For the Sake of Elena
Page 44
“What?”
She nodded towards one of the speakers. “That,” she said. “You know. That.”
“The music?”
“Wha’s it like?”
Sarah dropped her gaze from the girl’s earnest eyes and looked at her hands as the haunting mystery of Vollenweider’s electric harp and Moog synthesiser challenged her to answer, the music rising and falling, each note like a crystal. She thought about how to reply for such a length of time that Elena finally said, “Sorry. I jus’ thought—”
Sarah raised her head quickly, saw the girl’s distress, and realised that Elena thought she herself was embarrassed by being accosted with an unthinking act of mentioning a disability, as if Elena had asked her to look upon a disfigurement she’d prefer to avoid seeing. She said, “Oh no. It’s not that, Elena. I was trying to decide…Here. Come with me.” And she took her first to stand by the speaker, turning the sound up full volume. She placed her hand against it. Elena smiled.
“Percussion,” Sarah said. “Those are the drums. And the bass. The low notes. You can feel them, can’t you?” When the girl nodded, pulling on her lower lip with her chipped front teeth, Sarah looked round the room for something else. She found it in the soft camel hairs of dry fine brushes, the cool sharp metal of a clean pallet knife, the smooth cold glass of turpentine in a jar.
“All right,” she said. “Here. This is what it sounds like.”
As the music changed, shifted, and swelled, she played it against the girl’s inner arm where the flesh was tender and most sensitive to touch. “Electric harp,” she said, and with the pallet knife she tapped the light pattern of notes against her skin. “And now. A flute.” This was the brush, in a wavering dance. “And this. The background, Elena. It’s synthetic, you see. He’s not using an instrument. It’s a machine that makes musical sounds. Like this. Just one note now while all the rest are playing,” and she rolled the jar smoothly in one long line.
“All at once it happens?” Elena asked.
“Yes. All at once.” She gave the girl the pallet knife. She herself used the brush and the jar. And as the record continued to play, they made the music together. While all the time above their heads on a shelf not five feet away sat the muller that Sarah would use to destroy her.
Now on her bed in the dim afternoon light, Sarah clutched the blanket and tried to stop quaking. There had been no other alternative, she thought. There was no other way that he might learn to face the truth.
But she herself had to live with the horror of it all for the rest of her life. She had liked the girl.
She’d moved beyond sorrow eight months ago, into a limbo in which nothing could touch her. So that when she heard the car on the drive, Flame’s answering bark, and the footsteps approaching, she felt nothing at all.
“Okay, I accept the fact that the muller looks like a go for the weapon,” Havers said as they watched the panda car pull away from the kerb, taking Lady Helen and her sister home. “But we know that Elena was dead round half past six, Inspector. At least, she was dead round half past six if we can trust what Rosalyn Simpson said, and I don’t know about you, but I think we can. And even if Rosalyn wasn’t definite about the time she reached the island, she knows for certain that she got back to her room by half past seven. So if she did make an error, it’s probably in the other direction, putting the killing earlier, not later. And if Sarah Gordon—whose account is supported by two of her neighbours, mind you—didn’t leave her house until just before seven…” She squirmed in her seat to face Lynley. “Tell me. How was she in two places at once, at home having her Wheetabix in Grantchester at the same time as she was on Crusoe’s Island?”
Lynley guided the Bentley out of the car park and slid it into the spotty traffic heading southeast on Parkside. “You’re assuming that, when her neighbours saw her leaving at seven, it was the first time she left that morning,” he said. “Which is exactly what she wanted us to assume, exactly what she wanted her neighbours to assume. But by her own account, she was up that morning not long after five—and she would have had to tell the truth about that because one of the very same neighbours who saw her leaving at seven might well have seen her lights on earlier and told us about that. So I think it’s safe to conclude that she had plenty of time to make another, earlier trip to Cambridge.”
“But why go a second time? If she wanted to play discoverer of the body once Rosalyn saw her, why not just head out to the police station right then?”
“She couldn’t,” Lynley said. “She had no real choice in the matter. She had to change her clothes.”
Havers stared at him blankly. “Right. Well. I’m a real looby, then. What have clothes got to do with it?”
“Blood,” St. James responded.
Lynley nodded at his friend in the rearview mirror before saying to Havers, “She could hardly go dashing into the police station to report having found a body if she was wearing a tracksuit whose jacket front was spotted with the victim’s blood.”
“Then why even go to the police station at all?”
“She had to place herself at the crime scene just in case—when the news broke about Elena Weaver’s death—Rosalyn Simpson remembered what she had seen and went to the police. As you said yourself, she had to play discoverer of the body. So that even if Rosalyn had been able to give the police an accurate description of the woman she’d seen that morning, even if the description led the local CID to Sarah Gordon—as it might have done once Anthony Weaver got wind of it—why on earth would anyone conclude that she had been to the island twice? Why on earth would anyone conclude that she’d kill a girl, go home, change her clothes, and return?”
“Right, sir. So why the hell did she?”
“To hedge her bets,” St. James said. “In case Rosalyn got to the police before she got to Rosalyn.”
“If she was wearing different clothes from those Rosalyn had seen the killer wear,” Lynley went on, “and if one or more of her neighbours could verify that she hadn’t left her house till seven, why would anyone think she was the killer of a girl who’d died round a half hour earlier?”
“But Rosalyn said that the woman she saw had light hair, sir. It was practically the only thing she remembered.”
“Quite. A scarf, a cap, a wig.”
“Why bother with that?”
“So that Elena would think she was seeing Justine.” Lynley circled through the roundabout at Lensfield Road before he continued. “Time has been the issue that we’ve stumbled over from the first, Sergeant. Because of it, we’ve spent two days following an assortment of blind leads about sexual harassment, pregnancy, unrequited love, jealousy, and illicit affairs when we should have recognised the single point of similarity which everyone shares, both of the victims and every last suspect. All of them can run.”
“But everyone can run.” And, with an apologetic glance at St. James who, in his best moments, could only manage a moderate hobble, “I mean, generally speaking.”
Lynley nodded grimly. “That’s exactly my point. Generally speaking.”
Havers gave a sigh of frustration. “I’m getting flummoxed. I see means. I see opportunity. But I don’t see motive. It seems to me that if anyone was going to get beat up and strangled by anyone else in this case—and if Sarah Gordon did it—it doesn’t make sense that the victim was Elena when our Justine is the far better bet. Look at the facts. Not bothering to consider that it probably took Sarah half an age to paint it in the first place, that portrait was probably worth hundreds of pounds—possibly more, although what I don’t know about the value of art could fill a good-sized library—and Justine destroyed it. Having a bit of a tantrum, some real splatter and slash on an original oil sounds like a motive for something, if you ask me. And, mind you, it wasn’t a bit of dabbling by her husband that she was venting her feelings on, but the real thing. By a real artist with a real reputation. Even Weaver himself couldn’t have been too chuffed by that. As a matter of fact, he might have been the
one to do the killing once he saw what she’d done to the picture. So why bag Elena?” Her voice became thoughtful. “Unless, of course, Justine didn’t do the slashing at all. Unless Elena herself…Is that what you’re thinking, Inspector?”
Lynley didn’t reply. Instead, just before they reached the bridge that crossed the river on Fen Causeway, he pulled off the road and onto the pavement. Leaving the motor running, he turned to the others and said, “I’ll just be a moment.” Ten steps from the Bentley, he was enveloped by the fog.
He didn’t cross the street to look at the island for a third time. He knew it had no further secrets to reveal. From the causeway, he knew, he would see the shapes of trees, the mist-washed form of the footbridge that crossed the river, and perhaps the etching of birds on the water. He would see Coe Fen as an opaque screen of grey. And that would be all. If the lights of Peterhouse managed to cut through the vast and tenebrous expanse of fog on this day, they would be mere pinpricks, less substantial than stars. Even Whistler, he thought, would have found it a challenge.
For the second time, he walked to the end of the causeway bridge where the iron gate stood. And for the second time, he made note of the fact that anyone running along the lower river from Queens’—or from 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. A turn to the right and she would head towards Newnham Road. Or, as he had seen for himself on Tuesday afternoon, she could proceed straight ahead, crossing the street to where he now stood, ducking through the gate, and continuing south along the upper river.
What he had failed to consider on Tuesday afternoon was that someone running into the city from the opposite direction would have had three options as well. What he had failed to consider on Tuesday afternoon was that someone could have run in the opposite direction in the first place, starting from the upper rather than the lower river, and hence following the upper rather than the lower path on which Elena Weaver had been running on the morning of her death. He observed this upper path now, noting how it disappeared into the fog like a thin line of pencil. As on Monday, visibility was poor—perhaps less than twenty feet—but the river and hence the path next to it flowed due north at this particular section, with scarcely a bend or a wrinkle to cause a walker or a runner—either of them familiar with the lay of the land—any need for marked hesitation.
A bicycle came wheeling towards him out of the mist, a headlamp affixed to the ten-speed’s handlebars providing a weak beam of light not much wider than an index finger. When the rider—a young, bearded man wearing a rakish trilby as an odd accent piece to his faded jeans and black oilskin jacket—dismounted to open the gate, Lynley spoke to him.
“Where does this path lead?”
Making an adjustment to his hat, the young man looked back over his shoulder as if a perusal of the path would help him answer the question. Thoughtfully, he pulled on the end of his beard. “Along the river for a bit.”
“How far?”
“Couldn’t say for certain. I always pick it up round Newnham Driftway. I’ve never headed in the other direction.”
“Does it go to Grantchester?”
“This path? No, mate. It doesn’t go there.”
“Blast.” Lynley frowned at the river, realising that he might have to reassess what he had thought of as a plausible explanation for how Elena Weaver’s death had been orchestrated on Monday morning.
“But you can get there from here if you’ve a mind for the walk,” the young man said, perhaps anticipating that Lynley was anxious for a fog-dampened stroll. He slapped a spattering of mud from his jeans and waved his arm vaguely from south to southwest. “Down the river path there’s a car park, just past Lammas Land. If you cut through there and nip down Eitsley Ave, there’s a public footpath that goes through the fields. It’s posted well enough, and it’ll take you straight to Grantchester. Although—” He eyed Lynley’s fine overcoat and his hand-tooled Lobbs shoes. “I don’t know if I’d try it in the fog if you don’t know the route. You could end up doing nothing but thrashing round in the mud.”
Lynley found his excitement quickening as the young man spoke. The facts were going to support him after all. “How far is it?” he asked.
“The car park’s under half a mile, I should guess.”
“I mean Grantchester itself. If you go through the fields.”
“Mile and a half, mile and three-quarters. No more than that.”
Lynley looked back at the path, at the untroubled surface of the sluggish river. Timing, he thought. It all centred round timing. He returned to the car.
“Well?” Havers said.
“She wouldn’t have driven her car on the first trip,” Lynley said. “She couldn’t have taken the risk that one of her neighbours might see her leaving—as two did later in the morning—or that anyone might see it parked near the island.”
Havers looked in the direction from which he’d just come. “So she walked in on a footpath. But she must have had to run like the devil all the way back.”
He reached for his pocket watch and unhooked it from his waistcoat. “Who was it—Mrs. Stamford?—who said she was in a tearing hurry when she left at seven? At least now we know why. She had to find the body before anyone else did.” He flipped the watch open and handed it to Havers. “Time the drive to Grantchester, Sergeant,” he said.
He slid the Bentley into the traffic which, although slow-moving, was sparse at this time of afternoon. They descended the gentle slope of the causeway and, after one quick pause when an oncoming car veered into their lane in order to avoid hitting a postal van that was parked half on the pavement with its hazard lights blinking, they made their way into the Newnham Road roundabout. From there traffic diminished noticeably, and although the fog was still thick—swirling round the Granta King pub and a small Thai restaurant as if it were being stage-managed to do so—Lynley was able to increase his speed marginally.
“Time?” he asked.
“Thirty-two seconds so far.” She pivoted in her seat so that she faced him again, the watch still in her hand. “But she’s not a runner, sir. Not like the rest of them.”
“Which is why it took her nearly thirty minutes to get home, change her clothes, load her car, and get back to Cambridge. It’s little more than a mile and a half over the field to Grantchester,” he said. “A distance runner could have done the same course in less than ten minutes. And had Sarah Gordon been a runner, Georgina Higgins-Hart wouldn’t have needed to die.”
“Because she would have got home, changed clothes, and returned in good enough time that even if Rosalyn described her accurately, she could have said that she was stumbling off the island after having discovered the body?”
“Right.” He drove on.
She examined the watch. “Fifty-two seconds.”
They drove along the west side of Lammas Land, a broad green of picnic tables and play areas that sprawled for three-quarters of the length of Newnham Road. They swung through the dogleg where Newnham became Barton and spun past a line of dismal pensioners’ flats, past a church, past a steamy-windowed laundrette, past the newer, brick buildings of a city in the midst of economic growth.
“One minute fifteen,” Havers said as they made the turn south towards Grantchester.
Lynley looked in the rearview mirror at St. James. The other man had picked up the material which Pen had assembled at the Fitzwilliam Museum—welcomed by her former colleagues with the sort of delight one expects to greet only visiting royalty—and he was flipping through the X-rays and the infrared photographs in his usual deliberate and thoughtful fashion. “St. James,” Lynley asked, “what’s the best part of loving Deborah?”
St. James raised his head slowly. He looked surprised. Lynley understood. Considering their history, these were straits which they did not generally navigate. “That’s an unusual question to ask a man about his wife.”
“Have you ever considered it?”
“I don’t think I have,” St. James said. “But I suppose it’s that feeling of being thoroughly struck by life. Feeling alive, not just being alive. I can’t merely go through the motions with Deborah. I can’t make do. She doesn’t allow it. She demands my best. She engages my soul.” He looked into the mirror once again. Lynley caught his gaze. Sombre, thoughtful, it seemed at odds with his words.
“That’s what I would imagine,” Lynley said.
“Why?”
“Because she’s an artist.”
The last buildings—a row of old terrace houses—on the outskirts of Cambridge melted away, enclosed by the fog. Country hedges replaced them, dusty grey hawthorn preparing for winter. Havers looked at the watch. “Two minutes, thirty seconds,” she said.
The road was narrow, undivided, and unmarked. It swept past fields where a nimbus seem-ed to rise from the land, creating a solid, two-dimensional, mouse-coloured canvas on which nothing was drawn. If farm buildings existed somewhere in the distance round which a farmer worked and animals grazed, the heavy fog hid them.
They drove into Grantchester, passing a man in tweeds and black Wellingtons who was watching his collie explore the verge as he himself leaned heavily on a cane. “Mr. Davies and Mr. Jeffries,” Havers said. “Doing their usual number, I expect.” As Lynley slowed through the turn into the high street, she examined the face of the watch again. Using her fingers to help her with her calculations, she said, “Five minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” and jerked forward in her seat with a “Whoa, what’re you doing, sir?” when Lynley abruptly applied the brakes.
A metallic blue Citroën was parked squarely in the drive of Sarah Gordon’s house. Seeing it with the mist lapping at its tyres, Lynley said, “Wait here,” and got out of the Bentley. He pressed the door closed to shut it without sound and walked the remaining distance to the remodelled school.