For the Sake of Elena

by Elizabeth George

  “What’s he saying?”

  “He doesn’t want me to defend him. He says there’s nothing for me to defend.”

  “You’re an engineering undergraduate, aren’t you?” Lynley asked. Gareth nodded. He said, “And the engineering lab’s by Fen Causeway, isn’t it? Did you know Elena Weaver ran that way in the morning? Did you ever see her run? Did you ever go with her?”

  “You want to think I killed her because she wouldn’t have me” was his reply. “You think I was jealous. You’ve got it figured that I killed her because she was giving some other bloke what she wouldn’t give me.”

  “It’s a fairly solid motive, isn’t it?”

  Bernadette gave a tiny mewl of protest.

  Gareth said, “Maybe the bloke who got her pregnant killed her. Maybe he didn’t fancy her as much as she fancied him.”

  “But you don’t know who he was?”

  Gareth shook his head. Lynley had the distinct impression he was lying. And yet he couldn’t at the moment come up with a reason why Gareth Randolph would lie about the identity of the man who made Elena pregnant, especially if he truly believed that man might be her killer. Unless he intended to take care of dealing with the man himself, in his own time, on his own terms. And with a blue in boxing, he’d have the odds on his side if it came to taking another by surprise.

  Even as Lynley dwelt on this thought, he realised there was yet another possible reason why Gareth might choose not to cooperate with the police. If he was savouring Elena’s death at the same time as he mourned it, what better way to prolong his enjoyment than to lengthen the time it would take to bring the criminal to justice. How often had a jilted lover believed that a crime of violence perpetrated by someone else was exactly what the loved one deserved?

  Lynley rose to his feet and nodded to the boy. He said, “Thank you for your time,” and turned to the door.

  On the back of it he saw what he hadn’t had the opportunity to notice when he had entered the room. It was hung with a calendar on which the entire year was visible at one glance. So it was not avoidance that had made Gareth Randolph shift his eyes to the door when Lynley had told him of Elena Weaver’s pregnancy.

  He’d forgotten about the bells. They’d rung at Oxford as well when he was an undergraduate, but somehow the years had taken that memory from him. Now as he stepped out of the Peterhouse Library and began the walk back to St. Stephen’s College, the resonant calling of the faithful to Evensong formed an auditory backdrop—like antiphonal chanting—from college chapels across the city. It was, he thought, one of life’s most joyous sounds, this ringing of bells. And he found himself regretting the fact that the span of time in which he had given himself over to learning how to understand the criminal mind had allowed him to forget the sheer pleasure of church bells ringing into an autumn wind.

  He let sound itself become his most conscious perception as he strolled past the old, overgrown graveyard of Little St. Mary’s Church and made the turn onto Trumpington where the jingle of bicycle bells and the metallic clicking of their unoiled gears joined the rumble of evening traffic.

  “Go on, Jack,” a young man shouted to a retreating bike rider from the doorway of a grocer’s shop as Lynley passed. “We’ll catch you up at the Anchor. All right?”

  “Right.” A vague call in return, caught on the wind.

  Three girls walked by, engaged in a heated discussion about “that sod, Robert.” They were followed by an older woman, high heels snapping against the pavement, pushing a crying baby in a pram. And then lurched by a black-garbed figure of uncertain sex from the folds of whose voluminous coat and trailing scarves came the plaintive notes of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” played on harmonica.

  Through it all, Lynley heard Bernadette giving voice to Gareth’s angry words: We don’t want your hearing. But you can’t believe that, can you, because you think you’re special instead of just bloody different.

  He wondered if this had marked the crucial difference between Gareth Randolph and Elena Weaver. We don’t want your hearing. For because of her parents’ well-intentioned if perhaps arguably misguided efforts on her behalf, Elena had been taught to know every moment of her life that something was missing. She had been given something to want. So how could Gareth ever have hoped to win her over to a life-style and a culture that she had been taught from birth to reject and overcome?

  He wondered what it had been like for the two of them: Gareth dedicated to his people, seeking to make Elena one of them. And Elena merely following the dictates laid down by the Master of her College. Had she feigned interest in DeaStu? Had she feigned enthusiasm? And if she did neither, if she felt contempt, what kind of effect would this have had on the young man who had been given the unwanted assignment of steering her into a society so foreign to that which she had always known?

  Lynley wondered what kind of blame—if any—ought to be assessed upon the Weavers for the efforts they had made with their daughter. For in spite of the manner in which they had apparently tried to create an inaccurate fantasy out of the reality of their daughter’s life, hadn’t they in fact given Elena what Gareth himself had never known? Hadn’t they given her her own form of hearing? And if that was the case, if Elena did move with a relative degree of comfort in a world in which Gareth felt himself an alien, how could he come to terms with the fact that he had fallen in love with someone who shared neither his culture nor his dreams?

  Lynley paused in front of the multi-spired gatehouse of King’s College where lights shone brightly from the porter’s lodge. He stared, unseeing, at the collection of bicycles leaning this way and that. A young man was scrawling some sort of notice on a blackboard beneath the gate, while a chatting group of black-gowned academics hurried across the lawn towards the chapel with that self-important stride that appeared to be inherent to senior members of all the colleges who were blessed with the privilege of setting foot to grass. He listened to the continuing echo of the bells, with Great St. Mary’s just across King’s Parade calling out in a ceaseless, sonorous petition for prayer. Each note cast itself into the emptiness of Market Hill just beyond the church. Each building there caught the sound and flung it back into the night. He listened, he thought. He knew he was intellectually capable of getting to the root of Elena Weaver’s death. But as the evening continued to swell with sound, he wondered if he was unprejudicially capable of getting to the root of Elena’s life.

  He was bringing to the job at hand the preconceptions of a member of the hearing world. He wasn’t sure how to shed them—or even if he needed to do so—in order to get at the truth behind her killing. But he did know that only through coming to an understanding of Elena’s own vision of herself could he also understand the relationships she shared with other people. And—all previous thoughts on Crusoe’s Island aside—for the moment, at least, it seemed that these relationships had to be the key to what had happened to her.

  At the far end of the north range of Front Court, an amber rhombus of light melted out onto the lawn as the south door to King’s College Chapel slowly opened. The faint sound of organ music drifted on the wind. Lynley shivered, turned up the collar of his overcoat, and decided to join the college for Evensong.

  Perhaps a hundred people had gathered in the chapel where the chóir was just filing down the aisle, passing beneath the magnificent Florentine screen atop of which angels held brass trumpets aloft. They were led by cross- and incense-bearers, the latter filling the icy chapel air with the heady sweet scent of smoky perfume. And they, along with the congregation, were dwarfed by the breathtaking interior of the chapel itself, whose fanvaulted ceiling soared above them in an intricate display of tracery periodically bossed by the Beaufort portcullis and the Tudor rose. It formed a beauty that was at once both austere and exalted, like the arcing flight of a jubilant bird, but one who does his sailing against a winter sky.

  Lynley took a place at the rear of the chancel from which he could meditate at a distance upon Adoration of the Ma
gi, the Rubens canvas that served as the chapel’s reredos, softly lit above the main altar. In it, one of the Magi leaned forward, hand outstretched to touch the child while the mother herself presented the baby, as if with the serene confidence that he wouldn’t be harmed. And yet even then she must have known what lay ahead. She must have had a premonition of the loss she would face.

  A lone soprano—a small boy so tiny that his surplice hung just inches from the floor—sang out the first seven pure notes of a Kyrie Eleison, and Lynley lifted his eyes to the stained glass window above the painting. Through it moonlight shimmered in a muted corona, giving only one colour to the window itself, a deep blue faintly touched on its outer edge by white. And although he knew and could see that the crucifixion was what the window depicted, the only section which the moon brought to life was a single face—soldier, apostle, believer, or apostate—his mouth a black howl of some emotion eternally unnamed.

  Life and death, the chapel said. Alpha and omega. With Lynley finding himself caught between the two and trying somehow to make sense of both.

  As the choir filed out at the end of the service and the congregation rose to follow, Lynley saw that Terence Cuff had been among the worshippers. He had been sitting on the far side of the choir, and now he stood with his attention given to the Rubens, his hands resting in the pockets of an overcoat that was just a shade or two darker than the grey of his hair. Seeing his partial profile, Lynley was struck once again by the man’s self-possession. His features did not display the slightest trace of anxiety. Nor did they reveal any reaction to the pressures of his job.

  When Cuff turned from the altar, he exhibited no surprise to find Lynley watching him. He merely nodded a greeting, left his pew, and joined the other man next to the chancel screen. He looked round the chapel before he spoke.

  “I always come back to King’s,” he said. “At least twice a month like a prodigal son. I never really feel like a sinner in the hands of an angry God here. A minor transgressor, perhaps, but not a real miscreant. For what kind of God could honestly stay angry when one asks his forgiveness in such architectural splendour?”

  “Have you a need to ask forgiveness?”

  Cuff chuckled. “I’ve found it’s always unwise to admit one’s misdeeds in the presence of a policeman, Inspector.”

  They left the chapel together, Cuff stopping at the brass collection tray near the door to drop in a pound coin which clanked heavily against an assortment of ten- and fifty-pence pieces. Then they went out into the evening.

  “This meets my occasional need to get away from St. Stephen’s,” Cuff said as they strolled round the west end of the chapel towards Senate House Passage and Trinity Lane. “My academic roots are here at King’s.”

  “You were a senior fellow here?”

  “Hmm. Yes. Now it serves as part refuge and part home, I suppose.” Cuff pointed towards the chapel spires that rose like sculptured shadows against the night sky. “This is how churches ought to look, Inspector. No one since the Gothic architects has known quite so well how to set fire to emotion with simple stone. You’d think the very material itself would quash the possibility that one might actually feel something at the sight of the finished building. But it doesn’t.”

  Lynley took his lead from the other man’s first thought. “What sort of refuge does the master of a college need?”

  Cuff smiled. In the weak light, he looked much younger than he had appeared in his library on the previous day. “From political machinations. The battle of personalities. The jockeying for position.”

  “Everything attending the selection of the Penford Professor?”

  “Everything in attendance on a community filled with scholars who have reputations to maintain.”

  “You’ve a distinguished enough group set on doing the maintaining.”

  “Yes. St. Stephen’s is lucky in that.”

  “Is Lennart Thorsson among them?”

  Cuff paused, turning to Lynley. The wind was ruffling his hair, and it blew at the charcoal scarf he wore slung round his neck. He cocked his head appreciatively. “You led into that well.”

  They continued their walk past the back of the old law school. Their footsteps echoed in the narrow lane. At the entrance to Trinity Hall, a girl and boy were engaged in an intent discussion, the girl leaning against the ashlar wall with her head thrown back and tears glittering on her face while the boy spoke urgently in an angry voice, one hand flat against the wall by her head and the other on her shoulder.

  “You don’t understand,” she was saying. “You never try to understand. I don’t even think you want to understand any longer. You only want—”

  “Can’t you ever leave it, Beth? You act like I’m rolling in your knickers every night.”

  As Lynley and Cuff passed, the girl turned away, her hand to her face. Cuff said quietly, “It always comes down to that sort of give-and-take, doesn’t it? I’m fifty-five years old and I still wonder why.”

  “I should think it’s based on the injunctions women grow up hearing,” Lynley said. “Protect yourself from men. They only want one thing, and once they get it from you, they’ll be fast on their way. Don’t give an inch. Don’t trust them. Don’t trust anyone in fact.”

  “Is that the sort of thing you’d tell a daughter of yours?”

  “I don’t know,” Lynley said. “I don’t have a daughter. I like to think I’d tell her to know her own heart. But then, I’ve always been a romantic when it comes to relationships.”

  “That’s an odd predisposition in your line of work.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” A car approached slowly, its indicator signalling for Garret Hostel Lane, and Lynley took the opportunity to glance at Cuff as the light from the headlamps struck his face. He said, “Sex is a dangerous weapon in an environment like this. Dangerous for anyone wielding it. Why didn’t you tell me about Elena Weaver’s charges against Lennart Thorsson?”

  “It seemed unnecessary.”

  “Unnecessary?”

  “The girl’s dead. There didn’t seem to be a point to bringing up something unproved that would only serve to damage the reputation of one of the senior fellows. It’s been difficult enough for Thorsson to climb as far as he has at Cambridge.”

  “Because he’s a Swede?”

  “A University isn’t immune to xenophobia, Inspector. I dare say a British Shakespearean wouldn’t have had to jump the academic hurdles Thorsson’s had to jump in the last ten years to prove himself worthy. And that despite the fact that he did his graduate work here in the first place.”

  “Nonetheless, in a murder investigation, Dr. Cuff—”

  “Hear me out, please. I don’t much like Thorsson personally. I’ve always had the feeling he’s at heart a womaniser, and I’ve never had time for men of that sort. But he’s a sound—if admittedly quixotic—Shakespearean with a solid future ahead of him. To drag his name through the muck in a situation that can’t be proved at this point seemed—still seems—a fruitless endeavour.”

  Cuff shoved both hands back into his overcoat pockets and stopped walking when they came to the gatehouse of St. Stephen’s. Two undergraduates hurried by, calling out a hello to him which he acknowledged with a nod of his head. He continued to speak, his voice low, his face in shadow, his back turned to the gatehouse itself.

  “It goes beyond that. There’s Dr. Weaver to consider. If I bring this matter out into the open with a full investigation, do you think for a moment that Thorsson isn’t going to drag Elena’s name through the muck in order to defend himself? With his entire career on the line, what kind of tale will he tell about her alleged attempt to seduce him? About the clothes she wore when she came to her supervisions? About the way she sat? About what she said and how she said it? About everything she did to get him into bed? And with Elena not there to argue her case, how will her father feel, Inspector? He’s already lost her. Shall we set about destroying his memory of her as well? What purpose does that serve?”

 
; “It might be wiser to ask what purpose it serves to keep everything quiet. I imagine you’d like the Penford Professor to be a senior fellow here at St. Stephen’s.”

  Cuff locked eyes with his. “Your connotation is ugly.”

  “So is murder, Dr. Cuff. And you can’t really argue that a scandal involving Elena Weaver wouldn’t cause the search committee for the Penford Chair to think about turning its eyes in another direction. That, after all, is the easiest course of action.”

  “They’re not looking for the easiest. They’re looking for the best.”

  “Basing their decision upon…?”

  “Certainly not basing it upon the behaviour of the applicants’ children, no matter how outrageous that behaviour may be.”

  Lynley drew his conclusion from Cuff’s use of the adjective. “So you don’t really believe Thorsson harassed her. You believe she cooked up this tale because he wouldn’t have her when she wanted him.”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m merely saying there’s nothing to investigate. It’s his word against hers and she has no word to give us.”

  “Had you spoken to Thorsson about the charges prior to her death?”

  “Of course I’d spoken to him. He denied every one of her accusations.”

  “What were they exactly?”

  “That he’d tried to talk her into sex, that he’d made physical overtures—touching her breasts and thighs and buttocks—that he’d engaged her in discussions about his sex life and a woman he’d once been engaged to and the difficulties she’d had with the enormous size of his erection.”

  Lynley lifted an eyebrow. “Fairly imaginative material for a young girl to have cooked up, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not in this day and age. But it makes no difference because every bit of it was impossible to prove. Unless more than one girl was willing to come forward with an accusation against Thorsson, there was virtually nothing that I could do save speak to the man and warn him off, which I did.”

  “And you didn’t see the harassment accusation as a motive for murder? If there are other girls who might have come forward once the word went out that Elena had turned him in, Thorsson would have been in deeper water then.”