For the Sake of Elena

  At the doorway to Anthony’s study, she paused. He was crouched by an open drawer of the filing cabinet. The contents of two manila folders lay on the floor, comprising perhaps two dozen pencil sketches. Next to them was a canvas rolled like a tube.

  For a moment, Glyn watched as Anthony’s hand passed slowly over the drawings in a gesture like an incomplete caress. Then he began to go through them. His fingers seemed clumsy. Twice he gasped for breath. When he paused to remove his spectacles and wipe their lenses on his shirt, she realised that he was crying. She entered the room to get a better look at the drawings on the floor and saw that they were all sketches of Elena.

  “Dad’s got himself into drawing these days,” Elena had told her. She’d pronounced it dawing, and she’d laughed about the idea. They’d often chuckled over Anthony’s attempts to find himself through one activity or another as he approached middle age. First it had been long distance running, after that he had begun to swim, then he’d taken up bicycling like a zealot, and finally he had learned to sail. But of all the activities which he had pursued, drawing amused them the most. “Dad t’inks he’s got the soul of Van Gogh,” Elena would say. And she’d mimic her father’s wide-legged stance with sketch pad in hand, eyes squinting towards the distance, hand shading her brow. She’d draw a moustache like his on her upper lip and pull her face into a contorted frown of concentration. “Doe move an inch, Glynnie,” she would command of her mother. “Hol’ that pose. Hol’—that—pose.” And they would laugh together.

  But now Glyn could see that the sketches were quite good, that he had managed to achieve something far more in them than was depicted in the still lifes that hung in the sitting room, or the sailboats, the harbours, and the fishing villages here on the study walls. For in the series of drawings he’d spread out on the floor, she could see that he had managed to capture the essence of their daughter. Here were the exact tilt of her head, the elfin shape of her eyes, the wide chipped-tooth grin, the contour of a cheekbone, of nose, and of mouth. These were studies only, they were quick impressions. But they were lovely and true.

  As she took a step closer, Anthony looked up. He gathered the drawings together and replaced them in their respective folders. Along with the canvas which fit into the back, he shoved them into the drawer.

  “You don’t have any of them framed,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he closed the drawer and went to the desk, where he played restlessly with the computer, switching on the Ceephone and watching the screen. A series of menu instructions appeared. He stared at them but did nothing with the keyboard.

  “Never mind,” Glyn said. “I know why you hide them.” She went to stand behind him. She spoke near his ear. “How many years have you lived like this, Anthony? Ten? Twelve? How on earth have you managed?”

  His head lowered. She studied the back of his neck, remembering unexpectedly how soft his hair was and how, when overlong, it curled like a child’s against his skin. It was greying now, with scattered strands like white threads woven against black.

  “What did she hope to gain? Elena was your daughter. She was your only child. What on earth did she hope to gain?”

  His reply was a whisper. He spoke as if answering someone not in the room. “She wanted to hurt me. There was nothing else she could do to make me understand.”

  “Understand? What?”

  “How it felt to be devastated. How I’d devastated her. Through cowardice. Selfishness. Egocentricity. But mostly through cowardice. You want the Penford Chair only for your ego, she said. You want a beautiful house and a beautiful wife and a daughter who’ll be your marionette. So that people will look at you with admiration and envy. So that people will say the lucky bloke’s got it all. But you don’t have it all. You have practically nothing. You have less than nothing. Because what you have is a lie. And you don’t even have the courage to admit it.”

  A sudden fist of knowledge squeezed at Glyn’s heart as the full meaning of his words slowly dawned upon her, even though he spoke them in a fugue. “You could have prevented it. If only you’d given her what she wanted. Anthony, you could have stopped her.”

  “I couldn’t. I had to think of Elena. She was here in Cambridge, in this home, with me. She was starting to come round, to be free with me at last, to let me be her father. I couldn’t run the risk of losing her again. I couldn’t take the chance. And I thought I would lose her if I—”

  “You lost her anyway!” she cried, shaking his arm. “She’s not going to walk through that door. She’s not going to say Dad, I understand, I forgive you, I know you did your best. She’s gone. She’s dead. And you could have prevented it.”

  “If she had a child, she might have understood what it felt like to have Elena here. She might have known why I couldn’t face the thought of doing anything that might have resulted in losing her again. I’d lost her once. How could I face that agony again? How could she expect me to face it?”

  Glyn saw that he wasn’t really responding to her. He was ruminating. He was speaking in tongues. Behind a barrier that shielded him from the worst of the truth, he was talking in a canyon where an echo exists, but throws back different words. Suddenly, she felt the same degree of anger towards him that she’d felt during the worst years of their marriage when she’d greeted his blind pursuit of his career with pursuits of her own, waiting for him to notice the late nights she was keeping, wanting him to notice the nature of the bruises on her neck, her breasts, and her thighs, anticipating the moment when he would finally speak, when he’d give an indication that he really did care.

  “This is all about you, isn’t it?” she asked him. “It always has been. Even having Elena here in Cambridge was for your benefit, not for herself. Not for her education, but to make you feel better, to give you what you want.”

  “I wanted to give her a life. I wanted us to have a life together.”

  “How would that have been possible? You didn’t love her, Anthony. You only loved yourself. You loved your image, your reputation, your wonderful accomplishments. You loved being loved. But you didn’t love her. And even now you can stand here and look at your daughter’s death and think about how you caused it and how you feel about it now and how devastated you are and what kind of statement it all makes about you. But you won’t do anything about any of it, will you, you won’t make any declaration, you won’t take any stand. Because how might that reflect upon you?”

  Finally, he looked at her. The rims of his eyes appeared bloody and sore. “You don’t know what happened. You don’t understand.”

  “I understand perfectly. You plan to bury your dead, lick your wounds, and go on. You’re as much a coward as you were fifteen years ago. You ran out on her then in the middle of the night. You’ll run out on her now. Because it’s the easiest thing to do.”

  “I didn’t run out on her,” he said carefully. “I stood firm this time, Glyn. That’s why she died.”

  “For you? Because of you?”

  “Yes. Because of me.”

  “The sun rises and sets on the same horizon in your world. It always has.”

  He shook his head. “Perhaps once,” he said. “But it only sets now.”

  21

  Lynley pulled the Bentley into a vacant space at the southwest corner of the Cambridge police station. He stared at the vaguely discernible shape of the glass-encased notice board in front of the building, feeling drained. Next to him, Havers fidgeted in her seat. She began to flip through her notebook. He knew she was reading what she’d just recorded from Rosalyn Simpson.

  “It was a woman,” the Queens’ undergraduate had said.

  She had walked them along the same route she had taken early Monday morning, through the thick, dun, cotton wool of fog in Laundress Lane where the open door to the Asian Studies Faculty shot a meagre light out into the gloom. Once someone slammed it shut, however, the mist seemed impenetrable. The universe became confined to the twenty square feet which comprised the boundary
of what they could see.

  “Do you run every morning?” Lynley asked the girl as they crossed Mill Lane and skirted the metal posts that kept vehicles off the pedestrian bridge which crossed the river at Granta Place. To their right, Laundress Green was obscured by the fog, an expanse of misty field intermittently disturbed by the hulking forms of crack willows. Beyond it, from across the pond, a single light winked from an upper floor in the Old Granary.

  “Nearly,” she answered.

  “Always the same time?”

  “As close to a quarter past six as I can make it. Sometimes a bit later.”

  “And on Monday?”

  “Mondays are slower for me, getting out of bed. It was probably round six-twenty-five when I left Queens’ on Monday.”

  “So you’d reach the island…”

  “No later than half past.”

  “You’re certain of that. It couldn’t have been later?”

  “I was back in my room by half past seven, Inspector. I’m quick, it’s true, but I’m not that quick. And I did a good ten miles Monday morning, with the island at the start of it. It’s part of my training circuit.”

  “For Hare and Hounds?”

  “Yes. I fancy a blue this year.”

  She hadn’t noticed anything unusual on the morning of her run, she told them. It was still quite dark when she left Queens’ College, and aside from overtaking a workman who was pushing a cart down Laundress Lane, she hadn’t seen another soul. Just the usual assortment of ducks and swans, some already floating on the river, others still placidly dozing on the bank. But the fog was heavy—“At least as heavy as it is today,” she said—so she had to admit that anyone might have been lurking in a doorway or waiting, hidden by the fog, on the green.

  When they reached the island, they found a small fire burning, sending up weak puffs of acrid, soot-coloured smoke to melt into the fog. A man in a peaked cap, overcoat, and gloves was feeding autumn leaves, trash, and bits of wood into the blue-tipped flames. Lynley recognised him as Ned, the surlier of the two older boat repairmen.

  Rosalyn indicated the footbridge that crossed not the Cam itself, but the secondary stream that the river became as it flowed round the west side of the island. “She was crossing this,” she said. “I heard her because she stumbled against something—she might have lost her footing, everything was quite damp—and she was coughing as well. I assumed she was out running like me and was feeling worn out, and frankly I was a bit peeved to come upon her like that because she didn’t appear to be watching where she was going and I nearly bumped into her. And—” She seemed embarrassed. “Well, I suppose I have the University mind set about townees, don’t I? What was she doing, I thought, invading my patch?”

  “What gave you the impression she was a local?”

  Rosalyn looked thoughtfully at the footbridge through the mist. The damp air was catching on her eyelashes, spiking them darkly. Childlike curls of hair were forming against her brow. “It was something about her clothes, I should guess. And perhaps her age, although I suppose she could have been from Lucy Cavendish.”

  “What about her clothes?”

  Rosalyn gestured at her own mismatched sweat suit. “University runners generally wear their college colours somewhere, their college sweatshirts as well.”

  “And she wasn’t wearing a sweat suit?” Havers asked sharply, glancing up from her notebook.

  “She was—a tracksuit actually—but it wasn’t from a college. I mean, I don’t recall seeing a college name on it. Although, now I think of it, considering the colour, she might have been from Trinity Hall.”

  “Because she was wearing black,” Lynley said.

  Rosalyn’s quick smile indicated affirmation. “You know the colleges’ colours, then?”

  “It was just a good guess.”

  He walked onto the footbridge. The wrought iron gate was partially open upon the south end of the island. The police line was gone now, the island available to anyone who wished to sit by the water, to meet surreptitiously, or—like Sarah Gordon—to attempt to sketch. “Did the woman see you?”

  Rosalyn and Havers remained on the path. “Oh yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I nearly ran into her. She couldn’t have helped seeing me.”

  “And you were wearing the same clothes you’re wearing now?”

  Rosalyn nodded, and plunged her hands into the pockets of the anorak she’d taken from her room prior to their setting out into the fog. “Without this, of course,” she said with a lift of her shoulders to indicate the anorak. She added ingenuously, “One gets warm enough running. And”—her face brightened—“she didn’t have a coat or a jacket on, so that must have been another reason why I assumed she was a runner. Although..” A marked hesitation as she looked into the mist. “She might have been carrying one, I suppose. I can’t recall. But I think she was carrying something…I think.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Look like?” Rosalyn frowned down at her gym shoes. “Slender. She wore her hair pulled back.”

  “Colour?”

  “Oh dear. It was light, I think. Yes, quite light.”

  “Anything unusual about her? A feature perhaps? A mark on her skin? The shape of her nose? A large forehead? A pointed chin?”

  “I can’t recall. I’m terribly sorry. I’m not much help, am I? You see, it was three days ago and I didn’t know at the time that I’d have to remember her. I mean, one doesn’t really study everyone one meets. One doesn’t expect to have to recall them.” Rosalyn blew out a breath of frustration before going on to say earnestly, “Perhaps if you’d like to hypnotise me the way they do sometimes when a witness can’t recall the details of a crime…”

  “It’s fine,” Lynley said. He rejoined them on the path. “Do you think she got a clear look at your sweatshirt?”

  “Oh, I dare say she did.”

  “She would have seen the name?”

  “Queens’ College, you mean? Yes. She would have seen that.” Rosalyn looked back in the direction of the college, although even had there been no fog, she wouldn’t have been able to see it in the distance. When she turned back to them, her face was sombre, but she didn’t say anything until a young man, coming across Crusoe’s Bridge from Coe Fen, descended the ten iron steps—shoes ringing loudly against the metal—and plodded past them, head bent into the mist which quickly enveloped him. “Melinda was right, then,” Rosalyn said quietly. “Georgina died in my place.”

  A girl her age didn’t need to carry round that sort of responsibility for a lifetime, Lynley thought. He said, “You can’t know that for a certainty,” although he was fast arriving at the same conclusion.

  Rosalyn reached for one of the tortoise shell combs in her hair. She pulled it out and grasped a long lock in her fingers. “There’s this,” she said, and then she unzipped her anorak and pointed to the emblem across her breast. “And this. We’re the same height, the same weight, the same colouring. We’re both from Queens’. Whoever followed Georgina yesterday morning thought she was following me. Because I saw. Because I knew. Because I might have told. And I would have, I should have…And if I had done—as by rights I should have and I know it, you don’t have to tell me, I know it—Georgina wouldn’t be dead.” She whipped her head away and blinked furiously at the cloudy mass of Sheep’s Green.

  And he knew there was little or nothing he could say to lessen her guilt or lighten her burden of responsibility.

  Now, more than an hour later, Lynley drew a deep breath and let it out, staring at the sign in front of the police station. Across the street, the wide green that was Parker’s Piece might not even have existed, hidden as it was by the mat-work of fog. A distant beacon blinked off and on in its centre, serving as a guide to those trying to find their way.

  “So it had nothing to do with the fact that Elena was pregnant,” Havers said. And then, “What now?”

  “Wait here for St. James. See what he’s able to conclude a
bout the weapon. And let him have a go at eliminating the boxing gloves as well.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll go to the Weavers’.”

  “Right.” Still, she didn’t move from the car. He could feel her looking at him. “Everyone loses, don’t they, Inspector?”

  “That’s always the case with a murder,” he said.

  Neither of the Weaver cars was in the drive when Lynley pulled up to the front of the house. But the garage doors were closed and, assuming that the cars would be kept out of the damp, he went to ring the bell. From the back of the house, he could hear the dog’s answering bark of welcome. It was followed moments later by a woman’s voice calling for quiet behind the door. The bolt was drawn back.

  Since she’d met him at the door on his two previous visits, Lynley had been expecting to see Justine Weaver when the broad oak panels slid soundlessly open. So he was taken aback when in her place stood a tall, somewhat beefy middle-aged woman carrying a plate of sandwiches. These gave off the distinct odour of tuna. They were surrounded by a substantial nest of crisps.

  Lynley recalled his initial interview with the Weavers, and the information that Anthony Weaver had given him about his former wife. This, he realised, would be Glyn.

  He produced his warrant card and introduced himself. She took her time about scrutinising it, giving him time to scrutinise her. Only in height was she like Justine Weaver. In every other way, she was Justine’s antithesis. Looking at her heavy tweed skirt that stretched wide across her hips, her line-weary face with its loose flesh on the jaw, her wiry hair liberally streaked with grey and pulled back into an unflattering chignon, Lynley found himself hearing once again Victor Troughton’s assessment of his wife’s middle age. And he felt a surge of mortification when he realised that he too was in the process of judging and dismissing based upon what time had done to a woman’s body.