it was with an altered tone, one deliberately light and unaffected. "Come into the auditorium then. There's not much to see since we've got virtually nothing at all done. But there have been sparks aplenty. Joanna's been harassing David Sydeham all morning with an endless list of complaints that she wants him to handle, and Gabriel's been attempting to pour oil on their troubled waters. He's managed to alienate nearly everyone present, but most particularly Irene. The meeting may well turn into a brawl, yet it does have some amusement value. Will you join us?"
After the manufactured excuse for her presence at the theatre, Lady Helen knew she could hardly refuse. So she followed him into the dark auditorium and took a seat in the very last row. He smiled at her politely and began to walk towards the brightly lit stage where the players, Lord Stinhurst, and several other people were gathered round a table, their voices raised in discussion.
"Rhys," she called. When he turned back to her, she said, "May I see you tonight?"
It was part contrition and part desire. But which was the greater and more pressing, she could not have said. She knew only that she couldn't leave him today on a lie.
"I'm sorry, but I can't, Helen. I've a meeting with Stuart...Lord Stinhurst about the new production."
"Oh. Yes, of course. I wasn't thinking. Then perhaps sometime..."
"Tomorrow night? For dinner, if you're free. If that's what you want."
"I...yes. Yes, it's what I want. Truly."
He stood in shadow, so she could not see his face. She could only hear his words and the fragile core of tenderness behind them. The timbre of his voice told her the cost of his speaking at all. "Helen. I woke up this morning knowing with perfect certainty that I love you. So much. God help me, but I don't understand why no other moment in my life has ever been quite as frightening."
"Rhys-"
"No. Please. Tell me tomorrow." He turned decisively and walked down the aisle, up the steps to join the others.
Left alone, Lady Helen forced her eyes to remain on the stage, but her thoughts would not. Instead, they attached themselves stubbornly to a reflection on loyalty. If this encounter with Rhys were a test of her devotion to him, she saw that, without even thinking, she had failed it miserably. And she wondered if that momentary failure meant the very worst, if in her heart she questioned what Rhys had really done two nights ago while she was asleep at Westerbrae. The very thought was devastating. She despised herself.
Getting to her feet, she returned to the entrance hall and approached the offi ce doors. She decided against an elaborate fabrication. She would face Stinhurst's secretary with the truth.
That commitment to honesty would, in this case, be a wise decision.
"IT'S THE CHAIR, Havers," Lynley was saying once again, possibly for the fourth or fifth time.
The afternoon was growing unbearably cold. A frigid wind had swept in from The Wash and was tearing across the Fens, unbroken by woodland or hills. Lynley made the turn back towards Porthill Green just as Barbara concluded her third examination of the suicide photographs and replaced them in the Darrow file that Chief Constable Plater had loaned them.
She shook her head inwardly. As far as she could tell, the case he was building was more than tenuous; it was virtually nonexistent. "I don't see how you can possibly reach any viable conclusion from looking at a picture of a chair," she said.
"Then you look at it again. If she hanged herself, how would she tip the chair onto its side? It couldn't have been done. She could have kicked at the back of it, or even turned it sideways and still kicked at the back of it. But in either case, the chair would have fallen onto its back, not onto its side. The only way for the chair to end up in that position at Hannah Darrow's own doing would be if she had twisted her foot into the space between the seat and the back and actually tried to toss the thing."
"It could have happened. She was missing a shoe," Barbara reminded him.
"Indeed. But she was missing her right shoe, Havers. And if you look again, you'll see that the chair was tipped over to her left."
Barbara saw that he was determined to win her to his way of thinking. There seemed little point to a further protest. Nonetheless, she felt compelled to