Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(79)

“Rhys,” she called. When he turned back to her, she said, “May I see you tonight?”

It was part contrition and part desire. But which was the greater and more pressing, she could not have said. She knew only that she couldn’t leave him today on a lie.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t, Helen. I’ve a meeting with Stuart…Lord Stinhurst about the new production.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. I wasn’t thinking. Then perhaps sometime…”

“Tomorrow night? For dinner, if you’re free. If that’s what you want.”

“I…yes. Yes, it’s what I want. Truly.”

He stood in shadow, so she could not see his face. She could only hear his words and the fragile core of tenderness behind them. The timbre of his voice told her the cost of his speaking at all. “Helen. I woke up this morning knowing with perfect certainty that I love you. So much. God help me, but I don’t understand why no other moment in my life has ever been quite as frightening.”

“Rhys—”

“No. Please. Tell me tomorrow.” He turned decisively and walked down the aisle, up the steps to join the others.

Left alone, Lady Helen forced her eyes to remain on the stage, but her thoughts would not. Instead, they attached themselves stubbornly to a reflection on loyalty. If this encounter with Rhys were a test of her devotion to him, she saw that, without even thinking, she had failed it miserably. And she wondered if that momentary failure meant the very worst, if in her heart she questioned what Rhys had really done two nights ago while she was asleep at Westerbrae. The very thought was devastating. She despised herself.

Getting to her feet, she returned to the entrance hall and approached the office doors. She decided against an elaborate fabrication. She would face Stinhurst’s secretary with the truth.

That commitment to honesty would, in this case, be a wise decision.



“IT’S THE CHAIR, Havers,” Lynley was saying once again, possibly for the fourth or fifth time.

The afternoon was growing unbearably cold. A frigid wind had swept in from The Wash and was tearing across the Fens, unbroken by woodland or hills. Lynley made the turn back towards Porthill Green just as Barbara concluded her third examination of the suicide photographs and replaced them in the Darrow file that Chief Constable Plater had loaned them.

She shook her head inwardly. As far as she could tell, the case he was building was more than tenuous; it was virtually nonexistent. “I don’t see how you can possibly reach any viable conclusion from looking at a picture of a chair,” she said.

“Then you look at it again. If she hanged herself, how would she tip the chair onto its side? It couldn’t have been done. She could have kicked at the back of it, or even turned it sideways and still kicked at the back of it. But in either case, the chair would have fallen onto its back, not onto its side. The only way for the chair to end up in that position at Hannah Darrow’s own doing would be if she had twisted her foot into the space between the seat and the back and actually tried to toss the thing.”

“It could have happened. She was missing a shoe,” Barbara reminded him.

“Indeed. But she was missing her right shoe, Havers. And if you look again, you’ll see that the chair was tipped over to her left.”

Barbara saw that he was determined to win her to his way of thinking. There seemed little point to a further protest. Nonetheless, she felt compelled to argue. “So what you’re saying is that Joy Sinclair, in innocently researching a book about a suicide, fell upon a murder instead. How? Out of all the suicides in the country, how could she possibly have stumbled onto one that was a murder? Good God, what do you think the odds are for doing that?”

“But consider why she was attracted to Hannah Darrow’s death in the first place, Havers. Look at all the oddities involved that would have made it stand out glaringly in comparison to any others she looked at. The location: the Fens. A system of canals, periodic floods, land reclaimed from the sea. All the natural characteristics that have made it the inspiration of everyone from Dickens to Dorothy Sayers. How did Joy describe it on her tape? ‘The sound of frogs and pumps, the unremittingly flat land.’ Then there’s the site of the suicide: an old abandoned mill. The bizarre clothing she was wearing: two wool coats over two wool sweaters. And then the inconsistency that surely must have struck Joy the moment she saw those police photos: the position of that chair.”

“If it is an inconsistency, how do you explain the fact that Plater himself overlooked it during the investigation? He doesn’t exactly seem to be your bumbling Lestrade type.”

“By the time Plater got there, all the men from the pub had been searching for Hannah, all of them convinced that they were looking for a suicide. And when they found her and telephoned for the police, they reported a suicide. Plater was predisposed to believe that’s exactly what he was looking at when he got to the mill. So he’d lost objectivity before he ever saw the body. And he was given fairly convincing evidence that Hannah Darrow had indeed intended to kill herself when she left her flat. The note.”

“But you heard Plater say it was genuine enough.”

“Of course it’s genuine,” Lynley said. “I’m certain it’s her handwriting.”

“Then how do you explain—”

“Good God, Havers, look at the thing. Is there a single misspelled word in it? Is there a point of punctuation that she even missed?”