“Wasn’t it Freud who said there are no accidents?” Vinney’s voice sounded resigned. “I must have wanted you to know, so you’d understand what I meant when I said that Joy and I were always-and only-friends. Call it absolution, I suppose. Perhaps vindication. It makes no difference now.”
“She did know?”
“I had no secrets from her. I don’t think I could have had one if I tried.” Vinney looked deliberately back at the boy. His expression softened. His lips curved in a smile of remarkable tenderness. “We are cursed by love, aren’t we, Inspector? It gives us no peace. We seek it endlessly in a thousand different ways, and if we’re lucky, we do have it for a shuddering instant. And we feel like free men then, don’t we? Even when we bear its most terrible burden.”
“Joy would have understood that, I dare say.”
“God knows. She was the only one in my life who ever did.” His hand dropped from the window. “So I owe her this about the Rintouls, you see. It’s what she would have wanted. The story. The truth.”
Lynley shook his head. “Revenge is what she wanted, Mr. Vinney. And I do think she got that. After a fashion.”
“So that’s the way it’s to be? Can you really let it end this way, Inspector? After what these people have done to you?” He waved in the direction of the building behind them.
“We do things to ourselves,” Lynley replied. He nodded, raised the window, and drove on.
HE WOULD LATER SEE the trip to Skye as a phantasmagorical blur of continually changing countryside that he was only dimly aware of as he flew towards the north. Stopping merely for food and petrol and once for a few hours of rest at an inn somewhere between Carlisle and Glasgow, he arrived at Kyle of Lochalsh, a small village on the mainland across from the Isle of Skye, in the late afternoon the following day.
He pulled into the car park of an hotel on the waterfront and sat gazing at the strait, its rippled surface the colour of old coins. The sun was setting, and on the island the majestic peak of Sgurr na Coinnich looked covered in silver. Far below it, the car ferry pulled away from the dock and began its slow movement towards the mainland, carrying only a lorry, two hikers who hugged one another against the bitter cold, and a slender solitary fi gure whose smooth chestnut hair blew round her face, which was lifted, as if for blessing, to the last rays of the winter sun.
Seeing Helen, Lynley all at once perceived the sheer lunacy of his coming to her now. He knew he was the last person she wanted to see. He knew that she wanted this isolation. Yet none of that mattered as the ferry drew nearer to the mainland and he saw her eyes fall upon the Bentley in the car park above her. He got out, pulled on his overcoat, and walked down to the landing. The wind blew frigidly against him, buffeting his cheeks, whipping through his hair. He tasted the salt of the distant North Atlantic.
When the ferry docked, the lorry started up with a foul emission of smoke, and trundled down the Invergarry road. Arm in arm, the hikers passed him, laughing, a man and a woman who stopped to kiss, then to ponder the opposite shore of Skye. It was hung with clouds, dove grey turning to the lavish hues of sunset.
The drive north from London had given Lynley long hours in which to contemplate what he would say to Helen when he fi nally saw her. But as she stepped from the ferry, brushing her hair from her cheeks, words were lost to him. He wanted only to hold her in his arms and knew beyond a doubt that he did not have that right. Instead, he walked wordlessly at her side up the rise towards the hotel.
They went inside. The lounge was empty, its vast front windows offering a panorama of water and mountains and the sunset-shot clouds of the island. Lady Helen walked to these and stood before them, and although her posture-the slightly bent head, the small curved shoulders-spoke volumes of her desire for solitude, Lynley could not bring himself to leave her with so much left unsaid between them. He joined her and saw the shadows under her eyes, smudges of both sorrow and fatigue. Her arms were crossed in front of her, as if in the need of warmth or protection.
“Why on earth did he kill Gowan? More than anything else, Tommy, that seems so senseless to me.”
Lynley wondered why he had ever given a moment to thinking that Helen, of all people, would greet him with the score of recriminations that he had so steadfastly earned. He had been prepared to hear them, to admit to their truth. Somehow in the confusion of the last few days, he had forgotten the basic human decency that was the central core of Helen’s character. She would put Gowan before herself.
“At Westerbrae, David Sydeham claimed that he’d left his gloves at the reception desk,” he replied, watching her eyes lower thoughtfully, the lashes dark against her creamy skin. “He said he’d left them there when he and Joanna fi rst arrived.”
She nodded in comprehension. “But when Francesca Gerrard ran into Gowan and spilled all those liqueurs that night after the reading, Gowan had to clean the entire area. And he saw that David Sydeham’s gloves weren’t there at all, didn’t he? But he must not have remembered it at once.”
“Yes, I think that’s what happened. At any rate, once Gowan remembered, he would have realised what it meant. The single glove that Sergeant Havers found at the reception desk the next day-and the one that you found in the boot-could have got there only one way: through Sydeham’s putting them there himself, after he killed Joy. I think that’s what Gowan tried to tell me. Just before he died. That he hadn’t seen the gloves at the reception desk. But I…I thought he was talking about Rhys.”
Lynley saw her eyes close painfully upon the name, knew she hadn’t expected to hear it from him.
“How did Sydeham manage it?”
“He was still in the sitting room when Macaskin and the Westerbrae cook came to me and asked if everyone could be allowed out of the library. He slipped into the kitchen then and got the knife.”
“But with everyone in the house? Especially with the police?”
“They’d been packing up to leave. Everyone was wandering here and there. And besides, it was only the work of a minute or two. After that, he went up the back stairs and along to his room.”
Without thinking, Lynley raised his hand, grazed it gently along the length of her hair, following its curve to touch her shoulder. She did not move away from him. He felt his heart beat heavily against his chest.
“I’m so sorry about everything,” he said. “I had to see you to say at least that much, Helen.”
She didn’t look at him. It seemed as if the effort to do so was monumental, as if she found herself unequal to the task. When she spoke, her voice was low and her eyes were fixed on the distant ruin of Caisteal Maol as the sun struck its crumbling walls for the fi nal time that day.
“You were right, Tommy. You said I was trying to replay Simon to a different ending, and I discovered that I was. But it wasn’t a different ending after all, was it? I repeated myself admirably when it came down to it. The only thing missing from the wretched scenario was a hospital room for me to walk out of, leaving him lying there entirely alone.”
No acrimony underscored her tone. But Lynley didn’t need to hear it to know how each word carried its full weight of searing self-loathing. “No,” he said miserably.
“Yes. Rhys knew it was you on the telephone. Was that just two nights ago? It seems like forever. And when I rang off, he asked me if it was you. I said no, I said it was my father. But he knew. And he saw that you’d convinced me that he was the killer. I kept denying it, of course, denying everything. When he asked me if I’d told you he was with me, I even denied that as well. But he knew I was lying. And he saw that I’d chosen, just as he’d told me I’d choose.” She lifted a hand as if to touch her cheek, but again it seemed that it required too much effort. She dropped it to her side. “I didn’t even need to hear a cock crow three times. I knew what I’d done. To both of us.”