Payment in Blood (Inspector Lynley, #2)(82)

“My father. My sister’s husband, Phillip Gerrard. My sister, Francesca. My wife, Marguerite. My father’s solicitor—he died some years ago and I can’t remember his name at the moment. Our physician. Myself.”

Stinhurst had omitted the very man whose identity they needed. St. James pointed to the photograph he had laid next to that of his sister. “And this man in profile?”

Stinhurst’s brow creased. “I don’t know. I can’t say I’ve ever seen him before.”

“Odd,” St. James said.

“Why?”

“Because in the original photo from which all of these were taken, he’s talking to you. And for some reason you look in that picture as if you know him quite well.”

“Indeed. I may have at the time. But my brother’s inquest was twenty-five years ago. And at this distance, I don’t think I can be expected to remember everyone who was there.”

“That’s true,” St. James replied and considered the fascinating fact that he had not mentioned that the photographs were from Geoffrey Rintoul’s inquest at all.

Stinhurst was getting to his feet. “If there’s nothing else, Mr. St. James, I’ve things to see to before my day ends here.”

He did not look at the photographs again as he spoke, gathering pipe and tobacco, readying himself to leave. And that was so unlikely a human reaction. It was as if the man had to keep his eyes from them lest his face reveal more than he had been willing to say. One thing was a certainty, St. James concluded: Lord Stinhurst knew exactly who the man in the photograph was.



CERTAIN KINDS of lighting refuse to lie about the relentless, ineluctable process of ageing. They are entirely unforgiving, capable of exposing flaws and baring the truth. Direct sunlight, the harsh overhead fluorescent lights of a business establishment, the flood lights used to film without soft-focus filters—these are proficient at doing their worst. In her dressing room, Joanna Ellacourt’s make-up table appeared to have this sort of lighting as well. At least it did today.

The air was quite cool, the way she always liked it in order to keep the flowers fresh when they arrived from a score of admirers before her performances. There were no flowers now. Instead, the air held that combination of odours peculiar to every dressing room she had ever inhabited, the mingling scents of cold cream, astringent, and lotion that littered the tabletop. Joanna was only dimly aware of this scent as she stared unflinchingly at her reflection and forced her eyes to rest upon each telling harbinger of approaching middle age: the incipient wrinkles from nose to chin; the delicate webbing round her eyes; the first ringed indentations on her neck, prelude to the old-age cording that could never be disguised.

She smiled in self-mockery at the thought that she had escaped nearly everything that had constituted the psychological quicksand of her life. Her family’s grubby fiveroom council house in Nottingham; the sight of her father sitting daily in unshaven gloom at his window, a machinist on the dole whose dreams had died; the sound of her mother whining about the cold that persistently seeped through the poorly sealed windows, or the black and white telly whose knobs were broken off so that the sound remained at a constant nerve-shattering pitch; the future that each of her sisters had chosen, one that repeated the history of their parents’ marriage, an endless, bone-grinding repetition of producing babies at intervals of eighteen months and living without either hope or joy. She had escaped all that. But she could not escape that process of slow decomposition that awaits every man.

Like so many egocentric creatures whose beauty dominates the stage and the screen and the covers of countless magazines, she had thought for a time that she might elude it. She had, in fact, grown to believe that she would. For David had always allowed her to do so.

Her husband had been more than her liberation from the miseries of Nottingham. David had been the one true constant in a fickle world in which fame is ephemeral, in which the critics’ apotheosis of a new talent could mean the ruin of an established actress who has given her life to the stage. David knew all about that, knew how it frightened her, and through his continual support and love—in spite of her tantrums, her demands, her flirtations—he had assuaged her fears. Until Joy Sinclair’s play had come along, changing everything irrevocably between them.

Fixing her eyes on her reflection without really seeing it, Joanna felt the anger all over again. No longer the fire that had consumed her with such irrational, revenge-seeking intensity on Saturday night at Westerbrae, it had burned itself down to a glowing pilot, capable of igniting her central passion at the least provocation.

David had betrayed her. She forced herself to think of it again and again, lest the decades of their shared intimacy insinuate themselves into her consciousness and demand that she forgive him. She would never do so.

He had known how much she had depended upon Othello being the last time she performed with Robert Gabriel. He had known how much she despised Gabriel’s pursuit of her, flavoured with accidental encounters, casually inadvertent movements that grazed his hand across the very tips of her breasts, longing stage kisses in front of enormous audiences who grew to believe it was part of the show, private double-edged compliments attached to references to his sexual prowess.

“Like it or not, you and Gabriel have magic when you’re on the stage together,” David had said.

Not the least bit jealous, not the least bit concerned. She had always wondered why. Until now.