anyone’s suspicion, how on earth is he connected to Westerbrae and Joy Sinclair’s death?”

  “Thro
ugh the telephone calls,” Lynley said. “Wales and Suffolk over and over. Joy Sinclair innocently telling her cousin Rhys Davies-Jones about her frustrations in dealing with John Darrow, not to mention her budding suspicions about Hannah’s death. And Davies-Jones biding his time, suggesting that Joy arrange to have a room next to Helen, then finishing her off the moment he saw his chance.”

  Barbara heard him, incredulous. Once again she saw how he was turning and interpreting all the facts skillfully, using only what he needed to take him closer to an arrest of Davies-Jones. “Why?” she demanded in exasperation.

  “Because there’s a connection between Darrow and Davies-Jones. I don’t know what it is yet. Perhaps an old relationship. Perhaps a debt to be paid. Perhaps mutual knowledge. But whatever it is, we’re getting closer to finding it.”

  12

  WINE’S THE PLOUGH was just minutes short of its midafternoon closing when Lynley and Havers entered. John Darrow made no secret of his displeasure at seeing them.

  “Closing,” he barked.

  Lynley ignored the man’s implied refusal to speak with them. Instead, he approached the bar, opened the file, and took out Hannah Darrow’s suicide note. Next to him, Havers flipped open her notebook. Darrow watched all this with his mouth pressed into a hostile line.

  “Tell me about this,” Lynley suggested, passing the note across to him.

  The man gave it a moment’s sullen, cursory attention, but he said nothing. Instead, he began gathering the pint glasses that lined the bar, dousing them furiously into a pan of murky water beneath it.

  “How much education did your wife have, Mr. Darrow? Did she finish school? Did she go to university? Or was she self-educated? A great reader, perhaps?”

  Darrow’s scowling face revealed a stumbling search through Lynley’s words for a trap. Apparently not finding one, he said shortly, “Hannah didn’t hold with books. She’d had enough of school at fifteen.”