"Not at all. Years ago he had a small part in a production I did in Norwich. And I remember thinking when I saw him yesterday that he has about as much stage presence now as he did then. Which is to say he has none. He's always looked like someone who's just dropped fifteen lines and can't think how to ad-lib his way out of the mess. He couldn't even manage to rhubarb successfully. Poor man. The stage was not his gift, I'm afraid. But then he's awfully dumpy to play any significant role."

"What time did you return to your room last night?"

"I'm really not certain, as I didn't check the time. It's not the sort of thing one does as a matter of course. I just played records until I was sufficiently cooled off." She gazed at the fire. Her unruffled composure altered a degree as she ran a hand along the fine crease in her trousers. "No, that's not quite true, is it? I wanted to make certain David had time to fall asleep. Face-saving, I suppose, although when I think about it now, why I wanted to give him a chance to save face is beyond me."

"To save face?" Lynley queried.

Joanna smiled quickly, without apparent cause. It appeared to be a distraction, a way of automatically concentrating an audience's attention on her beauty rather than the quality of her performance. "David is in the wrong about this entire contract situation with Robert Gabriel, Inspector. And had I come back sooner, he would have wanted to put the anger between us at rest. But..." She looked away again, touching the tip of her tongue to her lips as if in the need to buy time. "I'm sorry. I just don't think I can tell you after all. Silly of me, isn't it? I suppose you might even want to arrest me. But there are some things...I know David wouldn't have told you himself. But I couldn't go back to our room until he was asleep. I just couldn't. Please understand."

Lynley knew she was asking for permission to cease talking, but he said nothing, merely waiting for her to continue. When she did so, she kept her face averted, and she drew on her cigarette several times before crushing it out altogether.

"David would have wanted to make it up. But he hasn't been able to...for nearly two months now. Oh, he would have tried anyway. He'd have felt he owed me that. And if he failed, everything would have been that much worse between us. So I stayed out of the room until I thought he'd be asleep. Which he was. And I was glad of it."

This was a fascinating piece of information, to be sure. It made the longevity of the Ellacourt-Sydeham marriage even more difficult to understand. As if in recognition of this fact, Joanna Ellacourt spoke again. Her voice became sharp, unclouded by either sentiment or regret.

"David's my history, Inspector. I'm not ashamed to admit that he made me what I am. For twenty years he's been my biggest supporter, my biggest critic, my best friend. One doesn't throw that over simply because life gets a little inconvenient now and again."

Her final statement declared marital loyalty more eloquently than anything Lynley had ever heard. Nonetheless, it was difficult for him to put aside David Sydeham's evaluation of his wife. She was, indeed, one h.e.l.l of an actress.

FRANCESCA GERRARD'S bedroom was tucked far away into the corner of the upper northeast corridor, where the hallway narrowed and an old disused harp, covered haphazardly, cast a Quasimodo shadow against the wall. No portraits hung here. No tapestries served as buffers against the cold. Here were no overt ill.u.s.trations of comfort and security. Only monochromatic plaster, showing the tracery of age like fine webbing, and a paper-thin carpet running along the floor.

Casting a hasty look behind her, Elizabeth Rintoul slipped down this hallway and paused at her aunt's door, listening intently. From the upper west corridor, she could hear the rumble of voices. But from inside the room there was nothing. She tapped her fingernails against the wood, a nervous movement that resembled the pecking of small birds. No one called entrance. She knocked again.

"Aunt Francie?" A whisper was all she was willing to risk. Again there was no response.

She knew her aunt was inside, for she'd seen her walk down this corridor not five minutes past when the police had finally unlocked all their rooms. So she tried the doork.n.o.b. It turned, feeling slippery under her sweaty hand.

Inside, the air held a smell of musty pomanders, sweetly suffocating face powder, pungent a.n.a.lgesic, and inexpensive cologne. The room's furnishings acted as companion pieces to the bleak paucity of decoration in the corridor outside: a narrow bed, a single wardrobe and chest of drawers, a cheval gla.s.s that cast strange green reflections, distorted so that foreheads were bulbous and chins were too small.

Her aunt had not always used this as her bedroom. It was only after her husband's death that she had moved to this part of the house, as if its inconvenience and inelegance were part of the process of mourning him. She appeared to be engaged in that process now, for she was sitting upright on the very edge of the bed, her attention given to a studio photograph of her husband that was hanging on the wall, the room's sole decoration. It was a solemn picture, not at all the Uncle Phillip that Elizabeth remembered from her childhood, but undeniably the melancholy man he had become. After New Year's Eve. After Uncle Geoffrey.

Elizabeth shut the door quietly behind her, but as the wood sc.r.a.ped against the strike plate, her aunt gave a choked, mewling gasp. She rose swiftly from the bed and spun, both hands raised in front of her like claws, as if in defence.

Elizabeth stiffened. How a gesture, so simple, could bring everything back, a memory suppressed and believed forgotten. A six-yearold girl, wandering happily out to the stable in Somerset; seeing the kitchen maids squatting to look through a fissure in the building's stone wall where the mortar had worn away; hearing them whisper to her Come and see some nancy boys, luv; not knowing what it meant but eager-always so pathetically eager-to be friends; bending to the peephole and seeing two stable-boys, their clothes strewn carelessly round a stall, one of them on all fours and the other rearing and plunging and snorting behind him and both of their bodies sheened with a sweat that glistened like oil; frightened and recoiling from the sight only to hear the girls' stifled laughter. Laughter at her. At her innocence and her blind naivete. And wanting to strike out at them, to hurt them, to claw at their eyes. With hands just like Aunt Francie's were now.

"Elizabeth!" Francesca dropped her arms. Her body sagged. "You startled me, my dear."

Elizabeth watched her aunt warily, afraid to contend with any other memories that might be stirred by another inadvertent gesture. Francesca, she saw, had begun to make herself ready for dinner when her husband's picture had drawn her into the reverie that Elizabeth had interrupted. Now she was peering at her reflection in the mirror as she ran a brush through her thinning grey hair. She smiled at Elizabeth, but her lips quivered to belie whatever air of tranquillity she was straining to project.

"As a girl, you know, I got used to looking in the mirror without seeing my own face. People say it can't be done, but I mastered it. I can do my hair, my make-up, my earrings, anything. And I never have to see how homely I am."

Elizabeth didn't bother to offer a soothing denial. Denial was insult, for her aunt spoke the truth. She was homely and had always been so, burdened by a long, horsey face, a preponderance of teeth, and very little chin. Possessing a gangling body, she was all arms, legs, and elbows, the recipient of every genetic curse of the Rintoul family. Elizabeth had often thought that homeliness was the reason her aunt wore so much costume jewellery, as if it might somehow distract one's attention from the gross misfortunes of her face and body.

"You mustn't mind, Elizabeth," Francesca was saying gently. "She means well. She does mean well. You mustn't mind so awfully much."

Elizabeth felt her throat close. How well her aunt knew her. How completely she had always understood. "'Get Mr. Vinney a drink, darling.... His gla.s.s is almost empty.'" Bitterly, she mimicked her mother's retiring voice. "I wanted to die. Even with the police. Even with Joy. She can't stop. She won't stop. It won't ever end."

"She wants your happiness, my dear. She sees it in marriage."

"Like her own, you mean?" The words tasted like acid.

Her aunt frowned. She put her brush on the chest of drawers, placing her comb neatly across its bristles. "Have I shown you the photographs Gowan gave to me?" she asked brightly, pulling open the top drawer. It squeaked and stuck. "Silly dear boy. He saw a magazine with those before-and-after pictures and decided we'd do a set of the house. Of each room as we renovate it. And then perhaps we'll display them all in the drawing room when everything's done. Or perhaps an historian might find them of interest. Or we could always use them to..." She struggled with the drawer, but the wood was swollen with the winter damp.

Elizabeth watched her wordlessly. It was always the way within the circle of the family: unanswered questions, secrets, and withdrawal. They were all conspirators whose collusion insisted upon ignoring the past so that it would go away. Her father, her mother, Uncle Geoffrey, and Granda. And now Aunt Francie. Her loyalties, too, were to the ties of blood.

There was no point in staying in the room any longer. Only one thing needed to be said between them. Elizabeth steadied herself to say it.

"Aunt Francie. Please."

Francesca looked up. She still held on to the drawer, still pulled at it fruitlessly, without realising that she was only making its inutility even more p.r.o.nounced.

"I wanted you to know," Elizabeth said. "You need to know. I...I'm afraid I didn't manage things properly at all last night."

Francesca at last dropped her grip on the drawer. "In what way, my dear?"

"It's just that...she wasn't alone. She wasn't even in her room. So I didn't have a chance to talk to her at all, to give her your message."

"It doesn't matter, darling. You did your best, didn't you? And at any rate, I-"

"No! Please!"

Her aunt's voice-as always-was warm with compa.s.sion, with understanding how it felt to be barren of ability or talent or hope. In the face of this unconditional acceptance, Elizabeth felt the dry choking of fruitless tears. She couldn't bear to weep-in either sorrow or pain-so she turned and left the room.

"BLUIDY THING!"

Gowan Kilbride had just about reached his point of no return in his ability to survive nonstop aggravation. The situation in the library had been bad enough, but afterwards it had grown worse with the knowledge, neither admitted to nor denied by the girl herself, that Mary Agnes had allowed Robert Gabriel the very liberties that were forbidden to Gowan's own pleasure. And now, after all that, to be sent to the scullery by Mrs. Gerrard with directions to do something about the b.l.o.o.d.y boiler that hadn't worked properly in fifty years...It was beyond a person's ability to endure.

With a curse, he threw his spanner down onto the floor where it promptly chipped an old tile, bounced once, and slid under the fiery coils of the infernal water heater.

"d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n!" Gowan fumed with rising anger.

He squatted on the floor, poked about with his arm, and immediately burned himself on the metal underside of the boiler.

"Jesus flippin' Christ!" he howled, throwing himself to one side and staring at the old mechanism as if it were a malevolent, living being. He kicked it viciously, kicked it again.

He thought about Robert Gabriel with Mary Agnes and kicked it a third time, which dislodged one of the rusting pipes. Steaming water began to spray out in a hissing arc.

"Oh h.e.l.l!" Gowan snapped. "Burn an' rot an' worms eat yer insides!"

He grabbed a piece of towelling from the scullery sink and wrapped it round the pipe to grasp it without further damage to himself. Wrestling the piece into inadequate submission, sputtering against the fine hot spray that shot against his face and his hair, he lay on his chest. With one hand he forced the pipe back into place, and with the other he sought the spanner that he had dropped, finally locating it back against the far wall. He scrabbled against the floor to inch his way closer to the tool. His fingers were mere centimetres from it when suddenly the entire scullery went black, and Gowan realised that on top of everything else, the single light bulb in the room had just burnt out. The only light left came from the boiler itself, a thin useless glow of red that was shining directly into his eyes. It was the final blow.

"Ye s.h.i.ttin' piece of crile!" he cried. "Ye d.a.m.n pie-eyed sheemach! Ye veecious piece o' sussy! Ye-"

And then, with no warning, he knew that he wasn't alone.

"Who's there? c.u.m here an' help me!"

There was no answer.

"Here! Richt on the fluir!"

And still no response.

He turned his head, tried and failed to pierce the gloom. He was about to call out again-and louder this time, for the hair on the back of his neck had begun to rise with consternation-when there was a rush of movement in his direction. It sounded as if half a dozen people were storming him at once.

"Hey-"

A blow cut off his voice. A hand gripped his neck and smashed his head to the floor. Pain roared through his temples. His fingers loosened their hold on the pipe and water shot out directly into his face, blinding him, searing him, scalding his flesh. He struggled wildly to free himself but was shoved savagely onto the burning pipe so that the gush of water entered his clothes, blistering his chest, his stomach, and his legs. His clothing was wool, and it clung to him like a sealant, holding the liquid like acid upon his skin.

"Gaaaa-"

He tried to cry out as agony, terror, and confusion ripped through him. But a knee dropped onto the small of his back, and the hand twined in his hair forced his head to turn and ground his forehead, nose, and chin into the pool of steaming water forming on the tile.

He felt the bridge of his nose crack, felt the skin sc.r.a.pe from his face. And just as he began to understand that his unseen a.s.sailant meant to drown him in less than one inch of water, he heard the unmistakable snick of metal on tile.

The knife entered his back a second later.

THE LIGHT switched on again. Quick footsteps climbed the stairs.

7.

"I SUPPOSE the more important question is whether you believe Stinhurst's story," St. James pointed out to Lynley. They were in their corner bedroom, where the northwest wing of the house met the main body. It was a small room, adequately furnished in beechwood and pine, inoffensively papered with stripes of creeping jenny on a field of pale blue. The air held that vaguely medicinal smell of cleanser and disinfectant, disagreeable but not overwhelming. From the window, Lynley could see across a recess to the west wing where Irene Sinclair was moving listlessly in her room, a dress draped over her arm as if she couldn't decide whether to put it on or to forget the business entirely. Her face looked etiolated, an elongated white oval framed by black hair, like an artist's study of the power of contrast. Lynley dropped the curtain and turned to find that his friend had begun changing his clothes for dinner.

It was an awkward ritual, made worse because St. James' father-in-law was not there to a.s.sist him, made worse because the entire need for a.s.sistance in what for anyone else would have been a simple procedure had its genesis on a single night of Lynley's own drunken carelessness. He watched St. James, caught between wanting to offer him help and knowing that the offer would be politely rebuffed. The leg brace was uncovered, the crutches were used, the shoes were untied, and always St. James' face remained entirely indifferent, as if he had not been lithe and athletic a mere decade before.

"Stinhurst's story had the ring of truth, St. James. It's not exactly the kind of tale one spins to get out of a murder charge, is it? What could he possibly hope to gain from disparaging his own wife? If anything, the case against him looks blacker now. He's given himself a solid motive for murder."

"One that can't be verified," St. James argued mildly, "unless you check with Lady Stinhurst herself. And something tells me that Stinhurst is betting you're too much the gentleman to do so."

"I'll do it, of course. If it becomes necessary."

St. James dropped one of his shoes onto the floor and began attaching his leg brace to another. "But let's go beyond what he's a.s.suming your reaction will be, Tommy. Let's consider for a moment that his story is true. It would be clever of him, wouldn't it, to outline his motive for murder so obviously. That way you needn't dig for it, needn't be additionally suspicious when you uncover it. Taken to the extreme, you needn't even suspect him of the murder in the first place since he's been perfectly honest with you about everything from the start. It's clever, isn't it? Too clever by half. And what better way to develop a crucial need to destroy the evidence than by acquiescing to Jeremy Vinney's presence here as well, a man likely to pursue any embarra.s.sing story once Joy was killed."

"You're arguing that Stinhurst knew in advance that Joy's revisions of the play would turn it into an expose of his wife and brother's affair. But that really doesn't hold with Helen being given the room adjoining Joy's, does it? Or with the locked hall door. Or with Davies-Jones' fingerprints all over that key."

St. James didn't disagree. He merely remarked, "If it comes to that, Tommy, I suppose one could say that it also doesn't hold with the fact that Sydeham was alone for a part of the night. As was his wife, as it turns out. So either one of them had the opportunity to kill her."

"Opportunity, perhaps. Everyone appears to have had the opportunity. But motive is a problem. Not to mention the fact that Joy's door was locked, so whoever did it either had access to those master keys or got in through Helen's room. We'll always go back to that, you see."

"Stinhurst could have had access to the keys, couldn't he? He told you himself that he's been here before."

"As have his wife, his daughter, and Joy. All of them with access to the keys, St. James. Even David Sydeham may have had access to them if he went down the corridor later on in the afternoon to see which room Elizabeth Rintoul had disappeared into when she saw him and Joanna Ellacourt arrive. But that's stretching things, isn't it? Why would he be curious about Elizabeth Rintoul's hiding place? More, why would Sydeham kill Joy Sinclair? To spare his wife a production with Robert Gabriel? It doesn't wash. Apparently, she's tightly under contract to appear with Gabriel anyway. Killing Joy accomplished nothing."

"We go back to that point, don't we? Joy's death seems to benefit one person only: Stuart Rintoul, Lord Stinhurst. Now that she's dead, the play that promised to be so embarra.s.sing for him is never to be produced. By anyone. It looks bad, Tommy. I don't see how you can ignore such a motive."

"As to that-"

A knock sounded on the door. Lynley answered it to find Constable Lonan standing in the corridor, carrying a lady's shoulder bag that was encased in plastic. He held it stiffly before him in both hands, like a butler presenting a tray of questionable hors d'oeuvres.

"It's Sinclair's," the constable explained. "The inspector thought you might want to have a look at the contents before the lab goes over the bag for prints."

Lynley took it from him, laid it on the bed, and pulled on the latex gloves that St. James wordlessly pa.s.sed him from the open valise at his feet. "Where was it found?"

"In the drawing room," Lonan replied. "On the window seat behind the curtains."

Lynley looked at him sharply. "Hidden?"

"Looks like she just tossed it there the same way she tossed about everything in her room."

Lynley unzipped the plastic, slipping the shoulder bag out onto the bed. The other two men watched curiously as he opened it and spilled out its contents. They comprised an interesting array of articles which Lynley sorted through slowly, dividing them into two piles. Into one pile he placed those objects common to a hundred thousand handbags hanging from the arms of a hundred thousand women: a set of keys attached to a large, bra.s.s ring, two inexpensive ballpoint pens, an opened pack of Wrigley's, a single matchbook, and a pair of dark gla.s.ses in a new leather case.

The rest of the contents went into the second pile where they attested to the fact that, like many women, Joy Sinclair had imbued even so mundane an object as a black shoulder bag with the singular stamp of her personality. Lynley thumbed through her chequebook first, scanning the entries for anything unusual and finding nothing. Apparently the woman had not been overly concerned with the state of her finances, since she had not balanced the book in at least six weeks. This financial nonchalance had its explanation in her wallet, which held nearly one hundred pounds in notes of varying denominations. But neither chequebook nor wallet retained Lynley's interest once his eyes fell upon the final two objects Joy Sinclair had carried with her-an engagement calendar and a small, hand-sized tape recorder.

The calendar was new, its pages scarcely having seen use at all. The weekend at Westerbrae was blocked out, as was a luncheon with Jeremy Vinney two weeks past. There were references to a theatre party, a dental appointment, some sort of anniversary, and three engagements marked Upper Grosvenor Street-each one crossed out as if none had been kept. Lynley turned the page to the successive month, found nothing, turned again. Here the single word P. Green was written across one entire week, chapters 1-3 across the week after that. There was nothing else save a reference to S birthday jotted down on the twenty-fifth.

"Constable," Lynley said thoughtfully, "I'd like to keep this for now. The contents, not the bag itself. Will you check that with Macaskin before he pushes off?"

The constable nodded and left the room. Lynley waited until the door closed behind him before he turned back to the bed, picked up the tape recorder, and with a glance at St. James switched it on.

She had a perfectly lovely voice, throaty and musical. It was husky, a come-hither sort of voice with the kind of inadvertent sensuality that some women consider a blessing and others a curse. The sound switched on and off, in varying tempos with differing backgrounds- traffic, the underground, a quick blare of music-as if she grabbed the recorder out of her shoulder bag to save a sudden thought wherever it happened to strike her.

"Try to put Edna off at least two more days. There's nothing to report. Perhaps she'll believe I've had flu....That penguin! She used to love penguins. It'll be perfect....For G.o.d's sake, don't let Mum forget Sally again this year.... John Darrow believed the best about Hannah until circ.u.mstances forced him to believe the worst....See about tickets and a decent place to stay. Take a heavier coat this time....Jeremy. Jeremy. Oh Lord, why be in such a lather about him? It's hardly a lifetime proposition....It was dark, and although the winter storm...wonderful, Joy. Why not simply go with a dark and stormy night and have done with creativity once and for all.... Remember that peculiar smell: decaying vegetables and flotsam washed down the river by the last storm....The sound of frogs and pumps and the unremittingly flat land....Why not ask Rhys how best to approach him? He's good with people. He'll be able to help....Rhys wants to-"

Lynley switched off the recorder at this. He looked up to find St. James watching him. In a play for time before the inevitable came into the open between them, Lynley gathered up the articles and placed them all into a plastic bag which St. James had produced from his valise. He folded it closed, took it to the chest of drawers.

"Why haven't you questioned Davies-Jones?" St. James asked.

Lynley returned to the foot of the bed, to his suitcase which lay on a luggage stand there. Flipping this open, he pulled out his dinner clothes, giving himself time to consider his friend's question.

It would be easy enough to say that the initial circ.u.mstances had not allowed him to question the Welshman, that there was a logic to the manner in which the case had developed so far and he had intuitively followed the logic to see where it would lead. There was truth in that explanation as well. But beyond that truth, Lynley recognised an additional, unpleasant reality. He was struggling with a need to avoid confrontation, a need with which he had not yet come to terms, so foreign was it to him.

In the next room, he could hear Helen, her movements light and brisk and efficient. He had heard her thus a thousand and one times over the years, heard her without noticing. The sounds were amplified now, as if with the intention of imprinting themselves permanently onto his consciousness.

"I don't want to hurt her," he said at last.

St. James was attaching his leg brace to a black shoe, and he paused in the effort, shoe in one hand, brace in the other. His face, usually so noncommittal, reflected surprise. "You've certainly an odd way of showing it, Tommy."

"You sound just like Havers. But what would you have me do? Helen's determined to be absolutely blind to the obvious. Shall I point out the facts to her now, or hold my tongue and let her become even more involved with the man so that she's thoroughly devastated when she discovers how he's used her?"

"If he's used her," St. James said.

Lynley pulled on a clean shirt, b.u.t.toned it in a poorly hidden agitated fashion, and knotted his tie. "If? Just what do you conjecture his visit to her room last night was all about, St. James?"