The actor’s last statement rang with a certain pride, the kind evidenced by men who feel compelled to talk about their sexual conquests. No matter how puerile the reported seduction appears to others, in the speaker it always meets some undefined need. Lynley wondered what it was in Gabriel’s case.
“Tell me about last night,” he said.
“There’s nothing to tell. I had a drink in the library. Spoke to Irene. After that, I went to bed.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, as hard as that may be for you to believe, alone. Not with Mary Agnes. Not with anyone else.”
“That takes away an alibi, though, doesn’t it?”
“Why in God’s name would I need an alibi, Inspector? Why would I want to kill Joy? All right, I had an affair with her. I admit my marriage fell apart because of it. But if I wanted to kill her, I would have done so last year when Irene found out and divorced me. Why wait until now?”
“Joy wouldn’t cooperate in the plan you had, would she, the plan to win your wife back? Perhaps you knew that Irene would come back to you if Joy would tell her that she’d been to bed with you only once. Not again and again over a year, but once. Except that Joy had no intention of lying to benefi t you.”
“So I killed her because of that? When? How? There’s not a person in the house who doesn’t know her door was locked. So what did I do? Hide in the wardrobe and wait for her to fall asleep? Or better yet, tiptoe back and forth through Helen Clyde’s room and hope she wouldn’t notice?”
Lynley refused to let himself become involved in a shouting match with the man. “When you left the library this evening, where did you go?”
“I came here.”
“Immediately?”
“Of course. I wanted a wash. I felt like hell.”
“Which stairs did you use?”
Gabriel blinked. “What do you mean? What other stairs are there? I used the stairs in the hall.”
“Not those right next door to this very room? The back stairs? The stairs in the scullery?”
“I had no idea they were even there. It’s not my habit to prowl about houses looking for secondary access routes to my room, Inspector.”
His answer was clever enough, impossible to verify if no one had seen him in the scullery or the kitchen within the last twenty-four hours. Yet certainly Mary Agnes had used the stairs when she worked on this fl oor. And the man wasn’t deaf. Nor were the walls so thick that he would hear no footsteps.
It appeared to Lynley that Robert Gabriel had just made his fi rst mistake. He wondered about it. He wondered what else the man was lying about.
Inspector Macaskin poked his head in the door. His expression was calm, but the four words he said held a note of triumph.
“We’ve found the pearls.”
“THE GERRARD woman had them all along,” Macaskin said. “She handed them over readily enough when my man got to her room for the search. I’ve put her in the sitting room.”
Sometime since their earlier meeting that night, Francesca Gerrard had decided to deck herself out in a grating array of costume jewellery. Seven strands of beads in varying colours from ivory to onyx had joined those of puce, and she was sporting a line of metallic bracelets that made her movements sound as if she were in shackles. Discoidal plastic earrings striped violently in purple and black were clipped to her ears. Yet the tawdry display seemed the product of neither eccentricity nor self-absorption. Rather, it appeared however questionably to be a substitute for the ashes which women of other cultures pour upon their heads at the time of a death.
Nothing was quite so clear as the fact that Francesca Gerrard was grieving. She sat at the table in the centre of the room, one arm pressed tightly into her waist, one fi st clenched between her eyebrows. Swaying slowly from side to side, she wept. The tears were not spurious. Lynley had seen enough mourning to know when he was faced with the real thing.
“Get something for her,” he said to Havers. “Whisky or brandy. Sherry. Anything. From the library.”
Havers went to do so, returning a moment later with a bottle and several glasses. She poured a few tablespoons of whisky into one of the tumblers. Its smoky scent struck at the air like a sound.
With a gentleness unusual in her, Havers pressed the glass into Francesca’s hand. “Drink a bit,” she said. “Please. Just to steady yourself.”
“I can’t! I can’t!” Nonetheless, Francesca allowed Sergeant Havers to lift the glass to her lips. She took a grimacing swallow, coughed, took another. Then she said brokenly, “He was…I liked to pretend he was my son. I’ve no children. Gowan…It’s my fault that he’s dead. I asked him to work for me. He didn’t really want to. He wanted to go to London. He wanted to be like James Bond. He had dreams. And he’s dead. And I’m to blame.”
Like people afraid of making any sudden movements, the others in the room took seats surreptitiously: Havers at the table with Lynley, St. James and Macaskin out of Francesca’s line of vision.
“Blame is part of death,” Lynley said quietly. “I bear equal responsibility for what’s happened to Gowan. I’m not likely to forget it.”
Francesca looked up, surprised. Clearly, she had not expected such an admission from the police.
“Part of myself feels lost. It’s as if…No, I can’t explain.” Her voice quavered, then held.
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Exposed for years to death in a thousand and one horrible varieties, Lynley understood far better than Francesca Gerrard could ever have realised. But he said only, “You’ll find that, in a case like this, a burial of grief comes hand-in-hand with justice. Not at once, of course. But eventually.”
“And you need me for that. Yes. I do understand.” She drew herself up, blew her nose shakily on a wadded tissue from her pocket, took another hesitant sip of whisky. Her eyes brimmed with tears again. Several escaped in a wet trail from cheeks to lips.
“How did you come to have the necklace in your room?” Lynley asked. Sergeant Havers took out her pencil.
Francesca hesitated. Her lips parted twice to speak before she was able to go on. “I took it back last night. I would have told you earlier in the drawing room. I wanted to. But when Elizabeth and Mr. Vinney began…I didn’t know what to do. Everything happened so quickly. And then Gowan…” She faltered on the name, like a runner stumbling and not righting himself properly.
“Yes. I see. Did you go to Joy’s room for the necklace or did she bring it to you?”
“I went to her room. It was on the chest of drawers by the door. I suppose I had changed my mind about her having it.”
“You took it back as easily as that? There was no discussion?”
Francesca shook her head. “There couldn’t have been. She was asleep.”
“You saw her? You got into her room? Was the door unlocked?”
“No. I’d gone without my keys because I thought at first it might be unlocked. Everyone knew each other, after all. There was no reason to lock doors. But hers was locked, so I went to the office for the master keys.”
“The key wasn’t in her lock from the inside?”
Francesca frowned. “No…It couldn’t have been, could it, or I wouldn’t have been able to unlock it with my own.”
“Take us through exactly what you did, Mrs. Gerrard.”
Willingly, Francesca retraced her route from her bedroom to Joy’s where she turned the door handle only to find the room locked; from Joy’s room to her own where she picked up her desk key from her chest of drawers; from her room to her office where she took the master keys from the bottom drawer of her desk; from her office to Joy’s room where she unlocked the door quietly, saw the necklace in the light from the corridor, took it, and relocked the door; from Joy’s room to her office where she returned the keys; from her office back to her own room where she replaced the necklace in her jewellery box.