“Renie, for the love of God-”
“No! I heard you! It was Hampstead all over again! Exactly! And they say that life doesn’t repeat itself, don’t they? What a fi lthy laugh!
All I needed to do was open the door to fi nd you a second time having my sister. Just as I did last year, with the only difference being that I was alone this time. At least our children would have been spared a second go at the sight of their father sweating and panting and moaning over their lovely aunt Joy.”
“It isn’t-”
“What I think?” Irene felt her face quiver with encroaching tears. Their presence angered her-that he should still be able to reduce her to this. “I don’t want to hear it, Robert. No more clever lies. No more, ‘It only happened once.’ No more anything.”
He grabbed her arm. “Do you think I killed your sister?” His face looked ill, perhaps from lack of sleep, perhaps from guilt.
She laughed hoarsely, shaking him off. “Killed her? No, that’s not at all your style. Dead, Joy was absolutely no good to you, was she? After all, you aren’t the least bit interested in screwing a corpse.”
“That didn’t happen!”
“Then what did I hear?”
“I don’t know what you heard! I don’t know who you heard! Anyone could have been with her.”
“In your room?” she demanded.
His eyes widened in panic. “In my…Renie, good God, it’s not what you think!”
She flung his coat off her shoulders. Dust leaped from the floor when it dropped. “It’s worse than knowing you’ve always been a filthy liar, Robert. Because now I realise that I’ve become one. God help me. I used to think that if Joy died I’d be free of the pain. Now I believe I’ll only be free of it when you’re dead as well.”
“How can you say that? Is that what you really want?”
She smiled bitterly. “With all my heart. God, God! With all my heart!”
He stepped away from her, away from the coat on the floor between them. His face was ashen. “So be it, love,” he whispered.
LYNLEY FOUND Jeremy Vinney outside on the drive, stowing his suitcase into the boot of a hired Morris. Vinney was muffled against the cold in coat, gloves, and scarf; his breath steamed the air. His high domed forehead gleamed pink where the sun struck it and he looked, surprisingly, as if he were perspiring. He was also, Lynley noted, the first to leave. A decidedly strange reaction in a newspaperman. Lynley crossed the drive to him, his footsteps grating against the gravel and ice. Vinney looked up.
“Making an early start of it,” Lynley remarked.
The journalist nodded towards the house where dark early morning shadows were painted like ink along the stone walls. “Not really a spot for lingering, is it?” He slammed the boot lid home and checked to see that it was securely locked. Fumbling a bit with his keys, he dropped them and cleared his throat raspily as he bent to retrieve them in their worn leather case. When he finally looked at Lynley, it was to reveal a face upon which grief played subtly, the way it often does when an initial shock has been lived through and the immensity of a loss begins to be measured against the endlessness of time.
“Somehow,” Lynley said, “I should think a journalist would be the last to leave.”
At this, Vinney gave an abrupt, little laugh. It seemed self-directed, punitive, and unkind. “Hot after a story at the scene of the crime? Looking for a good ten inches of space on page one? Not to mention a byline and a knighthood for having solved the crime single-handedly? Is that how you see it, Inspector?”
Lynley answered the question by asking one. “Why were you actually here this weekend, Mr. Vinney? Every other presence can be accounted for in one way or another. But you remain a bit of a mystery. Can you shed some light on it for me?”
“Didn’t you get a good enough picture from our attractive Elizabeth last evening? I was wild to get Joy in bed. Or better yet, I was picking her brains for material to bolster my career. Choose either one.”
“Frankly, I’d prefer the reality.”
Vinney swallowed. He seemed discomfi ted, as if he expected something other than equanimity from the police. Bellicose insistence upon the truth, perhaps, or a fi nger stabbed provocatively into his chest. “She was my friend, Inspector. Probably my best friend. Sometimes I think my only friend. And now she’s gone.” His eyes looked burnt out as he turned them towards the untroubled surface of the loch in the distance. “But people don’t understand that kind of friendship between a man and a woman, do they? They want to make something of it. They want to cheapen it up.”
Lynley was not untouched by the man’s distress. He noticed, however, that Vinney had sidestepped his question. “Was Joy the one who actually arranged for you to be here? I know you did the phoning to Stinhurst, but did she smooth the way? Was it her idea?” When Vinney nodded, he asked, “Why?”
“She said she was worried about how Stinhurst and the actors would receive the revisions she’d made to the play. She wanted a friend along, she said, for moral support should things not go her way. I’d been following the Agincourt renovation for months. It seemed reasonable that I might ask to be included in the setting-up of the play for its opening. So I came. To support her, as she asked. But I didn’t support her at all in the end, did I? She may as well have been here alone.”
“I saw your name in her engagement book.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised. We met for lunch regularly. We’ve done so for years.”
“At these meetings, did she tell you anything about this weekend? What it would be like? What to expect?”
“Just that it was a read-through and that I might find it an interesting story.”
“The play itself?”
Vinney didn’t answer at first. His vision appeared fixed on nothing. When he replied, however, his voice sounded thoughtful, as if he’d been struck by an idea unconsidered before. “Joy said she wanted me to think about writing an early article on the play. It would be a piece about the stars, the plot, perhaps the format she was using. Coming here would give me an idea about how the play would be staged. But I…I could easily have got that information in London, couldn’t I? We see… saw…each other often enough. So could she… could she have been worried that something like this might happen to her, Inspector? Good God, could she have hoped I’d see to it that the truth were told?”
Lynley commented upon neither the man’s apparent belief in the inability of the police to ferret out the truth nor the egotistical likelihood of a single journalist’s being able to do it for them. Nonetheless, he catalogued the fact that Vinney’s remark was astonishingly close to Lord Stinhurst’s own assessment of the columnist’s presence.
“Are you saying she was concerned about her safety?”
“She didn’t say that,” Vinney admitted honestly. “And she didn’t act concerned.”
“Why was she in your room the other night?”
“She said she was too keyed up to sleep. She’d had it out with Stinhurst and went to her room. But she felt restless, so she came to mine. To talk.”
“What time was this?”
“A bit after midnight. Perhaps a quarter past.”
“What did she talk about?”
“The play at first. How she was bound and determined to see to it that it was produced, with or without Stinhurst. And then about Alec Rintoul. And Robert Gabriel. And Irene. She felt rotten about everything that had happened to Irene, you know. She…she was desperate for her sister to get back with Gabriel. That’s why she wanted Irene in the play. She thought if the two of them were thrown together enough, nature would take its course.