Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(118)

There were other things to contend with, among them the press, finally eager for a statement, materialising from nowhere, shouting questions, demanding interviews.

He pushed past them, crumpled into nothing a message from Superintendent Webberly that was pressed into his hand. Nearly blind with exhaustion, he made his way towards the lift, caught up at last in only one conscious thought: to find Helen. In only one conscious need: to sleep.

He found his way home like an automaton and fell onto his bed fully clothed. He did not awaken when Denton came in, removed his shoes, and covered him with a blanket. He did not awaken until the afternoon.



“IT WAS HER EYESIGHT,” Lynley said. “I noticed nearly everything else in Hannah Darrow’s diaries save the reference to the fact that she hadn’t worn her spectacles to that second play, so she couldn’t see the stage clearly. She only thought Sydeham was one of the actors because he came out the stage door at the end of the performance. And of course, I was too blinded by Davies-Jones’ role in The Three Sisters to realise what it meant that Joanna Ellacourt had been in the same scene from which the suicide note was drawn. Sydeham would know any scene Joanna was in, probably better than the actors themselves. He helped her with her lines. I heard him doing that myself at the Agincourt.”

“Did Joanna Ellacourt know her husband was the killer?” St. James asked.

Lynley shook his head, taking the proffered cup of tea from Deborah with a faint smile. The three of them sat in St. James’ study, dividing their attention among cakes and sandwiches, tarts and tea. A misty shaft of late afternoon sunlight struck the window and reflected against a mound of snow on the ledge outside. Some distance away, rush-hour traffic on the Embankment began its noisy crawl towards the suburbs.

“She’d been told by Mary Agnes Campbell—as had they all—that Joy’s bedroom door was locked,” he responded. “Like me, she thought Davies-Jones was the killer. What she didn’t know—what no one knew until late yesterday afternoon—was that Joy’s door hadn’t been locked all night. It was only locked once Francesca Gerrard went into the room to look for her necklace at three-fifteen, found Joy dead, and, assuming her brother had done it, went down to her office for the keys and locked the door in an attempt to protect him. I should have heard the lie when she told me the pearls were on the chest of drawers by the door. Why would Joy have put them there when the rest of her jewellery was on the dressing table on the other side of the room? I’d seen that myself.”

St. James selected another sandwich. “Would it have made a difference had Macaskin managed to reach you before you left for Hampstead yesterday?”

“What could he have told me? Only that Francesca Gerrard had confessed to him that she lied to us at Westerbrae about the door being locked. I don’t know whether I would have had the common sense to put that together with a number of facts that I had been choosing to ignore. The fact that Robert Gabriel had a woman with him in his bedroom; the fact that Sydeham admitted that Joanna had not been with him for some hours the night Joy died; the fact that Jo and Joy are two easy names to confuse, especially for a man like Gabriel, who pursued women tirelessly and took as many to bed as he could manage.”

“So that’s what Irene Sinclair heard.” St. James moved in his chair to a more comfortable position, grimacing as the lower part of his leg brace caught against the piping on the ottoman’s edge. He disengaged it with an irritable grunt. “But why Joanna Ellacourt? She’s not made it a secret that she loathes Gabriel. Or was that dramatic loathing part of the ploy?”

“She loathed Sydeham more than Gabriel that night, because he’d got her into Joy’s play in the first place. She felt he’d betrayed her. She wanted to hurt him. So she went to Gabriel’s bedroom at half past eleven and waited there, to take her revenge on her husband in coin that he would well understand. But what she didn’t realise was that, in going to Gabriel, she’d given Sydeham the opportunity he had been looking for ever since Joy made the remark about John Darrow at dinner.”

“I suppose Hannah Darrow didn’t know that Sydeham was married.”

Lynley shook his head. “Evidently not. She’d only seen them once together and even then another man was with them. All she knew was that Sydeham had access to drama coaches and voice coaches and everything else that went into success. As far as Hannah was concerned, Sydeham was the key to her new life. And for a time, she was his key to a sexual prowess he had been lacking.”

“Do you suppose Joy Sinclair knew about Sydeham’s involvement with Hannah Darrow?” St. James asked.

“She hadn’t got that far in her research. And John Darrow was determined she never would. She merely made an innocent remark at dinner. But Sydeham couldn’t afford to take a chance. So he killed her. And of course, Irene’s references to the diaries at the theatre yesterday were what took him to Hampstead last night.”

Deborah had been listening quietly, but now she spoke, perplexed. “Didn’t he take a terrible chance when he killed Joy Sinclair, Tommy? Couldn’t his wife have returned to their room at any moment and found him gone? Couldn’t he have run into someone in the hall?”

Lynley shrugged. “He was fairly sure where Joanna was after all, Deb. And he knew Robert Gabriel well enough to believe that Gabriel would keep her with him as long as he could possibly continue to demonstrate his virility. Everyone else in the house was easily accounted for. So once he heard Joy return from Vinney’s room shortly before one, all he had to do was wait a bit for her to fall asleep.”