Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(30)

“Because of Alec,” Stinhurst replied. “Our son. As you said yourself, a divorce like that would have been messy. More than messy. At that time it would have produced an attendant scandal that, God knows, would have spread across the front page of every newspaper for months. I couldn’t let Alec be tormented like that. I wouldn’t. He meant too much to me. More, I suppose, than my marriage itself.”

“Last night Joy accused you of killing Alec.”

A weary smile touched Stinhurst’s lips, comprising equal parts sorrow and resignation. “Alec…my son was in the RAF. His plane went down in a test flight over the Orkney Islands in 1978. Into…” Stinhurst blinked quickly and made a change in his position. “Into the North Sea.”

“Joy knew that?”

“Of course. But she was in love with Alec. They wanted to marry. She was devastated by his death.”

“You opposed the marriage?”

“I wasn’t delighted by it. But I didn’t actively oppose it. I merely suggested that they wait until Alec had done his time in the military.”

It was a decidedly odd choice of words. “Done his time?”

“Every man in my family has gone into the military. When that pattern has been in motion for three hundred years, one doesn’t want one’s son to be the first Rintoul to break it.” For the first time Stinhurst’s voice was clouded by a wisp of emotion. “But Alec didn’t want to do it, Thomas. He wanted to study history, to marry Joy, to write, and perhaps teach at university. And I—blind fool of a patriot with more love for my family tree than for my own son—I gave him no peace until I’d persuaded him to do his duty. He chose the Royal Air Force. I think he believed it would take him farthest from conflict.” Stinhurst looked up quickly and commented as if in defence of his son, “It wasn’t danger he was afraid of. He merely couldn’t stomach war. Not an unnatural reaction from a decent historian.”

“Did Alec know about the affair his mother and uncle had?”

Stinhurst lowered his head again. The conversation appeared to be ageing him, diminishing the very last of his resources. It was a remarkable change in such an otherwise youthful man. “I thought not. I hoped not. But now I know, according to what Joy said last night, he did.”

So the wasted years, the entire charade—performed to protect Alec—had been for nothing. Stinhurst’s next words echoed Lynley’s thought.

“I’ve always been so blasted civilised. I wasn’t about to become Chillingsworth to Marguerite’s Hester Prynne. So we lived the charade of Elizabeth’s being my daughter until New Year’s Eve of 1962.”

“What happened?”

“I discovered the truth. It was a chance remark, a slip of the tongue that effectively put my brother Geoffrey in Somerset instead of London where he was supposed to be that particular summer. Then I knew. But I suppose I had always suspected as much.”

Stinhurst stood abruptly. He walked to the fireplace, threw several lumps of coal onto the blaze, and watched the flames take them. Lynley waited, wondering if the activity was part of the man’s need to quell emotion or to conceal his past.

“There was…I’m afraid we had a terrible fight. Not an argument. A physical fight. It was here at Westerbrae. Phillip Gerrard, my sister’s husband, put an end to it. But Geoffrey got the worst of it. He left shortly after midnight.”

“Was he fit to leave?”

“I suppose he thought he was. God knows, I didn’t try to stop him. Marguerite tried, but he wouldn’t have her near him. He tore out of here in a passionate frenzy, and less than five minutes later he was killed on the switchback just below Hillview Farm. He hit ice, missed the turn. The car flipped over. He broke his neck. He was…burned.”

They were silent. A piece of coal tumbled to the hearth and singed the edge of the carpet. The air became scented with the acrid odour of burnt wool. Stinhurst swept the ember back to the grate and finished his story.

“Joy Sinclair was here at Westerbrae that night. She’d come up for the holidays. She was one of Elizabeth’s school friends. She must have heard bits and pieces of the argument and put them all together. God knows, she always had a passion for setting the record straight. And what better way to get her vengeance upon me for inadvertently causing Alec’s death?”

“But that was ten years ago. Why would she wait so long for her revenge?”

“Who was Joy Sinclair ten years ago? How could she have taken revenge then—a twenty-five-year-old woman merely at the start of her career? Who would have listened to her? She was no one. But now—an award-winning author with a reputation for accuracy—now she could command an audience that would listen. And how cleverly she did it after all, writing one play in London but bringing a different play here to Westerbrae. With no one the wiser until we actually began the reading last night. With a journalist present to pick out the most lubricious of the facts. Of course, it didn’t get quite as far as Joy had hoped it would. Francesca’s reaction put an end to the reading long before the worst of the details in our sordid little family saga came to light. And now an end has been put to the play as well.”

Lynley marvelled at the man’s words, at the bald indication of culpability they contained. Surely Stinhurst understood to what degree they blackened him?