Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(15)

Sydeham wordlessly jerked his head at Robert Gabriel, who pushed a bottle of Beefeaters in his direction. It was two-thirds empty. Sydeham poured his wife a drink and returned the bottle to Gabriel, who grasped it and murmured with laughter catching at his voice:

“‘I have thee not and yet I see thee still…Come, let me clutch thee.’” Gabriel leered at Joanna and poured himself another drink. “Sweet shades of the regionals, Jo, m’love. Wasn’t that our first? Hmm, no, perhaps not.” He managed to make it sound more like a sexual encounter than a production of Macbeth.

Scores of her school chums had swooned over Gabriel’s Peter Pan good looks fifteen years ago, but Barbara had never been able to see his appeal. Nor, apparently, did Joanna Ellacourt. She favoured him with a smile that hurled daggers of an entirely different sort.

“Darling,” she responded, “how could I ever forget? You dropped ten lines in the middle of act two, and I carried you all the way to the end. Frankly, I’ve been waiting for those multitudinous seas to become incarnadine for the last seventeen years.”

Gabriel gave a snort of laughter. “West End Bitch,” he announced. “Ever true to form.”

“You’re drunk.”

Which was certainly more than halfway true. As if in response to this, Francesca Gerrard stood up uneasily, pushing herself away from the couch she was sharing with her brother, Lord Stinhurst. She seemed to want to take control of the situation, perhaps to act out the role of hotel proprietress in even so inconsequential a manner as she chose when she turned to Barbara.

“If we could have some coffee…” Her hand fluttered up to a collection of coloured beads which she wore across her chest like mail. Contact with them seemed to give her courage. She spoke again, with more authority. “We’d like some coffee. Will you arrange it?” When Barbara didn’t reply, she turned to Lord Stinhurst. “Stuart…”

He spoke. “I’d appreciate your arranging for a pot of coffee,” he said to Barbara. “Some of the party want sobering up.”

Barbara gave fleeting and delighted thought to how many opportunities she would ever have again to put an earl in his place.

“Sorry,” she replied tartly. And then she said to Lady Helen, “If you’ll come with me now, I should guess the inspector will want to see you first.”



LADY HELEN CLYDE felt more than a little numb as she fumbled her way across the library. She told herself that it was the lack of food, the endless and appalling day, the ghastly discomfort of sitting hour after hour in her nightclothes in a room that had continually alternated between subfreezing and claustrophobic. Reaching the doorway, she gathered the greatcoat about her with as much dignity as she could muster and stepped out into the hall. Sergeant Havers was an unacknowledged companion behind her.

“Are you quite all right, Helen?”

Gratefully, Lady Helen turned to see that St. James had waited for her. He stood in the shadows just outside the door. Lynley and Macaskin had already disappeared up the stairs.

She smoothed her hand against her hair in an attempt to arrange it but gave up the effort with a small, chagrined smile. “Can you possibly imagine what it’s been like to spend an entire day with a roomful of individuals who communicate directly with Thespis?” she asked St. James. “We’ve run the gamut since half past seven this morning. From rage to hysteria to grief to paranoia. Frankly, by noon, I would have sold my soul for just one of Hedda Gabler’s pistols.” She drew the greatcoat up to her throat and held it closed at her neck, stifling a shiver. “But I’m fine. At least, I think so.” Her eyes took in the stairs and then moved back to St. James. “Whatever’s wrong with Tommy?”

Behind her, Sergeant Havers moved with inexplicable sharpness, but it was a gesture Lady Helen couldn’t clearly see. St. James, she noted, took his time about replying, using a moment to brush at the leg of his trousers. There was nothing on them for his attention, however, and when he chose to speak, it was to ask a question of his own.

“What on earth are you doing here, Helen?”

She glanced back at the closed library door. “Rhys invited me. He was to direct Lord Stinhurst’s new production for the opening of the Agincourt Theatre, and this weekend was to be a run-through—a sort of preliminary reading of the new script.”

“Rhys?” St. James repeated.

“Rhys Davies-Jones. You don’t remember him? My sister used to see him. Years ago. Before he…” Lady Helen twisted a button at the throat of the greatcoat, hesitating, wondering how much to say. She settled on, “He’s been working in regional theatre over the past two years. This was to be his first London production since…The Tempest. Four years ago. We were there. Surely you remember.” She saw that he did.

“Lord,” St. James said with some reverence. “Was that Davies-Jones? I’d completely forgotten.”

Lady Helen wondered how that was even possible, for it was something she knew she could never forget: that awful night at the theatre when Rhys Davies-Jones, the director, had taken the stage himself and everyone had seen he was inches short of delirious. Shoving actors and actresses alike to one side, chasing demons only he could see, he had publicly ended his career with a vengeance. She could see it all still—the stage, the pandemonium, the devastation he had wrought upon himself and others. For it had been during the act 4 speech when his drunken frenzy broke into the lovely words, blotting out both his past and future in an instant, leaving, indeed, not a single rack behind.