the button on the small tape recorder. Irene shrank infi nitesimally at the sound of her sister's voice. He let the machine play. Through the cheerful comments, through the vibrant excitement, through the future plans. He couldn't help thinking, as he listened to Joy Sinclair once again, that she didn't sound at all like a woman bent upon destroying anyone. Halfway through it, Irene raised a hand to her eyes. She bent her head.
"Does any of that mean anything to you?" Lynley asked.
Irene shook her head blindly, a passionate movement, a second patent lie.
Lynley waited. She seemed to be attempting to withdraw from him, moving further into herself both physically and emotionally. Shrivelling up through a concerted act of will. "You can't bury her this way, Irene," he said quietly. "I know that you want to. I understand why. But you know if you try it, she'll haunt you forever." He saw her fi ngers tighten against her skull. The nails caught at her fl esh. "You don't have to forgive her for what she's done to you. But don't put yourself into a position of doing something for which you cannot forgive yourself."
"I can't help you." Irene's voice sounded distraught. "I'm not sorry my sister's dead. So how can I help you? I can't help myself."
"You can help by telling me anything about this tape." And ruthlessly, mercilessly, Lynley played it again, hating himself for doing so at the same time as he acknowledged it was part of the job, it had to be done. Still, at the end, there was no response from her. He rewound the tape, played it again. And then again.
Joy's voice was like a fourth person in the room. She coaxed. She laughed. She tormented. She pleaded. And she broke her sister the fifth time through the tape, on the words, "For God's sake, don't let Mum forget Sally again this year."
Irene snatched the recorder, shut it off with hands which fumbled on the buttons, and flung it back onto the bed as if touching it contaminated her.
"The only reason my mother ever remembered my daughter's birthday is because Joy reminded her," she cried. Her face bore the signs of anguish, but her eyes were dry. "And still I hated her! I hated my sister every minute and I wanted her to die! But not like this! Oh God, not like this! Have you any idea what it's like to want a person dead more than anything in the world and then to have it happen? As if a mocking deity listened to your wishes and only granted the foulest ones you possess?"
Good God, the power of simple words. He knew. Of course, he knew. In the timely death of his own mother's lover in Cornwall, in ways that Irene Sinclair could never hope to understand. "It sounds as if some of what she said was to be part of a new work. Do you recognise the place she's describing? The decaying vegetables, the sound of frogs and pumps, the fl at land?"
"No."
"The circumstance of a winter storm?"
"No!"
"The man she mentions, John Darrow?"
Irene's hair swung out in an arc as she turned her head away. At the sudden movement, Lynley said, "John Darrow. You recognise the name."
"Last night at dinner. Joy talked about him. She said something about wining and dining a dreary man called John Darrow."
"A new man she's involved with?"
"No. No, I don't think so. Someone-I think it was Lady Stinhurst-had asked her about her new book. And John Darrow came up. Joy was laughing the way she always did, making light of the difficulties she's been having with the writing, saying something about information she needed and was trying to get. It involved this John Darrow. So I think he's connected with the book somehow."
"Book? Another play, you mean?"
Irene's face clouded. "Play? No, you've misunderstood, Inspector. Aside from an early play six years ago and the new piece for Lord Stinhurst, my sister didn't write for the theatre. She wrote books. She used to be a journalist, but then she took up documentary nonfiction. Her books are all about crimes. Real crimes. Murders, mostly. Didn't you know that?"
Murders mostly. Real crimes. Of course. Lynley stared at the little tape recorder, hardly daring to believe that the missing piece to the triangular puzzle of motive-means-opportunity would be given to him so easily. But there it was, what he had been seeking, what he had known instinctively he would find. A motive for