“Inspector Lynley.” She spoke with the same sort of inflection one uses when naming a social disease. “The superintendent’s scheduled for a meeting with Chief Constable in Huntingdon at half past ten. I shall ask you to keep that in mind when you—”
“That’ll do, Edwina,” a voice called from the inner office.
Her lips minced their way round a glacial smile. She stepped to one side and allowed Lynley to pass her. “Of course,” she said. “Coffee, Mr. Sheehan?”
“Yes.” As he spoke, Superintendent Daniel Sheehan came across the room to meet Lynley at the door. He offered a large beefy hand, a companion in bulk to the rest of him. His grip was firm, and in spite of the fact that Lynley represented a Scotland Yard invasion into his patch, his smile offered fellowship. “Coffee for you, Inspector?”
“Thank you. Black.”
Edwina nodded curtly and disappeared. Her high heels cracked sharp reports in the hall. Sheehan snorted a chuckle. “Come in. Before the lions have at you. Or at least the lioness. Not all of my troops are taking your visit well.”
“That’s a reasonable reaction.”
Sheehan motioned him not to one of the two plastic chairs which faced his desk but to a blue vinyl-covered sofa which along with a pressed wood coffee table apparently constituted the conference area of his office. A map of the city centre hung on the wall there. Each of the colleges was outlined in red.
While Lynley took off his overcoat, Sheehan went to his desk where, in apparent defiance of gravity, a stack of folders leaned precariously towards the rubbish container on the floor. As the superintendent gathered up a loose collection of papers and fastened them together with a paperclip, Lynley regarded him, caught between curiosity and admiration at finding Sheehan so calm in the face of what could easily be interpreted as a declaration of his CID’s incompetence.
Sheehan certainly didn’t appear unflappable on the surface. His ruddy complexion suggested a quick temper. His thick fingers promised notable fists. His barrel chest and massive thighs seemed suitable to a brawler. And yet his easy manner contradicted his physique. As did his words, which were perfectly dispassionate. His choice of topic suggested that he and Lynley had spoken to each other before, establishing some sort of camaraderie. It was an oddly non-political approach to what could have been an uneasy situation. Lynley liked him for choosing it. It revealed him to be direct and confident of who and what he was.
“I can’t say we didn’t bring this on ourselves,” Sheehan said. “It’s a problem in forensic that should have been resolved two years back. But my CC doesn’t like to get involved in departmental squabblings, and as a result the chickens, if you’ll pardon the cliché and don’t mind wearing feathers, have come home to roost.”
He snagged one of the plastic chairs, returned to the sofa, and dropped his collection of papers onto the table where a manila folder labeled Weaver already lay. He sat. The chair creaked under his weight.
“I’m not happy as a sod myself about having you here,” he admitted. “But I wasn’t surprised when the Vice Chancellor rang me and said the University wanted the Yard. Forensic made a real balls-up of an undergraduate suicide last May. The University doesn’t want a replay. I can’t say I blame them. What I don’t much like is the implication of bias, though. They seem to think that if a student pops off, the local CID are as likely to say good riddance to another gown as they are to investigate.”
“I was told you had a leak in the department that caused the University bad press last term.”
Sheehan gave a grunt of confirmation. “A leak from forensic. We’ve got two prima donnas out there. And when one disagrees with the other’s conclusions, they fight it out in the press instead of the lab. Drake—the senior man—called the death a suicide. Pleasance—the junior—called it murder, based on the propensity for a suicide to stand before a mirror to cut his throat. This suicide did it while lying on his bed, and Pleasance wouldn’t buy it. The trouble started from there.” Sheehan lifted a thigh with another grunt and drove his hand into his trouser pocket. He brought out a packet of chewing gum and balanced it on his palm. “I’ve been after my CC to separate those two—or fire Pleasance—for exactly twenty-one months now. If the Yard’s involvement in this case can manage to bring that about, I’ll be a happy man.” He offered the gum. “Sugarless,” he said, and when Lynley shook his head, “Don’t blame you a bit. Stuff tastes like rubber.” He popped a folded piece into his mouth. “But it manages to give the illusion of food. If only I could convince my stomach.”
“Dieting?”
Sheehan smacked his palm against his bulging waistline where his stomach overhung the belt on his trousers. “It’s got to go. I’d a heart attack last year. Ah. Here’s the coffee.”
Edwina marched into the room with a cracked wooden tray held in front of her on which plumes of steam rose from two brown mugs. She set the coffee on the table, looked at her watch, and said with a brief, meaningful glance in Lynley’s direction, “Shall I buzz you in time to leave for Huntingdon, Mr. Sheehan?”
“I’ll manage, Edwina.”
“Chief Constable expects you—”
“—at half past ten. Yes.” Sheehan reached for his coffee and raised it to his secretary in a salute. He offered a smile of both thanks and dismissal. Edwina looked as if she wished to say more, but she left the room instead. The door, Lynley saw, did not quite catch behind her.
“We don’t have much more than the preliminaries for you,” Sheehan said with a lift of his coffee mug towards the papers and the folder on the table. “We can’t get her into autopsy until late this morning.”
Lynley put on his spectacles, saying, “What do you know?”
“Not much so far. Two blows to the face causing a sphenoidal fracture. That was the initial damage. Then she was strangled with the tie cord of her tracksuit’s hood.”
“All this occurred on an island, as I understand it.”
“Only the killing itself. We’ve got a good-sized blood splatter on the footpath that runs along the riverbank. She would have been attacked there first, then dragged across the footbridge onto the island. When you go out there, you’ll see that it’d be no problem. The island’s only separated from the west bank of the river by a bit of a ditch. Dragging her off the footpath would have been a matter of fifteen seconds or less, once she was unconscious.”
“Did she put up a fight?”
Sheehan blew across the top of his coffee mug and took a gusty slurp. He shook his head. “She was wearing mittens, but we’ve got no hairs or skin caught in the material. It looks to us like someone caught her by surprise. But forensic are taping her tracksuit to see what’s what.”
“Other evidence?”
“A plethora of crap that we’re sorting through. Disintegrating newspapers, half a dozen empty cigarette packs, a wine bottle. You name it, it’s there. The island’s a local hang-out, has been for years. We’ve probably got two generations of rubbish to sift through.”
Lynley opened the folder. “You’ve narrowed time of death between half past five and seven,” he noted and looked up. “According to the college, the porter saw her leaving the grounds at a quarter past six.”
“And the body was found not long after seven. So you’ve actually less than an hour to play with. Nice and narrow,” Sheehan said.
Lynley flipped through to the crime scene photographs. “Who found her?”
“Young woman called Sarah Gordon. She’d gone there to sketch.”
Lynley raised his head sharply. “In the fog?”
“My thought as well. You couldn’t see ten yards. I don’t know what she was thinking. But she had a whole kit of stuff with her—couple of easels, a case of paints and pastels—so she was obviously setting up for a good long stay. Which was cut a bit short when she found the body instead of inspiration.”
Lynley looked through the pictures. The girl lay mostly covered by a mound of sodden leaves. She was on her right side, her arms in front of her
, her knees bent, and her legs slightly drawn up. She might have been sleeping save for the fact that her face was turned towards the earth, her hair falling forward to leave her neck bare. Round this, the ligature cut into her skin, so deeply in places that it seemed to disappear, so deeply in places that it suggested a rare, brutal, and triumphant sort of strength, a surging of adrenaline through a killer’s muscles. Lynley studied the pictures. There was something vaguely familiar about them, and he wondered if the crime were a copy of another.
“She certainly doesn’t look like an arbitrary body dump,” he said.
Sheehan leaned forward to get a look at the picture. “She wouldn’t be, would she? Not at the hour in the morning. This wasn’t any arbitrary killing. This was a lying-in-wait.”
“Quite. There’s some evidence of that.” He told the superintendent about Elena’s alleged call to her father’s house the night before she died.
“So you’re looking for someone who knew her movements, what her schedule would be that morning, and the fact that her stepmother wouldn’t go running along the river at a quarter past six if she had the chance not to. Someone close to the girl, I should guess.” Sheehan picked up a picture and then another, looking at them with an expression of marked regret on his face. “I always hate to see a young girl like this die. But especially this way.” He tossed the pictures back. “We’ll do what we can at our end to help you—matters being what they are in forensic. But if the body’s any indication, Inspector, aside from someone who knew the girl well, I should say you’re looking for a killer who’s craw-filled with hate.”
Sergeant Havers emerged from the buttery and descended the stairs from the terrace only moments after Lynley emerged from the library passage which connected Middle Court to North Court. She flipped her cigarette into a bed of asters and sank both hands into the pockets of her coat. Pea-soup green, it hung open to reveal navy trousers going baggy at the knees, a purple pullover, and two scarves—one brown and one pink.
“You’re a vision, Havers,” Lynley said when she joined him. “Is this the rainbow effect? You know the sort of thing. Rather like the greenhouse effect but more immediately apparent?”
She rummaged in her bag for a packet of Players. She shook one out, lit it, and reflectively blew smoke in his face. He did his best not to lap up the aroma. Ten months without smoking and he still felt the urge to rip the cigarette from his sergeant’s hand and smoke it to the nub.
“I thought I ought to blend in with the environment,” Havers said. “You don’t like it? Why? Don’t I look academic?”
“You do. Certainly. By someone’s definition.”
“What could I hope to expect from a bloke who spent his formative years at Eton?” Havers asked the sky. “If I’d shown up in a top hat, striped trousers, and cutaway, would I have passed muster with you?”
“Only if you had Ginger Rogers on your arm.”
Havers laughed. “Sod you.”
“Sentiments returned.” He watched her flick a bit of ash to the ground. “Did you get your mother settled at Hawthorn Lodge?”
Two girls passed them, holding a muted conversation, their heads together over a piece of paper. Lynley saw that it was the same hand-out which had been posted in front of the police station. His eyes went back to Havers, who kept her own on the two girls until they disappeared round the herbaceous border that marked the entrance to New Court.
“Havers?”
She waved him off, puffing on her cigarette. “I changed my mind. It didn’t work out.”
“What have you done about her?”
“Carrying on with Mrs. Gustafson for a bit. I’ll see how it goes.” She brushed her hand aimlessly over the top of her head, ruffling her short hair. The cold air made it crackle. “So. What d’we have here?”
For the moment, he submitted himself to her desire for privacy and gave her what facts he had gleaned from Sheehan. When he was finished telling her what he knew so far, she said:
“Weapons?”
“For beating her, they don’t know yet. Nothing was left at the scene, and they’re still working on possible trace evidence on the body.”
“So we’ve got the ubiquitous unidentified blunt object,” Havers said. “And the strangulation?”
“The tie from the hood of her jacket.”
“The killer knew what she would wear?”
“Possibly.”
“Photos?”
He handed her the folder. She put her cigarette between her lips, opened the folder, and squinted through the smoke at the pictures that lay on top of the report. “Have you ever been to Brompton Oratory, Havers?”
She looked up. The cigarette bobbed as she spoke. “No. Why? Are you getting some of that old-time religion?”
“There’s a sculpture there. The martyred St. Cecilia. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was about this body when I first saw the pictures, but on the way back here it came to me. It’s the sculpture of St. Cecilia.” Over her shoulder, he fingered through the pictures to find the one he wanted. “It’s the way her hair sweeps forward, the position of her arms, even the ligature round her neck.”
“St. Cecilia was strangled?” Havers asked. “I thought martyrdom was more your basic lion-attack in front of a crowd of cheering, down-thumbing Romans.”
“In this case—if I recall it correctly—her head was half-severed and she waited two days to die. But the sculpture only shows the cut itself, which looks like a ligature.”
“Jesus. No wonder she got into heaven.” Havers dropped her cigarette to the ground and crushed it out. “So what’s your point, Inspector? Do we have a killer hot after duplicating all the sculptures in Brompton Oratory? If that’s what’s going on, when he gets to the crucifixion, I hope I’m off the case. Is there a crucifixion sculpture in the Oratory, by the way?”
“I can’t remember. But all the Apostles are there.”
“Eleven of them martyrs,” she said reflectively. “We’ve got big trouble. Unless the killer’s only looking for females.”
“It doesn’t matter. I doubt anyone would buy the Oratory theory,” he said and guided her in the direction of New Court. As they walked, he listed the points of information he had gathered from Terence Cuff, the Weavers, and Miranda Webberly.
“The Penford Chair, blighted love, a good dose of jealousy, and an evil stepmother,” Havers commented when he was done. She looked at her watch. “All that in only sixteen hours by yourself on the case. Are you sure you need me, Inspector?”
“No doubt of that. You pass for an undergraduate better than I. I think it’s the clothes.” He opened the door to L staircase for her. “Two flights up,” he said and took the key from his pocket.
From the first floor, they could hear music playing. It grew louder as they climbed. The low moan of a saxophone, the answering call of a clarinet. Miranda Webberly’s jazz. In the second-floor corridor, they could hear a few tentative notes blown from a trumpet as Miranda played along with the greats.
“It’s here,” Lynley said and unlocked the door.
Unlike Miranda’s, Elena Weaver’s was a single room, and it overlooked the buff brick terrace of North Court. Also unlike Miranda’s, it was largely a mess. Cupboards and drawers gaped open; two lights burned; books lay strewn across the desk, their pages fluttering in the sudden breeze from the door. A green robe formed a heap on the floor along with a pair of blue jeans, a black camisole, and a balled-up bit of nylon that seemed to be dirty underwear.
The air felt close and overheated, fusty with the odour of clothes needing to be washed. Lynley walked to the desk and cracked open a window as Havers took off her coat and scarves, dumping them on the bed. She went to the walled-in fireplace in the corner of the room where a row of porcelain unicorns lined the mantel. Fanning out above them, posters hung, again depicting unicorns, the occasional maiden, and an excessive amount of phantasmagorical mist.
Across the room, Lynley glanced into the clothes cupboard which was largel
y a jumble of neon-coloured, elasticised garments. The odd exception of a pair of neat tweed trousers and a floral dress with a delicate lace collar hung away from the rest.
Havers came to his side. Wordlessly, she examined the clothing. “Better bag all this to make a match of any fibres they pull off her tracksuit,” Havers said. “She would have kept it in here.” She began removing the clothing from its hangers. “Odd, though, isn’t it?”
“What?”
She flicked a thumb towards the dress and the trousers at the end of the rod. “Which part of her was playing dress-up, Inspector? The vamp in neon or the angel in lace?”
“Perhaps both.” At the desk, he saw that a large calendar served as a blotter, and he moved the texts and the notebooks to one side to have a look at it. “A stroke of possible good fortune here, Havers.”
She was stuffing garments into a plastic sack which she’d removed from her shoulder bag. “What sort?”
“A calendar. She hasn’t removed the old months. She’s merely folded them back.”
“Score a point for our side.”
“Quite.” He reached for his spectacles in the breast pocket of his jacket.
The first six months of the calendar represented the latter two-thirds of Elena’s first year at the University, Lent and Easter terms. Most of her notations were clear. Lectures were listed by subject: from Chaucer—10:00 on every Wednesday to Spenser—11:00 the following day. Supervisions seemed to bear the name of the senior fellow with whom she would be meeting, a conclusion Lynley reached when he saw the name Thorsson blocking out the same period of time every week in Easter term. Other notations patched in more details of the dead girl’s life. DeaStu appeared with increasing regularity from January through May, indicating Elena’s adherence to at least one of the guidelines set down by the senior tutor, her supervisors, and Terence Cuff for her social rehabilitation. Attended by specific times, the titles Hare and Hounds and Search and Pellet suggested her membership in two of the University’s other societies. And Dad’s, sprinkled liberally throughout every month, gave evidence of the amount of time Elena spent with her father and his wife. There was no indication that she saw her mother in London at any time other than on holidays.