“This isn’t the time for a row about procedure,” Lynley replied. His voice was dispassionate enough, but Barbara could hear its taut control.
“It has nothing to do with procedure, does it? It has to do with decency. You treated Helen like a scrubber, Inspector, and if you’re about to answer that she acted like a scrubber, I might suggest you take a good look at one or two items in your own chequered past and ask yourself how well they’d appear in a scrutiny the likes of which you just forced her to endure.”
Lynley drew on his cigarette, but, as if he found the taste unpleasant, he stubbed it out in the ashtray. As he did so, a jerk of his hand spilled ashes across the cuff of his shirt. Both of them stared at the resulting contrast of black grime against white.
“Helen had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Lynley replied. “There was no way to get round it, Havers. I can’t give her special treatment because she’s my friend.”
“Is that right?” Barbara asked. “Well, I’ll be fascinated to see how that line plays out when we have the two old boys together for a confi dential little chat.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lords Asherton and Stinhurst sitting down for a chew. I can hardly wait for the chance to see you treat Stuart Rintoul with the same iron glove that you used on Helen Clyde. Peer to peer, chap to chap, Etonian to Etonian. Isn’t that how it plays? But as you’ve said, none of that will get in the way of Lord Stinhurst’s unfortunate placement of himself at the wrong place at the wrong time.” She knew him well enough to see his quick rise to anger.
“And what is it exactly that you would have me do, Sergeant? Ignore the facts?” Coolly, Lynley began to tick them off. “Joy Sinclair’s hall door is locked. The master keys are, for all intents and purposes, unavailable. Davies-Jones’ prints are on the key to the only other door that gives access to the room. We have a period of time that is unaccounted for because Helen was asleep. All that, and we haven’t even begun to consider where Davies-Jones was until one in the morning when he showed up at Helen’s door, or why Helen, of all people, was put into this room in the fi rst place. Convenient, isn’t it, when you consider that we have a man coincidentally coming here in the middle of the night to seduce Helen while his cousin is being murdered in the very next room?”
“And that’s the rub, isn’t it?” Barbara pointed out. “Seduction, not murder.”
Lynley picked up the cigarette case and lighter, slipped them back in his pocket, and got to his feet. He didn’t respond. But Barbara did not require him to do so. A response was pointless when she knew very well that his stiff-upper-lip breeding had a propensity towards deserting him in moments of personal crisis. And the truth of the matter was that the instant she had seen Lady Helen in the library, had seen Lynley’s face when Lady Helen crossed the room to him with that ridiculous greatcoat hanging forlornly to her heels, Barbara had known that, for Lynley, the situation had the potential of developing into a personal crisis of some considerable proportions.
Inspector Macaskin appeared at the bedroom door. Fury played on his features. His face was flushed, his eyes snapped, his skin looked tight. “Not one script in the house, Inspector,” he announced. “It appears our good Lord Stinhurst has burnt every last one.”
“Well, la-de-da-da,” Barbara murmured to the ceiling.
IN THE LOWER NORTH corridor, which was one-fourth of a quadrangle surrounding a courtyard where untouched snow reached nearly to the height of the leaded windows, a door gave out onto the estate grounds.To one side of this door, Francesca Gerrard had established a storage area-a jumble of discarded Welling-tons, fishing gear, rusty gardening tools, mackintoshes, hats, coats, and scarves. Lady Helen knelt on the floor in front of this clutter, throwing aside one boot after another, furiously seeking a mate to the one she had already pulled on. She heard the distinctive sound of St. James’ awkward footsteps coming down the stairs, and she rooted frantically among gumboots and fishing baskets, determined to get out of the house before St. James found her.
But the perverse acuity that had always allowed him to know most of her thoughts before she was even aware of thinking them led him directly to her now. She heard his strained breathing from his rapid descent of the stairs and did not need to look up to know that his face would be pinched with irritation at his body’s weakness. She felt his tentative touch on her shoulder. She jerked away.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“You can’t. It’s far too cold. Beyond that, I’d have too hard a time following you in the dark, and I want to talk to you, Helen.”
“I don’t think we have anything to say to each other, do we? You had your place at the peep show. Or did you want to tip the tart?”
She looked up at that, saw his reaction to her words in the sudden darkening of his smoky blue eyes. But rather than rejoice in her ability to wound him, she was defeated at once. She ceased her search, and stood, with one boot on and another uselessly in her hand. St. James reached out, and Lady Helen felt his cool, dry fingers close over her own.
“I felt just like a whore,” she whispered. Her eyes were dry and hot. She was far beyond tears. “I’ll never forgive him.”
“I’ll not ask that of you. I’ve not come to excuse Tommy, merely to say that he was hit squarely in the face today with several monumental truths. Unfortunately, he wasn’t prepared to deal with any of them. But he’ll have to be the one to explain that to you. When he can.”
Lady Helen plucked miserably at the top of the boot she held. It was black and smudged along its upper ridge with a stickiness that made it look even blacker.
“Would you have answered his question?” she asked abruptly.
St. James smiled, a warm transformation of his otherwise unattractive, angular face. “You know, I always envied your ability to sleep through anything, Helen. Fire, flood, or thunder. I would lie next to you for hours, wide awake, and steadily curse you for having a conscience so unclouded that nothing ever got in the way of your sleep. I used to think that I could have marched the Queen’s Household Cavalry right through the bedroom and you wouldn’t even have noticed. But I wouldn’t have answered him. There are some things, in spite of everything that’s happened, that are just between the two of us. Frankly, that’s one of them.”
Lady Helen felt the tears then, a hot fl urry behind her eyelids which she blinked back, looking away, trying to find her voice. St. James didn’t wait for her to do so. Rather, he drew her gently towards a narrow bench that rested on splintered legs along one of the walls. Several coats hung on pegs above it, and he removed two of them, draping one round her shoulders and using the other himself to ward off the chill that invaded the storage area.
“Aside from the changes Joy had made to the script, did anything else strike you that might have led up to the row last night?” he asked.
Lady Helen considered the hours she had spent with the group from London prior to the turmoil in the sitting room. “I couldn’t say for certain. But I do think everyone’s nerves were strung.”
“Whose in particular?”
“Joanna Ellacourt’s, for one. From what I could gather at cocktails last night, she was already a bit overwrought by the thought that Joy might be writing a play that was going to be a vehicle to resurrect her sister’s career.”
“That would certainly have bothered her, wouldn’t it?”
Lady Helen nodded. “Besides the opening of the new Agincourt Theatre, the production was to celebrate Joanna’s twentieth year on the stage, Simon, so its focus was supposed to be on her, not on Irene Sinclair. But I got the impression that she didn’t think it would be.” Lady Helen explained the brief scene she had witnessed in the drawing room last night, when the company had gathered before dinner. Lord Stinhurst had been standing near the piano with Rhys Davies-Jones, fl ipping through a set of designs for costumes, when Joanna Ellacourt joined them, slinking across the room in a semi-bodiceless coruscating gown that gave new definition to dressing for dinner. She had taken up the drawings for her own perusal, but her face revealed in an instant how she felt about what she saw.