For the Sake of Elena (43 page)

“I know where the damn book is,” Rodger snapped and took his children from the room.

“Oh dear,” Lady Helen murmured. “I’m afraid there’s going to be hell to pay for this.”

“I don’t think so,” Lynley said. “Harry’s an educated man. At the very least we know he can read.”

“
Cautionary Verses?
”

Lynley shook his head. “The handwriting on the wall.”

“After an hour, we all managed to come to an agreement. The strongest likelihood is that it was glass. When I left, Pleasance was still holding out for his theory that it was a champagne or wine bottle—preferably full—but he’s fresh from graduate school and still attached to any opportunity to expatiate. Frankly, I expect he’s more attracted to the sound of his arguments than to their viability. No wonder the head of forensic—is it Drake?—wants his neck in a noose.”

Forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James joined Barbara Havers at her solitary table in the officers’ mess at Cambridge Police Station. For the past two hours, he’d been holed up at the regional police laboratory with the disputing parties of Superintendent Sheehan’s forensic team, examining not only the X-rays of Elena Weaver but the body itself and comparing his conclusions with those developed by the younger scientist in the Cambridge group. It was an activity that Barbara had begged off attending. The brief period during her police training that had been given to watching autopsies had more than sated whatever nugatory interest she may once have had in forensic medicine.

“Please note, officers,” the forensic pathologist had intoned as he stood before the draped cart under which was the corpse that would be their object lesson, “that the mark of the ligature used in strangling this woman can still be plainly observed although our killer made what he apparently believed would be an ingenious attempt at obfuscation. Step closer, please.”

Like idiots—or automatons—the probationary DC’s had done so. And three of them had fainted dead away when, with a tiny smile of malicious anticipation, the pathologist whipped back the sheet to display the grisly remains of a body that had been saturated with paraffin and set afire. Barbara herself had remained on her feet, but only just. And she had never been in a tearing hurry to stand in on an autopsy from that time forward. Just bring me the facts, she always thought when a body was carted away from a murder scene. Don’t make me watch you gather them.

“Tea?” she asked St. James as he lowered himself into one of the chairs, adjusting his position to make allowances for the brace he wore on his left leg. “It’s fresh.” She gave a glance to her watch. “Well, okay. Only moderately fresh. But it’s riddled with enough caffeine to paste your eyelids permanently open if you’re feeling clapped out.”

St. James accepted the offer and ministered to his cup with three overlarge spoonfuls of sugar. After a taste of it, he added a fourth, saying, “Falstaff is my only defence, Barbara.”

She lifted her cup to him. “Cheers,” she said, and watched him drink.

He was looking well, she decided. Still too thin and angular, still too lined about the face, but there was an appealing sheen to the undisciplined dark hair, and his hands on the table seemed utterly relaxed. A man at peace with himself, she thought, and she wondered how long it had taken St. James to achieve such psychic equilibrium. He was Lynley’s oldest and closest friend, an expert witness from London upon whose forensic services they had called more than once.

“If not a wine bottle—and there was one at the crime scene, by the way—and not a champagne bottle, then what was used to beat her?” she asked. “And why have the Cambridge people been scrapping over this issue in the first place?”

“A case of male posturing, to my way of thinking,” St. James replied. “The head of forensic is just over fifty. He’s been on the job for a good twenty-five years. Along comes Pleasance, twenty-six years old and acting the upstart crow. So what you have is—”

“Men,” Barbara said in simple conclusion. “Why don’t they just go outside and settle their dispute by seeing who can pee the farthest?”

St. James smiled. “Not a bad idea.”

“Ha! Women should run the world.” She poured herself more tea. “So why couldn’t it have been a wine or champagne bottle?”

“The shape doesn’t make a match. We’re looking for something with a slightly broader curve making the connection between bottom and sides. Like this.” He cupped his right palm to form half an oval.

“And the leather gloves wouldn’t work for that curve?”

“For the curve, perhaps. But leather gloves of that weight wouldn’t shatter a cheekbone in a single blow. I’m not sure a heavyweight could even do that, and from what you said, the boy who owns the gloves isn’t a heavyweight by any stretch of the imagination.”

“Then what?” Barbara asked. “A vase perhaps?”

“I don’t think so. Whatever was used had some sort of handgrip. And it was quite heavy, enough to do maximum damage with minimum effort. She’d only been struck three times.”

“A handgrip. That suggests the neck of a bottle.”

“Which is why Pleasance is continuing to propound his full-champagne-bottle theory despite compelling evidence to the contrary. Unless, of course, it’s the most oddly shaped champagne bottle on record.” St. James removed a paper napkin from the table dispenser and roughed out a sketch, saying, “What you’re looking for is flat on the bottom, with a broad curve on the sides, and, I imagine, a sturdy gripping neck.” He handed it over. Barbara studied the drawing.

“This looks like one of those ship’s decanters,” she said, pulling on her upper lip thoughtfully. “Simon, did someone cosh the girl in the face with the family Waterford?”

“It’s as heavy as crystal,” St. James replied. “But smooth-surfaced, not cut. Solid as well. And if that’s the case, it’s not a container of any sort.”

“What, then?”

He looked at the drawing which she placed between them. “I have no idea.”

“You won’t go for something metal?”

“Doubtful. Glass—especially if it’s smooth and heavy—is the likelier substance when there’s no trace evidence left behind.”

“Need I ask if you were able to find trace evidence where the Cambridge team found none?”

“You needn’t. I didn’t.”

“What a balls-up.” She sighed.

He didn’t disagree. Rather, he shifted position in his chair and said, “Are you and Tommy still intent on connecting the two killings? That’s an odd approach when the means are so different. If you’re working with the same killer, why weren’t both victims gunned down?”

She picked at the gelatinous surface of a cherry tart that was doing service as the edible portion of her afternoon tea. “We’re thinking that the motive determined the means in each killing. The first motive was personal, so it required a personal means.”

“A hands-on means? Beating then strangling?”

“Yes. If you will. But the second murder wasn’t personal at all, just a need to eliminate a potential witness who could place the killer at Crusoe’s Island right at the time Elena Weaver was strangled. A shotgun sufficed to carry that out. Of course, what the killer didn’t know is that the wrong girl got shot.”

“A nasty business.”

“Quite.” She speared a cherry. It looked disturbingly like a large clot of blood. Shuddering, she tapped it onto her plate and tried another. “But at least we’ve got a tab on the killer now. And the Inspector’s gone to—” She stopped, brow furrowed, as Lynley came through the swinging doors, his overcoat slung over his shoulder and his cashmere scarf fluttering round him like carmine wings. He was carrying a large manila envelope. Lady Helen Clyde and another woman—presumably her sister—were right behind him.

“St. James,” he said by way of greeting his friend. “I’m in your debt again. Thank you for coming. You know Pen, of course.” He dropped his coat over the back of a chair as St. James greeted Penelope and brushed a kiss across Lady Helen’s cheek. He pulled extra chairs over to their table as Lynley introduced Barbara to Lady Helen’s sister.

Barbara watched him, perplexed. He’d gone to the Weaver house for information. As soon as he had it, his next step was supposed to be to make an arrest. But clearly, no arrest had been made. Something had taken him in another direction.

“You haven’t brought her with you?” she asked.

“I haven’t. Look at this.”

From the envelope, he took out a thin stack of photographs, telling them about the canvas and the set of sketches that Glyn Weaver had given him. “There was dual damage to the painting,” he said. “Someone had defaced it with great smears of colour and then finished the job with a kitchen knife. Weaver’s former wife assumed that the subject was Elena and that Justine had destroyed it.”

“She was wrong, I take it?” Barbara asked, picking up the photographs and flipping through them. Each of them showed a different section of the canvas. They were curious pieces, some of them looking like nothing so much as double exposures in which one figure was superimposed over another. They depicted various portraits of a female, from childhood up to young adulthood. “What are these?” Havers asked, passing each photograph on to St. James after she perused it.

“Infrared photographs and X-rays,” Lynley said. “Pen can explain. We did it at the museum.”

Penelope said, “They show what was originally on the canvas. Before it was smeared with paint.”

There were at least five head studies in the group, one of which was more than double the size of all the rest. Barbara puzzled her way through them, saying, “Odd sort of painting, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not when you assemble them,” Penelope said. “Here. I’ll show you.”

Lynley cleared away the tea debris, piling the stainless steel teapot, the cups, the plates, and the silverware onto a table nearby. “Because of its size, it could only be photographed in sections,” he explained to Barbara.

Pen went on. “When the sections are assembled, it looks like this.” She laid the photographs out to form an incomplete rectangle from whose right-hand corner a quadrilateral was missing. What Barbara saw on the table was a semi-circle of four head studies of a growing girl—depicted as a baby, a toddler, a child, an adolescent—and offset by the fifth and larger head study of the young adult.

“If this isn’t Elena Weaver,” Barbara said, “then who—”

“It’s Elena all right,” Lynley said. “Her mother was dead on the money about that. Where she went wrong was in the rest of the scenario. She saw sketches and a painting hidden in Weaver’s study and reached a logical conclusion based upon her knowledge that he dabbled in art. But obviously this isn’t dabbling.”

Barbara looked up, saw that he was removing another photograph from the envelope. She held her hand out for it, put it into the empty spot at the bottom right-hand corner, and looked at the artist’s signature. Like the woman herself, it was not flamboyant. Just the simple word
Gordon
in thin strokes of black.

“Full circle,” he said.

“So much for coincidence,” she replied.

“If we can just connect her to some sort of weapon, we’re starting to fly home free.” Lynley looked at St. James as Lady Helen gathered the pictures into a neat stack and replaced them in the folder. “What did you come up with?” he asked.

“Glass,” St. James said.

“A wine bottle?”

“No. Not the right shape.”

Barbara went to the table where Lynley had stacked their tea things and rooted through them to find the drawing St. James had made. She pulled it from beneath the teapot and tossed it their way. It fell to the floor. Lady Helen picked it up, looked at it, shrugged, and handed it to Lynley.

“What is it?” he asked. “It looks like a decanter.”

“My thought as well,” Barbara said. “Simon says no.”

“Why?”

“It needs to be solid, heavy enough to shatter a bone with one blow.”

“Damn and blast,” Lynley said and flipped it to the table.

Penelope leaned forward, drew the paper towards her. “Tommy,” she said thoughtfully, “you know, I can’t be certain, but this looks awfully like a muller.”

“A muller?” Lynley asked.

Havers said, “What the dickens is that?”

“A tool,” Penelope said. “It’s what an artist first uses when he’s making his own paint.”

22

Sarah Gordon lay on her back and fixed her eyes on the ceiling in her bedroom. She studied the patterns made in the plaster, urging out of the subtle swirls and indentations the silhouette of a cat, the gaunt face of an old woman, the wicked grin of a demon. It was the only room of the house on whose walls she had hung no decoration, establishing in it a monastic simplicity that she had believed would be conducive to the flights of imagination that had always in the past led her to creation.

They led her only to memory now. The thud, the crunch, the crushing of bone. The blood unexpectedly hot when it flew up from the girl’s face to speckle her own. And the girl herself. Elena.

Sarah turned on her side and drew the woollen blanket closer round her, curling herself into a foetal position. The cold was intolerable. She’d kept a fire burning downstairs for most of the day, and she’d turned the heat up as far as it would go, but still she couldn’t escape the chill. It seemed to seep from the walls and the floor and the bed itself like an insidious contagion, determined to have her. And as the minutes passed, the cold became ever more the victor as her body convulsed with new spasms of shivering.

A small fever, she told herself. The weather’s been bad. One can’t expect to remain unaffected by the damp, the fog, or the ice-driven wind.

But even as she repeated key words—damp, fog, and wind—like a hypnotic chant designed to focus her thoughts on the narrowest, most bearable and acceptable pathway, the single part of her mind that she had been unable to discipline from the very beginning forced Elena Weaver forward again.

She’d come to Grantchester two afternoons a week for two months, rolling up the drive on her ancient bicycle with her long hair tied back to keep it out of her face and her pockets filled with contraband treats to slip to Flame when she thought Sarah was least likely to notice. Scruff-dog, she called him, and she tugged affectionately on his lopsided ears, bent her face to his, and let him lick her nose. “Wha’ d’ I have for li’l Scruffs?” she said, and she laughed when the dog snuffed at her pockets, his tail thumping happily, his front paws digging at the front of her jeans. It was a ritual with them, generally carried out on the drive where Flame dashed out to meet her, barking a frantic, delighted greeting that Elena claimed she could feel vibrating through the air.

Then she’d come inside, slinging off her coat, untying her hair, shaking it out, smiling her hello, a little embarrassed if Sarah happened to have caught her in the act of greeting the dog with such an open display of affection. She seemed to feel it wasn’t quite adult of her to love an animal, especially one that she didn’t even own.

“Ready?” she’d say in that half-swallowed manner that made the word sound much more like
reh-y
. She seemed shy at first, when Tony brought her by those few nights to model for the life-drawing class. But it was only the initial reserve of a young woman conscious of her difference from others, and even more conscious of how that difference might somehow contribute to others’ discomfort. Once she sensed another’s ease in her presence—at least once she’d sensed Sarah’s ease—she herself grew more forthright, and she began to chat and to laugh, melding into the environment and the circumstances as if she’d always been a part of them.

She hopped onto the tall stool in Sarah’s studio at precisely half past two on those free afternoons. Her eyes danced round the room, scouting out whatever pieces had been worked on or were new since her last visit. And always she talked. She was, at heart, so like her father in that.

“You never married, Sarah?” Even her choice of topics was the same as her father’s, except unlike his, her question came out more like
You ne’r mah-weed, Sehah?
and it was a moment before Sarah mentally worked through the careful if distorted syllables to comprehend their meaning.

“No. I never did.”

“Why?”

Sarah examined the canvas on which she was working, comparing it to the lively creature perched atop the stool and wondering if she would ever be able to capture completely that quality of energy which the girl seemed to exude. Even in repose—holding her head at an angle with her hair sweeping round and the light glancing off it like sun hitting summer wheat—she was electric and alive. Restless and questioning, she seemed eager for experience, anxious to understand.

“I suppose I thought a man might get in my way,” Sarah replied. “I wanted to be an artist. Everything else was secondary.”

“My da’ wan’s to be an ar’ist as well.”

“Indeed he does.”

“Is he good, d’you think?”

“Yes.”

“An’ d’you like him?”

This last with her eyes riveted on Sarah’s face. It was only so that she could easily read the answer, Sarah told herself. But still she said abruptly, “Of course. I like all my students. I always have done. You’re moving, Elena. Please put your head back as it was.”

She watched the girl reach her toe forward and rub it along the top of Flame’s head where he lay on the floor, anticipating the treat he hoped would fall from her pocket. She waited, breath held, for the moment’s question about Tony to pass. It always did. For Elena excelled at recognising boundaries, which went far to explain why she also excelled at obliterating most of them.

She grinned, said, “Sorry, Sarah,” and resumed her position while Sarah herself escaped from the girl’s scrutiny by going to the stereo and switching it on.

“Dad’ll be s’prised when he sees this,” Elena said. “When c’n I see it?”

“When it’s done. Position again, Elena. Damn, we’re losing light.”

And afterwards with the easel covered and the music playing, they’d sit in the studio and have their tea. Shortbread which Elena slipped into Flame’s eager mouth—his tongue lapping bits of sugar from her fingers—tarts and cakes that Sarah made from recipes she’d not thought about in years. As they munched and talked, the music continued, and Sarah’s fingers tapped its rhythm against her knee.

“Wha’s it like?” Elena asked her casually one afternoon.

“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?”