Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(108)

“Are you rehearsing a production of Titus Andronicus?” Deborah asked with a laugh. She took the jar and the book from her husband, brushed a kiss against his cheek, and said, “Here’s Tommy, my love.”

Lynley spoke to St. James without preamble. He wanted his questions to sound purely professional, a natural extension of the case. He knew he failed miserably. “St. James, where’s Helen? I’ve been phoning her since last night. I stopped by her flat this morning. What’s happened to her? What’s she told you?”

He followed his friend into the lab and waited impatiently for a response. St. James typed a quick notation into his word processor, saying nothing. Lynley knew the other man well enough not to push for an answer when none was forthcoming. He bit back his misgivings, waited, and let his eyes roam round the room in which Helen spent so much of her time.

The laboratory had been St. James’ sanctuary for years, a scientific haven of computers, laser printers, microscopes, culture ovens, shelves of specimens, walls of graphs and charts, and in one corner a video screen on which microscopic samples of blood or hair or skin or fibre could be enlarged. This last modernity was a recent addition to the lab, and Lynley recalled the laughter with which Helen had described St. James’ attempts to teach her how it worked just three weeks past. Hopeless, Tommy darling. A video camera hooked into a microscope! Can you imagine my dismay? My God, all this computer-age wizardry! I’ve only just recently come to understand how to boil a cup of water in a microwave oven. Untrue, of course. But he’d laughed all the same, immediately freed of whatever cares the day had heaped upon him. That was Helen’s special gift.

He had to know. “What’s happened to her? What’s she told you?”

St. James added another notation to the word processor, examined the consequent changes in a graph on the screen, and shut down the unit. “Only what you told her,” he replied in a voice that was perfectly detached. “Nothing more, I’m afraid.”

Lynley knew how to interpret that careful tone, but for the moment he refused to engage in the discussion that St. James’ words encouraged. Instead he temporised with, “Deborah’s told me Vinney phoned you.”

“Indeed.” St. James swung around on his stool, pushed himself off it awkwardly, and walked to a well-ordered counter where five microscopes were lined up, three in use. “Apparently, no newspapers are picking up the story of the Sinclair death. According to Vinney, he turned in an article about it this morning only to have it rejected by his editor.”

“Vinney’s the drama critic, after all,” Lynley noted.

“Yes, but when he phoned round to see if any of his colleagues were working on the murder, he discovered that not one had been assigned to the story. It’s been killed from higher up. For the time being, according to what he’s been told. Until there’s an arrest. He was in a fair state, to say the least.” St. James looked up from a pile of slides he was organising. “He’s after the Geoffrey Rintoul story, Tommy. And a connection between that and Joy Sinclair’s death. I don’t think he plans to rest until he has something in print.”

“He’ll never see it happen. In the first place, there’s not one accessible shred of evidence against Geoffrey Rintoul. In the second place, the principals are dead. And without damned solid evidence, no newspaper in the country is going to take on so potentially libelous a story against so distinguished a family as Stinhurst’s.” Lynley felt suddenly restless, needing movement, so he walked the length of the room to the windows and looked down at the garden far below. Like everything else, it was covered with last night’s snow, but he saw that all the plants had been wrapped in burlap and that breadcrumbs were spread out neatly on the top of the garden wall. Deborah’s loving hand, he thought.

“Irene Sinclair believes that Joy went to Robert Gabriel’s room the night she died,” he said and sketched out the story that Irene had related to him. “She told me last night. She’d been holding it back, hoping to protect Gabriel.”

“Then Joy saw both Gabriel and Vinney during the night?”

Lynley shook his head. “I don’t see how it’s possible. She can’t have been with Gabriel. At least not in bed with him.” He related the autopsy information from Strathclyde CID.

“Perhaps the Strathclyde team have made a mistake,” St. James noted.

Lynley smiled at the idea. “With Macaskin as their DI? What do you think the likelihood of that is? Certainly nothing I’d want to make book on. Last night when Irene told me, I thought at first that she had been mistaken in what she heard.”

“Gabriel with someone else?”

“That’s what I thought. That Irene had only assumed it was Joy. Or perhaps assumed the worst about what was going on between Joy and Gabriel in the room. But then I thought that she might very well have been lying to me, to implicate Gabriel in Joy’s death, all the time protesting that she wants to protect him for her children’s sake.”

“A fine revenge, that,” Deborah noted from the doorway of her darkroom where she stood listening, with a string of negatives in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other.

St. James crisscrossed the stack of slides absently. “It is indeed. Clever as well. We know from Elizabeth Rintoul that Joy Sinclair was in Vinney’s room. So there’s corroboration, if Elizabeth’s to be trusted. But who’s to corroborate Irene’s claim that Joy was also with her husband? Gabriel? Of course not. He’ll deny it hotly. And no one else heard it. So it’s left to us to decide whether to believe the philandering husband or the long-suffering wife.” He looked at Lynley. “Are you still certain about Davies-Jones?”