and when no additional question came forth he said, "All right, all right! I may have touched her here and there. I probably kissed her. I don't know."
"You may have touched her? You don't know if you kissed her?"
"I wasn't paying attention, Inspector. I didn't know I would have to account for every second of my time with the London police."
"You talk as if touching and kissing are knee-jerk reactions," Lynley pointed out with impassive courtesy. "What does it take for you to remember your behaviour? Complete seduction? Attempted rape?"
"All right! She was willing enough! And I didn't kill that boy over it."
"Over what?"
Gabriel had at least enough conscience to look uncomfortable. "Good God, just a bit of nuzzle. Perhaps a feel beneath her skirt. I didn't take the girl to bed."
"Not then, at least."
"Not at all! Ask her! She'll tell you the same." He pressed his fingers to his temples as if to quell pain. His face, bruised from his run-in with Gowan, looked riven by exhaustion. "Look, I didn't know Gowan had his eye on the girl. I hadn't even seen him then. I didn't know he existed. As far as I was concerned, she was free for the taking. And, by God, she didn't protest. She could hardly do that, could she, when she was doing her best to manage a feel of her own."
The actor's last statement rang with a certain pride, the kind evidenced by men who feel compelled to talk about their sexual conquests. No matter how puerile the reported seduction appears to others, in the speaker it always meets some undefined need. Lynley wondered what it was in Gabriel's case.
"Tell me about last night," he said.
"There's nothing to tell. I had a drink in the library. Spoke to Irene. After that, I went to bed."
"Alone?"
"Yes, as hard as that may be for you to believe, alone. Not with Mary Agnes. Not with anyone else."
"That takes away an alibi, though, doesn't it?"
"Why in God's name would I need an alibi, Inspector? Why would I want to kill Joy? All right, I had an affair with her. I admit my marriage fell apart because of it. But if I wanted to kill her, I would have done so last year when Irene found out and divorced me. Why wait until now?"
"Joy wouldn't cooperate in the plan you had, would she, the plan to win your wife back? Perhaps you knew that Irene would come back to you if Joy would tell her that she'd been to bed with you only once. Not again and again over a year, but once. Except that Joy had no intention of lying to benefi t you."
"So I killed her because of that? When? How? There's not a person in the house who doesn't know her door was locked. So what did I do? Hide in the wardrobe and wait for her to fall asleep? Or better yet, tiptoe back and forth through Helen Clyde's room and hope she wouldn't notice?"
Lynley refused to let himself become involved in a shouting match with the man. "When you left the library this evening, where did you go?"
"I came here."
"Immediately?"
"Of course. I wanted a wash. I felt like hell."
"Which stairs did you use?"
Gabriel blinked. "What do you mean? What other stairs are there? I used the stairs in the hall."
"Not those right next door to this very room? The back stairs? The stairs in the scullery?"
"I had no idea they were even there. It's not my habit to prowl about houses looking for secondary access routes to my room, Inspector."
His answer was clever enough, impossible to verify if no one had seen him in the scullery or the kitchen within the last twenty-four hours. Yet certainly Mary Agnes had used the stairs when she worked on this fl oor. And the man wasn't deaf. Nor were the walls so thick that he would hear no footsteps.
It appeared to Lynley that Robert Gabriel had just made his fi rst mistake. He wondered about it. He wondered what else the man was lying about.
Inspector Macaskin poked his head in the door. His expression was calm, but the four words he said held a note of triumph.
"We've found the pearls."
***
"THE GERRARD woman had them all along," Macaskin said. "She handed them over readily enough when my man got to her room for the search. I've put her in the sitting room."
Sometime since their earlier meeting that night, Francesca Gerrard had decided to deck herself out in