"He woke me. He was dressed. I asked the time. He told me."
"And between one and fi ve, Helen?"
Lady Helen felt a quick surge of disbelief. "What is it exactly that you want to know?"
"I want to know what happened in this room between one and five. To use your own word: exactly." His voice was ice.
Past the wretchedness she felt at the question itself, at the brutal intrusion into her life and the implied assumption that she would be only too willing to answer it, Lady Helen saw Sergeant Havers' mouth drop open. She closed it quickly enough, however, when Lynley's frosty glance swept over her.
"Why are you asking me this?" Lady Helen asked Lynley.
"Would you like a solicitor to explain exactly what I can and cannot ask in a murder investigation? We can telephone for one if you think it's necessary."
This wasn't her friend, Lady Helen thought bleakly. This wasn't her laughing companion of more than a decade. This was a Tommy she didn't know, a man to whom she could give no rational response. In his presence, a tumult of emotions argued for precedence within her: anger, anguish, desolation. Lady Helen felt them attack like an onslaught, not one after another but all at once. They gripped her with punishing, unforgiving force, and when she was able to speak, her words struggled desperately for indifference.
"Rhys brought me cognac." She indicated the bottle on the table. "We talked."
"Did you drink?"
"No. I'd had some earlier. I wanted none."
"Did he have any?"
"No. He...isn't able to drink."
Lynley looked towards Havers. "Tell Macaskin's men to check the bottle."
Lady Helen read the thought behind the order. "It's sealed!"
"No. I'm afraid it isn't." Lynley took Havers' pencil and applied it to the foil at the top of the cognac. It came off effortlessly, as if it had once been removed and then reapplied to wear the guise of a closure.
Lady Helen felt ill. "What are you saying? That Rhys brought something with him this weekend to drug me? So that he could safely get away with murdering Joy Sinclair-my God, his own cousin-and have me as an alibi for his innocence? Is that what you think?"
"You said you talked, Helen. Am I to understand that, having refused his offer of a drink of whatever is in this bottle, you spent the remainder of the night in scintillating conversation together?"
His refusal to answer her question, his rigid adherence to the formality of police interrogation when it served his needs, his casual decision to fix blame upon a man and then bend the facts to fit it, outraged her. Carefully, deliberately, giving each separate syllable its own private position in the balance on which she measured the gravity of what he was doing to their friendship, she replied.
"No. Of course there's more, Tommy. He made love to me. We slept. And then, much later, I made love to him."
Whatever she had hoped for, Lynley showed absolutely no reaction to her words. Suddenly the smell of burnt tobacco from the ashtray was overwhelming. She wanted to fling it from sight. She wanted to fling it at him.
"That's all?" he asked. "He didn't leave you during the night? He didn't get out of bed?"
He was too damnably quick for her. When she couldn't keep the answer off her face, he said, "Ah. Yes. He did get out of bed. What time please, Helen?"
She looked down at her hands. "I don't know."
"Had you been asleep?"
"Yes."
"What awakened you?"
"A noise. I think it was a match. He was smoking, standing by the table."
"Dressed?"
"No."
"Just smoking?"
She hesitated momentarily. "Yes. Smoking. Yes."
"But you noticed something more, didn't you?"
"No. It's just that..." He was dragging words from her. He was compelling her to say things that belonged unspoken.
"That what? You noticed something about him, something not quite right?"
"No. No." And then Lynley's eyes-shrewd, brown, insistent-held her own. "I went to him and his skin was damp."
"Damp? He'd bathed?"
"No. Salty. He was...his shoulders...perspiring. And it was so cold in here."
Lynley looked automatically to Joy Sinclair's room. Lady Helen continued.
"Don't you see, Tommy? It was the cognac. He wanted it. He was desperate. It's like an illness. It had nothing at all to do with Joy."
She might not have spoken, for Lynley was clearly following his own line of thought. "How many cigarettes did he have, Helen?"
"Five. Six. What you see here."
He was designing a pattern. Lady Helen could see it. If Rhys Davies-Jones had taken the time to smoke the six cigarettes that