Sergeant Havers spoke. “If Gabriel didn’t kill your sister, what you tell us can only help him.”
Irene shook her head. Her eyes were hollows of terrible fear. “Not this. It can’t.” She looked at each one of them, her fi ngers digging into the worn surface of her handbag. She was like a fugitive, determined to escape but recognising the futility of further flight. When she began to speak at last, her body shuddered as if an illness had taken her. As, in a way, it had. “My sister was with Robert that night in his room. I heard them. I’d gone to him. Like a fool…God, why am I such a pathetic fool? He and I had been in the library together earlier, after the read-through, and there was a moment then when I thought that we might really go back to the way things had been between us. We’d been talking about our children, about…our lives in the past. So later, I went to Robert’s room, meaning to…Oh God, I don’t know what I meant to do.” She ran a hand back through her dark hair, gripping it hard at the scalp as if she wanted the pain. “How much more of a fool can I possibly be in one lifetime? I almost walked in on my sister and Robert for a second time. And the funny part-it’s almost hysterical when one really thinks about it-is that he was saying exactly the same thing that he had been saying to Joy that day in Hampstead when I found them together. ‘Come on, baby. Come on, Joy. Come on! Come on!’ And grunting and grunting and grunting like a bull.”
Lynley heard her words, recognising the kaleidoscopic effect they had on the case. They threw everything into a new perspective. “What time was this?”
“Late. Long after one. Perhaps nearly two. I don’t actually know.”
“But you heard him? You’re certain of that?”
“Oh, yes. I heard him.” She bent her head in shame.
Yet after that, Lynley thought, she would still seek to protect the man. That kind of undeserved, selfless devotion was beyond his comprehension. He avoided trying to deal with it by asking her something altogether different. “Do you remember where you were in March of 1973?”
She did not seem to take in the question at once. “In 1973? I was…surely I was at home in London. Caring for James. Our son. He was born that January, and I’d taken some time off.”
“But Gabriel wasn’t home?”
She pondered this. “No, I don’t think he was. I think he was appearing in the regionals then. Why? What does that have to do with all this?”
Everything, Lynley thought. He put all his resources into compelling her to listen and understand his next words. “Your sister was getting ready to write a book about a murder that occurred in March of 1973. Whoever committed that murder also killed Joy and Gowan Kilbride. The evidence we have is virtually useless, Irene. And I’m afraid we need you if we’re to bring this creature to any kind of justice.”
Her eyes begged him for the truth. “Is it Robert?”
“I don’t think so. Inspite of everything you’ve told us, I simply don’t see how he could have managed to get the key to her room.”
“But if he was with her that night, she could have given it to him!”
That was a possibility, Lynley acknowledged. How to explain it? And then how to align it with what the forensic report revealed about Joy Sinclair? And how to tell Irene that even if, by helping the police, she proved her husband innocent, she would only be proving her own cousin Rhys guilty?
“Will you help us?” he asked.
Lynley saw her struggle with the decision and knew exactly the dilemma she faced. It all came down to a simple choice: her continued protection of Robert Gabriel for the sake of their children, or her active involvement in a scheme that might bring her sister’s killer to justice. To choose the former, she faced the uncertainty of never knowing whether she was protecting a man who was truly innocent or guilty. To choose the latter, however, she in effect committed herself to an act of forgiveness, a posthumous absolution of her sister’s sin against her.
Thus, it was a choice between the living and the dead wherein the living promised only a continuation of lies and the dead promised the peace of mind that comes from a dissolution of rancour and a getting on with life. On the surface, it appeared to be no choice at all. But Lynley knew too well that decisions governed by the heart could be wildly irrational. He only hoped Irene had grown to see that her marriage to Gabriel had been infected with the disease of his infidelities, and that her sister had played only a small and unhappy role in a drama of demise that had been grinding itself out for years.
Irene moved. Her fingers left damp marks on her leather handbag. Her voice caught, then held. “I’ll help you. What do I have to do?”
“Spend tonight at your sister’s home in Hampstead. Sergeant Havers will go with you.”
16
WHEN DEBORAH ST. JAMES answered the door to Lynley’s knock the next morning at half past ten, her unruly hair and the stained apron she wore over her threadbare jeans and plaid shirt told him he had interrupted her in the midst of her work. Still, her face lit when she saw him.
“A diversion,” she said. “Thank God! I’ve spent the last two hours working in the darkroom with nothing but Peach and Alaska for company. They’re sweet as far as dogs and cats go, but not much for conversation. Simon’s right there in the lab, of course, but his entertainment value plunges to nothing when he’s concentrating on science. I’m so glad you’ve come. Perhaps you can rout him out for morning coffee.” She waited until he had removed overcoat and muffler before she touched his shoulder lightly and said, “Are you quite all right, Tommy? Is there anything…? You see, they’ve told me a bit about it and…You don’t look well. Are you sleeping at all? Have you eaten? Should I ask Dad…? Would you like…?” She bit her lip. “Why do I always babble like an idiot?”
Lynley smiled affectionately at her jumble of words, gently pushed one of her fallen curls back behind her ear, and followed her to the stairs. She was continuing to speak.
“Simon’s had a phone call from Jeremy Vinney. It’s put him into one of those long, mysterious contemplations of his. And then Helen rang not fi ve minutes later.”
Below her, Lynley hesitated. “Helen’s not here today?” Inspite of his tone, which he had endeavoured to keep guarded, he saw that Deborah read through the question easily. Her green eyes softened.
“No. She’s not here, Tommy. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it?” Without waiting for his answer, she said kindly, “Do come up and talk to Simon. He knows Helen better than anyone, after all.”
St. James met them at the door to his laboratory, an old copy of Simpson’s Forensic Medicine in one hand and a particularly grisly-looking anatomical specimen in the other: a human finger preserved in formaldehyde.
“Are you rehearsing a production of Titus Andronicus?” Deborah asked with a laugh. She took the jar and the book from her husband, brushed a kiss against his cheek, and said, “Here’s Tommy, my love.”
Lynley spoke to St. James without preamble. He wanted his questions to sound purely professional, a natural extension of the case. He knew he failed miserably. “St. James, where’s Helen? I’ve been phoning her since last night. I stopped by her flat this morning. What’s happened to her? What’s she told you?”
He followed his friend into the lab and waited impatiently for a response. St. James typed a quick notation into his word processor, saying nothing. Lynley knew the other man well enough not to push for an answer when none was forthcoming. He bit back his misgivings, waited, and let his eyes roam round the room in which Helen spent so much of her time.
The laboratory had been St. James’ sanctuary for years, a scientific haven of computers, laser printers, microscopes, culture ovens, shelves of specimens, walls of graphs and charts, and in one corner a video screen on which microscopic samples of blood or hair or skin or fibre could be enlarged. This last modernity was a recent addition to the lab, and Lynley recalled the laughter with which Helen had described St. James’ attempts to teach her how it worked just three weeks past. Hopeless, Tommy darling. A video camera hooked into a microscope! Can you imagine my dismay? My God, all this computer-age wizardry! I’ve only just recently come to understand how to boil a cup of water in a microwave oven. Untrue, of course. But he’d laughed all the same, immediately freed of whatever cares the day had heaped upon him. That was Helen’s special gift.