“It’s a possibility, to be sure.”

“And there’s something else.” She told them about her search through Joy Sinclair’s study, about the absence of any materials that referred to the play she had been writing for Lord Stinhurst.

St. James’ interest was piqued. “Was there any sign of forcible entry to the house?”

“None that I noticed.”

“Could someone else have had a key?” Lady Helen asked, then went on to say, “But that’s not quite right, is it? Everyone with an interest in the play was at Westerbrae, so how could her house…Unless someone rushed back to London and managed to get everything out of the study before you arrived. Yet that doesn’t seem at all likely, does it? Or even possible. Besides, who would have a key?”

“Irene, I imagine. Robert Gabriel. Perhaps even…” Barbara hesitated.

“Rhys?” Lady Helen asked.

Barbara felt a stirring of discomfort. She could read worlds into the manner in which Lady Helen had said the man’s name. “Possibly. There were a number of phone calls to him on her telephone bill. They were interspersed with calls to a place called Porthill Green.” Her loyalty to Lynley prevented her from saying anything else. The ice she was walking on in this private investigation was insubstantial enough without giving Lady Helen any information which she might inadvertently or deliberately pass on to someone else.

But Lady Helen required no further information. “And Tommy thinks that Porthill Green somehow gives Rhys a motive for murder. Of course. He’s looking for a motive. He told me as much.”

“And yet, none of this takes us any closer to understanding Joy’s play, does it?” St. James looked at Barbara. “Vassal,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

She frowned. “Feudalism and fi efs. Should it mean something more?”

“It’s somehow connected to all of this,” Lady Helen answered. “It’s the only part of the play that stuck in my mind.”

“Why?”

“Because it made no sense to anyone but the members of Geoffrey Rintoul’s family. And it made perfect sense to them. They reacted when they heard the character say that he wasn’t about to become another vassal. It seemed to be some sort of familial code word that only they understood.”

Barbara sighed. “So where do we go from here?”

Neither St. James nor Lady Helen had an answer for her. They fell into several minutes of meditation that were broken by the sound of the front door opening and a young woman’s pleasant voice calling, “Dad? I’m home. Absolutely freezing and in desperate need of food. I’ll eat anything. Even steak and kidney pie, so you can see how immediately in danger of starvation I am.” Her light laughter followed.

Cotter’s voice replied sternly from one of the upper floors. “Your ’usband’s eaten every crumb in the ’ouse, luv. And that’ll teach you to leave the poor man to ’is own devices all these hours. What’s the world comin’ to?”

“Simon? He’s home so soon?” Footsteps sounded hurriedly in the hall, the study door burst open, and Deborah St. James said eagerly, “My love, you didn’t-” She stopped abruptly when she saw the other women. Her eyes went to her husband and she pulled off a beret the colour of cream, loosing an undisciplined mass of coppery red hair. She was dressed in business clothes-a fine coat of ivory wool over a grey suit-and she carried a large metal camera case which she set down near the door. “I’ve been doing a wedding,” she explained. “And together with the reception, I thought I’d never escape. You’re all of you back from Scotland so soon? What’s happened?”

A smile broke over St. James’ face. He held out his hand and his wife crossed the room to him. “I know exactly why I married you, Deborah,” he said, kissing her warmly, tangling his hand in her hair. “Photographs!”

“And I always thought it was because you were absolutely mad for my perfume,” she replied crossly.

“Not a bit of it.” St. James pushed himself out of his chair and went to his desk. There, he rooted through a large drawer and pulled out a telephone directory which he opened quickly.

“Whatever are you doing?” Lady Helen asked him.

“Deborah’s just given us the answer to Barbara’s question,” St. James replied. “Where do we go from here? To photographs.” He reached for the telephone. “And if they exist, Jeremy Vinney is the one man who can get them.”

11

PORTHILL GREEN was a village that looked as if it had grown, like an unnatural protuberance, out of the peat-rich earth of the East Anglian Fens. Close to the centre of a rough triangle created by the Suffolk and Cambridgeshire towns of Brandon, Mildenhall, and Ely, the village was not a great deal more than the intersection of three narrow lanes that wound through fi elds of sugar beets, traversing chalky brown canals by means of bridges barely the width of a single car. It sat in a landscape largely given over to the colours grey, brown, and green-from the cheerless winter sky, to the loamy fi elds dotted irregularly by patchy snow, to the vegetation that bordered the lanes in thick abundance.

The village possessed little to recommend itself. Nine buildings of knapped flint and four of plaster, carelessly half-timbered in a drunken pattern, lined the high street. Those that were places of business announced that fact with signs of chipped and sooty paint. A lone petrol station, with pumps that appeared to be fabricated largely from rust and glass, stood sentry on the outskirts of the village. And at the end of the high street, marked by a weather-smoothed Celtic cross, lay a circle of dirty snow under which no doubt grew the grass for which the village was named.

Lynley parked here, for the green lay directly across from Wine’s the Plough, a building no different from any of the other sagging structures on the street. He examined it while next to him Sergeant Havers buttoned her coat beneath her chin and gathered her notebook and shoulder bag.

Lynley could see that, originally, the pub had simply been called The Plough, and that on either side of its name had been fi xed the words Wines and Liquors. The latter had fallen off sometime in the past, however, leaving merely a dark patch on the wall where the word had once been, the shape of its letters still legible. Rather than replace Liquors, or even repaint the building for that matter, to the first word had been added an apostrophe by means of a tin mug nailed into the plaster. Thus the building was renamed, no doubt to someone’s amusement.

“It’s the same village, Sergeant,” Lynley said after a cursory examination through the windscreen. Aside from a liver-coloured mongrel sniffing along an ill-formed hedge, the place might have been abandoned.

“Same as what, sir?”

“As that drawing posted in Joy Sinclair’s study. The petrol station, the greengrocers. There’s the cottage set back behind the church as well. She’d been here long enough to become familiar with the place. I’ve no doubt someone will remember her. You take care of the high while I have a word with John Darrow.”

Havers reached for the door handle with a sigh of resignation. “Always the footwork,” she groused.

“Good exercise to clear your head after last night.”

She looked at him blankly. “Last night?”

“Dinner, film? The chap from the supermarket?”

“Oh, that,” Havers said, fidgeting in her seat. “Believe me, it was very forgettable, sir.” She got out of the car, letting in a gust of air that commingled the faint odours of the sea, dead fish, and rotting debris, and strode over to the first building, disappearing behind its weathered black door.

By pub hours it was early yet, the drive from London having taken them less than two hours, so Lynley was not surprised to fi nd the door locked when he tried to enter Wine’s the Plough across the street. He stepped back from the building and looked above to what seemed to be a flat, but his observation gained him nothing. Limp curtains served as a barrier against prying eyes. No one was about at all, and there was no automobile or motorbike to indicate that the building was currently under anyone’s ownership. Nonetheless, when Lynley peered through the grimy windows of the pub itself, a missing slat in one of the shutters revealed a light shining in a far doorway that appeared to lead to the building’s cellar stairs.