Six denials. Lynley knew his man well enough to discern the fact that his last remarks had deliberately misdirected the conversation. Vinney wasn’t a good liar. But he was skilled in seizing the moment and using it cleverly. He’d just done so. But why?
“I won’t keep you any longer, Mr. Vinney,” Lynley concluded. “No doubt you’re anxious to get back to London.”
Vinney looked as if he wanted to say more, but instead he got into the Morris and switched on its ignition. At fi rst the car made that rolling sound that comes from an engine unwilling to start. But then it coughed and fi red into life, releasing exhaust fumes dyspeptically. Vinney cranked down the window while the front wipers worked to free the windscreen of snow.
“She was my friend, Inspector. Just that. Nothing more.” He reversed the car. The tyres spun fiercely on a patch of ice before gaining hold on the gravel. He shot down the drive towards the road.
Lynley watched Vinney’s departure, intrigued by the man’s compulsion to repeat that last remark, as if it contained an underlying meaning that a detective’s close scrutiny would instantly reveal. For some reason-perhaps because of the distant presence of Inverness-it took him back to Eton and a fifth form’s passionate debate over the obsessions and compulsions evidenced by Macbeth, that pricking of conscience spurring his tormented references to sleep once the deed was done. What need is going unfulfilled in the man despite his successful completion of the act that he thought would bring him joy? His pacing literature master would ask the question insistently, pointing at this boy or that for assessments, evaluations, speculations, defence. Needs drive compulsions. What need? What need? It was a very good question, Lynley decided.
He felt for his cigarette case and started back across the drive just as Sergeant Havers and St. James came round the corner of the house. Snow clung to their trouser legs as if they’d been thrashing in it. Lady Helen was right behind them.
For an awkward moment, the four of them stared at one another wordlessly. Then Lynley said, “Havers, put a call in to the Yard, will you? Let Webberly know we’re on our way back to London this morning.”
Havers nodded, disappearing through the front door. With a quick glance from Lady Helen to Lynley, St. James did likewise.
“Will you come back with us, Helen?” Lynley asked when they were alone. He put his cigarette case back into his pocket, unopened. “It’ll be a quicker trip for you. We’ve a helicopter waiting near Oban.”
“I can’t, Tommy. You know that.”
Her words were not unkind. But they were unmercifully final. There seemed to be nothing more for them to say to each other. Still, Lynley found himself struggling to break her reserve in some manner, no matter how shadowy or inconsequential. It was inconceivable that he should part from her this way. And that’s what he told her, before common sense or pride or stiff propriety could prevent him from doing so.
“I can’t bear your going away from me like this, Helen.”
She was caught before him in a streak of sunlight. It slanted through her hair, turning it the colour of a fine, old brandy. Just for a moment her lovely dark eyes held an unreadable emotion. Then it vanished.
“I must go,” she said quietly, passed by him and entered the house.
It’s like a death, Lynley thought. But without a proper burial, without a period of mourning, without an end to lamentation.
IN HIS CLUTTERED London offi ce, Superintendent Malcolm Webberly placed the telephone receiver back into its cradle.
“That was Havers,” he said. In a characteristic gesture, he raked his right hand through his thinning, sandy hair and pulled on it roughly, as if to encourage his incipient baldness.
Sir David Hillier, Chief Superintendent, did not move from the window where he had been standing for the last quarter hour, his eyes placidly evaluating the serried collection of buildings that composed the city skyline. As always, he was impeccably dressed, and his posture suggested a man at ease with success, comfortable with navigating the treacherous straits of political power. “And?” he asked.
“They’re on their way back.”
“That’s all?”
“No. According to Havers, they’re tracking a lead to Hampstead. Apparently, Sinclair was working on a book there. At her home.”
Hillier’s head turned slowly, but with the sun behind him his face was in shadow. “A book? In addition to the play?”
“Havers wasn’t all too clear about it. However, I got the impression it was something that struck Lynley, something that he feels he must follow through.”
Hillier smiled coolly at this. “Thank God for Inspector Lynley’s remarkably creative intuition.”
“He’s my best man, David,” Webberly said bitterly.
“And he’ll follow orders, of course. As will you.” Hillier turned back to his contemplation of the city.
10
IT WAS HALF past two when Lynley and Havers finally reached Joy Sinclair’s small corner house. Located in the fashionable Hampstead area of London, the white brick building was a testament to the author’s success. Its front window, hung with diaphanous ivory curtains, bowed out over a patch of garden where pruned rose bushes, dormant star jasmine, and tight-budded camellias grew. Two window boxes spilled ivy down the front and up the walls of the house, particularly near the doorway whose narrow shingled pediment was nearly lost beneath lush, bronze-veined leaves. Although the house faced Flask Walk, its garden entry was on Back Lane, a narrow cobbled avenue that climbed towards Heath Street a block away, where traffic moved smoothly, almost without sound.
Followed by Havers, Lynley unhooked the wrought iron gate and crossed the fl agstone pathway. The day was windless but the air was raw, and a watery winter sunshine caught upon the brass lighting fixture to the left of the door and upon the polished post slot at its centre.
“Not bad digs,” Havers commented with grudging admiration. “Your basic bricked-in garden, your basic nineteenth-century lamp post, your basic tree-shaded street lined with your very basic BMWs.” She jerked a thumb at the house. “Must have set her back a few quid.”
“From what Davies-Jones said about the terms of her will, I’ve the impression she could afford it,” Lynley replied. He unlocked the door and motioned Havers inside.
They found themselves in a small anteroom, marble-tiled and unfurnished. A collection of several days’ letters lay scattered on the fl oor, pushed through the slot in the door by the postman. They were the kind of collection one might expect in the post of a successful author: five circulars, an electricity account, eleven letters addressed to Joy in care of her publisher and forwarded on, a telephone account, a number of small envelopes that looked like invitations, several business-size envelopes with a variety of return addresses. Lynley handed them to Havers.
“Have a look through these, Sergeant.”
She took them and they went on into the house, through an opaque glass door that led into a long hall. Here, two doors opened along the left wall and a staircase rose along the right. At the far end of the corridor, afternoon shadows filled what appeared to be the kitchen.
Lynley and Havers entered the sitting room first. The room shone in a filtered gold light that fell in three oblique shafts through a large bay window across a carpet the colour of mushrooms, which had the look and smell of having been newly laid. But there was very little else to reveal the personality of the house’s owner, other than low-slung chairs grouped round calf-high tables that spoke of a penchant for modern design. This was affirmed by Joy Sinclair’s choice of art. Three oils after the fashion of Jackson Pollock leaned against one wall, waiting to be hung, and on one of the tables an angular marble sculpture stood, its subject indeterminate.