For the Sake of Elena

by Elizabeth George

  Justine came to his side and poured the tea. Its steam rose in the air with the fruity scent of the modern, herbal blend she preferred. The two of them stood there with the food spread out before them, the silver gleaming, and the flowers fresh. Glyn remained by the window in the other room. No one moved towards a chair.

  “What did the police tell you?” Glyn asked. “They never phoned me.”

  “I told them not to.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I should be the one to—”

  “You?”

  Anthony saw Justine set down her teacup. He saw that her eyes remained on its rim.

  “What happened to her, Anthony?”

  “Glyn, sit down. Please.”

  “I want to know what happened.”

  Anthony set his plate down next to the cup of tea which he had not tasted. He returned to the sitting room. Justine followed. He sat on the sofa, motioned his wife down next to him, and waited to see if Glyn would move from the window. She did not do so. Next to him, Justine began twisting her wedding band.

  Anthony recited the facts for Glyn. Elena was out running, someone killed her. She was beaten and strangled.

  “I want to see the body.”

  “No. Glyn. You don’t.”

  Glyn’s voice wavered for the first time. “She was my daughter. I want to see the body.”

  “Not as she is now. Later. When the morticians—”

  “I’ll see her, Anthony.”

  He could hear the tight elevation in her voice and knew from experience where it would lead. He headed her off with, “One side of her face is bashed in. The bones are showing. She doesn’t have a nose. Is that what you want to see?”

  Glyn fumbled in her handbag and brought out a tissue. “Damn you,” she whispered. Then, “How did it happen? You told me—you promised me—she wouldn’t run alone.”

  “She phoned Justine last night. She said she wasn’t going to run this morning.”

  “She phoned..” Glyn’s glance moved from Anthony to his wife. “You ran with Elena?”

  Justine stopped twisting her wedding band, but she kept her fingers on it, as if it were a talisman. “Anthony asked me to. He didn’t like her running along the river when it was dark, so I ran as well. Last night she phoned and said she wouldn’t be running, but evidently, for some reason she changed her mind.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Glyn asked, her attention going back to her former husband. “You said Elena wouldn’t be running alone, but you never said that Justine—” She abruptly shifted gears. “How could you do that, Anthony? How could you entrust your daughter’s well-being to—”

  “Glyn,” Anthony interposed.

  “She wouldn’t be concerned. She wouldn’t watch over her. She wouldn’t take care to see that she was safe.”

  “Glyn, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s true. She’s never had a child, so how could she know what it’s like to watch and wait and worry and wonder. To have dreams. A thousand and one dreams that won’t come to anything because she didn’t run with Elena this morning.”

  Justine hadn’t moved on the sofa. Her expression was fixed, a glazed mask of good breeding. “Let me take you to your room,” she said and got to her feet. “You must be exhausted. We’ve put you in the yellow room at the back of the house. It’s quiet there. You’ll be able to rest.”

  “I want Elena’s room.”

  “Well, yes. Of course. That’s no trouble at all. I’ll just see to the sheets..” Her voice drifting off, Justine left the room.

  Glyn said at once, “Why did you give her Elena?”

  “What are you saying? Justine is my wife.”

  “That’s the real point, isn’t it? How much do you care that Elena’s dead? You’ve got someone right here to cook up another.”

  Anthony got to his feet. Against her words, he summoned up the image of Elena as he last had seen her from the window of the morning room, offering him a grin and a final wave from her bicycle as she pedalled off to a supervision after their lunch together. It had been just the two of them, eating their sandwiches, chatting about the dog, sharing an hour of love.

  He felt anguish swell. Re-create Elena? Fashion another? There was only one. He himself had died with her.

  Blindly, he pushed past his ex-wife. He could still hear her low, harsh words continue as he left the house even though he couldn’t distinguish one from another. He stumbled to his car, fumbled the keys into the ignition. He was reversing down the driveway when Justine ran outside.

  She called his name. He saw her caught for a moment in the headlamps before he plunged his foot onto the accelerator and, with a sputter of gravel, clattered into Adams Road.

  He felt his chest heaving, his throat aching as he drove. He began to weep—dry, hot, tearless sobs for his daughter and his wives and the mess he’d made of every part of his life.

  He was on Grange Road and then on Barton Road and then, blessedly, out of Cambridge itself. It had grown quite dark and the fog was thick, especially in this area of fallow, open fields and winter-dying hedges. But he drove without caution, and when the countryside gave way to a village, he parked and threw himself out of the car only to find that the temperature had fallen further, encouraged by the bitter East Anglian wind. He’d left his overcoat at home. All he wore was a suit jacket. But that was of no account. He turned up its collar and began to walk, past a kissing gate, past half a dozen thatched cottages, stopping only when he came to her house. He crossed the street then to get some distance from the building. But even through the fog, he could see in the window.

  She was there, moving across the sitting room with a mug in her hand. She was small, so slender. If he held her, she would be practically nothing in his arms, just a fragile heartbeat and a glowing life that consumed him, fired him, and had once made him whole.

  He wanted to go to her. He needed to talk to her. He wanted to be held.

  He stepped off the kerb. As he did so, a car skidded by, horn honking in warning, a stifled shout from inside. It brought him back to his senses.

  He watched her go to the fireplace where she fed wood into the flames as he once had done, turning from the fire to find her eyes on him, her smile a benediction, her hand held out.

  “Tonio,” she’d murmur, his name underscored with love.

  And he’d answer her even as he did this moment. “Tigresse.” Just a whisper. “Tigresse. La Tigresse.”

  Lynley arrived in Cambridge at half past five and drove directly to Bulstrode Gardens where he parked the Bentley in front of a house that reminded him of Jane Austen’s home in Chawton. Here was the same symmetry of design—two casement windows and a white front door below, three evenly spaced windows in the same positions above. Possessing a pantiled roof and several plain chimneys, the house was a rectangular, solid, uninteresting piece of architecture. Lynley didn’t, however, feel the same disappointment upon seeing it that he had felt in Chawton. One expected Jane Austen to have lived in a snug, whimsically atmospheric thatched cottage surrounded by a garden filled with flowerbeds and trees. One didn’t expect a struggling lecturer from the divinity faculty to maintain a wife and three children in that kind of wattle-and-daub heaven.

  He got out of the car and shrugged into his overcoat. The fog, he noted, managed to obscure and romanticise features of the house that spoke of a growing indifference and neglect. In lieu of a garden, a semi-circular driveway of leaf-strewn pebbles curved round the front door, and the inner part of the semi-circle comprised an overgrown flowerbed which was separated from the street by a low, brick wall. Here, nothing had been done to prepare the ground for autumn or winter, so the remains of summer plants were lying blackened and dying against a solid sheet of unturned soil. A large hibiscus was fast overpowering the garden wall, trailing among the yellowed leaves of narcissi which should long ago have been cleared away. To the left of the front door an actinidia had worked its way up to the roof and was sending out tendrils to
cover one of the lower windows, while to the right of the door, the same species of plant was creating an inert mound of disease-spotted leaves. As a result, the front of the house bore a lopsided appearance at odds with the symmetry of its design.

  Lynley passed beneath a birch at the edge of the drive. From a neighbouring house, he could hear faint music, and somewhere in the fog a door slammed like the crack of a pistol shot. Sidestepping an overturned large-wheeled tricycle, he mounted the single step to the porch and rang the bell.

  Its noise was answered by the shouting of two children who raced to the front door with the accompanying clatter of some sort of popping toy. Hands which could not yet successfully manage the doorknob pounded frantically instead on the wood.

  “Auntie Leen!” Either the boy or the girl was doing the shouting. It was difficult to tell.

  A light went on in the room to the right of the front door, sending an insubstantial oblong of illumination onto the driveway through the mist. A baby began crying. A woman’s voice called out, “Just a moment.”

  “Auntie Leen! Door!”

  “I know, Christian.”

  Above his head, the porchlight went on, and Lynley heard the sound of the deadbolt turning. “Step back, darling,” the woman said as she opened the door.

  The four of them were framed by the architrave, and held in a sideways diffusion of gold light from the sitting room that would have done credit to Rembrandt. Indeed, just for a moment, they looked very much like a painting, the woman in a rose cowl-necked sweater against which she held an infant wrapped in a cranberry shawl while two toddlers clutched the legs of her black wool trousers, a boy with a misshapen bruise beneath his eye and a girl with the handle of some sort of wheeled toy in her hand. This, apparently, was the source of the popping sound Lynley had heard, for the toy was domed in transparent plastic and when the child pushed it along the floor, coloured balls flew up and hit the dome like noisy bubbles.

  “Tommy!” Lady Helen Clyde said. She took a step back from the door and urged the two children to do the same. They moved like a unit. “You’re in Cambridge.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked over his shoulder as if in the expectation of seeing someone with him. “You’re alone?”

  “Alone.”

  “What a surprise. Come in.”

  The house smelled strongly of wet wool, sour milk, talcum powder, and nappies, the odours of children. It was filled with the detritus of children as well, in the form of toys strewn across the sitting room floor, storybooks with torn pages gaping open on the sofa and chairs, discarded jumpers and playsuits heaped on the hearth. A stained blue blanket was bunched onto the seat of a miniature rocking chair, and as Lynley followed Lady Helen through the sitting room into the kitchen at the rear of the house, the little boy ran to this, grabbed it, and clutched it. He peered at Lynley with defiant curiosity.

  “Who’s he, Auntie Leen?” he demanded. His sister remained at Lady Helen’s side, her left hand fixed like an extra appendage to her aunt’s trousers while her right hand made the climb to her face and her thumb found its way into her mouth. “Stop that, Perdita,” the boy said. “Mummy says not to suck. You baby.”

  “Christian,” Lady Helen said in gentle admonition. She guided Perdita to a child-sized table beneath a window where the little girl began to rock in the tiny ladder-back chair, her thumb in her mouth, her large dark eyes fixed with what looked like desperation on her aunt.

  “They’re not dealing with a new baby sister very well,” Lady Helen said quietly to Lynley, shifting the crying infant to her other shoulder. “I was just taking her up to be fed.”

  “How’s Pen doing?”

  Lady Helen glanced at the children. The simple look said it all. No better.

  She said, “Let me take the baby up. I’ll be back in a moment.” She smiled. “Can you manage?”

  “Does he bite?”

  “Only girls.”

  “That’s a comforting thought.”

  She laughed and went back through the sitting room. He heard her footsteps on the stairs and the sound of her voice as she murmured to the baby, gentling its cries.

  He turned back to the children. They were twins, he knew, just over four years old, Christian and Perdita. The girl was older by fifteen minutes, but the boy was larger, more aggressive, and, from what Lynley could see, unlikely to respond to friendly overtures from strangers. That was just as well, considering the times in which they lived. Nonetheless, it didn’t make for a comfortable situation. He had never been at his best with toddlers.

  “Mummy’s sick.” Christian accompanied this announcement by bashing his foot into the door of a kitchen cupboard. One, two, three savage little kicks, whereupon he discarded his blanket on the floor, opened the cupboard, and began pulling out a set of copper-bottomed pots. “The baby made her sick.”

  “That happens sometimes,” Lynley said. “She’ll get better soon.”

  “I don’t care.” Christian pounded a pan against the floor. “Perdita cries. She wet the bed last night.”

  Lynley glanced at the little girl. Curly hair tumbling into her eyes, she rocked without speaking. Her cheeks worked in and out round her thumb. “She didn’t mean to, I imagine.”

  “Daddy won’t come home.” Christian selected a second pan which he banged unmercifully into the first. The noise was teeth-jarring, but it didn’t seem to bother either one of the children. “Daddy doesn’t like the baby. He’s cross with Mummy.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I like Auntie Leen. She smells good.”

  Here, at least, was a subject about which they could converse. “She does indeed.”

  “You like Auntie Leen?”

  “I like her very much.”

  Christian seemed to feel this planted the seeds of friendship between them. He scrambled to his feet and shoved a pot and its cover into Lynley’s thigh.

  “Here,” he said. “You do this way,” and he demonstrated his skill at noise-making by slamming another cover onto a pot of his own.

  “Really, Tommy! Are you encouraging him?” Lady Helen closed the kitchen door behind her and went to rescue her sister’s pots and pans. “Sit with Perdita, Christian. Let me get your tea.”

  “No! I play!”

  “Not at the moment, you don’t.” Lady Helen detached his fingers from the handle of a pot, lifted him up, and carried him to the table. He kicked and squalled. His sister watched him, round-eyed and rocking. “I’ve got to get their tea,” Lady Helen said to Lynley over Christian’s wailing. “He won’t settle till he’s eaten.”

  “I’ve come at a bad time.”

  She sighed. “You have.”

  He felt his spirits sink. She knelt and began gathering the pots from the floor. He joined her. In the unforgiving kitchen light, he could see how pale she was. The natural blush of colour was faded from her skin, and there were faint smudges like newly bruised flesh beneath her eyes. He said, “How much longer will you be here?”

  “Five days. Daphne comes on Saturday for her two weeks. Then Mother for two. Then Pen’s on her own.” She brushed a lock of chestnut hair off her cheek. “I can’t think how she’s going to cope alone, Tommy. This is the worst she’s ever been.”

  “Christian said his father’s not here much.”

  Lady Helen pressed her lips together. “Quite. Well. That’s putting it mildly.”

  He touched her shoulder. “What’s happened to them, Helen?”

  “I don’t know. Some sort of blood score. Neither one of them will talk about it.” She smiled without humour. “The sweet bliss of a marriage made in heaven.”

  Unaccountably stung, he removed his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  His mouth quirked in a smile. He shrugged and put the last pot in its place.

  “Tommy.” He looked her way. “It isn’t any good. You know that, don’t you? You shouldn’t have come.”

  She got to her feet and began removing
food from the refrigerator, carrying four eggs, butter, a wedge of cheese, and two tomatoes to the cooker. She rummaged in a drawer and dragged out a loaf of bread. Then quickly, without speaking, she made the children’s tea while Christian occupied himself by scribbling on the table top with a stubby pencil he’d removed from between the pages of a telephone directory on a jumble-covered work top nearby. Perdita rocked and sucked blissfully with her eyes at half-mast.

  Lynley stood by the kitchen sink, watching Lady Helen. He hadn’t removed his overcoat yet. She hadn’t offered to take it from him.

  What, he wondered, had he hoped to accomplish by coming to her at her sister’s house when she was plagued by worry and worn by the effort of caring for two children and an infant who were not even hers? What had he hoped? That she would fall gratefully into his arms? That she would see him as her blessed salvation? That her face would light with joy and desire? That her defences would crumble and her spirit surrender—finally, irrefutably, once and for all? Havers was right. He was such a fool.

  “I’ll be off, then,” he said.

  She turned from the stove where she was scooping scrambled eggs onto two Beatrix Potter plates. “Back to London?” she asked.

  “No. I’m here on a case.” He told her what little he knew about it, concluding with, “They’ve given me digs at St. Stephen’s.”

  “So you can relive your own undergraduate days?”

  “Bedders and gyp rooms and night keys from the porter.”

  She took the plates to the table along with the toast, grilled tomatoes, and milk. Christian fell to like a victim of famine. Perdita rocked. Lady Helen placed a fork in her hand, touched her dark head, and rubbed her fingers gently against the child’s downy cheek.

  “Helen.” He found some comfort in saying her name. She looked up. “I’ll be off now.”

  “Let me see you out.”

  She followed him back through the sitting room to the front door. It was colder in this part of the house. He looked at the stairway.

  “Shall I say hello to Pen?”

  “I don’t think so, Tommy.” He cleared his throat, nodded. As if she read his expression, she touched his arm lightly. “Please understand.”