As Havers rooted for her notebook, Lynley took out the photographs of the inquest as well as the enlargements which Deborah St. James had made. He laid them out on the table wordlessly. If everything St. James had said was true, Stinhurst had no doubt telephoned Sir Kenneth Willingate yesterday afternoon. He would be well fortified for this coming interview. Through a long, sleepless night Lynley had carefully reviewed the various ways he might head off another well-crafted set of lies. He had come to the realisation that Stinhurst did have at least one Achilles’ heel. Lynley aimed his first remark in its direction.
“Jeremy Vinney knows the entire story, Lord Stinhurst. I don’t know whether he’ll write it since for the moment he has no hard evidence to back it up. But I have no doubt that he intends to start looking for that evidence.” Lynley straightened the photographs with deliberate attention. “So you can tell me another lie. Or we can explore in detail the one you created for me this past weekend at Westerbrae. Or you can tell the truth. But let me point out to you that had you told me the truth about your brother in the first place, it would probably have gone no further than St. James, in whom I confided. But because you lied to me, and because that lie didn’t fi t in with your brother’s grave in Scotland, Sergeant Havers knows about Geoffrey, as does St. James, as does Lady Helen Clyde, as does Jeremy Vinney. As will everyone with access to my report at Scotland Yard once I fi le it.” Lynley saw Stinhurst’s eyes go to his wife. “So what’s it to be?” he asked, relaxing into his chair. “Shall we talk about that summer thirty-six years ago when your brother Geoffrey was in Somerset and you travelled the country in the regionals and your wife-”
“Enough,” Stinhurst said. He smiled icily. “Hoist with my own petard, Inspector? Bravo.”
Lady Stinhurst’s hands writhed in her lap. “Stuart, what is all this? What have you told them?”
The question could not have come at a better time. Lynley waited for the man’s response. After a long and thoughtful perusal of the police, Stinhurst turned to his wife and began to speak. However, when he did so, it was to prove beyond a doubt that he was a master player in the game of disarmament and surprise.
“I told him you and Geoffrey were lovers,” he said. “I claimed that Elizabeth was your child, and that Joy Sinclair’s play was about your affair. I told them that she had revised her play without my knowledge to revenge herself upon us for Alec’s death. God forgive me, at least that last part was true enough. I’m sorry.”
Lady Stinhurst sat in uncomprehending silence, her mouth contorting with words that would not emerge. One side of her face seemed to collapse with the effort. Finally she managed, “Geoff? You never thought that Geoffrey and I…oh my God, Stuart!”
Stinhurst started to reach towards his wife, but she cried out involuntarily and shrank from the gesture. He withdrew fractionally, leaving his hand lying on the table between them. The fi ngers curled, then tightened into the palm.
“No, of course not. But I needed to tell them something. I needed…I had to keep them away from Geoff.”
“You needed to tell them…But he’s dead.” Her face transformed with growing revulsion as she took in the enormity of what her husband had done. “Geoff’s dead. And I’m not. Stuart, I’m not! You made a whore out of me to protect a dead man! You sacrifi ced me! My God! How could you have done that?”
Stinhurst shook his head. His words were laboured. “Not a dead man. Not dead at all. But alive and in this room. Forgive me if you can. I was a coward, first, last, and always. I was only trying to protect myself.”
“From what? You’ve done nothing! Stuart, for God’s sake. You did nothing that night! How can you say-”
“It isn’t true. I couldn’t tell you.”
“Tell me what? Tell me now!”
Stinhurst stared long at his wife, as if he were trying to summon courage from an examination of her face. “I was the one who gave Geoff over to the government. All of you learned the worst about him on that New Year’s Eve. But I…God help me, I’d known he was a Soviet agent since 1949.”
STINHURST HELD himself perfectly still as he spoke, perhaps in the belief that a single movement would cause the floodgates to open and the accumulated anguish of thirty-nine years to come pouring out. His voice was matter-offact, and although his eyes became increasingly red-rimmed, he shed no tears. Lynley found himself wondering if Stinhurst was even capable of weeping after so many years of deceit.
“I knew that Geoff was a Marxist when we were at Cambridge. He made no secret of it, and frankly, I took it as a bit of a lark, something he would outgrow in time. And if he didn’t, I thought what a laugh it would be to have the future Earl of Stinhurst committed to the workers’ struggle to change the tide of history. What I didn’t know was that his proclivities had been duly noted, and that he had been seduced into espionage while he was still a student.”
“Seduced?” Lynley asked.
“It is a process of seduction,” Stinhurst replied. “A combination of flattery and cajolery, making the student believe he plays an important role in the scheme of change.”
“How did you come to know this?”
“I discovered it quite by chance, after the war when we were all in Somerset. It was the weekend my son Alec was born. I’d gone out looking for Geoff directly after I’d seen Marguerite and the baby. It was…” He smiled at his wife for the first and only time. Her face did not register a single response. “A son. I was so happy. I wanted Geoff to know. So I went out looking and found him in one of our boyhood haunts, an abandoned cottage in the Quantock Hills. Apparently he’d felt that Somerset was safe.”
“He was meeting someone?”
Stinhurst nodded. “I probably would have thought it was only a farmer, but earlier that weekend I’d seen Geoff working in the study on some government papers, the sort that are stamped confi dential in garish letters across the front. I thought nothing of it at the time, just that he’d brought work home. His briefcase was on the desk, and he was putting a document into a manila envelope. Not an estate envelope, nor a government one. I remember that distinctly. But I thought nothing of it until I came upon him in the cottage and saw him pass that same envelope to the man he was meeting. I’ve often thought that had I arrived a minute sooner-a minute later-I might well have assumed his companion was indeed a Somerset farmer. But as it was, once I saw the envelope change hands, I guessed the worst. Of course, for a moment I tried to tell myself that it was all a coincidence, that the envelope could not possibly be the same one I had seen in the study. But if it was only an innocent exchange of information that I’d witnessed-all legal and aboveboard-why arrange for it to take place in the Quantock Hills, in the middle of nowhere?”
“If you’d discovered them,” Lady Stinhurst asked numbly, “why didn’t they do…something to keep you from revealing what you knew?”
“They didn’t know exactly what I’d seen. And even if they had, I was safe. In spite of everything, Geoff would have drawn the line at the elimination of his own brother. He was, after all, more of a man than I when it came right down to it.”
Lady Stinhurst looked away. “Don’t say that about yourself.”
“It’s true, I’m afraid.”
“Did he admit to his activities?” Lynley asked.
“Once the other man was gone, I confronted him,” Stinhurst said. “He admitted to it. He wasn’t ashamed. He believed in the cause. And I…I don’t know what I believed in. All I knew was that he was my brother. I loved him. I always had. Even though I was revolted by what he was doing, I couldn’t bring myself to betray him. He would have known, you see, that I was the one to turn him in. So I did nothing. But it ate away at me for years.”