discussed his two sons' love triangle before a coroner's jury. Family loyalty would have precluded that. "Did he give any specifi cs?"
"Yes." Vinney pointed to a section midway down the page. "Apparently Geoffrey was hot to get back to London and decided to take off that night in spite of the storm. His father testified that he didn't want him to go. Because of the weather. Because he hadn't seen much of Geoffrey for the past six months and wanted to keep him there while he could. Evidently, their recent relationship hadn't been smooth, and the old earl saw this New Year's gathering as a way to heal the breach between them."
"What sort of breach?"
"I gathered that the earl had taken Geoffrey under considerable fire for not marrying. I suppose he wanted Geoffrey to feel duty bound to shore up the ancestral house. At any rate, that was what was at the heart of the trouble in their relationship." Vinney studied the notes before he went on delicately, as if he had come to understand how important a show of impartiality might be when discussing the Rintoul family. "I do get the impression that the old man was used to having things his way. So when Geoffrey decided to return to London, his father lost his temper and the argument grew from there."
"Is there any indication why Geoffrey wanted to return to London? A woman friend that his father wouldn't have approved of? Or perhaps a relationship with a man that he wanted to keep under wraps?"
There was an odd, unaccountable hesitation, as if Vinney were trying to read St. James' words for an additional meaning. He cleared his throat. "There's nothing to indicate that. No one ever came forward to claim an illicit relationship with him. And consider the tabloids. If someone had been involved with Geoffrey Rintoul on the side, he or she would probably have come forward and sold the story for a good deal of money once he was dead. God knows that's the way things were happening in the early sixties, with call girls servicing what seemed like half the top ministers in the government. You remember Christine Keeler's tales about John Profumo. That set the Tories reeling. So it does seem that if someone Geoffrey Rintoul was involved with needed the money, he or she would merely have followed in Keeler's footsteps."
St. James responded pensively. "There is something in what you're saying, isn't there? Perhaps more than we realise. John Profumo was state secretary for war. Geoffrey Rintoul worked for the Ministry of Defence. Rintoul's death and inquest were in January, the very same month that John Profumo's sexual relationship with Keeler was brewing in the press. Is there some sort of connection between these people and Geoffrey Rintoul that we're failing to see?"
Vinney seemed to warm to the plural pronoun. "I wanted to think so. But if any call girl had been involved with Rintoul, why would she have held her tongue when the tabloids were willing to pay a fortune for a juicy story about someone in government?"
"Perhaps it wasn't a call girl at all. Perhaps Rintoul was involved with someone who didn't need the money and certainly wouldn't have benefitted from the disclosure."
"A married woman?"
Once again they were back to Lord Stinhurst's original story about his brother and his wife. St. James pushed past it. "And the testimony of the others?"
"They all supported the old earl's story of the argument, Geoffrey going off in a rage, and the accident on the switchback. There was something rather odd, however. The body was badly burned, so they had to send to London for X rays and dental charts to use in the formal identification. Geoffrey's physician, a man called Sir Andrew Higgins, brought them personally. He did the examination along with Strathclyde's pathologist."
"Unusual but not out of the range of belief."
"That's not it." Vinney shook his head. "Sir Andrew was a longtime school friend of Geoffrey's father. They'd been at Harrow and Cambridge together. They were in the same London club. He died in 1970."
St. James supplied his own conclusion to this new revelation. Sir Andrew may have hidden what needed to be hidden. He may have brought forth only what needed to be brought forth. Yet, all the disjointed pieces of information considered, the time period-January 1963-struck St. James as the most relevant item. He couldn't have said why. He reached for the photographs.