Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(100)

“Something you appear to be disregarding for the moment.”

The boy made a wry face and nodded towards the journals under Lynley’s arm. “About Mum, isn’t it? I’ve read ’m, you see. Dad left the keys one night. I’ve been through ’m all.” He rolled onto the balls of his feet awkwardly, driving one hand into the pocket of his blue jeans. “We don’t talk about it. Don’t think Dad could. But if you catch this bloke, will you let me know?”

Lynley hesitated. The boy spoke again.

“She was my mum, you know. She wasn’t perfect, wasn’t no la-de-da type. But she was my mum all the same. She didn’t do bad to me. And she didn’t kill herself.”

“No. She didn’t that.” Lynley headed for the door. He paused there and thought of a way he might answer the boy’s need. “You watch the papers, Teddy. When we’ve got the man who killed Joy Sinclair, that’ll be the man you want.”

“Will you get him for my mum as well, Inspector?”

Lynley considered lying to save the boy from facing yet another harsh reality. But as he studied his friendly, anxious face, he knew he couldn’t do so. “Not unless he confesses.”

The boy nodded with childish sophistication, although his jaw tightened whitely. He said with deliberate and painful carelessness, “No evidence, I suppose.”

“No evidence. But it’s the same man, Teddy. Believe me.”

The boy turned back to the television. “I remember her a bit, is all.” He fiddled with a knob without turning on the set. “Do get him,” he said in a low voice.



RATHER THAN stop in Mildenhall and run the risk of wasting time finding no public library, Lynley drove on to Newmarket where he knew there would be one. Once there, however, he spent twenty minutes fighting his way through the late afternoon traffic until he found the building he was looking for at a quarter past five. He parked illegally, left his police identification in plain sight propped against the steering wheel, and hoped for the best. Concerned that it had begun to snow, knowing that every moment was precious as a result of this, he dashed up the steps into the library, with the Norwich theatre programme folded into a pocket of his overcoat.

The building smelled powerfully of beeswax, old paper, and a central heating system that was sadly overworked. It was a place of high windows, dark bookcases, brass table lamps fitted out with tiny white shades, and an enormous U-shaped circulation desk behind which a well-tailored man in large spectacles pumped information into a computer. This last looked gratingly out-of-place in the otherwise antique environment. But at least it made no noise.

Lynley strode to the card catalogue and hunted through it for Chekhov. Within five minutes he was sitting down at one of the long, battle-worn tables with a copy of The Three Sisters opened in front of him. He began scanning it, at first reading only the first line of each speech. Midway through the play, however, he realised that, from the length of the speeches and the way the suicide note had been torn, what Hannah had written might well have come from the middle of a speech. He began again, more slowly, yet all the while anxiously aware of the bad weather outside that would impede the flow of traffic to London, aware of the time that was passing and what might be happening in the city while he was gone. It took him nearly thirty minutes to find the speech, ten pages into act 4. He read the words once, then a second time to make sure.



What trifles, what silly little things in life will suddenly for no reason at all, take on meaning. You laugh at them just as you’ve always done, consider them trivial, and yet you go on, and you feel that you haven’t the power to stop. Oh, let’s not talk about that! I feel elated, I see these fir trees, these maples and birches, as if for the first time, and they all gaze at me with curiosity and expectation. What beautiful trees and, in fact, how beautiful life ought to be with them! 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…The papers you gave me are on my table under the calendar.



The speaker had not been one of the women, as Lynley had originally supposed, but one of the men. Baron Tuzenbach, speaking to Irina in the final moments of the play. Lynley pulled the Norwich programme out of his pocket, opened it to the cast, ran his finger down the page and found what he had dreaded—and hoped—to see. Rhys Davies-Jones had indeed played Tuzenbach to Joanna Ellacourt’s Irina, Jeremy Vinney’s Ferapont, and Robert Gabriel’s Andrei in that winter of 1973.

It was, at last, the verification he had sought. For what better man to know how a set of lines could be used than the man who had said them night after night? The man Helen trusted. The man she loved and believed to be innocent.

Lynley shelved the book and went in search of a telephone.





15


FOR THE ENTIRE DAY, Lady Helen had known that she should have felt exultant. After all, they had done what she had been determined they should do. They had proven Tommy wrong. Through their explorations into Lord Stinhurst’s background, they had proven nearly every suspicion against Rhys Davies-Jones in the deaths of Joy Sinclair and Gowan Kilbride to be without merit. They had, in doing so, altered the entire direction of the case. So when Sergeant Havers telephoned St. James at noon with the information that Stinhurst had been brought in for interrogation, that he had admitted to the truth about his brother’s involvement with the Soviets, Lady Helen knew that she should have been swept up in a tide of jubilation.