Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(17)

“As soon as possible,” he replied with a smile. “But I suppose that comes from living in the same house with one’s father-in-law. A few days out of his presence and we become hopeless reprobates, I’m ashamed to say. Why?”

“Where do you leave the key?”

St. James looked from Lynley to the door. “In the keyhole, generally.”

“Yes.” From the dressing table, Lynley picked up the door key by the metal ring that attached the key to its plastic identification tab. “Most people do. So why do you suppose Joy Sinclair locked the door and put the key on the dressing table?”

“There was an argument last night, wasn’t there? She was part of it. She may well have been distracted or upset when she came in. She may have locked the door and tossed the key there in a fit of temper.”

“Possibly. Or perhaps she wasn’t the one who locked the door at all. Perhaps she didn’t come in by herself but with someone else who did the locking up while she waited in the bed.” Lynley noticed that Inspector Macaskin was pulling at his lip. He said to him, “You don’t agree?”

Macaskin chewed on the side of his thumb for a moment before he dropped his hand with a look of distaste, as if it had climbed to his mouth of its own volition. “As to someone being with her,” he said, “no, I don’t think so.”

Lynley dropped the key back on to the dressing table and went to the wardrobe, opening the doors. Inside, clothes hung in a haphazard arrangement; shoes were tossed to the back; a pair of blue jeans was in a heap on the floor; a suitcase yawned, displaying stockings and brassieres.

Lynley looked through these items and turned back to Macaskin. “Why not?” he asked him as St. James crossed the room to the chest of drawers and began going through it.

“Because of what she was wearing,” Macaskin explained. “You couldn’t have recognised much from the CID photographs, but she had on a man’s pyjama top.”

“Doesn’t that make it even more likely that someone was with her?”

“You’re thinking that she had on the pyjama top of whoever came to see her. I can’t agree.”

“Why not?” Lynley closed the wardrobe door and leaned against it, his eyes on Macaskin.

“Realistically then,” Macaskin began with the assurance of an exponent who has given his subject a great deal of prior thought, “does a man bent on seduction go to a woman’s room in his oldest pyjamas? Top she had on was thin, washed many times and worn through at the elbows in two separate spots. At least six or seven years old, I should guess. Possibly older. Not exactly what one would expect a man to have on or, for that matter, to leave as a memento for a woman to wear after a night of lovemaking.”

“How you describe it,” Lynley said thoughtfully, “it sounds more like a talisman, doesn’t it?”

“Indeed.” Lynley’s agreement seemed to encourage Macaskin to warm to his topic. He paced the distance from bed to dressing table and from there to the wardrobe, using his hands for emphasis. “And supposing it had always belonged to her and came from no man at all. Would she wait for a lover in her oldest bedclothes? I hardly think so.”

“I agree,” St. James said from the chest of drawers. “And considering that we’ve not one reasonable sign of a struggle, we have to conclude that even if she wasn’t asleep when the murderer entered—if it was someone she let in the room for a friendly chat—she certainly was asleep when he plunged the dirk through her throat.”

“Or perhaps not asleep,” Lynley said slowly. “But taken completely by surprise, by someone she had reason to trust. But in that case, wouldn’t she have locked the door herself?”

“Not necessarily,” Macaskin said. “The murderer could have locked it, killed her, and—”

“Returned to Helen’s room,” Lynley finished coldly. His head snapped towards St. James. “By God—”

“Not yet,” St. James replied.



THEY GATHERED at a small magazine-covered table by the window and sat surveying the room companionably. Lynley flipped through the assortment of periodicals; St. James lifted the lid of the teapot on the abandoned morning tray and gave consideration to the transparent film that had formed on the liquid; and Macaskin tapped a pen in staccato against the bottom of his shoe.

“We’ve two lapses of time,” St. James said. “Twenty minutes or more between the discovery of the body and the call to the police. Then nearly two hours between the call to the police and their arrival here.” He gave his attention to Macaskin. “And your crime-scene men weren’t able to go over the room thoroughly before you had the call from your CC, ordering you back to the station?”

“That’s right.”

“Then you may as well have them go over the room now if you want to phone for them. I don’t expect we’ll gain much from the effort, though. Any amount of apocryphal evidence could have been planted in here during that time.”

“Or removed,” Macaskin noted blackly. “With only Lord Stinhurst’s word that he locked all the doors and waited for us and did nothing else.”

That remark struck a chord in Lynley. He got to his feet and went without speaking from the chest of drawers to the wardrobe to the dressing table. The other two watched as he opened doors and drawers and looked behind furniture.