Payment in Blood

“Are you all right, Irene?” Rhys Davies-Jones asked.

She looked up, managing a weary smile. “Yes. Fine. A bit tired, I’m afraid.” That would be enough for now.

Others began to arrive. Irene heard rather than saw them, mentally ticking off each person’s entrance as she listened for signs of strain in their voices, signs of guilt, signs of increased anxiety. Robert Gabriel gingerly took his place next to her. He fingered his swollen face with a rueful smile.

“I’ve not had a chance to say thank you for last night,” he said in a tender voice. “I’m… well, I’m sorry about it, Renie. I’m most wretchedly sorry about everything, in fact. I would have said something when the doctors had finished with me, but you’d already gone. I rang you up, but James said you were at Joy’s in Hampstead.” He paused for a reflective moment. “Renie. I thought…I did hope we might-”

She cut him off. “No. There was a great deal of time for me to think last night, Robert. And I did that. Clearly. At last.”

Gabriel took in her tone and turned his head away. “I can guess what kind of thinking you accomplished at your sister’s,” he said with aggrieved fi nality.

The arrival of Joa

Joa

Stinhurst did not reply to either of them. He looked and moved like a man ageing rapidly. Managing the stairs seemed to drain him of energy. He appeared to be wearing the very same suit, shirt, and tie that he’d had on yesterday, the charcoal jacket rumpled, its sleeves badly creased. As if he’d given up interest in his appearance entirely. Watching him, Irene wondered, with a chill, if he would even live to see this production open. When he took his chair, with a nod of acknowledgement towards Rhys Davies-Jones, the new reading began.

They were midway through the play when Irene allowed herself to drop off to sleep. The theatre was so warm, the atmosphere on the stage was so close, their voices rose and fell with such hypnotic rhythm that she found it easier than she had supposed it would be to let herself go. She stopped worrying about their willingness to believe in the role she was playing and became the actress she had been years ago, before Robert Gabriel had entered her life and undermined her confi dence with year after year of public and private humiliation.

She even felt herself begi

“Renie?”

“Irene!”

She opened her eyes with a start, pleased to feel the rush of embarrassment sweep over her. “Did I drop off? I’m terribly sorry.”

“Late night, sweetie?” Joa

“Yes, I’m afraid…I…” Irene swallowed, smiled flickeringly to mask pain, and said, “I spent most of the night going through Joy’s things in Hampstead.”

Stu

“There were diaries, you see,” she said hollowly.

As if instinct alone told her that she was in the presence of a performance capable of upstaging her own, Joa

Irene shook her head. She allowed her voice to raise a degree. “No, no, that isn’t it. You see, they weren’t hers. They had come by express yesterday, and when I opened them and found the note from the husband of that wretched woman who had written them-”

“For God’s sake, is this really necessary?” Joa

“-I started to read. I didn’t get very far, but I saw that they were what Joy had been waiting for to do her next book. The one she talked about just the other night in Scotland. And suddenly…I seemed to realise that she was really dead, that she wouldn’t ever be back.” Irene’s tears began to fall, becoming suddenly copious as she felt the fi rst swelling of genuine grief. Her next words only marginally touched upon the script that she and Sergeant Havers had so painstakingly prepared. She was rambling, she knew it, but the words had to be said. And nothing else mattered but saying them. “So she’ll never write it now. And I felt as if…with Ha

And then, having done it, she let herself weep, understanding at last the source of her tears, mourning the sister she had loved but forgiven too late, mourning the youth she had wasted in devotion to a man who fi nally meant nothing to her. She sobbed despairingly, for the years gone and the words unspoken, caring for nothing at last but this act of grief.

Across from her, Joa

But Sydeham was gazing out into the theatre. “We’ve a visitor,” he said.

Their eyes followed his. Marguerite Rintoul, Countess of Stinhurst, was standing midway down the centre aisle.

SHE WAITED only as long as it took to close the door to her husband’s office. “Where were you last night, Stuart?” she demanded, doing nothing to hide the asperity in her voice as she pulled off her coat and gloves and threw them down on a chair.

It was a question which Lady Stinhurst knew quite well she would not have asked twenty-four hours ago. Then she would have accepted his absence in her usual, pathetically cringing fashion, hurt and wondering and afraid to know the truth. But now she was beyond that. Yesterday’s revelations in this room had combined with a long night of soulsearching to produce an anger so fi nely honed that it could not be blunted by any stony wall of protective and deliberate inattention.

Stinhurst went to his desk, sat behind it in the heavy leather chair.

“Sit down,” he said. His wife didn’t move.

“I asked you a question. I want an answer. Where were you last night? And please don’t ask me to believe that Scotland Yard kept you until nine this morning. I like to think I’m not that much of a fool.”

“I went to an hotel,” Stinhurst said.

“Not your club?”

“No. I wanted anonymity.”

“Something you couldn’t have at home, of course.”

For a moment, Stinhurst said nothing, fi ngering a letter opener that lay on his desk. Long and silver, it caught the light. “I found I couldn’t face you.”

Perhaps more than anything else, her reaction to that single sentence signalled the ma