to join him on the couch by the fire. The coals there had burned down to small grey lumps speckled with glowing rose. "You're doing nothing more than unstringing your nerves. Which is exactly what the police would like you to do, would like all of us to do, in fact. It makes their job easier."
"And you're hell-bent on not doing that, I dare say," Jeremy Vinney put in just a pitch above sotto voce.
Gabriel's temper flared. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
Vinney ignored him, struck a match, and applied it to his pipe.
"I asked you a question!"
"And I'm choosing not to answer it."
"Why, you miserable-"
"We all know Gabriel had a row with Joy yesterday," Rhys Davies-Jones said reasonably. He was sitting furthest from the bar, in a chair next to the window whose curtains he had recently pulled back. Black night yawned through the glass. "I don't think any of us need make veiled references to it in the hope that the police will get the point."
"Get the point?" Robert Gabriel's voice held the cutting edge of his ire. "Nice of you to have me fingered for the murder, Rhys, but I'm afraid it won't wash. Not a bit of it."
"Why? Have you an alibi?" David Sydeham asked. "The way it looks to me, you're one of the very few people at significant risk, Gabriel. Unless, of course, you can produce a second party with whom you spent the night." He smiled sardonically. "What about the little girl? Is that what Mary Agnes is up to right now, trotting out stories about your technique? That must be keeping the coppers on the edge of their seats, all right. An intimate description of what it's like for a woman to have you between her legs. Or was Joy's play heading us towards that kind of revelation last night?"
Gabriel surged to his feet, knocking against a brass floor lamp. Its arc of light fl ashed wildly round the room. "I bloody well ought to-"
"Stop it!" Joanna Ellacourt put her hands over her ears. "I can't stand it! Stop!"
But it was too late. The quick exchange of words had struck Gowan like fists. He leaped out of his chair. In four steps he made it across the room to Gabriel and furiously whipped the actor around to face him.
"Damn ye tae hell!" he shouted. "Did ye titch Mary Agnes?"
But the answer didn't interest him. Seeing Gabriel's face, Gowan needed no response.
They were a match for size, but the boy's fury made him stronger. It crested within him, fi ring him to fight. His single punch put Gabriel flat on the floor, and he fell upon him, one hand at the man's throat, the other solidly delivering nasty and well-placed blows to his face.
"Wha' did ye dae tae Mary Agnes?" Gowan roared as he struck.
"Jesus God!"
"Stop him!"
Fragile composure-that thin shell of civility-disintegrated into uproar. Limbs fl ailed viciously. Hoarse cries charged the air. Glassware smashed onto the hearth. Feet kicked and jolted abandoned furniture to one side. Gowan's arm encircled Gabriel's neck, and he dragged the man, panting and sobbing, to the fi re.
"Tell me!" Gowan forced Gabriel's handsome face, now twisted with pain, over the fender, within an inch of the coals. "Tell me, ye bystart!"
"Rhys!" Irene Sinclair backed stiffl y into her chair, her face ashen. "Stop him! Stop him!"
Davies-Jones and Sydeham climbed past the overturned furniture and the frozen fi gures of Lady Stinhurst and Francesca Gerrard, who cowered together like two versions of Lot 's wife. They reached Gowan and Gabriel, struggled uselessly to haul them apart. But Gowan held the actor in a grip made unbreakable by the force of his passion.
"Don't believe him, Gowan," Davies-Jones said urgently into the boy's ear. He gripped his shoulder hard, jerking him to sensibility. "Don't lose yourself like this. Let him be, lad. Enough."
Somehow the words-and the implication of complete understanding behind them- reached past Gowan's red tide of anger. Releasing Robert Gabriel, he tore himself away from Davies-Jones and fell to his side on the floor, gasping convulsively.
He realised, of course, the gravity of what he had done, the fact that he would lose his job-and Mary Agnes-because of it. But beyond the enormity of his behaviour, it was the torment of loving and being unloved in return that drove the threat from him, entirely blind to the impact it might have on others in the room, seeking only to wound as he had been wounded.