"Better speak now, lad," Davies-Jones said. "Don't be a fool to talk like that when there's a killer in the room."
Elizabeth Rintoul had not moved once during the altercation. Now she stirred, as if from a deep sleep. "No. Not here. Father's gone to the sitting room, hasn't he?"
"I SHOULD GUESS you see Marguerite as she is now, a sixty-nine-year-old woman very much near the end of her resources. But at thirty-four, when all this occurred, she was lovely. Lively. And eager-so eager to live."
Restlessly, Lord Stinhurst had gone to a different chair, not one of those in the centre of the room, but one on its perimeter, well out of the light. He sat forward in it, leaning his arms on his knees, and he studied the fl oral carpet as he talked, as if its muted arabesque pattern held answers for him. His voice was toneless. It was the voice of a man giving a recitation that had to be got through with no expenditure of emotion.
"She and my brother Geoffrey fell in love shortly after the war."
Lynley said nothing. But he wondered how, even at a distance of thirty-six years, any man could speak of such a monumental act of disloyalty with so little affect. Stinhurst's lack of emotion spoke of a man who was dead inside, who could no longer afford to let himself be touched, who single-mindedly pursued excellence in his career so that he never had to face the agony rife in his personal life.
"Geoff had been decorated numerous times. He came back from the war a hero. I suppose it was natural that Marguerite was attracted to him. Everyone was. He had a way about him...an air." Stinhurst paused refl ectively. His hands sought each other and pressed hard together.
"You served in the war as well?" Lynley asked.
"Yes. But not like Geoffrey. Not with his flair, not with his devotion. My brother was like a fire. He blazed through life. And like a fire, he attracted lesser creatures to him, weaker creatures. Moths. Marguerite was one of them. Elizabeth was conceived on a trip that Marguerite made alone to my family's home in Somerset. It was during the summer and I'd been gone two months, travelling from spot to spot in order to direct regional theatre. Marguerite had wanted to come with me, but frankly, I felt I would be burdened with her, with having to...keep her entertained. I thought," he didn't bother to disguise his self-contempt, "that she would be in the way. My wife was no fool, Thomas. She still isn't, for that matter. She could read my reluctance to have her about, so she stopped badgering me to take her. I ought to have realised what that meant, but I was too much caught up in the theatre to understand that Marguerite was making arrangements of her own. I didn't know at the time that she went to Geoffrey. I only knew at the end of the summer that she was pregnant. She would never tell me whose child it was."
That Lady Stinhurst had refused her husband this knowledge made perfect sense to Lynley. But that Stinhurst, in the face of it, had carried on with the marriage made no sense at all. "Why did you not divorce her?
Messy as it would have been, surely you would have gleaned some peace of mind."
"Because of Alec," Stinhurst replied. "Our son. As you said yourself, a divorce like that would have been messy. More than messy. At that time it would have produced an attendant scandal that, God knows, would have spread across the front page of every newspaper for months. I couldn't let Alec be tormented like that. I wouldn't. He meant too much to me. More, I suppose, than my marriage itself."
"Last night Joy accused you of killing Alec."
A weary smile touched Stinhurst's lips, comprising equal parts sorrow and resignation. "Alec...my son was in the RAF. His plane went down in a test flight over the Orkney Islands in 1978. Into..." Stinhurst blinked quickly and made a change in his position. "Into the North Sea."
"Joy knew that?"
"Of course. But she was in love with Alec. They wanted to marry. She was devastated by his death."
"You opposed the marriage?"
"I wasn't delighted by it. But I didn't actively oppose it. I merely suggested that they wait until Alec had done his time in the military."