“My age,” he repeated.
“Sure,” she said cheerfully. “When a bloke gets along in years, things take a bit of time to heat up, don’t they? I understand.” She scrambled on the floor. “Seen my ’and-bag? Oh, ’ere it is. I’m off then. P’raps we’ll ’ave a go on Sunday? My Jim’ll be back on the road by then.” That being her sole form of farewell, she made her way to the door and left him in the dark.
My age, he thought, and he could hear his mother’s cackle of ironic laughter. She would light one of her foul Turkish cigarettes, regard him speculatively, and try to keep her face vacant. It was her analyst’s expression. He hated her when she wore it, cursing himself for having been born to a Freudian. What we’re dealing with, she would say, is typical in a man your age, Robert. Midlife crisis, the sudden realisation of impending old age, the questioning of life’s purpose, the search for renewal. Coupled with your over-active libido, this propels you to seek new ways of defi ning yourself. Always sexual, I’m afraid. That appears to be your dilemma. Which is unfortunate for your wife, as she seems to be the only steadying influence available to you. But you are afraid of Irene, aren’t you? She’s always been too much woman for you to cope with. She made demands on you, didn’t she? Demands of adulthood that you simply couldn’t face. So you sought out her sister-to punish Irene and to keep yourself feeling young. But you couldn’t have everything, lad. People who want everything generally end up with nothing.
And the most painful fact was that it was true. All of it. Gabriel groaned, sat up, began the search for his clothes. The dressing-room door opened.
He had only time to look in that direction, to see a thick shape against the additional darkness of the hallway outside his door. He had only a moment to think, Someone’s shut off all the corridor lights, before a fi gure stormed across the room.
Gabriel smelled whisky, cigarettes, the acrid stench of perspiration. And then a rain of blows fell, on his face, against his chest, savagely pounding into his ribs. He heard, rather than felt, the cracking of bones. He tasted blood and ate the torn tissue in his mouth where his cheek was driven into his teeth.
His assailant grunted with effort, spewed spittle with rage, and finally rasped on the fourth vicious blow between Gabriel’s legs, “Keep your soddin’ piece in your trousers from now on, man.”
Gabriel thought only, Absolutely no teenagers next time, before he lost consciousness.
LYNLEY REPLACED the telephone and looked at Barbara. “No answer,” he said. Barbara saw the muscle in his cheek contract. “What time did Nkata first phone in?”
“A quarter past eight,” she replied.
“Where was Davies-Jones?”
“He’d gone into an off-licence near Kensington Station. Nkata was in a call box outside.”
“And he was alone? He hadn’t taken Helen with him? You’re certain of that?”
“He was alone, sir.”
“But you spoke to her, Havers? You did speak to Helen after Davies-Jones left her fl at?”
Barbara nodded, feeling a growing concern for him that she would have rather lived without. He looked completely worn out. “She phoned me, sir. Right after he’d left.”
“Saying?”
Barbara patiently repeated what she had told him once already. “Only that he’d gone. I did try to keep her on the line for thirty minutes when I first phoned, just as you asked. But she wouldn’t have it, Inspector. She only said that she’d got company and could she telephone me later. And that was it. I don’t think she wanted my help, frankly.” Barbara watched the play of anxiety cross Lynley’s face. She finished by saying: “I think she wanted to handle it alone, sir. Perhaps…well, perhaps she doesn’t see him as a killer yet.”
Lynley cleared his throat. “No. She understands.” He pulled Barbara’s notes across his desk towards him. They contained two sets of data, the results of her interrogation of Stinhurst and the fi nal information from Inspector Macaskin at Strathclyde CID. He put on his spectacles and gave himself over to reading. Outside his office, night subdued the normal jangle of noises in the department. Only the occasional ringing of a telephone, the quick raising of a voice, the congenial burst of laughter told them that they were not alone. Beyond, snow muffled the sounds of the city.
Barbara sat opposite him, holding Hannah Darrow’s diary in one hand and the playbill from The Three Sisters in the other. She had read them both, but she was waiting for his reaction to the material she had prepared for him during his absence in East Anglia and his entanglement in traffic on the way back to London.
He was, she saw, frowning as he read and looking as if the past few days had made demands upon him that were scarring their way into his very flesh. She averted her eyes and made an exercise out of considering his office, pondering the ways it reflected the dichotomy of his character. Its shelves of books bowed to the proprieties of his job. There were legal volumes, forensic texts, commentaries upon the judges’ rules, and several works from the Policy Studies Institute, evaluating the effectiveness of the Metropolitan Police. They composed a fairly standard collection for a man whose interest was well focussed on his career. But the office walls inadvertently cut through this persona of professionalism and revealed a second Lynley, one whose nature was filled with convolutions. Little enough hung there: two lithographs from America’s Southwest that spoke of an abiding love of tranquillity, and a single photograph that disclosed what had lain long at the heart of the man.
It was of St. James, an old picture taken prior to the accident that had cost him the use of his leg. Barbara noticed the overtly innocuous details: how St. James stood, his arms crossed, leaning against a cricket bat; how the left knee of his white flannels bore a large, jagged tear; how a grass stain made a cumulous shadow on his hip; how he laughed unrestrainedly and with perfect joy. Summer past, Barbara thought. Summer dead forever. She knew quite well why the photograph hung there. She moved her eyes away from it.
Lynley’s head was bent, supported by his hand. He rubbed three fingers across his brow. It was some minutes before he looked up, removed his spectacles, and met her gaze. “We’ve nothing here for an arrest,” he said, gesturing at the information from Macaskin.
Barbara hesitated. His passion on the telephone earlier that evening had so nearly convinced her of her own error in seeking an arrest of Lord Stinhurst that even now she thought twice before pointing out the obvious. But there was no need to do so, for he went on to speak of it himself.
“And God knows we can’t take Davies-Jones on the strength of his name in a fi fteenyear-old playbill. We may as well arrest any one of them if that’s all the evidence we have.”
“But Lord Stinhurst burnt the scripts at Westerbrae,” Barbara pointed out. “There’s still that.”
“If you want to argue that he killed Joy to keep her silent about his brother, yes. There is still that,” Lynley agreed. “But I don’t see it that way, Havers. The worst Stinhurst really faced was familial humiliation if the entire story about Geoffrey Rintoul became known through Joy’s play. But Hannah Darrow’s killer faced exposure, trial, imprisonment if she wrote her book. Now, which motive seems more logical to you?”
“Perhaps…” Barbara knew she had to suggest this carefully, “we’ve a double motive. But a single killer.”
“Stinhurst again?”
“He did direct The Three Sisters in Norwich, Inspector. He could be the man Hannah Darrow met. And he could have gotten the key to Joy’s bedroom door from Francesca.”