He returned to his car and sat for a moment, thinking about Lennart Thorsson, observing the neighbourhood, and reflecting upon the nature of the man himself. He thought of all the young minds, listening to Thorsson expound about his version of Shakespeare, utilising literature more than four hundred years old to promote a political bent that was appearing more and more to be only a convenient guise to hide the basic mundanity of the man beneath. And how dazzling it all was. To take a piece of literature as familiar as one’s childhood prayers, to pick and choose lines, to pick and choose scenes, and upon them to hang an interpretation that—under close scrutiny—was potentially more myopic than all the other interpretations it sought to refute. Yet Thorsson’s presentation of his material was undeniably beguiling. Lynley had seen that much in the brief time he had stood at the back of the lecture hall in the English Faculty. The man’s commitment to his theory was palpable, his intelligence irrefutable, and his manner just dissident enough to encourage a camaraderie that might otherwise not exist with the undergraduates. For what young person could really resist the temptation of rubbing elbows with a rebel?
If this were the case, how unlikely was the possibility that Elena Weaver might have sought out Thorsson, found herself rejected, and cooked up a charge of harassment against him as a bit of revenge? Or how unlikely was the alternative possibility that Thorsson had intentionally involved himself with Elena Weaver, only to discover that she was no easy tumble but rather a woman with entrapment on her mind?
Lynley stared at the house, waiting for answers and knowing that ultimately everything in the case narrowed down to one fact: Elena Weaver was deaf. Narrowed down to one object: the Ceephone.
Thorsson had been to her room. He knew about the Ceephone. All that remained was for him to place the call that had kept Justine Weaver from meeting Elena in the morning. If, in fact, Thorsson knew that Elena ran with her stepmother. If, in fact, he knew how to use the phone in the first place. If, in fact, someone else already with access to a Ceephone hadn’t placed the call. If, in fact, there had been a call at all.
Lynley started the Bentley, wound slowly through the streets of the housing estate, and began to evaluate the almost instant antipathy that had developed between Sergeant Havers and Lennart Thorsson. Havers’ instincts were generally sound when it came to hypocrisy in her fellow men, and she was anything but xenophobic. She hadn’t needed to see Thorsson’s home in suburbia to recognise the extent of his affectation. Her play upon Shakespeare earlier in the day indicated that. And Lynley knew her well enough to realise that, having ascertained that Thorsson had been missing from his home in the early hours of the previous day, she would be hot to give him the caution and pin him to the wall of one of Sheehan’s interrogation rooms upon her return to Cambridge in the morning. And that’s what would happen—that’s what solid policework dictated at this point—unless he came up with something else.
In spite of the manner in which their store of facts pointed ineluctably towards Thorsson, Lynley felt discomfited by the very neatness with which everything was falling into place. He knew from experience that murder was often an obviously cut-and-dried affair in which the likeliest suspect was indeed the perpetrator of the crime. But he also knew that some deaths grew from darker places in the soul and from motives far more convoluted than were suggested by the initial evidence. And as the facts and the faces from this particular case drifted in and out of his field of consciousness, he began to weigh the other possibilities, all of them darker than that which was defined by the mere need to dispose of a girl because she was pregnant:
Gareth Randolph, knowing that Elena had a lover, yet loving her all the time himself. Gareth Randolph, with a Ceephone in his office at DeaStu. Justine Weaver, recounting Elena’s sexual behaviour. Justine Weaver, with a Ceephone but without her own children. Adam Jenn, seeing Elena regularly at her father’s request, his own future tied in to Weaver’s promotion. Adam Jenn, with a Ceephone in Anthony Weaver’s study in Ivy Court. And everything peculiar about that study, most particularly Sarah Gordon’s brief visit to it Monday night.
He made the turn west and began the drive back into Cambridge, recognising the fact that, no matter the day’s revelations to the contrary, his mind kept returning to Sarah Gordon. She didn’t sit well with him.
You know why, Havers would have argued. You know why she keeps forcing her way into your thoughts. You know who she reminds you of.
He couldn’t deny it. Nor could he avoid admitting that at the end of the day when he was most exhausted, he was also most likely to lose the discipline that kept his mind focussed while he was at work. At the end of the day, he was most susceptible to anything and anyone that reminded him of Helen. This had been the case for nearly a year now. And Sarah Gordon was slender, she was dark, she was sensitive, she was intelligent, she was passionate. Still, he told himself, those qualities which she shared with Helen were not the only reasons why he returned to her at a moment when both motive and opportunity were affixing themselves squarely to Lennart Thorsson.
There were other reasons not to eliminate Sarah Gordon. Perhaps they were not as pressing as those which cast blame in Thorsson’s direction, but they still existed, nagging at the mind.
You’re talking yourself into it, Havers would have said. You’re building a case out of dust motes and lint.
But he wasn’t so sure.
He didn’t like coincidences in the midst of a murder investigation, and—Havers’ protests to the contrary—he couldn’t avoid seeing Sarah Gordon’s presence at the murder scene followed by her presence at Ivy Court that night as coincidental. More than that, he couldn’t get away from the fact that she knew Weaver. He had been her student—her private student. She had called him Tony.
Okay, so they were boffing each other, Havers would have continued. So they were doing it five nights a week. So they were doing it in every position known to mankind and in some they invented. So what, Inspector.
He wants the Penford Chair, Havers.
Ah, she would have crowed. Let me get this straight. Anthony Weaver stopped boffing Sarah Gordon—whom, of course, we don’t know whether he was boffing in the first place—because he was afraid that if anyone found out, he wouldn’t get the Chair. So Sarah Gordon killed his daughter. Not Weaver himself, who probably deserves to be put out of his misery if he’s such a gormless twit, but his daughter. Great. When did she do it? How did she carry it off? She wasn’t even on the island until seven in the morning and the girl was dead by then. Dead, Inspector, cold, out, kaput, dead. So why are you thinking about Sarah Gordon? Tell me, please, because this is making me nervous. We’ve walked the path before, you and I.
He couldn’t come up with an answer that Havers would find acceptable. She would argue that any exploration of Sarah Gordon at this point was, in fact or fantasy, a pursuit of Helen. She would not accept his essential curiosity about the woman. Nor would she allow for his uneasiness with coincidence.
But Havers wasn’t with him at the moment to argue against a course of action. He wanted to know more about Sarah Gordon, and he knew where to find someone with access to the facts. In Bulstrode Gardens.
How convenient, Inspector, Havers would have hooted.
But he made the right turn into Hills Road and dismissed his sergeant’s spectral presence.
He arrived at the house at half past eight. Lights were on in the sitting room, filtering through the curtains in lacy strands which fell upon the semi-circle of the drive and glanced off the silver metal of a child’s pantechnicon which lay on its side with one wheel missing. Lynley picked it up and rang the front bell.
Unlike the previous evening, there was no shouting of children’s voices. Only a few moments of quiet in which he listened to the traffic passing on the Madingley Road and smelled the acrid odour of leaves being burnt somewhere in the neighbourhood close by. Then the deadbolt was drawn and the door was opened.
“Tommy.”
It was curious, he thought
. For how many years had she greeted him in this identical fashion, just saying his name and nothing more? Why had he never before stopped to realise how much it had come to mean to him—such simplistic idiocy this all was, really—just to hear the cadence of her voice as she said it?
He handed her the toy. Along with a missing wheel, he noticed that the lorry’s bonnet bore a considerable dent, as if it had been smashed with a rock or a hammer. “This was in the drive.”
She took it from him. “Christian. He’s not making a great deal of progress in the taking-care-of-possessions department, I’m afraid.” She stepped back from the door. “Come in.”
He took off his overcoat without invitation this time, hanging it on a rattan rack just to the left of the front door. He turned to her. She wore a teal pullover with an ash-coloured blouse beneath it, and the sweater was smeared in three separate places with what appeared to be spaghetti sauce. She saw his glance take in the stains.
“Christian again. He’s also not making progress in the table manners area.” She smiled wearily. “At least he doesn’t offer false compliments to the cook. And God knows that I’ve never been much in the kitchen.”
He said, “You’re exhausted, Helen.” He felt his hand go up as if of its own volition and for a moment the backs of his fingers brushed against her cheek. Her skin was cool and smooth, like the untroubled surface of fresh, sweet water. Her dark eyes were on his. A pulse beat rapidly in the vein on her neck. He said, “Helen,” and felt the quick current of perennial longing that always accompanied the simple, mindless act of saying her name.
She moved away from him, walked into the sitting room, saying, “They’re in bed now, so the worst is over. Have you eaten, Tommy?”
He found that he still had his hand lifted as if to touch her, and he dropped it to his side, feeling ever the lovesick fool. He said, “No. Dinner got past me somehow.”
“Shall I make you something?” She glanced down at her pullover. “Other than spaghetti, of course. Although I don’t recall your ever throwing food at the cook.”
“Not lately, at least.”
“We’ve some chicken salad. There’s a bit of ham left. Some tinned salmon if you like.”
“Nothing. I’m not hungry.”
She stood near the fireplace where a pile of children’s toys leaned against the wall. A wooden puzzle of the United States was balanced on the top. Someone, it appeared, had bitten off the southern end of Florida. He looked from the puzzle to her, saw the lines of weariness beneath her eyes.
He wanted to say, Come with me, Helen, be with me, stay with me. Instead he said merely, “I need to talk to Pen.”
Lady Helen’s eyes widened. “Pen?”
“It’s important. Is she awake?”
“I think so, yes. But”—she glanced warily towards the doorway and the stairs beyond it—“I don’t know, Tommy. It’s been a bad day. The children. A row with Harry.”
“He’s not home?”
“No. Again.” She picked up the small Florida and examined the damage, then chucked the puzzle piece back with the others. “It’s a mess. They’re a mess. I don’t know how to help her. I can’t think what to tell her. She’s had a baby she doesn’t want. She has a life she can’t bear. She has children who need her and a husband who’s set on punishing her for punishing him. And my life is so easy, so smooth compared to hers. What can I say that isn’t base and blind and entirely useless?”
“Just that you love her.”
“Love isn’t enough. It isn’t. You know that.”
“It’s the only thing there is, when you cut to the bone. It’s the only real thing.”
“You’re being simplistic.”
“I don’t think so. If love were simple in and of itself, we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we? We wouldn’t bother to want to entrust our lives and our dreams into the safekeeping of another human being. We wouldn’t bother with vulnerability. We wouldn’t expose weakness. We wouldn’t risk emotion. And God knows we’d never make a leap of blind faith. We’d never surrender. We’d cling to control. Because if we lose control, Helen, if we lose it for an instant, God knows what the void beyond it is like.”
“When Pen and Harry married—”
Frustration seared through him. “This isn’t about them. You know that damn well.”
They stared at each other. The width of the room separated them. It might have been a chasm. Still, he spoke to her across it, even though he felt the uselessness of saying words that he knew had no power to effect any action, yet saying them anyway, always needing to say them, casting aside caution, dignity, and pride.
“I love you,” he said. “And it feels like dying.”
Although her eyes looked bright with tears, her body was tense. He knew she wouldn’t cry.
“Stop being afraid,” he said. “Please. Just that.”
She made no reply. But she didn’t look away from him, nor did she try to leave the room. He took hope from that.
“Why?” he said. “Won’t you tell me that much?”
“We’re fine where we are, as we are.” Her voice was low. “Why can’t that be enough for you?”
“Because it can’t, Helen. This isn’t about friendship. We aren’t chums. We aren’t mates.”
“We were once.”
“We were. But we can’t go back to that. At least I can’t do it. And God knows I’ve tried. I love you. I want you.”
She swallowed. A single tear slid from her eye, but she brushed it away quickly. He felt torn at the sight of her.
“I always believed it should be jubilation. But whatever it is, it shouldn’t be this.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No more than I.” He looked away from her. On the overmantel behind her stood a photograph of her sister and her family. Husband, wife, two children, life’s purpose defined. He said, “I still need to see Pen.”
She nodded. “Let me get her.”
As she left the room, he walked to the window. The curtains were drawn. There was nothing to see. He stared at the rapidly blurring floral pattern on the chintz.
Walk away from it, he told himself fiercely. Make the cut, make it surgical, make it permanent, walk away.
But he couldn’t do it. It was, he knew, the great irony of love. That it came out of nowhere, that it had no logic, that it could always be denied and ignored, but that one ultimately paid the price for fleeing it in coin that came from the spirit, from the soul. He’d been witness to the cycle of love and denial in other lives before, generally in womanisers and in men hot after the pursuit of their careers. Hearts were never touched in their cases, so pain was never felt. And why should it be otherwise? The womaniser sought only the conquest of the moment. The career man sought only the glories from his job. Neither was affected by love or sorrow. Either walked off without a backward glance.
His misfortune—if it could be called that—lay in not being of that ilk. Instead of sexual conquest or professional success, he knew only the desire for connection. For Helen.
He heard them on the stairway—quiet voices, slow footsteps—and turned back to the sitting room door. He had known from Helen’s words that her sister was not well, but still he was jarred by the sight of her. His face, he knew, was well enough controlled when she walked into the room. But his eyes apparently betrayed him, for Penelope smiled wanly as if in recognition of an unspoken fact and ran ringless fingers through her limp, dull hair.
“You aren’t exactly catching me at my best,” she said.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
Again, the wan smile. She shuffled across the room, Lady Helen at her side. She eased herself into a wicker rocker and drew her dusky pink dressing gown closed at the throat.
“May we offer you something?” she said. “A whisky? Brandy?”
He shook his head. Lady Helen went to the end of the sofa, the nearest spot to the rocking chair, and sat on the edge of it, leaning forward, her eyes on her sister, her hands exte
nded as if to give her support. Lynley took the wingback chair opposite Pen. He tried to gather his thoughts without considering the changes that had come over her and what they meant and how they had to be striking every chord of her younger sister’s fear. Deep circles beneath her eyes, complexion mottled and spotty, an angry sore at the corner of her mouth. Unwashed hair, unwashed body.
“Helen tells me you’re in Cambridge on a case,” she said.
He told her the essentials of the murder itself. As he spoke, she rocked. The chair creaked companionably. He ended with:
“But it’s Sarah Gordon who intrigues me. I thought you might be able to tell me something about her. Have you heard of her, Pen?”
She nodded. Her fingers played with the cord of her dressing gown. “Oh yes. For any number of years. There was quite a splash in the local newspaper when she first moved to Grantchester.”
“When was this?”
“Some six years ago.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes. It was”—again the lifeless smile and a shrug—“before the children, and I was working at the Fitzwilliam then. Picture restoring. The museum had a large reception for her. And a showing of her work. Harry and I went. We met her. If you can call it met. It was more like being presented to the Queen although that feeling came mostly from the museum directors. Sarah Gordon herself, as I recall, was rather unassuming. Friendly, quite approachable. Not the sort of woman I’d gone expecting to meet, considering all I’d heard and read about her.”
“She’s that important an artist?”
“Generally speaking, yes. Each piece she creates is a bit of social commentary which usually results in a fair amount of press. At the time I met her, she’d just been named M.B.E., O.B.E., one of the two. I can’t recall. She’d done a portrait of the Queen that had been well-received by the critics—some of them were actually calling it ‘the conscience of the nation’ or some such critical nonsense. She’d had several successful showings at the Royal Academy. She was being touted as the new darling of art.”