Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(117)

His voice sounded nothing more than monumentally weary. It was half past three. “I’d got the dirk earlier when I went down to the library for the whisky. It was easy enough to pull it off the dining room wall, go through the kitchen, up the back stairs, and along to my room. And then, of course, all I had to do was wait.”

“Did you know that your wife was with Robert Gabriel?”

Sydeham moved his eyes to the Rolex whose gold casing glittered in a half-crescent beneath his black sweater. Caressingly, he rotated a finger round its face. His hands were quite large, but without callosity, unexposed to labour. They didn’t look at all like the hands of a killer.

“It didn’t take long to work it out, Inspector,” he finally replied. “As Joanna herself would no doubt point out, I had wanted her together with Gabriel, and she was just giving me what I wanted. Theatre of the real in spades. It was an expert revenge, wasn’t it? Of course, I wasn’t sure at first that she was actually with him. I thought—perhaps I hoped—she’d gone somewhere else in the house to sulk. But I suppose I really knew that’s not at all her style. And at any rate, Gabriel was fairly forthright about his conquest of my wife the other day at the Agincourt. But then, it isn’t the kind of thing he’d be likely to keep quiet about, is it?”

“You assaulted him in his dressing room the other night?”

Sydeham smiled bleakly. “It was the only part of this bloody mess that I truly enjoyed. I don’t like other men stuffing my wife, Inspector, whether she’s a willing participant or not.”

“But you’re more than willing to have another man’s wife, if it comes down to it.”

“Ah. Hannah Darrow. I had a feeling that little minx would do me in, in the end.” Sydeham reached for a Styrofoam cup of coffee on the table before him. His nails made crescent patterns upon it. “When Joy talked at dinner about her new book, she mentioned the diaries she was trying to get off John Darrow, and I could see fairly well how everything was going to come down. She didn’t seem the sort to give up just because Darrow said no once. She hadn’t got to where she was in her career by shrinking away from a challenge, had she? So when she talked about the diaries, I knew it was just a matter of time before she had them. And I didn’t know what Hannah had written so I couldn’t take the chance.”

“What happened that night with Hannah Darrow?”

Sydeham brought his eyes to Lynley. “We met at the mill. She was some forty minutes late, and I’d begun to think—to hope, actually—that she wasn’t coming. But she showed up at the last in her usual fashion, hot to make love right there on the floor. But I…I put her off. I’d brought her a scarf she’d seen in a boutique in Norwich. And I insisted she let me put it on her right then.” He watched his hands continue their play on the white cup, fingers pressing upon its rim. “It was easy enough. I was kissing her when I tightened the knot.”

Lynley thought about the innocent references he had been too blind to see earlier in Hannah’s diary and took a calculated gamble with, “I’m surprised you didn’t have her one last time right there in the mill, if that’s what she wanted.”

The payoff he was looking for came without a pause. “I’d lost the touch with her. Each time we met, it was becoming more difficult.” Sydeham laughed shortly, an expression of contempt that was self-directed. “It was going to be Joanna all over again.”

“The beautiful woman who rises to fame, who’s the object of every man’s steamy fantasy, whose own husband can’t service her the way she wants.”

“I’d say you’ve got the picture, Inspector. Nicely put.”

“Yet you’ve stayed with Joanna all these years.”

“She’s the one thing in my life that I did completely right. My unmitigated success. One doesn’t let something like that go easily, and as for me, I’d never have considered it. I couldn’t let her go. Hannah merely came along at a bad time for Jo and me. Things had been…off between us for about three weeks. She’d been thinking of signing on with a London agent and I felt a bit left out in the cold. Useless. That must have been what started my…trouble. Then when Hannah came along, I felt like a new man for a month or two. Every time I saw her, I had her. Sometimes two or three times in a single evening. Christ. It was like being reborn.”

“Until she wanted to become an actress like your wife?”

“And then it was history repeating itself. Yes.”

“But why on earth kill her? Why not just break it off?”

“She’d found my London address. It was bad enough when she showed up at the theatre one evening when Jo and I were setting off with the London agent. After that happened, I knew if I left her behind in the Fens, she’d show up one day at our flat. I would have lost Joanna. There simply didn’t seem to be another choice.”

“And Gowan Kilbride? Where did he fit in?”

Sydeham placed his coffee cup back onto the table, its rim caved in all around, entirely useless now. “He knew about the gloves, Inspector.”



THEY COMPLETED their preliminary interview with David Sydeham at five-fifteen in the morning and staggered, red-eyed, out into the corridor where Sydeham was led to a telephone to make a call to his wife. Lynley watched him go, feeling caught in a flood of pity for the man. This surprised him, for justice was being served by the arrest. Yet he knew that the effect of the murders—that stone thrown into a pond whose surface cannot remain unchanged by the intrusion—had only just begun for everyone. He turned away.