For the Sake of Elena

by Elizabeth George

  “Oh God.”

  “In the bathroom upstairs.”

  “She followed me up. She came in. She..” He rubbed his hand along his jawline. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved that day, for the stubble was thick, like a bruise on his skin.

  “Did you take off all your clothes?”

  “Christ, Justine.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. We stood against the wall. I lifted her up. She wanted it that way.”

  “I see.”

  “All right. I wanted it as well. Against the wall. Just like that.”

  “Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

  “Yes. She told me.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What did you plan to do about it?”

  He’d been looking at the river, but now he turned back to her. “I planned to marry her,” he said.

  It wasn’t the answer she had come prepared to hear, although the more she thought about it, the less it surprised her. It did leave, however, a slight problem unresolved.

  “Victor,” she said, “where was your wife Sunday night? What was Rowena doing while you were having Elena?”

  11

  Lynley was relieved to find Gareth Randolph in the offices of DeaStu, Cambridge University’s odd acronym for the Deaf Students’ Union. He had tried his room at Queens’ College first, only to be directed to Fenners, the central gymnasium for University sports where the boxing team worked out for two hours each day. There, however, in the smaller of the two gyms where he was assailed by the eye-prickling smells of sweat, damp leather, athletic tape, chalk, and unwashed workout clothes, Lynley had questioned a lorry-sized heavyweight who had pointed his side-of-beef fist in the direction of the exit and said that the Bant—apparently a reference to Gareth’s bantam-weight—was sitting by the phones at DeaStu, hoping for a call about the bird who got killed.

  “She was his woman,” the heavyweight said. “He’s taking it hard.” And he drove his fists like battering rams into the punching bag which hung from the ceiling, putting his shoulders into each blow with such force that it seemed as if the floor shook beneath him.

  Lynley wondered if Gareth Randolph was as powerful a fighter in his own weight class. He considered this question on the way to DeaStu. Anthony Weaver had made allegations about the boy that he could not avoid coupling with Havers’ report from the Cambridge police: Whatever Elena had been beaten with, it had left no trace.

  DeaStu was housed in the basement of the Peterhouse Library not far from the University Graduate Centre, just at the bottom of Little St. Mary’s Lane, little more than two blocks from Queens’ College where Gareth Randolph lived. Its offices were tucked at the end of a low-ceilinged corridor illuminated by bright round globes of light. They had two means of access, one through the Lubbock Room on the ground floor of the library, and the other directly from the street at the rear of the building, not fifty yards away from the Mill Lane footbridge across which Elena Weaver had to have run on the morning of her death. The main office door of opaque glass bore the words Deaf Students of Cambridge University and beneath that the less formal DeaStu was superimposed over two hands crossed, fingers extended, palms outward.

  Lynley had given lengthy thought to how he was going to communicate with Gareth Randolph. He had played round with the idea of calling Superintendent Sheehan to see if he had an interpreter associated with the Cambridge police. He’d never spoken with anyone deaf before, and from what he had gathered over the last twenty-four hours, Gareth Randolph did not have Elena Weaver’s facility for reading lips. Nor did he have her spoken language.

  Once inside the office, however, he saw that things would take care of themselves. For talking to a woman who sat behind a desk piled with pamphlets, papers, and books was a knobby-ankled, bespectacled girl with her hair in plaits and a pencil stuck behind her ear. As she chatted and laughed, she was signing simultaneously. She also turned in his direction at the sound of the door opening. Here, Lynley thought, would be his interpreter.

  “Gareth Randolph?” the woman behind the desk said in answer to Lynley’s question and after an inspection of his warrant card. “He’s just in the conference room. Bernadette, will you…?” And then to Lynley, “I assume you don’t sign, Inspector.”

  “I don’t.”

  Bernadette adjusted the pencil more firmly behind her ear, grinned sheepishly at this momentary display of self-importance, and said, “Right. Come along with me, Inspector. We’ll see what’s what.”

  She led him back the way he had come and then down a short corridor whose ceiling was lined with pipes painted white. She said, “Gareth’s been here most of the day. He’s not doing very well.”

  “Because of the murder?”

  “He had a thing for Elena. Everyone knew it.”

  “Did you know Elena yourself?”

  “Just to see her. The others”—with a jutting out of her elbows to encompass the area and presumably the membership of DeaStu—“they sometimes like to have an interpreter go with them to their lectures just to make sure they don’t miss anything important. That’s my function, by the way. Interpreting. I make extra money to see me through the term that way. I get to hear some pretty decent lectures as well. I did a special Stephen Hawking lecture last week. What a job that was trying to sign. Astrophysical whatevers. It was like a foreign language.”

  “I can well imagine.”

  “The lecture hall was so quiet you’d have thought God was putting in an appearance. And after it was over, everyone stood and applauded and—” She rubbed the side of her nose with her index finger. “He’s rather special. I quite felt like crying.”

  Lynley smiled, liking her. “But you never interpreted for Elena Weaver?”

  “She didn’t use an interpreter. I don’t think she liked to.”

  “She wanted people to think she could hear?”

  “Not so much that,” Bernadette said. “I think she was proud that she could read lips. It’s difficult to do, especially if someone’s born deaf. My mum and dad—they’re both deaf, you see—they never learned to read much beyond ‘three quid please’ and ‘ta.’ But Elena was amazing.”

  “How involved was she with the Deaf Students Union?”

  Bernadette wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. “I couldn’t really say. Gareth’ll be able to tell you, though. He’s in here.”

  She led him into a conference room that was roughly the size of an academic classroom. It contained little more than a large, rectangular table covered by green linen. At this, a young man was sitting, bent over a notebook. Lank hair the colour of old wet straw fell across his wide brow and into his eyes. As he wrote, he paused to chew at the fingernails of his left hand.

  Bernadette said, “Wait a sec,” and from the door she flashed the lights off and on.

  Gareth Randolph looked up. He got slowly to his feet, and as he did so, he gathered up from the table a large pile of used tissues, crushing them into a wad in his fist. He was a tall boy, Lynley saw, with a pallid complexion against which the scattered pits of old acne scars stood out in crimson. He wore typical student garb: blue jeans and a sweatshirt onto which had been stencilled the words What’s your sign? superimposed over two hands making a gesture which Lynley couldn’t interpret.

  The boy said nothing at all until Bernadette spoke. And even then, since his eyes were on Lynley, he made a rough gesture so that Bernadette had to repeat her first remark.

  “This is Inspector Lynley from New Scotland Yard,” she said a second time. Her hands fluttered like quick, pale birds just below her face. “He’s come to talk to you about Elena Weaver.”

  The boy’s eyes went back to Lynley. He looked him over from head to toe. He replied, hands chopping the air, and Bernadette interpreted simultaneously. “Not in here.”

  “Fine,” Lynley said. “Wherever he likes.”

  Bernadette’s hands flew over Lynley’s words, but as they did she continued with, “Speak to Gareth di
rectly, Inspector. Call him you, not him. Else it’s quite dehumanising.”

  Gareth read and smiled. His gestures in response to Bernadette’s were fluid. She laughed.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, Ta, Bernie. We’ll make you a deaf woman yet.”

  Gareth led them out of the conference room and back down the hall to an unventilated office made overly warm by a wheezing radiator. Inside, there was not much space for more than a desk, metal bookshelves on the walls, three plastic chairs, and a separate birch veneer table on which stood a Ceephone identical to those that Lynley had seen elsewhere.

  Lynley realised with his first question that he would be at a disadvantage in this sort of interview. Since Gareth watched Bernadette’s hands in order to read Lynley’s words, there would not be an opportunity to catch a revealing if fleeting expression quickly veiled in his eyes should a question take him unaware. Additionally, there would be nothing to read in his voice, in his tone, in what he stressed or what he deliberately left unaccentuated. Gareth had the advantage of the silence that defined his world. Lynley wondered how, and if, he would use it.

  “I’ve been hearing a great deal about your relationship with Elena Weaver,” Lynley said. “Dr. Cuff from St. Stephen’s apparently brought you together.”

  “For her own good,” Gareth replied, the hands again sharp and staccato in the air. “To help her. Maybe save her.”

  “Through DeaStu?”

  “Elena wasn’t deaf. That was the problem. She could have been, but she wasn’t. They wouldn’t allow it.”

  Lynley frowned. “What do you mean? Everyone’s said—”

  Gareth scowled and grabbed a piece of paper. With a green felt-tip pen he scrawled out two words: Deaf and deaf. He drew three heavy lines under the upper case D and shoved the paper across the desk.

  Bernadette spoke as Lynley looked at the two words. Her hands included Gareth in the conversation. “What he means, Inspector, is that Elena was deaf with a lower case d. She was disabled. Everyone else round here—Gareth especially—is Deaf with an upper case D.”

  “D for different?” Lynley asked, thinking how this assessment went legions to support Justine Weaver’s words to him that day.

  Gareth’s hands took over. “Different, yes. How could we not be different? We live without sound. But it’s more than that. Being Deaf is a culture. Being deaf is a handicap. Elena was deaf.”

  Lynley pointed to the first of the two words. “But you wanted her to be Deaf, like you?”

  “Wouldn’t you want a friend to run instead of crawl?”

  “I’m not sure I follow the analogy.”

  Gareth shoved his chair backwards. It screeched against the linoleum floor. He went to the bookshelf and pulled down two large leather-bound albums. He dropped them onto the desk. Lynley saw that across each was imprinted the acronym DeaStu with the year beneath it.

  “This is Deaf.” Gareth resumed his seat.

  Lynley opened one of the albums at random. It appeared to be a record of the activities in which the deaf students had engaged during the previous year. Each term had its own identifying page on which Michaelmas, Lent, or Easter had been written in fine calligraphy.

  The record consisted of both written documents and photographs. It encompassed everything from DeaStu’s American football team whose plays were called by students on the sidelines who beat an enormous drum to signal the team via vibration-code, to dances held with the aid of powerful speakers which conveyed the rhythm of the music in much the same way, to picnics and meetings in which dozens of hands moved at once and dozens of faces lit with animation.

  Bernadette said over Lynley’s shoulder, “That’s called wind-milling, Inspector.”

  “What?”

  “When everyone signs at once like that. All their hands are going. Like windmills.”

  Lynley continued through the book. He saw three rowing teams whose strokes were orchestrated by coxswains utilising small red flags; a ten-member percussion group who used the movement of an oversized metronome to keep their pulsating rhythm together; grinning men and women in camouflage setting out with banners that read DeaStu Search and Pellet; a group of flamenco dancers; another of gymnasts. And in every photograph, participants in an activity were surrounded and supported by people whose hands spoke the language of commonality. Lynley returned the album.

  “It’s quite a group,” he said.

  “It’s not a group. It’s a life.” Gareth replaced the albums. “Deaf is a culture.”

  “Did Elena want to be Deaf?”

  “She didn’t know what Deaf was until she came to DeaStu. She was taught to think that deaf meant disabled.”

  “That’s not the impression I’ve been getting,” Lynley said. “From what I understand, her parents did everything possible to allow her to fit into a hearing world. They taught her to read lips. They taught her to speak. It seems to me that the last thing they thought was that deaf meant disabled, especially in her case.”

  Gareth’s nostrils flared. He said, “Fug at sht, fug ’t,” and began to sign with hands that pounded through his words.

  “There is no fitting into a hearing world. There’s only bringing the hearing world to us. Make them see us as people as good as they are. But her father wanted her to play at hearing. Read lips like a pretty girl. Talk like a pretty girl.”

  “That can’t be a crime. It is, after all, a hearing world that we live in.”

  “A hearing world you live in. The rest of us without sound get on fine. We don’t want your hearing. But you can’t believe that, can you, because you think you’re special instead of just different.”

  Again, it was only a slight variation on the theme Justine Weaver had introduced. The deaf weren’t normal. But then, for God’s sake, neither were the hearing most of the time.

  Gareth was continuing. “We are her people. DeaStu. Here. We can support. We can understand. But he didn’t want that. He didn’t want her to know us.”

  “Her father?”

  “He wanted to make believe she could hear.”

  “How did she feel about that?”

  “How would you feel if people wanted you to play at being something you weren’t?”

  Lynley repeated his earlier question. “Did she want to be Deaf?”

  “She didn’t know—”

  “I understand that she didn’t know what it meant at first, that she had no way of understanding the culture. But once she did know, did she want to be Deaf?”

  “She would have wanted it. Eventually.”

  It was a telling response. The uninformed, once informed, had not become an adherent to the cause. “So she involved herself with DeaStu solely because Dr. Cuff insisted. Because it was the only way to avoid being sent down.”

  “At first that was why. But then she came to meetings, to dances. She was getting to know people.”

  “Was she getting to know you?”

  Gareth yanked open the centre drawer of the desk. He took out a pack of gum and unwrapped a stick. Bernadette began to reach forward to get his attention, but Lynley stopped her, saying, “He’ll look up in a moment.” Gareth let the moment drag on, but Lynley felt it was probably harder for the boy to keep his eyes fixed upon and his fingers working over the silver wrapper of the Juicy Fruit than it was for himself to wait him out. When at last he looked up, Lynley said,

  “Elena Weaver was eight weeks pregnant.”

  Bernadette cleared her throat. She said, “My goodness.” Then, “Sorry.” And her hands conveyed the information.

  Gareth’s eyes went to Lynley and then beyond him to the closed door of the office. He chewed his gum with what looked like deliberate slowness. Its scent was liquid sugar in the air.

  When he replied, his hands moved as slowly as his jaws. “I didn’t know that.”

  “You weren’t her lover?”

  He shook his head.

  “According to her stepmother, she’d been seeing someone regularly sinc
e December of last year. Her calendar indicates that with a symbol. A fish. That wasn’t you? You would have first been introduced to her round then, wouldn’t you?”

  “I saw her. I knew her. It was what Dr. Cuff wanted. But I wasn’t her lover.”

  “A bloke at Fenners called her your woman.”

  Gareth took a second stick of gum, unwrapped it, rolled it into a tube, popped it into his mouth.

  “Did you love her?”

  Again, his eyes dropped. Lynley thought of the wad of tissues in the conference room. He looked once again at the boy’s pallid face. He said, “You don’t mourn someone you don’t love, Gareth,” even though the boy’s attention was not on Bernadette’s hands.

  Bernadette said, “He wanted to marry her, Inspector. I know that because he told me once. And he—”

  Perhaps sensing the conversation, Gareth looked up. His hands flashed quickly.

  “I was telling him the truth,” Bernadette said. “I said you wanted to marry her. He knows you loved her, Gareth. It’s completely obvious.”

  “Past. Loved.” Gareth’s fists were on his chest more like a punch than a sign. “It was over.”

  “When did it end?”

  “She didn’t fancy me.”

  “That’s not really an answer.”

  “She fancied someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. I thought we were together. And we weren’t. That was it.”

  “When did she make this clear to you? Recently, Gareth?”

  He looked sullen. “Don’t remember.”

  “Sunday night? Is that why you were arguing with her?”

  “Oh, dear,” Bernadette murmured, although she cooperatively continued to sign.

  “I didn’t know she was pregnant. She didn’t tell me that.”

  “But as to the other. The man she loved. She told you about that. That was Sunday night, wasn’t it?”

  Bernadette said, “Oh, Inspector, you can’t really think that Gareth had anything to do—”

  Gareth lunged across the desk and grabbed Bernadette’s hands. Then he jerked out a few signs.