Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(29)
But the answer didn’t interest him. Seeing Gabriel’s face, Gowan needed no response. They were a match for size, but the boy’s fury made him stronger. It crested within him, firing him to fight. His single punch put Gabriel flat on the floor, and he fell upon him, one hand at the man’s throat, the other solidly delivering nasty and well-placed blows to his face.
“Wha’ did ye dae tae Mary Agnes?” Gowan roared as he struck.
“Jesus God!”
“Stop him!”
Fragile composure—that thin shell of civility—disintegrated into uproar. Limbs flailed viciously. Hoarse cries charged the air. Glassware smashed onto the hearth. Feet kicked and jolted abandoned furniture to one side. Gowan’s arm encircled Gabriel’s neck, and he dragged the man, panting and sobbing, to the fire.
“Tell me!” Gowan forced Gabriel’s handsome face, now twisted with pain, over the fender, within an inch of the coals. “Tell me, ye bystart!”
“Rhys!” Irene Sinclair backed stiffly into her chair, her face ashen. “Stop him! Stop him!”
Davies-Jones and Sydeham climbed past the overturned furniture and the frozen figures of Lady Stinhurst and Francesca Gerrard, who cowered together like two versions of Lot’s wife. They reached Gowan and Gabriel, struggled uselessly to haul them apart. But Gowan held the actor in a grip made unbreakable by the force of his passion.
“Don’t believe him, Gowan,” Davies-Jones said urgently into the boy’s ear. He gripped his shoulder hard, jerking him to sensibility. “Don’t lose yourself like this. Let him be, lad. Enough.”
Somehow the words—and the implication of complete understanding behind them—reached past Gowan’s red tide of anger. Releasing Robert Gabriel, he tore himself away from Davies-Jones and fell to his side on the floor, gasping convulsively.
He realised, of course, the gravity of what he had done, the fact that he would lose his job—and Mary Agnes—because of it. But beyond the enormity of his behaviour, it was the torment of loving and being unloved in return that drove the threat from him, entirely blind to the impact it might have on others in the room, seeking only to wound as he had been wounded.
“I know bluidy all! An’ I’ll tell the police! An’ ye’ll pay!”
“Gowan!” Francesca Gerrard cried out in horror.
“Better speak now, lad,” Davies-Jones said. “Don’t be a fool to talk like that when there’s a killer in the room.”
Elizabeth Rintoul had not moved once during the altercation. Now she stirred, as if from a deep sleep. “No. Not here. Father’s gone to the sitting room, hasn’t he?”
“I SHOULD GUESS you see Marguerite as she is now, a sixty-nine-year-old woman very much near the end of her resources. But at thirty-four, when all this occurred, she was lovely. Lively. And eager—so eager to live.”
Restlessly, Lord Stinhurst had gone to a different chair, not one of those in the centre of the room, but one on its perimeter, well out of the light. He sat forward in it, leaning his arms on his knees, and he studied the floral carpet as he talked, as if its muted arabesque pattern held answers for him. His voice was toneless. It was the voice of a man giving a recitation that had to be got through with no expenditure of emotion.
“She and my brother Geoffrey fell in love shortly after the war.”
Lynley said nothing. But he wondered how, even at a distance of thirty-six years, any man could speak of such a monumental act of disloyalty with so little affect. Stinhurst’s lack of emotion spoke of a man who was dead inside, who could no longer afford to let himself be touched, who single-mindedly pursued excellence in his career so that he never had to face the agony rife in his personal life.
“Geoff had been decorated numerous times. He came back from the war a hero. I suppose it was natural that Marguerite was attracted to him. Everyone was. He had a way about him…an air.” Stinhurst paused reflectively. His hands sought each other and pressed hard together.
“You served in the war as well?” Lynley asked.
“Yes. But not like Geoffrey. Not with his flair, not with his devotion. My brother was like a fire. He blazed through life. And like a fire, he attracted lesser creatures to him, weaker creatures. Moths. Marguerite was one of them. Elizabeth was conceived on a trip that Marguerite made alone to my family’s home in Somerset. It was during the summer and I’d been gone two months, travelling from spot to spot in order to direct regional theatre. Marguerite had wanted to come with me, but frankly, I felt I would be burdened with her, with having to…keep her entertained. I thought,” he didn’t bother to disguise his self-contempt, “that she would be in the way. My wife was no fool, Thomas. She still isn’t, for that matter. She could read my reluctance to have her about, so she stopped badgering me to take her. I ought to have realised what that meant, but I was too much caught up in the theatre to understand that Marguerite was making arrangements of her own. I didn’t know at the time that she went to Geoffrey. I only knew at the end of the summer that she was pregnant. She would never tell me whose child it was.”
That Lady Stinhurst had refused her husband this knowledge made perfect sense to Lynley. But that Stinhurst, in the face of it, had carried on with the marriage made no sense at all. “Why did you not divorce her? Messy as it would have been, surely you would have gleaned some peace of mind.”