For the Sake of Elena

by Elizabeth George

  He took a step towards her, placing his hand on her shuddering back. “Glyn, I’m—”

  “Don’t you touch me!” She rolled away from him, lost her footing, and fell to one knee.

  The flimsy flannel covering on the coffin tore. The wood was thin and vulnerable beneath it.

  Heart pounding in both his chest and his ears, Lynley staggered to a halt within sight of Fen Causeway. He dug in his pocket for his watch. He flipped it open, panting, and checked the time. Seven minutes.

  He shook his head, bent nearly double with his hands on his knees, wheezing like an undiagnosed case of emphysema. Less than a mile’s run and he felt completely done for. Sixteen years of cigarette smoking had taken its toll. Ten months of abstinence was not enough to redeem him.

  He stumbled onto the worn wooden planks that bridged the stream between Robinson Crusoe’s Island and Sheep’s Green. He leaned against the metal rail, threw his head back, and gulped in air like a man saved from drowning. Sweat beaded his face and dampened his jersey. What a wonderful experience it was to run.

  With a grunt, he turned to rest his elbows against the rail, letting his head hang while he caught his breath. Seven minutes, he thought, and not quite a mile. She would have run the same course in not much more than five.

  There could be no doubt about it. She ran daily with her stepmother. She was a long-distance runner. She ran with the Cambridge cross country team. If her calendar was any indication of reality, she’d been running with the University Hare and Hounds as far back as last January and probably before. Depending on the distance she had planned to go that morning, her pacing might have been different. But he couldn’t imagine her taking any longer than ten minutes to run to the island, no matter the course she had intended to follow. That being the case, unless she stopped off somewhere along the route, she would have reached the site of her murder no later than six-twenty-five.

  Respiration finally slowing, he raised his head. Even without the fog which had shrouded most of the region on the previous day, he had to admit that this was an exceptional spot for a murder. Crack willows, alders, and beeches—none of them yet leafless—created an impenetrable screen which shielded the island not only from the causeway bridge which arched above its south end on the way into the town but also from the public footpath that ran along the stream—Sheehan’s bit of a ditch—not ten feet away. Anyone wishing to carry off a crime reaped the benefit of virtual privacy here. And although the occasional pedestrian crossed over the larger bridge from Coe Fen to the island and from there to the footpath, although bicycle riders pedalled across Sheep’s Green or along the river, in the nighttime darkness of half past six on a cold November morning the killer could have been fairly certain that no witness would come upon the beating and strangulation of Elena Weaver. At half past six in the morning no one would even be in the area, except her stepmother. And her presence had been eliminated with a simple call placed on the Ceephone, a call made by someone who presumed on a personal knowledge of Justine to assume that, given the opportunity, she wouldn’t run by herself the next morning.

  Of course, she had run anyway. But it was the killer’s luck that she had chosen a different route. If, indeed, it had been luck at all.

  Lynley pushed himself off the railing and walked across the footbridge onto the island. A tall wooden gate leading to the north end stood open, and Lynley entered to see a workshed with punts piled to one side of it and three old bicycles leaning against its green doors. Inside, bundled in heavy pullovers against the cold, three men were examining a hole in a punt. Fluorescent lights along the ceiling yellowed their skin. The scent of marine varnish made a weight of the air. It wafted from a crowded workbench where two gallon cans stood open with paintbrushes resting across their tops. It spread from two other punts, freshly refurbished, that rested on sawhorses, waiting to dry.

  “Bloomin idiots, they are,” one of the men was saying. “Lookit this bash, will you? It’s carelessness, that is. They none of them have a stitch of respect.”

  One of the other men looked up. Lynley saw that he was young—no more than twenty. His face was spotty, his hair was long, and his earlobe sported a glittering zircon stud. He said, “Help you, mate?”

  The other two ceased working. They were middle-aged and tired-looking. One gave Lynley a once-over look that took in his makeshift running clothes of brown tweed, blue wool, and white leather. The other went to the far end of the shed where he fired up an electric sander and began to savage the side of a canoe.

  Having seen the official crime-scene notice still marking off the south end of the island, Lynley wondered why Sheehan had done nothing about this section. He discovered soon enough when the younger man said:

  “No one shuts us out just ’cause some slag’s in the shit.”

  “Leave off, Derek,” the older man said. “It’s a killing they’re dealing with, not some lady in distress.”

  Derek tossed his head derisively. He pulled a cigarette from his blue jeans and lit one with a kitchen match which he threw to the floor, casually oblivious of the proximity of several cans of paint.

  Identifying himself, Lynley asked if any of them had known the dead girl. Just that she was from the University, they told him. They had no more information than what the police had given them upon their arrival at the workshop yesterday morning. They knew only that a college girl’s body had been found on the south end of the island, with her face mashed up and some string round her neck.

  Had the police conducted a search of this northern area? Lynley wanted to know.

  “Poked their faces everywhere, they did,” Derek replied. “Cut right through the gate before we even got here. Ned was right cheesed off about that all day.” He shouted through the noise that screeched from the sander at the end of the building, “Weren’t you, mate?”

  If he heard him, Ned gave no sign. He was fully intent upon the canoe.

  “You noticed nothing out of the ordinary?” Lynley said.

  Derek blew cigarette smoke from his mouth and sucked it up with his nostrils. He grinned, apparently pleased with the effect. “You mean aside from about two dozen coppers crawling round through the bushes trying to pin what they can on blokes like us?”

  “How’s that?” Lynley asked.

  “It’s the regular story. Some college tart got bagged. The coppers are looking to nab a local because if the University nits don’t like the nature of the collar, all hell’s go’n to break loose. Just ask Bill here how it works.”

  Bill didn’t appear to be willing to hold forth on this particular topic. He busied himself at the workbench where he picked up a hacksaw and went after a narrow piece of wood being held steady by an old red vice.

  Derek said, “His boy works on the local rag, he does. Was following a story ’bout some bloke who supposably offed himself last spring. Uni didn’t like the way the story was developing and bang on the button they tried to quash it straight away. That’s the way it runs round here, mister.” Derek stabbed a dirty thumb in the direction of the centre of town. “Uni like the locals to toe the Uni line.”

  “Isn’t that sort of thing dead and gone?” Lynley asked. “I mean the town-and-gown strife.”

  Bill finally spoke. “Depends on who you ask.”

  Derek added, “Yeah. It’s dead and gone, all right, when you’re talking with the toffs down river. They don’t see trouble till it smacks them in the face. But it’s a bit different, isn’t it, when you’re rubbing your elbows with the likes of us.”

  Lynley gave thought to Derek’s words as he walked back to the south end of the island and ducked under the established police line. How often had he heard variations on that theme espoused religiously over the last few years? We’ve no class system any longer, it’s dead and gone. It was always stated with well-meaning sincerity by someone whose career, whose background, or whose money effectively blinded him to the reality of life. While all the time those without brilliant careers, those without family trees
whose roots plunged deeply into British soil, those without access to ready money or even the hope of saving a few pounds from their weekly pay, those were the people who recognised the insidious social strata of a society that claimed no strata existed at the very same moment as it labelled a man from the sound of his voice.

  The University would probably be the first to deny the existence of barriers between gown and town. And why would they not? For those who are the primary architects of ramparts rarely, if ever, feel constricted by their presence.

  Still, he had difficulty attributing Elena Weaver’s death to the resurrection of a social dispute. Had a local been involved in the killing, his instincts told him that the very same local would have been involved with Elena. But no local had known her from what he had been able to ascertain. And following any pathway that led towards town-and-gown promised, he felt certain, to be a search for nothing.

  He walked along the trail of boards which the Cambridge police had laid down from the island’s wrought iron gate to the site of the murder. Everything that constituted potential evidence had been swept up and carted away by the crime-scene team. Only a roughly shaped fire ring remained, half-buried in front of a fallen branch. He went to this and sat.

  Whatever difficulties existed within the political arena of Cambridge Constabulary’s forensic department, the crime-scene team had done their job well. The ashes from the fire ring had been sifted through. It looked as if some of them had even been removed.

  Next to the branch, he saw the impression of a bottle in the damp earth and he remembered the list of items which Sarah Gordon had said she had seen. He wondered about this, picturing a killer clever enough to use an unopened wine bottle, to dump the wine in the river afterwards, to wash the bottle inside and out, to tamp it into the earth so that it looked like part of the general rubbish in the area. Smeared with mud, it would appear to have been there for weeks. Moisture inside would be attributed to the damp. Filled with wine, it suited the still-limited description of the weapon which had been used to beat the girl. But if that was the case, how on earth were they to trace a bottle of wine in a city where students kept supplies of drink in their very own rooms?

  He shoved himself off the branch and walked to the clearing where the body had been hidden. Nothing was left to indicate that yesterday morning a pile of leaves had camouflaged a killing. Bladder campion, English ivy, nettles, and wild strawberries remained untrampled, despite the fact that every leaf on every plant had been scrutinised and evaluated by people trained to ferret out the truth. He moved to the river and gazed across the wide expanse of marshy land that constituted Coe Fen along whose far edge the beige rise of the buildings of Peterhouse lay. He studied them, admitting the fact that he could see them clearly, admitting that at this distance their lights—especially the light from one building’s lantern cupola—would probably glow visibly through all but the most impenetrable fog. He admitted also that he was checking out Sarah Gordon’s story. He admitted also that he could not have said why.

  He began to turn from the river and caught on the air the unmistakable, sour smell of human vomit, just a solitary whiff of it like the breath of an illness that was passing by. He tracked this to its source on the bank, a coagulating pool of greenish brown slop. It was lumpy and foul, with the tracks and the peck-marks of birds sinking into it. As he bent to examine it, he could hear Sergeant Havers’ laconic comment: Her neighbours cleared her, Inspector, her story checks out, but you can always ask her what she had for brekkie and cart this in to forensic for a check-out as well.

  Perhaps, he thought, that was the problem he was having with Sarah Gordon. Everything about her story checked out completely. There wasn’t a hole anywhere.

  Why do you want a hole? Havers would have asked. Your job isn’t to want holes. Your job is to find them. And when you can’t find them, you just move on.

  He decided to do so, following the trail of boards back the way he had come, leaving the island. He walked up the rise in the path that led up to the causeway bridge where a gate gave way to the pavement and the street. Directly across from it was a similar gate, and he went to see what lay beyond it.

  A morning jogger, he realised, coming along the river from the direction of St. Stephen’s would have three options upon reaching Fen Causeway. A turn to the left and she would run past the Department of Engineering in the direction of Parker’s Piece and the Cambridge Police Station. A turn to the right and she would head towards Newnham Road and, if she persisted far enough, to Barton beyond it. Or, he now saw, she could proceed straight ahead, crossing the street, ducking through this second gate, and continuing south along the river. Whoever killed her, he realised, must have not only known her route but also known her options. Whoever killed her, he realised, had known in advance that the only certain chance of catching her was at Crusoe’s Island.

  He was feeling the cold beginning to seep through his clothes and he headed back the way he had come, maintaining a slower pace this time, one designed merely to keep himself warm. As he made the final turn from Senate House Passage where Senate House itself and the outer walls of Gonville and Caius College were acting like a refrigerated wind tunnel, he saw Sergeant Havers emerging from the gatehouse of St. Stephen’s, looking dwarfed by its turrets and its heraldic carving of yales supporting the founder’s coat of arms.

  She gave his appearance a poker-faced scrutiny. “Going undercover, Inspector?”

  He joined her. “Don’t I blend in with the environment?”

  “You’re a regular bit of camouflage.”

  “Your sincerity overwhelms me.” He explained what he had been doing, ignoring the cocked and leery eyebrow which she raised at his references to Sarah Gordon’s corroborative vomit, and finishing with, “I’d say Elena ran the course in about five minutes, Havers. But if she was intent on having a fairly long workout, then she may have paced herself. So ten at the extreme.”

  Havers nodded. She squinted down the lane in the direction of King’s College, saying, “If the porter really saw her leave round six-fifteen—”

  “And I think we can depend upon that.”

  “—then she got to the island far in advance of Sarah Gordon. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Unless she stopped off somewhere en route.”

  “Where?”

  “Adam Jenn said his digs are by Little St. Mary’s. That’s less than a block from part of Elena’s run.”

  “Are you saying she stopped off for a morning cuppa?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. But if Adam was looking for her yesterday morning, he wouldn’t have had much trouble finding her, would he?”

  They crossed over to Ivy Court, wound their way through the ubiquitous rows of bicycles, and headed towards O staircase. “I need a shower,” Lynley said.

  “As long as I don’t have to scrub your back.”

  When he returned from the shower, he found her at his desk, perusing the notes he had written on the previous night. She’d made herself at home, scattering her belongings across the room, one scarf on the bed, another draped across the armchair, her coat on the floor. Her shoulder bag gaped upon the desk top, spilling out pencils, chequebook, a plastic comb with missing teeth, and an orange lapel button printed with the message Chicken Little Was Right. Somewhere in this wing of the building, she’d managed to find a stocked gyp room, for she’d made a pot of tea, some of which she was pouring into a gold-rimmed cup.

  “I see you’ve brought out the best china,” he said, towelling off his hair.

  She tapped her finger against it. The sound snapped sharply rather than sang. “Plastic,” she said. “Can your lips endure the insult?”

  “They’ll soldier through.”

  “Good.” She poured a cup for him. “There was milk as well, but there were white globs floating in it so I left its future to science.” She dropped in two sugar cubes, stirred the brew with one of her pencils, and handed him the cup. “And would you please put on a shirt, Inspector? You�
�ve got lovely pectorals, but I tend to go light-headed at the sight of a man’s chest.”

  He obliged her by completing the dressing which he’d begun in the icy bathroom down the corridor. He took his tea to the armchair where he saw to his shoes.

  “What do you have?” he asked her.

  She pushed his notebook to one side and swivelled the desk chair so that she was facing him. She rested her right ankle on her left knee, which gave him his first glimpse of her socks. They were red.

  “We’ve got fibres,” she said, “on both armpits of her track jacket. Cotton, polyester, and rayon.”

  “They could have come from something in her cupboard.”

  “Right. Yes. They’re checking for a match.”

  “So we’re wide open there.”

  “No. Not exactly.” He saw she was holding back a satisfied smile. “The fibres were black.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. My guess is that he dragged her by the armpits onto the island and left the fibres that way.”

  He swam by that hook of potential culpability. “What about the weapon? Have they made any headway with what was used to beat her?”

  “They keep coming up with the same description. It’s smooth, it’s heavy, and it left no trace deposit on the body. The only change in what we knew before is that they’ve moved off calling it your standard blunt object. They’ve deleted the adjectives, but they’re looking like the dickens for some others. Sheehan was talking about bringing in help to have a go with the body because apparently his two pathologists have a history of being incapable of coming to a clear conclusion—not to mention an agreement—on anything.”

  “He indicated there might be trouble with forensic,” Lynley said. He thought about the weapon, pondered the location, and said, “Wood seems possible, doesn’t it, Havers?”

  As usual, she was with him. “An oar, you mean? A paddle?”

  “That would be my guess.”