"And how did he lock the door when he left?"

"I don't know. Perhaps he went out the window."

"In a storm, Havers? You're stretching it more than I am." Lynley dropped her notes onto the table, removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes.

"I see that Davies-Jones had access, Inspector. I see that he had opportunity, as well. But Joy Sinclair's play was to resurrect his career, wasn't it? And he had no way of knowing for certain whether the play was finished just because Stinhurst withdrew his support. Someone else well might have financed it. So it seems to me that he's the only person in the house with a solid motive for keeping the woman alive."

St. James spoke. "No. There's another, isn't there, if it comes to regenerating dying careers? Her sister, Irene."

"I DID WONDER when you would get to me."

Irene Sinclair stepped back from the door. She walked to her bed and sat down, her shoulders slumped. In deference to the lateness of the hour, she had changed into her nightclothes, and like the woman itself, her garments were restrained. Flat-heeled slippers, a navy flannel dressing gown under which the high neck of a white nightdress rose and fell with her steady breathing. There was something, however, oddly impersonal about her clothing. It was serviceable, indeed, yet adhering strictly to a norm of perceived propriety, it was exceedingly chilling, as if designed and worn to hold life itself at bay. Lynley wondered if the woman ever slopped round the house in old blue jeans and a tattered jersey. Somehow, he doubted it.

Her resemblance to her sister was remarkable. In spite of the fact that he had observed Joy only through the photographs of her death, Lynley could easily recognise in Irene those features she had shared with her sister, features unaffected by the five or six years that separated them in age: prominent cheekbones, broad brow, the slight squaring of jawline. She was, he guessed, somewhere in her early forties, a statuesque woman with the sort of body other women long for and most men dream of taking into their beds. She had a face that might have belonged to Medea and black hair in which the grey was beginning to streak back dramatically from the left peak of her forehead. Any other woman, remotely insecure, would have coloured it long ago. Lynley wondered if the thought had even crossed Irene's mind. He studied her wordlessly. Why on earth had Robert Gabriel ever found the need to stray?

"Someone has probably told you already that my sister and my husband had an affair last year, Inspector," she began, keeping her voice low. "It's no particular secret. So I don't mourn her death as I ought to, as I probably shall eventually. It's just that when your life's been torn apart by two people you love, it's difficult to forgive and forget. Joy didn't need Robert, you see. I did. But she took him anyway. And that still hurts when I think of it, even now."

"Was their affair over?" Lynley asked.

Irene's attention drifted from Havers' pencil to the floor. "Yes." The single word had the distinct flavour of a lie, and she continued at once, as if to hide this fact. "I even knew when it started between them. One of those dinner parties where people have too much to drink and say things they wouldn't otherwise say. That night Joy announced that she'd never had a man who'd been able to satisfy her in only one go. That, of course, was the sort of thing Robert would take as a personal challenge that had to be attended to without delay. Sometimes what hurts me the most is the fact that Joy didn't love Robert. She never loved anyone at all after Alec Rintoul died."

"Rintoul's been a recurring theme this evening. Were they ever engaged?"

"Informally. Alec's death changed Joy."

"In what way?"

"How can I explain it?" she replied. "It was like a fire, a rampage. It was as if Joy decided that she would start living with a vengeance once Alec was gone. But not to enjoy herself. Rather, to destroy herself. And to take as many of us down with her as she could. It was a sickness with her. She went through men, one after another, Inspector. She devoured them. Rapaciously. Hatefully. As if no one could ever begin to make her forget Alec and she was daring each and every one of them to try."

Lynley walked to the bed, placed the contents from Joy's shoulder bag onto the counterpane. Irene considered the objects listlessly.

"Are these hers?" she asked.

He handed her Joy's engagement calendar first. Irene seemed reluctant to take it, as if she would come across knowledge within it that she would rather not possess. However, she identified what notations she could: appointments with a publisher in Upper Grosvenor Street, the birthday of Irene's daughter Sally, Joy's self-imposed deadline for having three chapters of a book done.

Lynley pointed out the name scrawled across one entire week. P. Green. "Someone new in her life?"

"Peter, Paul, Philip? I don't know, Inspector. She might have been going off on holiday with someone, but I couldn't say. We didn't speak to one another very often. And then, when we did, it was mostly business. She probably wouldn't have told me about a new man in her life. But it wouldn't surprise me at all to know that she had one. That would have been more than typical of her. Really." Disconsolately, Irene fingered one or two other items, the wallet, the matchbook, the chewing gum, the keys. She said nothing else.

Watching her, Lynley pressed the b.u.t.ton on the small tape recorder. Irene shrank infinitesimally at the sound of her sister's voice. He let the machine play. Through the cheerful comments, through the vibrant excitement, through the future plans. He couldn't help thinking, as he listened to Joy Sinclair once again, that she didn't sound at all like a woman bent upon destroying anyone. Halfway through it, Irene raised a hand to her eyes. She bent her head.

"Does any of that mean anything to you?" Lynley asked.

Irene shook her head blindly, a pa.s.sionate movement, a second patent lie.

Lynley waited. She seemed to be attempting to withdraw from him, moving further into herself both physically and emotionally. Shrivelling up through a concerted act of will. "You can't bury her this way, Irene," he said quietly. "I know that you want to. I understand why. But you know if you try it, she'll haunt you forever." He saw her fingers tighten against her skull. The nails caught at her flesh. "You don't have to forgive her for what she's done to you. But don't put yourself into a position of doing something for which you cannot forgive yourself."

"I can't help you." Irene's voice sounded distraught. "I'm not sorry my sister's dead. So how can I help you? I can't help myself."

"You can help by telling me anything about this tape." And ruthlessly, mercilessly, Lynley played it again, hating himself for doing so at the same time as he acknowledged it was part of the job, it had to be done. Still, at the end, there was no response from her. He rewound the tape, played it again. And then again.

Joy's voice was like a fourth person in the room. She coaxed. She laughed. She tormented. She pleaded. And she broke her sister the fifth time through the tape, on the words, "For G.o.d's sake, don't let Mum forget Sally again this year."

Irene s.n.a.t.c.hed the recorder, shut it off with hands which fumbled on the b.u.t.tons, and flung it back onto the bed as if touching it contaminated her.

"The only reason my mother ever remembered my daughter's birthday is because Joy reminded her," she cried. Her face bore the signs of anguish, but her eyes were dry. "And still I hated her! I hated my sister every minute and I wanted her to die! But not like this! Oh G.o.d, not like this! Have you any idea what it's like to want a person dead more than anything in the world and then to have it happen? As if a mocking deity listened to your wishes and only granted the foulest ones you possess?"

Good G.o.d, the power of simple words. He knew. Of course, he knew. In the timely death of his own mother's lover in Cornwall, in ways that Irene Sinclair could never hope to understand. "It sounds as if some of what she said was to be part of a new work. Do you recognise the place she's describing? The decaying vegetables, the sound of frogs and pumps, the flat land?"

"No."

"The circ.u.mstance of a winter storm?"

"No!"

"The man she mentions, John Darrow?"

Irene's hair swung out in an arc as she turned her head away. At the sudden movement, Lynley said, "John Darrow. You recognise the name."

"Last night at dinner. Joy talked about him. She said something about wining and dining a dreary man called John Darrow."

"A new man she's involved with?"

"No. No, I don't think so. Someone-I think it was Lady Stinhurst-had asked her about her new book. And John Darrow came up. Joy was laughing the way she always did, making light of the difficulties she's been having with the writing, saying something about information she needed and was trying to get. It involved this John Darrow. So I think he's connected with the book somehow."

"Book? Another play, you mean?"

Irene's face clouded. "Play? No, you've misunderstood, Inspector. Aside from an early play six years ago and the new piece for Lord Stinhurst, my sister didn't write for the theatre. She wrote books. She used to be a journalist, but then she took up doc.u.mentary nonfiction. Her books are all about crimes. Real crimes. Murders, mostly. Didn't you know that?"

Murders mostly. Real crimes. Of course. Lynley stared at the little tape recorder, hardly daring to believe that the missing piece to the triangular puzzle of motive-means-opportunity would be given to him so easily. But there it was, what he had been seeking, what he had known instinctively he would find. A motive for murder. Still obscure, but merely waiting for the details to flesh it out into a coherent explanation. And the connection was there on the tape as well, in Joy Sinclair's very last words: "...ask Rhys how best to approach him. He's good with people."

Lynley began replacing Joy's belongings in the bag, feeling uplifted yet at the same time filled with a hard edge of anger at what had happened here last night, and at the price he was going to have to pay personally to see that justice was done.

At the door, with Havers already out in the corridor, he was stopped by Irene Sinclair's last words. She stood near the bed, backed by inoffensive wallpaper and surrounded by a suitable bedroom suite. A comfortable room, a room that took no risks, threw out no challenges, made no demands. She looked trapped within it.

"Those matches, Inspector," she said. "Joy didn't smoke."

MARGUERITE RINTOUL, Countess of Stinhurst, switched out the bedroom light. The gesture was not born of a desire to sleep, since she knew very well that sleep would be an impossibility for her. Rather, it was a last vestige of feminine vanity. Darkness hid the tracery of lines that had begun to network and crumple her skin. In it, she felt protected, no longer the plump matron whose once beautiful b.r.e.a.s.t.s now hung pendulous inches short of her waist; whose shiny brown hair was the product of weavings and dyes expertly orchestrated by the finest hairdresser in Knightsbridge; whose manicured hands with their softly buffed nails bore the spotting of age and caressed absolutely nothing any longer.

On the bedside table she placed her novel, laying it down so that its lurid cover lined up precisely with the delicate bra.s.s inlay etched against the rosewood. Even in the darkness, the book's t.i.tle leered up at her. Savage Summer Pa.s.sion. So pathetically obvious, she told herself. So useless as well.

She looked across the room to where her husband sat in an armchair by the window, given over to the night, to the weak starlight that filtered through the clouds, to the amorphous shapes and shadows upon the snow. Lord Stinhurst was fully clothed, as was she, sitting upon the bed, her back against the headboard, a wool blanket thrown across her legs. She was less than ten feet away from him, yet they were separated by a chasm of twenty-five years of secrecy and suppression. It was time to bring it to an end.

The thought of doing so was paralysing Lady Stinhurst. Every time she felt that the breath she was taking was the breath that would allow her to speak at last, her entire upbringing, her past, her social milieu rose in concert to strangle her. Nothing in her life had ever prepared her for a simple act of confrontation.

She knew that to speak to her husband now was to risk everything, to step into the unknown, to hazard coming up against the insurmountable wall of his decades of silence. Having tested these waters of communication periodically before, she knew how little might be gained from ner efforts and how horribly her failure would sit upon her shoulders. Still, it was time.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed. A momentary dizziness took her by surprise when she stood, but it pa.s.sed quickly enough. She padded across to the window, acutely aware of the deep cold in the room and the nasty tightness in her stomach. Her mouth tasted sour.

"Stuart." Lord Stinhurst did not move. His wife chose her words carefully. "You must talk to Elizabeth. You must tell her everything. You must."

"According to Joy, she already knows. As did Alec."

As always, those last three words fell heavily between them, like blows against Lady Stinhurst's heart. She could still see him so clearly-alive and sensitive and achingly young, meeting the terrifying end that was destined for Icarus. But burning, not melting, out of the sky. We are not meant to outlive our children, she thought. Not Alec, not now. She had loved her son, loved him instinctively and devotedly, but invoking his memory-like a raw wound in both of them that time had only caused to fester-had always been one of her husband's ways of putting an end to unpleasant conversations. And it had always worked. But not tonight.

"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 a.s.sume 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d'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-motiveperpetrator took recognisable shape. Rather, they bore the appearance of contrivance, of an attempt to find and a.s.sess 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-cla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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?"

"He didn't finish the sentence, Havers," Lynley replied. "He said two words, didn't see.

Didn't see whom? Didn't see what? Davies-Jones? The cognac he was supposed to be carrying? He expected to see him with something in his hand because he came out of the library. He expected liquor. A book. But what if he only thought that's what he saw? What if he realised later that what he saw was something quite different, a murder weapon?"

"Or what if he didn't see Davies-Jones at all and that's what he was trying to tell us? What if he only saw someone else attempting to look like Davies-Jones, perhaps wearing his overcoat? It could have been anyone."

Lynley stood abruptly. "Why are you so determined to prove the man is innocent?"

From his sharp tone, Barbara knew what direction his thoughts were taking. But he wasn't the only one with a gauntlet to throw down. "Why are you so determined to prove that he's guilty?"

Lynley gathered Joy's belongings. "I'm looking for guilt, Havers. It's my job. And I believe the guilt lies in Hampstead. Be ready by half past eight."

He started for the door. Barbara's eyes begged St. James to intercede in an area where she knew she could not go, where friendship had stronger ties than the logic and rules that govern a police investigation.

"Are you certain it's wise to go back to London tomorrow?" St. James asked slowly. "When you think of the inquest-"

Lynley turned in the doorway, his face caught by the cavern of shadows in the hall. "Havers and I can't give professional evidence here in Scotland. Macaskin will handle it. As for the rest of them, we'll collect their addresses. They're not about to leave the country when their livelihood's tied up on the London stage."

With that, he was gone. Barbara struggled to find her voice. "I think Webberly's going to have his head over this. Can't you stop him?"

"I can only try to reason with him, Barbara. But Tommy's no fool. His instincts are sound. If he feels he's onto something, we can only wait to see what he finds."

In spite of St. James' a.s.surance, Barbara's mouth was dry. "Can Webberly sack him for this?"

"I suppose it depends on how it all turns out."

Something in his guarded statement told her everything she wanted to know. "You think he's wrong, don't you? You think it's Lord Stinhurst, too. G.o.d in heaven, what's wrong with him? What's happened to him, Simon?"

St. James picked up the bottle of whisky. "Helen," he said simply.

THE KEY in his hand, Lynley hesitated at Lady Helen's door. It was half past two. No doubt she would be asleep by now, his intrusion both disruptive and unwelcome. But he needed to see her. And he didn't lie to himself about the purpose of this visit. It had nothing to do with police work. He knocked once, unlocked the door and went in.

Lady Helen was on her feet, coming across the room, but she halted when she saw him. He closed the door. He said nothing at first, merely noting the details and striving to understand what they might imply.

Her bed was undisturbed, its yellow and white counterpane pulled up round the pillows. Her shoes, slim black pumps, were on the floor next to it. They were the only article of clothing that she had removed other than her jewellery: gold earrings, a thin chain, a delicate bracelet on the nightstand. This last object caught his eyes, and for a painful moment he considered how small her wrists were that such a piece could encircle them so easily. There was nothing else to see in the room, save a wardrobe, two chairs, and a dressing table in whose mirror they both were reflected, warily confronting one another like two mortal enemies come upon each other unexpectedly and without sufficient energy or will to do battle again.

Lynley walked past her to the window. The west wing of the house stretched into the darkness, scattered lights making bright slits against black where curtains were not fully drawn, where others waited, like Helen, for the morning. He closed the curtains.

"What are you doing?" Her voice was chary.

"It's far too cold in here, Helen." He touched the radiator, felt its ineffective tingle of warmth, and went to the door to speak to the young constable stationed at the top of the stairs. "Would you see if there's an electric fire somewhere?" Lynley asked him. When the man nodded, he shut the door again and faced her. The distance between them seemed enormous. Hostility thickened the air.

"Why have you locked me in here, Tommy? Do you expect me to hurt someone?"

"Of course not. Everyone's locked in. It'll be over in the morning."

There was a book on the floor next to one of the chairs. Lynley picked it up. It was a murder mystery, he saw, well thumbed through with typical, whimsical Helen-notations in the margins: arrows and exclamation points, underlinings and comments. She was always determined that no author would ever pull the wool over her eyes, convinced that she could solve any literary conundrum far sooner in its pages than could he. Because of this, he'd been the recipient of her discarded, dog-eared books for the better part of a decade. Read this, Tommy darling. You shall never sort it out.

At the memory's sudden force, he felt stricken with sorrow, desolate, utterly alone. And what he had come to say would only serve to make the situation worse between them. But he knew he had to speak to her, whatever the cost.

"Helen, I can't bear to see you do this to yourself. You're trying to replay St. James to a different ending. I don't want you to do it."