“Look at the facts that you’ve forgotten, Havers. Everything about Geoffrey Rintoul had been removed from Joy’s study. But everything related to Hannah Darrow-everything that led us right to her death in 1973-was left in plain sight.”

“Of course, sir. But Stinhurst could hardly have asked the boys at MI5 to collect everything about Hannah Darrow as well. That hardly applied to the government’s concern, did it? It wasn’t exactly an Official Secret. And besides, how could he have known what she had gathered on Hannah Darrow? She merely mentioned John Darrow at dinner that night. Unless Stinhurst-all right, unless the kill-er-had actually been inside Joy’s study prior to the weekend, how would he know for sure what material she had managed to gather? Or managed not to gather, for that matter.”

Lynley stared past her, his face telling her that he was caught up in a sudden thought. “You’ve given me an idea, Havers.” He tapped his fingers against the top of his desk. His eyes dropped to the journal in Barbara’s hand. “I think we’ve a way to manage it all without a single thing from Strathclyde CID,” he said at last. “But we’ll need Irene Sinclair.”

“Irene Sinclair?”

He nodded thoughtfully. “She’s our best hope. She was the only one of them not in The Three Sisters in 1973.”

DIRECTED BY a neighbour who had been drawn into staying with and calming her children, they found Irene Sinclair not at her home in Bloomsbury but in the waiting area of the emergency room at the nearby University College Hospital. When they walked in, she jumped to her feet.

“He asked for no police!” she cried out frantically. “How did you…what are you…? Did the doctor phone you?”

“We’ve been to your home.” Lynley drew her to one of the couches that lined the walls. The room was inordinately crowded, filled with an assortment of illnesses and accidents manifesting themselves in selected cries and groans and retchings. That pharmaceutical smell so typical of hospitals hung heavily in the air. “What’s happened?”

Irene shook her head blindly, sinking onto the couch, cradling her cheek with her hand. “Robert’s been beaten. At the theatre.”

“At this time of night? What was he doing there?”

“Going over his lines. We’ve a second reading tomorrow morning and he said that he wanted a feeling for how he sounded on the stage.”

Lynley saw that she didn’t believe the story herself. “Was he on the stage when he was attacked?”

“No, he’d gone to his dressing room for something to drink. Someone switched off the lights and came upon him there. Afterwards, he managed to get to a phone. Mine was the only number he could remember.” This last statement had the ring of excusing her presence.

“Not the emergency number?”

“He didn’t want the police.” She looked at them anxiously. “But I’m glad you’ve come. Perhaps you can talk some sense into him. It’s only too clear that he was meant to be the next victim!”

Lynley drew up an uncomfortable plastic chair to shield her from the stares of the curious. Havers did likewise.

“Why?” Lynley asked.

Irene’s face looked strained, as if the question confused her. But something told Lynley it was part of a performance designed specifi cally and spontaneously for him. “What do you mean? What else could it be? He’s been beaten bloody. Two of his ribs are cracked, his eyes are blackened, he’s lost a tooth. Who else could be responsible?”

“It’s not the way our killer’s been working, though, is it?” Lynley pointed out. “We’ve a man, perhaps a woman, who uses a knife, not fists. It doesn’t really look as if anyone intended to kill him.”

“Then what else could it be? What are you saying?” She drew her body straight to ask the question, as if an offence had been given and would not be brooked without some form of protest.

“I think you know the answer to that. I imagine you’ve not told me everything about tonight. You’re protecting him. Why? What on earth has he done to deserve this kind of devotion? He’s hurt you in every possible way. He’s treated you with a contempt that he hasn’t bothered to hide from anyone. Irene, listen to me-”

She held up a hand and her agonised voice told him her brief performance was at an end. “Please. All right. That’s more than enough. He’d had a woman. I don’t know who she was. He wouldn’t say. When I got there, he was still…he hadn’t…” She stumbled for the words. “He couldn’t manage his clothes.”

Lynley heard the admission with disbelief. What had it been like for her, going to him, soothing his fear, smelling those unmistakable odours of intercourse, dressing him in the very same clothes he had torn from his body in haste to make love to another woman? “I’m trying to understand why you still feel loyalty to a man like this, a man who went so far as to deceive you with your very own sister.” Even as he spoke, he considered his words, considered how Irene had attempted to spare Robert Gabriel tonight, and thought back to what had been said about the night Joy Sinclair died. He saw the pattern clearly enough. “You’ve not told me everything about the night your sister died either. Even in that, you’re protecting him. Why, Irene?”

Her eyes closed briefly. “He’s the father of my children,” she replied with simple dignity.

“Protecting him protects them?”

“Ultimately. Yes.”

John Darrow himself could not have said it better. But Lynley knew how to direct the conversation. Teddy Darrow had shown him.

“Children generally discover the worst there is to know about their parents, no matter how one longs to protect them. Your silence now does nothing but serve to protect your sister’s killer.”

“He didn’t. He couldn’t! I can’t believe that of Robert. Nearly anything else, God knows. But not that.”

Lynley leaned towards her and covered her cold hands with his own. “You’ve been thinking he killed your sister. And saying nothing about your suspicions has been your way of protecting your children, sparing them the public humiliation of having a murderer for a father.”

“He couldn’t. Not that.”

“Yet you think he did. Why?”

Sergeant Havers spoke. “If Gabriel didn’t kill your sister, what you tell us can only help him.”

Irene shook her head. Her eyes were hollows of terrible fear. “Not this. It can’t.” She looked at each one of them, her fi ngers digging into the worn surface of her handbag. She was like a fugitive, determined to escape but recognising the futility of further flight. When she began to speak at last, her body shuddered as if an illness had taken her. As, in a way, it had. “My sister was with Robert that night in his room. I heard them. I’d gone to him. Like a fool…God, why am I such a pathetic fool? He and I had been in the library together earlier, after the read-through, and there was a moment then when I thought that we might really go back to the way things had been between us. We’d been talking about our children, about…our lives in the past. So later, I went to Robert’s room, meaning to…Oh God, I don’t know what I meant to do.” She ran a hand back through her dark hair, gripping it hard at the scalp as if she wanted the pain. “How much more of a fool can I possibly be in one lifetime? I almost walked in on my sister and Robert for a second time. And the funny part-it’s almost hysterical when one really thinks about it-is that he was saying exactly the same thing that he had been saying to Joy that day in Hampstead when I found them together. ‘Come on, baby. Come on, Joy. Come on! Come on!’ And grunting and grunting and grunting like a bull.”

Lynley heard her words, recognising the kaleidoscopic effect they had on the case. They threw everything into a new perspective. “What time was this?”

“Late. Long after one. Perhaps nearly two. I don’t actually know.”

“But you heard him? You’re certain of that?”