But Phillip Gerrard was a decent man. The knowledge that he’d allowed himself to be talked into covering up a murder consumed him for the rest of his life.”
“Is that why he’s not buried on Westerbrae land?”
“He felt he had cursed it.”
“Why is your brother buried there?”
“Father wouldn’t have his body in Somerset. It was all we could do to convince him to bury Geoff at all.” Stinhurst fi nally looked at his wife. “We all broke on the wheel of Geoffrey’s sedition, didn’t we, Mag? But you and I worst of all. We lost Alec. We lost Elizabeth. We lost each other.”
“It’s always been Geoff between us, then,” she said dully. “All these years. You’ve always acted as if you killed him, not your father. There were even times when I wondered if you had.”
Stinhurst shook his head, refusing to accept exoneration. “I did. Of course I did. In the library that night, there was a split second of decision when I could have gone to them, when I could have stopped Father. They were on the floor and…Geoff looked at me. Maggie, I’m the last person he saw. And the last thing he knew was that his only brother was going to stand there and do nothing and watch him die. I may as well have killed him myself, you see. I’m responsible for it in the long run.”
Treason, like the plague, doth take much in a blood. Lynley thought that Webster’s line had never seemed so apt as it did now. For from the fountainhead of Geoffrey Rintoul’s treachery had sprung the destruction of his entire family. And since the destruction would not sicken, it continued to feed upon the other lives that touched on the periphery of the Rintouls’: on Joy Sinclair’s and Gowan Kilbride’s. But now it would stop.
There was just one more detail to be attended to. “Why did you involve MI5 this past weekend?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. All I knew was that any investigation would inevitably centre itself round the script we were reading the night Joy died. And I thought-I believed- that a close scrutiny of the script would reveal everything my family and the government had been so careful to keep hidden for twenty-fi ve years. When Willingate phoned me, he agreed that the scripts had to be destroyed. Then he got in touch with your people in Special Branch and they in turn contacted a Met commissioner, who agreed to send someone- someone special-to Westerbrae.”
Those last words brought with them a renewed swelling of bitterness that Lynley fought against uselessly. He told himself that had it not been for Helen’s presence at Wester-brae and the crushing revelation about her relationship with Rhys Davies-Jones, he would have seen through the web of lies that Stinhurst had woven, he would have found Geoffrey Rintoul’s grave himself and drawn his own conclusions from it without the generous aid of his friends. At the moment, clinging to that belief was his only source of self-respect.
“I’m going to ask you to make a complete statement at the Yard,” Lynley said to Stinhurst.
“Of course,” he replied, and the denial that followed his acquiescence was as mechanical as it was immediate. “I didn’t kill Joy Sinclair. Thomas, I swear it.”
“He didn’t.” Lady Stinhurst’s tone was more resigned than urgent. Lynley didn’t respond. She went on. “I would have known had he left our room that night, Inspector.”
Lady Stinhurst could not have chosen a single rationale less likely to meet with Lynley’s belief. He turned to Havers. “Take Lord Stinhurst in for a preliminary statement, Sergeant. See that Lady Stinhurst goes home.”
She nodded. “And you, Inspector?”
He thought about the question, about the time he still needed to come to terms with all that had happened. “I’ll be along directly.”
ONCE LADY STINHURST’S taxi was on its way to the family’s Holland Park home and Sergeant Havers and Constable Nkata had escorted Lord Stinhurst from the Agincourt Theatre, Lynley went back into the building. He did not relish the idea of an accidental meeting with Rhys Davies-Jones, and there was no doubt at all that the man was somewhere on the premises today. Yet something prompted Lynley to linger, perhaps as a form of expiation for the sins he had committed in suspecting Davies-Jones of murder, in doing everything in his power to encourage Helen to suspect him of murder as well. Governed by the force of passion rather than by reason, he had scrambled for facts that would point the case in the Welshman’s direction and had ignored those that wanted to lay the blame upon anyone else.
All this, he thought wryly, because I was so stupidly ignorant of what Helen meant in my life until it was too late.
“You needn’t try to comfort me.” It was a woman’s faltering voice, coming from the far side of the bar, just out of the range of Lynley’s vision. “I haven’t come here on any but equal terms. You said, let’s talk truthfully. Well, let’s do! Unsparingly, truthfully, even shamelessly, then!”
“Jo-” David Sydeham responded.
“It’s no longer a secret that I love you. It never was. I loved you as long ago as the time I asked you to read the stone angel’s name with your fingers. Yes, it had begun that early, this affliction of love, and has never let go of me since. And that is my story-”
“Joanna, shut up. You’ve dropped at least ten lines!”
“I haven’t!”
Sydeham and Ellacourt’s words pounded their way into Lynley’s skull. He crossed the lobby, reached the bar, unceremoniously grabbed the script out of Sydeham’s hand, and without a word ran his eyes down the page to find Alma’s speech in Summer and Smoke. He didn’t use his spectacles, so the words were blurred. But legible enough. And absolutely indelible.
You needn’t try to comfort me. I haven’t come here on any but equal terms. You said, let’s talk truthfully. Well, let’s do! Unsparingly, truthfully, even shamelessly, then! It’s no longer a secret that I love you. It never was. I loved you as long ago as the time I asked you to read the stone angel’s name with your fi ngers.Yes, I remember the long afternoons of our childhood…
And yet, for a moment, Lynley had assumed Joanna Ellacourt had been speaking for herself, not using the words that Tennessee Williams had written. Just as young Constable Plater must have assumed when faced with Hannah Darrow’s suicide note fi fteen years earlier in Porthill Green.
14
BECAUSE OF a traffic snarl on the M11, he did not arrive in Porthill Green until after one o’clock, and by that time clouds humped along the horizon like enormous tufts of grey cotton wool. A storm was brewing. Wine’s the Plough was not yet locked for its midafternoon closing, but rather than go into the pub at once for his confrontation with John Darrow, Lynley crunched across the snow on the green to a call box that leaned precariously in the direction of the sea. He placed a call to Scotland Yard. It was only a matter of moments before he heard Sergeant Havers’ voice, and from the background noises of crockery and conversation, he guessed that she was taking the call from the offi cers’ mess.
“Bloody hell, what happened to you?” she demanded. And then amended the question truculently with, “Sir. Where are you? You’ve had a phone call from Inspector Macaskin. They’ve done the complete autopsy on both Sinclair and Gowan. Macaskin said to tell you they’ve fixed Sinclair’s time of death between two and a quarter past three. And, he said with a great deal of hemming and hawing that she hadn’t been interfered with. I suppose that was his genteel way of telling me that there was no evidence of forcible rape or sexual intercourse. He said that the forensic team aren’t through with everything they gathered from the room. He’ll phone again as soon as they have it all done.”
Lynley blessed Macaskin’s thoroughness and his self-assured willingness to be of help, unthreatened by the involvement of Scotland Yard.