“It could be the same killer.” St. James nodded. “Right-handed. One blow.”

“Man or woman?”

St. James blew out a refl ective breath. “My guess is a man. But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a woman.”

“But surely we’re talking about considerable strength!”

“Or a rush of adrenaline. A woman could do it if she were driven.”

“Driven?”

“Blind rage, panic, fear.”

Macaskin bit down too hard on his fi nger. He tasted blood. “But who? Who?” he demanded of no one.

WHEN LYNLEY unlocked the door to Robert Gabriel’s room, he found the man sitting much like a solitary prisoner in a cell. He had chosen the least comfortable chair in the room and he leaned forward in it, his arms on his legs, his manicured hands dangling uselessly in front of him.

Lynley had seen Gabriel on the stage, most memorably as Hamlet four seasons past, but the man close-up was very different from the actor who swept the audience along with him through the tortured psyche of a Danish prince. In spite of the fact that he was not much past forty, Gabriel was starting to look worn out. There were pouches under his eyes, and a fatty layer had begun to take up permanent residence round his waist. His hair was well cut and perfectly combed, but in spite of a gel that attempted to encourage it into a modern style, it was thin upon his skull, artifi cial-looking as if he had enhanced its colour in some way. At the crown of his head, its thickness barely sufficed to cover a bald spot that made a small but growing tonsure. Youthfully dressed, Gabriel appeared to favour trousers and shirt of a colour and weight that seemed more appropriate to a summer in Miami Beach than a winter in Scotland. They were contradictions, notes of instability in a man one would expect to be self-assured and at ease.

Lynley nodded Havers towards a second chair and remained standing himself. He chose a spot near a handsome hardwood chest of drawers where he had an unobstructed view of Gabriel’s face. “Tell me about Gowan,” he said. The sergeant crackled through the pages of her notebook.

“I always thought my mother sounded just like the police,” was Gabriel’s weary response. “I see I was right.” He rubbed at the back of his neck as if to rid it of stiffness, then sat up in his chair and reached for the travel alarm clock on the bedside table. “My son gave this to me. Look at the silly thing. It doesn’t even keep proper time any longer, but I’ve not been able to bring myself to toss it in the rubbish. I’d call that paternal devotion. Mum would call it guilt.”

“You had a row in the library late this afternoon.”

Gabriel gave a derisive snort. “We did. It seems Gowan believed that I’d been savouring one or two of Mary Agnes’ finer qualities. He didn’t much like it.”

“And had you?”

“Christ. Now you sound like my ex-wife.”

“Indeed. That doesn’t go far to answering my question, however.”

“I’d spoken to the girl,” Gabriel snapped. “That’s all.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know. Sometime yesterday. Shortly after I arrived. I was unpacking and she knocked on the door, ostensibly to deliver fresh towels, which I didn’t need. She stayed to chat, long enough to find out if I had any acquaintance with a list of actors who appear to be running neck and neck at the top of her marital-prospect list.” Gabriel waited belligerently 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 a grating array of costume jewellery. Seven strands of beads in varying colours from ivory to onyx had joined those of puce, and she was sporting a line of metallic bracelets that made her movements sound as if she were in shackles. Discoidal plastic earrings striped violently in purple and black were clipped to her ears. Yet the tawdry display seemed the product of neither eccentricity nor self-absorption. Rather, it appeared however questionably to be a substitute for the ashes which women of other cultures pour upon their heads at the time of a death.