Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(55)

“She knows about Geoffrey, yes. But she doesn’t know it all. You see, she heard the argument that night. Stuart Elizabeth heard the fighting.” Lady Stinhurst stopped seeking a response from him, seeking some kind of sign that would tell her it was safe to continue. He gave her nothing. She plunged on. “You spoke to Francesca this morning, didn’t you? Did she tell you about her talk with Elizabeth last night? After the read-through?”

“No.”

“Then I shall. Elizabeth saw you leave that night, Stuart. Alec and Joy saw you as well. They were all watching from a window upstairs.” Lady Stinhurst felt her voice wavering. But she forced herself to continue. “You know how children are. They see part, hear part, and assume the rest. Darling. Francesca said that Elizabeth believes you killed Geoffrey. Apparently, she’s thought that…since the night it happened.”

Stinhurst made no reply. Nothing changed about him, not the even flow of his breathing, not his upright posture, not his steady gaze on the frozen grounds of Westerbrae. His wife tentatively put her fingers on his shoulder. He flinched. She dropped her hand.

“Please. Stuart.” Lady Stinhurst hated herself for the tremor behind her words, but she couldn’t stop them now. “You must tell her the truth. She’s had twenty-five years of believing you’re a murderer! You can’t let it continue. My God, you can’t do that!”

Stinhurst didn’t look at her. His voice was low. “No.”

She couldn’t believe him. “You didn’t kill your brother! You weren’t even responsible! You did everything in your power—”

“How can I destroy the only warm memories Elizabeth has? She has so little, after all. For God’s sake, at least let her keep that.”

“At the expense of her love for you? No! I won’t have it.”

“You will.” His voice was implacable, bearing the sort of unquestionable authority that Lady Stinhurst had never once disobeyed. For to disobey was to step out of the role she had been playing her entire life: daughter, wife, mother. And nothing else. As far as she knew, there was only a void beyond the narrow boundaries set up by those who governed her life. Her husband spoke again. “Go to bed. You’re tired. You need to sleep.”

As always, Lady Stinhurst did as she was told.



IT WAS PAST TWO in the morning when Inspector Macaskin finally left, with a promise to telephone with the postmortems and the forensic reports as soon as he could. Barbara Havers saw him out and returned to Lynley and St. James in the sitting room. They were at the table, with the items from Joy Sinclair’s shoulder bag spread out before them. The tape recorder was playing yet another time, Joy’s voice rising and falling with the broken messages that Barbara had long ago memorised. Hearing it now, she realised that the recording had begun to take on the quality of a recurring nightmare, and Lynley the quality of a man obsessed. His were not quantum leaps of intuition in which the misty image of crime-motive-perpetrator took recognisable shape. Rather, they bore the appearance of contrivance, of an attempt to find and assess guilt where only by the wildest stretching of the imagination could it possibly exist. For the first time in that endless harrowing day, Barbara began to feel uneasy. In the long months of their partnership, she had come to realise that, for all his exterior gloss and sophistication, for all his trappings of upper-class splendour that she so mightily despised, Lynley was still the finest DI she had ever worked with. Yet Barbara knew intuitively that the case he was building now was wrong, founded on sand. She sat down and reached restlessly for the book of matches from Joy Sinclair’s bag, brooding upon it.

It bore a curious imprint, merely three words, Wine’s the Plough, with the apostrophe an inverted pint glass spilling lager. Clever, Barbara thought, the sort of amusing memento one picks up, stuffs into a handbag, and forgets about. But she knew that it was only a matter of time before Lynley would grasp at the matchbook as another piece of evidence affirming Davies-Jones’ guilt. For Irene Sinclair had said that her sister did not smoke. And all of them had seen that Davies-Jones did.

“We need physical evidence, Tommy,” St. James was saying. “You know as well as I that all this is purest conjecture. Even Davies-Jones’ prints on the key can be explained away by the statement Helen gave us.”

“I’m aware of that,” Lynley replied. “But we’ll have the forensic report from Strathclyde CID.”

“Not for several days, at least.”

Lynley went on as if the other man had not spoken. “I’ve no doubt that some piece of evidence will turn up. A hair, a fibre. You know as well as I how impossible it is to carry off a perfect crime.”

“But even then, if Davies-Jones was in Joy’s room earlier in the day—and from Gowan’s report, he was—what have you gained by the presence of one of his hairs or a fibre from his coat? Besides, you know as well as I that the crime scene was contaminated by the removal of the body, and there’s not a barrister in the country who won’t know it as well. As far as I’m concerned, it comes back to motive again and again. The evidence is going to be too weak. Only a motive can give it strength.”

“That’s why I’m going to Hampstead tomorrow. I’ve a feeling that the pieces are lying there, ready to be put together, in Joy Sinclair’s flat.”

Barbara heard this statement with disbelief. It was beyond consideration that they should leave so soon. “What about Gowan, sir? You’ve forgotten what he tried to tell us. He said he didn’t see someone. And the only person he told me he saw last night was Rhys Davies-Jones. Don’t you think that means he was trying to change his statement?”