Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(24)

“A book?” St. James asked. “She was writing both a book and a play?”

Lady Helen laughed regretfully. “Incredible, wasn’t she? And to think that I feel industrious if I manage to answer a letter within five months of receiving it.”

“She sounds like a woman who might well inspire jealousy.”

“Perhaps. But I think it was more that she alienated people unconsciously.” Lady Helen told him of Joy’s light-hearted comments during cocktails about a Reingale painting that hung over the fireplace in the drawing room. It was a depiction of a white-gowned Regency woman, surrounded by her two children and a frisky terrier who nosed at a ball. “She said she’d never forgotten that painting, that as a child visiting Westerbrae, she’d liked to imagine herself as that Reingale woman, safe and secure and admired, with two perfect children to adore her. She said something like, what more could one ask for than that and isn’t it strange how life turns out. Her sister was sitting right below the painting as she spoke, and I remember noticing how Irene began to flush horribly, like a rash was spreading up her neck and across her face.”

“Why?”

“Well, of course, Irene had once been all those things, hadn’t she? Safe and secure, with a husband and two children. And then Joy had come along and destroyed it all.”

St. James looked sceptical. “How can you be sure that Irene Sinclair was reacting to what her sister had said?”

“I can’t, of course. I know that. Except at dinner, when Joy and Jeremy Vinney were talking together and Joy was making all sorts of amusing comments about her new book, entertaining the whole table with stories about some man she’d been trying to interview in the Fens, Irene…” Lady Helen hesitated. It was difficult to put into words the chilling effect Irene Sinclair’s behaviour had had upon her. “Irene was sitting quite still, staring at the candles on the table and she…it was rather dreadful, Simon. She drove the tines of her fork right into her thumb. But I don’t think she felt a thing.”



ST. JAMES reflected upon the tops of his shoes. They were smudged with dried mud from the drive, and he bent to wipe them off. “Then Joanna Ellacourt must have been wrong about Irene’s role in this changed version of the play. Why would Joy Sinclair be writing for her sister if she continued to alienate her at every juncture?”

“As I said, I think the alienation was unconscious. And as for the play, perhaps Joy felt guilty. After all, she had destroyed her sister’s marriage. She couldn’t give that back to her. But she could give her back her career.”

“But in a play with Robert Gabriel? After a messy divorce that Joy herself had likely helped cause? Doesn’t that smack of sadism to you?”

“Not if no one else in London was willing to give Irene a chance, Simon. Evidently, she’s been out of circulation for a good many years. This may well have been her only opportunity for a second go on stage.”

“Tell me about the play.”

As Lady Helen recalled, Joy Sinclair’s description of the new version of the play—prior to the actors’ actually seeing it—had been deliberately provocative. When asked about it by Francesca Gerrard, she had smiled up and down the length of the dining table and said, “It takes place in a house much like this. In the dead of winter, with ice sheeting the road and not a soul in miles and no way to escape. It’s about a family. And a man who dies, and the people who had to kill him. And why. Especially why.” Lady Helen had expected to hear wolves howling next.

“It sounds as if she intended that as a message for someone.”

“It does, doesn’t it? And then when we were all gathered in the sitting room and she began going over the changes in the plot, she said much the same thing.”

The plot concerned itself with a family and their thwarted New Year’s Eve celebration. According to Joy, the oldest brother was a man possessed of a terrible secret, a secret that was about to rip apart the fabric of everyone’s life.

“And then they began to read,” Lady Helen said. “I wish I had paid more attention to what they were reading, but it was so stuffy in the sitting room—no, it was more like a pan of water about to come to a boil—that I didn’t really follow much of what they had to say. All I remember for a certainty is that just before Francesca Gerrard went a bit mad, the older brother in the story—Lord Stinhurst was reading the part since it hadn’t been cast yet—had just received a telephone call. He decided that he had to leave at once, saying that after twenty-seven years, he wasn’t about to become another vassal. I’m fairly certain those were the words. And that’s when Francesca leaped to her feet and the evening collapsed.”

“Vassal?” St. James repeated blankly.

She nodded. “Odd, isn’t it? Of course, since the play had nothing to do with feudalism, I thought it was something wildly avant-garde, with me just too dim to understand what it meant.”

“But they understood?”

“Lord Stinhurst, his wife, Francesca Gerrard, and Elizabeth. Decidedly. But I do think, aside from their irritation at the late changes in the script, everyone else was as confused as I was.” Lady Helen ran her fingers unconsciously round the top of the boot she still held. “Altogether, I had the impression that the play was supposed to serve a noble purpose that didn’t quite come off. A noble purpose for everyone. It was to honour Stinhurst’s achievement vis-à-vis the renovated Agincourt, it was to celebrate Joanna Ellacourt’s career on the stage, it was to bring Irene Sinclair back into the theatre, it was to get Rhys back into directing a major production in London. Perhaps Joy even intended a part for Jeremy Vinney as well. Someone mentioned that he’d started out as an actor before turning to dramatic criticism, and frankly, other than to continue following the Agincourt story, there doesn’t seem to be any other real reason for him to have come to the read-through. So you see,” she concluded with an urgency in her voice that she could not hide from him, “it doesn’t seem reasonable that any of those people would have murdered Joy, does it?”