“They went about together. People paired their names.”
“Did Elena like that?”
“She said he was just a friend.”
“Was there someone else special?”
She took a drink of her coffee and added more whisky to it, shoving the bottle across to him when she was through. “I don’t know if he was special, but she saw Adam Jenn. Her father’s graduate student. She saw a good bit of him. And her dad stopped by lots, but I suppose he doesn’t count, does he, because he was only here to keep tabs on her. She hadn’t done well last year—have they told you that?—and he wanted to make sure there was no repeat performance. That’s how Elena put it, at least. Here comes my keeper, she’d say when she saw him from the window. Once or twice she hid in my bed-sit just to tease him and came out laughing when he started to react because she wasn’t in her room when she’d said she’d be there to meet him.”
“I take it she didn’t like the plan they’d come up with to keep her at the University.”
“She said the best part about it was the mouse. Tibbit, she called him, companion of my cell. She was like that, Inspector. She could make a joke out of anything.”
Miranda seemed to have completed her recital of information, for she sat back in her chair Indian style with her legs tucked under her on the seat, and she drank more coffee. But her look at him was a chary one which indicated that something was being withheld.
“Was there someone else, Randie?”
Miranda squirmed. She examined a small basket of apples and oranges on the table, and after that the posters on the wall above it. Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Wynton Marsalis in concert, Dave Brubeck at the piano, Ella Fitzgerald at the mike. She hadn’t abandoned her love of jazz. She glanced at him again, poking the handle of the teaspoon into her mop of hair.
“Someone else?” Lynley repeated. “Randie, if you know something more—”
“I don’t know anything else absolutely for sure, Inspector. And I can’t tell you every little thing, can I, because something I tell you—some little detail—might not even mean anything. But if you took it to heart, people might get hurt, mightn’t they? Dad says that’s the biggest danger in policework.”
Lynley made a mental note to discourage Webberly from waxing philosophical with his daughter in the future. “That’s always possible,” he agreed. “But I’m not about to arrest someone just because you mention his name.” When she said nothing, he leaned across the table and tapped his finger against her coffee cup. “Word of honour, Randie. All right? Do you know something else?”
“What I know about Gareth and Adam and her father came from Elena,” she said. “That’s why I told you. Anything else in my head is nothing but gossip. Or something I maybe saw and didn’t understand. And that can’t be helpful. That could make things go wrong.”
“We’re not gossiping, Randie. We’re trying to get at the truth behind her death. The facts, not conjectures.”
She didn’t immediately respond. She stared at the bottle of whisky on the table. Its label bore a greasy fingerprint stain. She said, “Facts aren’t conclusions. Dad always says that.”
“Absolutely. Agreed.”
She hesitated, even looked over her shoulder as if to make sure they were still alone. “This is about seeing, nothing more,” she said.
“Understood.”
“All right.” She straightened her shoulders as if in preparation, but she still didn’t look as if she wanted to part with the information. “I think she had a row with Gareth on Sunday evening. Only,” she added in a rush, “I can’t know for sure because I didn’t hear them, they talked with their hands. I just caught a glimpse of them in Elena’s room before she shut the door and when Gareth left he was in quite a temper. He banged his way out. Only it could mean nothing because he’s so intense anyway that he’d be acting like that even if they’d been discussing the poll tax.”
“Yes. I see. And after their argument?”
“Elena left as well.”
“What time was this?”
“Round twenty to eight. I never heard her come back.” Miranda seemed to read heightened interest in his face, for she went on hastily. “I don’t think Gareth had anything to do with what’s happened, Inspector. He has a temper, true, and he’s on a tight string, but he wasn’t the only one…” She gnawed at her lip.
“Someone else was here?”
“Noooo…not exactly.”
“Randie—”
Her body slumped. “Mr. Thorsson then.”
“He was here?” She nodded. “Who is he?”
“One of Elena’s supervisors. He lectures in English.”
“When was this?”
“I saw him here twice, actually. But not on Sunday.”
“Day or night?”
“Night. Once probably round the third week of the term. Then again last Thursday.”
“Could he have been here more often?”
She looked reluctant to answer, but she said, “I suppose, yes. But I just saw him twice. Twice is all, Inspector.” Twice is the fact, her voice implied.
“Did she tell you why he came to see her?”
Miranda shook her head slowly. “I think she didn’t much like him because she called him Lenny the Lech. Lennart. He’s Swedish, see. And that’s all I know. Truly. Really.”
“That’s the fact, you mean.” Even as he said it, Lynley felt sure that Miranda Webberly—daughter of her father—could have produced half a dozen conjectures to go with it.
Lynley went through the gatehouse, stopping briefly in the porter’s lodge before stepping out into Trinity Lane. Terence Cuff had wisely seen to it that the rooms set aside for visitors to the college were in St. Stephen’s Court, which along with Ivy Court was across the narrow lane from the rest of the college. And unlike the rest of the college, it had neither porter nor gatehouse, so it wasn’t locked at night, thereby giving visitors more freedom of movement than the junior members of the college had.
A plain wrought iron fence separated this part of the college from the street. It ran north to south, forming a line of demarcation that was interrupted by the west wall of St. Stephen’s Church. This random rubble building was one of the original parish churches in Cambridge, and its stone quoins, buttresses, and Norman tower seemed strangely at odds with the neat Edwardian brick building that partially encircled it.
Lynley pushed open the iron gate. A second fence inside marked the boundary of the churchyard. There, graves lay dimly illuminated by the same ground lights that shone cones of yellow against the walls of the church where moths fluttered weakly with sodden wings in the glow. The fog had grown even heavier during the time he had spent with Miranda, and it transformed sarcophagi, gravestones, tombs, bushes, and trees into colourless silhouettes laid against a slowly shifting background of mist. Along the wrought iron fence that separated St. Stephen’s Court from the churchyard, perhaps a hundred or more bicycles stood, their handlebars gleaming, slick with the damp.
Passing these, Lynley made his way to Ivy Court, where the porter had earlier shown him to his room at the top of O staircase. It was quiet inside the building itself. These rooms, the porter had told him, were used only by the senior members of the college. They comprised studies and conference rooms where supervisions took place, gyp rooms and smaller rooms with beds for kipping. Since most of the senior fellows lived away from the college, the building was largely unpopulated at night.
Lynley’s room encompassed one of the building’s Dutch gables, and it looked out into Ivy Court and St. Stephen’s graveyard. With brown carpet squares on the floor, stained yellow walls, and faded floral curtains at the window, it wasn’t a particularly uplifting environment. Clearly, St. Stephen’s did not expect visitors to embark upon an extended stay.
Left alone there earlier by the porter, he’d found himself slowly examining its contents, touching a musty-smelling armchair, opening a drawer, running his fingers along the empty, adjustable booksh
elves that lined one wall. He ran water in the basin. He tested the strength of the single steel rod in a cupboard for holding clothes. He thought about Oxford.
The room had been different but the feeling was the same, that sensation of having the entire world opening up before him, revealing its mysteries even as it held out the promise of satisfactions to come. The blessing of relative anonymity had filled him with the sense of having been newly born. Empty shelves, blank walls, drawers that held nothing. Here, he had thought, he would make his mark. No one need know of his title and background, no one need know of his risible angst. The secret lives of one’s parents had no place in Oxford. Here, he had thought, he would be safe from the past.
He chuckled now to think of how tenaciously he had held on to that final, adolescent belief. He had actually seen himself moving into a golden future in which he had to do absolutely nothing to deal with what had led up to it. How we flee our personal realities, he thought.
His suitcase was still on the desk in the recess made by the gable. It took him less than five minutes to unpack, after which he sat, feeling the room’s chill and his own restless need to be elsewhere. He sought distraction by writing out his first day’s report, a job that would usually be completed by Sergeant Havers but one that he set upon automatically now, grateful for a diversion that would keep thoughts of Helen at bay, if only for an hour or so.
“One call. Yes, sir,” the porter had said as he passed through the lodge.
She’s phoned, Lynley thought. Harry’s come home. And his mood began to lift accordingly, only to plummet to earth when the porter handed him the message. Superintendent Daniel Sheehan of the Cambridge Constabulary would meet with him at half past eight in the morning.
There was nothing from Helen.
He wrote steadily, filling in page after page with the details of his meeting with Terence Cuff, with the impressions he’d formed after his conversation with Anthony and Justine Weaver, with a description of the Ceephone and the possibilities it presented, with the facts he’d managed to glean from Miranda Webberly. He wrote far more than he needed to write, forcing himself to address the murder in a stream-of-consciousness fashion which Havers would rightfully scorn but which also served to focus his mind on the killing and kept it from wandering to areas that would only intensify his nerve-aching frustration. At the end, however, the effort was a failure. For after an hour of writing, he set down his pen, removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, and thought immediately of Helen.
He could sense that he was fast approaching the limit of his capacity for friendship with her. She’d wanted time. He’d given it, month after month, believing that any false move on his part would cause him to lose her forever. As much as possible, he’d tried to refashion himself into the man who had once been her comrade in laughter, a casual companion willing to engage in whatever madcap adventure she’d cared to propose, from hot-air ballooning in the Loire to spelunking in the Burren. It didn’t particularly matter, as long as she was there. But he was finding that the pretence of fraternal affection was growing daily more difficult to maintain, and the words I love you were no longer a means of defining the nature of the close friendship between them. Instead, they were fast becoming a gauntlet which he repeatedly threw down before her, demanding a satisfaction that she did not appear willing to give.
She continued to see other men. She never told him this directly, but he knew it intuitively. He read it in her eyes when she spoke of a play she had seen, a drinks party she’d attended, a gallery she’d visited. And while he sought out other women in what amounted to a momentarily successful effort to drive the thought of Helen from his mind, he could not drive her spirit from his heart any more than he could obliterate the connection that tied her to his soul. He had closed his eyes upon more than one lover, imagining the body beneath his to be Helen’s, hearing Helen’s cries, feeling Helen’s arms, tasting the miracle of Helen’s mouth. And more than once, he had cried out with the pleasure of his body’s fleeting moment of release, only to be filled with desolation in the very next instant. It was no longer enough to take and give pleasure. He wanted to make love. He wanted to own love. But not without Helen.
His nerves felt strung. His arms and legs ached. He pushed away from the desk and went to the basin where he splashed water on his face and examined himself dispassionately in the mirror.
Cambridge would be their battleground, he decided. Whatever was to be won or lost, it would happen here.
Back at the desk, he flipped through the pages he had written, reading his words but assimilating nothing. He closed the notebook with a snap and slapped it down.
The air in the room seemed suddenly close, too much hung with the opposing odours of fresh disinfectant and old tobacco smoke. It felt oppressive. He leaned over the desk top, shoved the window up all the way, and let the damp night air wash over his cheeks. Below him the graveyard—half-hidden by the fog—cast up a faint, fresh scent of pine from its trees. The ground there would spring with fallen needles, and as he breathed in their fragrance, he could almost imagine the spongy feel of them beneath his feet.
A movement at the fence caught his attention. At first he thought the wind was rising to shift the fog away from bushes and trees. But as he watched, a figure melted out of the shadow of one of the spruces, and he saw that the movement had not come from within the graveyard at all, but from its perimeter where someone was easing stealthily between the bicycles, away from him, head lifted to examine the windows of the court’s east range. Woman or man, Lynley couldn’t tell, and when he switched off his desk lamp to have a better look, the figure froze as if preternaturally aware of being watched even at a distance of some twenty yards. Then Lynley heard the sound of a car’s engine idling in Trinity Lane. Voices called out a laughing good night. A horn tooted happily in response. With a grinding of gears, the car roared off. The voices faded as their owners walked away, and the shadow below became both substance and movement again.
Whoever it was, stealing one of the bicycles didn’t appear to be its objective. It headed for a doorway on the east range of the court. A lantern-shaped lamp, overhung with the ivy for which the court was named, provided scant illumination there, and Lynley waited for the figure to enter the milky penumbra directly in front of the door, hoping that whoever it was might toss a quick look over a shoulder and give him a glimpse of face. It didn’t happen. Instead, the figure hurried soundlessly to the doorway, shot out a pale hand to grasp the knob, and disappeared into the building. But just for a moment as the shadowy form passed beneath the light, Lynley saw hair, rich, dark, and plentiful.
A woman suggested an assignation, with someone no doubt anxiously waiting behind one of those sightless, darkened windows. He waited for one of them to brighten with light. It did not happen. Instead, less than two minutes after she had disappeared into the building, the door opened again and the woman re-emerged. This time she paused for an instant beneath the light in order to pull the door shut behind her. The faint glow outlined the curve of a cheek, the shape of a nose and chin. But only for a moment. Then she was gone, moving across the court, fading back into the darkness by the graveyard. She was as silent as the mist.
6
Cambridge police headquarters faced Parker’s Piece, a vast green crisscrossed by intersecting paths. Joggers ran here, their breaths gusting out in fibrous clouds, while on the grass two dalmatians—tongues flapping happily—chased after an orange Frisbee thrown by a whip-thin bearded man whose bald head shone in the morning sun. All of them seemed to be rejoicing in the disappearance of the fog. Even pedestrians rushing by on the pavement held up their faces to let the sunlight strike them for the first time in days. Although the temperature was no higher than it had been on the previous morning, and a brisk wind made the chill cut close, the fact that the sky was blue and the day was bright served to make the cold stimulating instead of insufferable.
Lynley paused outside the dun brick-and-concrete structure that housed the
main offices of the local police. A glass-enclosed notice board stood in front of the doors, on which were fastened posters about child safety in cars, drinking and driving, and an organisation called Crime-stoppers. Over this last had been taped a hand-out giving the superficial details of Elena Weaver’s death and asking for information from anyone who might have seen her yesterday morning or Sunday night. It was a hastily composed document with a grainy, photocopied picture of the dead girl upon it. And it had not been generated by the police. DeaStu and a telephone number were printed prominently at the bottom of the page. Lynley sighed when he saw this. The deaf students were launching their own investigation. That wouldn’t make his job any less complicated.
A blast of warm air hit him when he opened the doors and entered the lobby where a young man garbed in black leather was arguing with a uniformed receptionist about a traffic ticket. On one of the chairs, his companion waited, a girl in moccasins and what appeared to be an Indian bedspread. She kept murmuring, “Come on, Ron. Cripes. Come on,” with her feet drumming impatiently on the black tile floor.
The constable working reception cast a thankful look in Lynley’s direction, perhaps appreciative of the diversion. He broke into the young man’s “You listen here, mate. I bloody don’t intend to—” with “Sit down, lad. You’re getting in a twist over nothing,” after which he nodded to Lynley, saying, “CID? Scotland Yard?”
“It’s that obvious, then?”
“Colour of the skin. Police pallor, we call it. But I’ll have a glance at your ID all the same.”
Lynley produced his warrant card. The constable examined it before pressing the release on the locked door which separated the lobby from the station proper. A buzzer sounded, he nodded Lynley inside. “First floor,” he said. “Just follow the signs.” He resumed his argument with the boy in leather.
The superintendent’s office was at the front of the building, overlooking Parker’s Piece. As Lynley approached it, the door opened and an angular woman with a geometric haircut took up a position within its frame. Arms akimbo, elbows pointed like spikes, she scrutinised him from head to foot. Obviously, reception had phoned ahead.
For the Sake of Elena Page 11