For the Sake of Elena

by Elizabeth George

  Melinda followed him. She’d been gone most of the morning, struggling with an essay she was rewriting for the fourth time in an effort to make her points clear prior to showing it to her supervisor, who would, with his usual bent for academic sadism, no doubt tear it to shreds. It was nearly noon. And although it was typical to see the occasional member of college strolling through Old Court at this time of day, when Melinda emerged from the turreted passage that led to Queens’ Lane, she found numerous small clumps of students having hushed conversations on the path between the two rectangles of lawn while a larger group gathered at the staircase door to the left of the north turret.

  It was through this door that the policeman disappeared after he stopped for a moment to answer a question. Melinda faltered when she saw this. Her bicycle felt heavy, as if a rusting chain made it difficult to push, and she lifted her eyes to the top floor of the building where she tried to see through the windows of that misshapen room tucked under the eaves.

  “What’s going on?” she asked a boy who was passing. He wore a sky blue anorak and matching knit cap with the words Ski Bulgaria blazed onto it in red.

  “Some runner,” he said. “Got bagged this morning.”

  “Who?”

  “Another bird from Hare and Hounds, they said.”

  Melinda felt dizzy. She heard him ask, “You all right?” but she didn’t respond. Instead, with every sense numbed, she pushed her bicycle towards the door of Rosalyn Simpson’s staircase.

  “She promised,” Melinda whispered to herself. And just for a moment the overwhelming nature of Rosalyn’s betrayal was even more devastating than was her death.

  She hadn’t extracted the promise from her in bed when resolutions weaken in the face of desire. Nor had she engaged in a tear-filled confrontation in which she used Rosalyn’s past vulnerabilities as tools of successful manipulation. Instead, she had opted for discussion—trying to remain calm and to avoid falling into the panic and hysteria which she knew would drive Rosalyn away eventually if she didn’t learn to get it under control—and she urged her lover to consider the dangers of continuing to run while a killer was at large. She expected a fight, especially since she knew how much Rosalyn regretted the earlier impulsive promise that had led her to Oxford on Monday morning. But instead of an argument or even a refusal to discuss the issue, Rosalyn agreed. She wouldn’t run again until the killer was found. Or if she ran, she would not run alone.

  They had parted at midnight. Still a couple, Melinda thought, still in love…Although they hadn’t made love as she had hoped they might in what she’d imagined all Tuesday would be a celebration of Rosalyn’s coming forward and admitting her sexual preference to the world. It hadn’t worked out that way. Rosalyn had pleaded exhaustion, speaking of an essay she had to work on and expressing a need to be alone in order to come to terms with Elena Weaver’s death. All an excuse, Melinda realised now, all part of the beginning of the end between them.

  And didn’t it always happen that way? The initial rapture of love. The encounters, the hopes. The growing intimacy. A prayer for shared dreams. Joyful communication. And, ultimately, disappointment. She had thought that Rosalyn was going to be different. But it was obvious now. She was a liar and a cheat like all the rest.

  Bitch, she thought. Bitch. You promised and you lied what else did you lie about who else did you sleep with did you sleep with Elena?

  She leaned her bicycle against the wall—indifferent to the fact that the college rules explicitly required that she take it elsewhere—and elbowed her way into the crowd. She saw that one of the porters stood just inside the entry, barring the doorway to the curious and looking one part grim and one part angry and several other parts disgusted. Over the murmur of voices, she heard him say, “Shotgun. Blasted her direct in the face.”

  And her anger dissolved as fast as it had come upon her, melted by the power of those seven simple words.

  Shotgun. Blasted her direct in the face.

  Melinda found that she was biting down on her wool-covered fingers. Instead of the porter standing in the doorway in Old Court, what she saw was Rosalyn, her face and body shattered, disintegrating before her, blowing away in a roar of gunpowder, shot, and blood. And then directly afterwards, in Rosalyn’s place grew the dreadful knowledge of who had to have done this and why and how her own life hung in the balance.

  She searched the faces of the students round her, looking for the face that would be looking for hers. It wasn’t there. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t nearby, looking from a window, waiting to see her reaction to the death. He’d be resting a bit from the labours of the morning, but his every intention would be to see the job through to the end.

  She felt her muscles coiling as her body reacted to her mind’s demand for flight. At the same time, she was acutely aware of the need for an ostensible show of calm. For if she turned and ran in full view of everyone—especially in full view of the watcher who was simply waiting for her to make her move—she was lost for a certainty.

  Where to go, she wondered. God, God, where to go.

  The crowd of students in which she stood began to part as a man’s voice said, “Step to one side, please.” And then, “Havers, make that call to London, will you?” And the blond man she had seen in Queens’ Lane shouldered his way through the whispering group in front of the door as his companion headed in the general direction of the junior combination room.

  “Porter says it was a shotgun,” someone called out as the blond mounted the single step that gave entry to the building. In reaction, the man favoured the porter with a critical glance but he said nothing as he passed him and began climbing the stairs.

  “Blew her guts out, I heard,” a spotty-faced young man said.

  “No, it was her face,” someone replied.

  “Raped first…”

  “Tied up…”

  “Both her tits cut off and—”

  Melinda’s body sprang into action. She spun from the sound of the speculative voices and shoved her way blindly out of the crowd. If she was fast enough, if she didn’t pause to consider where she was going and how she was going to get there, if she scrambled to her room and grabbed a rucksack and some clothes and the money her mother had sent her for her birthday…

  She dashed across the front of the building to the stairway on the right side of the southern turret. She pushed open the door and flew up the stairs. Scarcely breathing, scarcely thinking, she sought only escape.

  Someone called her name when she hit the second landing, but she ignored the voice and continued to dash upward. There was her grandmother’s house in West Sussex, she thought. A great-uncle lived in Colchester, her brother in Kent. But none of them seemed safe enough, far enough away. None of them seemed capable of offering her the sort of protection she would need from a killer who seemed to know movements in advance of their being made, who seemed to know thoughts and plans in advance of their being given voice. He was, in fact, a killer who even now might be waiting…

  At the top floor she paused outside her door, recognising the potential danger that lay within. Her bowels were loosening, and tears were eating at the back of her eyes. She listened at the smudged white panels of the door, but the recessed shape of them did nothing more than act as amplifiers for her own torn breathing.

  She wanted to run, she needed to hide. But she had to have that cache of money to do either.

  “Jesus,” she whispered. “Oh God, oh God.”

  She would reach for the doorknob. She would fling the door open. If the killer was there she would scream like a banshee.

  She filled her lungs with enough air to do the job right and thrust her shoulder against the door. It flew open. It crashed back against the wall. It left her with an unimpeded view of the room. Rosalyn’s body was lying on her bed.

  Melinda began to scream.

  Glyn Weaver positioned herself just to the left of the window in her daughter’s bedroom and flicked the sheer material away from the gla
ss so that she could have an unimpaired glimpse of the front lawn. The Irish setter was gambolling there, yelping joyfully in expectation of a run. He was circling frantically round Justine who had changed into a tracksuit and running shoes and who was bending and stretching through a series of warm-ups. She’d taken the dog’s lead outside with her, and Townee scooped it up from the lawn on one of his passes by her. He carried it like a banner. He cavorted and pranced.

  Elena had sent her a dozen pictures of the dog: as a furry baby curled into her lap asleep, a long-legged pup rooting for his gifts beneath the Christmas tree in her father’s house, a sleek adolescent leaping over a dry-stone wall. On the back of each she had written Townee’s age—six weeks, two days; four months, eight days; ten months today!—like an indulgent mother. Glyn wondered if she would have done the same for the baby she’d carried or if Elena would have opted for abortion. A baby, after all, was different from a dog. And no matter her reasons for getting herself pregnant—and Glyn knew her daughter well enough to realise that Elena’s pregnancy had probably been a calculated act—Elena was not so much the fool as to believe her life would be unchanged as a result of bringing a child into it. Children always altered one’s existence in unaccountable ways, and their unwavering devotion could hardly be relied upon as could a dog’s. They took and took and rarely gave. And only the most selfless sort of adult could continually enjoy the sensation of being drained of every resource and bled of every dream.

  And for what reward? Just the nebulous hope that this lovely creature—this complete individual over whom one had absolutely no control—would somehow not make the same mistakes, repeat the same patterns, or know the same pain that the parents had lived through and inflicted on each other.

  Outside, Justine was tying back her hair at the nape of her neck. Glyn took note of the fact that to do so she used a scarf that matched both the colour of her tracksuit and the colour of her shoes. Idly, she wondered if Justine ever left the house in anything less than a complete ensemble, and she chuckled at the sight of her. Even if one wished to criticise the fact that Justine chose to go exercising just two days after her stepdaughter’s murder, one certainly couldn’t condemn her for her choice of colour. It was thoughtfully appropriate.

  Such a hypocrite, Glyn thought, her lower lip curling. She turned from the sight of her.

  Justine had left the house without a word, sleek and cool and utterly patrician, but no longer as controlled as she liked to be. Their confrontation this morning in the breakfast room had taken care of that, with the real woman smoked out from beneath the guise of dutiful hostess and professor’s perfect wife. So now she would run, to tone up that lovely, seductive body, to work up a fragrant rose-scented sweat.

  But it was more than that. She had to run now. And she had to hide. Because the fact beneath the fiction that was Justine Weaver had finally been revealed in the breakfast room in that fleeting moment when her normally guileless, butter-wouldn’t-melt features became rigid with the culpability that lay beneath them. The truth was out.

  She had hated Elena. And now that she was off for her run, Glyn was ready to search out the evidence which would prove that Justine’s facade of well-bridled feelings skilfully hid the desperation of a killer.

  Outside the house, she heard the dog barking, a happy sound of excitement that rapidly faded towards Adams Road. They were off, the two of them. Whatever time she had until Justine’s return, Glyn was determined to use every moment.

  She bustled to the master bedroom with its sleek Danish furniture and shapely brass lamps. She went to the long, low chest and began opening drawers.

  “Georgina Higgins-Hart.” The weasel-faced constable squinted at his notebook, the cover of which bore a stain that looked suspiciously like pizza sauce. “A member of Hare and Hounds. Working on an M.Phil. in Renaissance Literature. Newcastle girl.” He snapped the notebook closed. “President of the College and the senior tutor had no trouble identifying the body, Inspector. They’ve both known her since she came up to Cambridge three years back.”

  The constable stood posted outside the closed door of the girl’s bed-sitting room. He was positioned like a guard, legs spread and arms folded across his chest, and his expression—flickering indecisively between smug judgement and outright derision—indicated the degree to which he considered the inadequacies of New Scotland Yard CID responsible for this latest Cambridge killing.

  Lynley said only, “Do you have the key, Constable?” and took it from the man’s palm when he handed it over.

  Georgina, he saw, had been a devotee of Woody Allen, and most of the bed-sit’s limited wall space was given over to posters celebrating his films. Bookshelves took up the rest of the space, and on them sat an eclectic display of the girl’s possessions, everything from a collection of ancient Raggedy Ann dolls to a seriously extensive selection of wine. She had lined up what few books she owned onto the mantel of the bricked-in fireplace. They were held in place on either end by a dispirited-looking miniature palm.

  With the constable outside and the door closed upon him, Lynley sat on the edge of the single bed. A pink duvet covered it, with a large bouquet of yellow paeonies embroidered into its centre. His fingers traced the pattern of flowers and leaves as his mind traced the pattern of the two killings.

  The outline comprised the most obvious details: a second runner from Hare and Hounds; a second girl; a second victim who was tall and lithe and long-haired and engaged—in the darkness—in an early morning’s workout. Those were the superficial similarities. But if the killings were connected, there had to be others.

  And there were, of course. The most immediately apparent was the fact that Georgina Higgins-Hart, like Elena Weaver, had a relationship with the English Faculty. Although she was a postgraduate, Lynley could not overlook the fact that, in her fourth year at the University, she would have known many of the professors, most of the lecturers, and everyone associated with her own field of Renaissance Literature, those writings—both European and British—of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. He knew what Havers was going to make of this information when she learned of it, and he couldn’t deny the connection it suggested.

  But he also couldn’t ignore the fact that Georgina Higgins-Hart was a member of Queens’ College. Nor could he deny the additional connection that Queens’ College implied.

  He got to his feet and went to the desk which was tucked into an alcove whose walls were hung with a collection of framed stills from Sleeper, Bananas, and Take the Money and Run. He was reading the opening paragraph of an essay on The Winter’s Tale when the door opened and Sergeant Havers came into the room.

  She joined him at the desk. “Well?”

  “Georgina Higgins-Hart,” he said. “Renaissance Literature.” He could sense her smile as she matched the period of time with its most significant author.

  “I knew it. I knew it. We need to get back to his house and have a go at finding that shotgun, Inspector. I say we get some of Sheehan’s blokes to tear the place apart.”

  “You can hardly think that a man of Thorsson’s intelligence would blast a young girl into oblivion and then simply replace the gun among his belongings. He knows he’s under suspicion, Sergeant. He isn’t a fool.”

  “He doesn’t need to be a fool,” she said. “He just needs to be desperate.”

  “Beyond that, as Sheehan pointed out, we’re standing on the threshold of the pheasant season. Shotguns abound. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the University itself has an outdoor society devoted to hunting. If there’s a student handbook on the mantel, you can check on that yourself.”

  She didn’t move. “You can’t mean to suggest that these killings aren’t related.”

  “I don’t mean to suggest that. I think they are. But not necessarily in the most obvious fashion.”

  “Then how? What other connection is there but the most obvious ones which, by the way, we’ve been handed on a platter? Okay, I know you’re going to ar
gue that she was a runner so there’s another connection for us to play with. And I know she had the same general appearance as the Weaver girl. But frankly, Inspector, trying to build a case on those two facts seems a lot shakier than building a case on Thorsson.” She seemed to sense his inclination to dispute the position she was taking. She went on more insistently. “We know there was some truth in what Elena Weaver claimed about Thorsson. He as much as demonstrated that this morning. So if he was harassing her, why not this girl as well?”

  “There’s another connection, Havers. Beyond Thorsson. Beyond running.”

  “What?”

  “Gareth Randolph. He’s a member of Queens’.”

  She didn’t look either pleased with or intrigued by this piece of information. She said, “Right. Quite. And his motive, Inspector?”

  Lynley fingered through the items on Georgina’s desk. He catalogued them mentally and considered his sergeant’s question, trying to develop a hypothetical response that would fit both murders.

  “Perhaps we’re looking at a primary rejection that’s begun seeping into the rest of his life.”

  “Elena Weaver brushed him off so he killed her and then finding that single killing not enough to wipe the rejection out of his memory, he’s bent on killing her again and again? Wherever he finds her?” Havers made no effort to hide her incredulity. She ran a restless hand back through her hair and grabbed onto a fistful which she tugged at impatiently. “I can’t even begin to swallow that, sir. The means are too different. The Weaver girl may have been killed in a well-planned attack, but attack is the watchword. There was real rage behind what happened to her, a need to hurt as well as to kill. This other—” She waved her hand over the top of the desk as if an indication of its scattering of books and papers would stand as symbol for the death of the second girl—“I think this other was the need to eliminate. Do it fast. Do it simple. But just do it.”