When Lynley pushed open the wrought iron gate at the south entrance to Ivy Court, he saw that a wedding party was posing for photographs in the old graveyard of St. Stephen’s Church. It was a curious group, with the bride done up in whiteface and wearing what appeared to be part of a privet hedge on her head, her chief attendant swathed in a blood-red burnoose, and the best man looking like a chimney sweep. Only the groom wore conventional morning dress. But he was alleviating any concern this might have caused by drinking champagne from a riding boot which he’d apparently removed from the foot of one of the guests. The wind whipped everyone’s clothing about, but the play of colours—white, red, black, and grey—against the slick lichenous green of the old slate gravestones had its own distinct charm.
This the photographer himself seemed to see, for he kept calling out, “Hold it, Nick. Hold it, Flora. Right. Yes. Perfect,” as he snapped away with his camera.
Flora, Lynley thought with a smile. No wonder she was wearing a bush on her head.
He dodged past a heap of fallen bicycles and walked across the court to the doorway through which he had seen the woman disappear on the previous night. Nearly hidden by a tangle of goldheart ivy, a sign, still fresh with having been recently hand-lettered, hung on the wall beneath an overhead light. It contained three names. Lynley felt that quick, brief rush of triumph which comes with having one’s intuition affirmed by fact. Anthony Weaver’s was the first name listed.
Only one of the other two he recognised. A. Jenn would be Weaver’s graduate student.
It was Adam Jenn, in fact, whom Lynley found in Weaver’s study when he climbed the stairs to the first floor. The door stood ajar, revealing an unlit triangular entry off of which opened a narrow gyp room, a larger bedroom, and the study itself. Lynley heard voices coming from within the study—low questions from a man, soft responses from a woman—so he took the opportunity to have a quick look at the two other rooms.
To his immediate right, the gyp room was well-equipped with a stove, a refrigerator, and a wall of glass-fronted cupboards in which sat enough cooking utensils and crockery to set up housekeeping. Aside from the refrigerator and the stove, everything in the room appeared to be new, from the gleaming microwave to the cups, saucers, and plates. The walls were recently painted, and the air smelled fresh, like baby powder, a scent which he tracked to its source: a solid rectangle of room deodoriser hanging on a hook behind the door.
He was intrigued by the perfection of the gyp, so at odds with what he envisaged Anthony Weaver’s professional environment would be, considering the state of his study at home. Curious to see if some stamp of the man’s individuality evidenced itself elsewhere, he flipped on the lightswitch of the bedroom across the entry and stood in the doorway surveying it.
Above wainscoting painted the colour of forest mushrooms rose walls which were papered in cream with thin brown stripes. Framed pencil sketches hung from these—a pheasant shoot, a fox hunt, a deer chased by hounds, all signed with the single name Weaver—while from the white ceiling a pentagonal brass fixture shed light on a single bed next to which stood a tripod table holding a brass reading lamp and a matching diptych frame. Lynley crossed the room and picked this up. Elena Weaver smiled from one side, Justine from the other, the first a candid snapshot of the daughter joyfully romping with an Irish setter puppy, the second an earnest studio portrait of the wife, her long hair carefully curled back from her face and her smile close-lipped as if she wished to hide her teeth. Lynley replaced it and looked around reflectively. The hand that had outfitted the kitchen with its chromium appliances and ivory china had apparently seen to the decoration of the bedroom as well. On impulse, he pulled back part of the brown and green counterpane on the bed to find only a bare mattress and unslipped pillow beneath it. The revelation was not the least surprising. He left the room.
As he did so, the study door swung open and he found himself face-to-face with the two young people whose murmured conversation he had heard a few moments earlier. The young man, his broad shoulders emphasised by an academic gown, reached out for the girl when he caught sight of Lynley, and he pulled her back against him protectively.
“Help you with something?” His words were polite enough but the frigid tone conveyed an entirely different message, as did the young man’s features which quickly altered from the relaxed repose that accompanies friendly conversation to the sharpness that signals suspicion.
Lynley glanced at the girl who was clutching a notebook to her chest. She wore a knitted cap from which bright blonde hair spilled. It was drawn low on her forehead, hiding her eyebrows but heightening the colour of her eyes which were violet and, at the moment, very frightened.
Their responses were normal, admirable in the circumstances. An undergraduate in the college had been brutally murdered. Strangers would be neither welcomed nor tolerated. He produced his warrant card and introduced himself.
“Adam Jenn?” he said.
The young man nodded. He said to the girl, “I’ll see you next week, Joyce. But you’ve got to get on with the reading before you do the next essay. You’ve got the list. You’ve got a brain. Don’t be so lazy, okay?” He smiled as if to mitigate the negativity of the final comment, but the smile seemed rote, merely a quick curving of the lips that did nothing to alter the wariness in his hazel eyes.
Joyce said, “Thank you, Adam,” in that breathy sort of voice which always manages to sound as if it’s extending an illicit invitation. She smiled her goodbye and a moment later they heard her clattering noisily down the wooden stairs. It wasn’t until the ground-floor staircase door opened and shut upon her departure that Adam Jenn invited Lynley into Weaver’s study.
“Dr. Weaver’s not here,” he said. “If you’re wanting him, that is.”
Lynley didn’t respond at once. Rather, he strolled to one of the windows which, like the sole window in his own room in the building, was set into one of the ornate Dutch gables overlooking Ivy Court. Unlike his room, however, no desk stood in the recess. Instead, two comfortably battered armchairs faced each other at an angle there, separated by a chipped piecrust table on which lay a copy of a book entitled Edward III: The Cult of Chivalry. Anthony Weaver was its author.
“He’s brilliant.” Adam Jenn’s assertion had the distinct ring of defence. “No one in the country comes close to touching him in medieval history.”
Lynley put on his spectacles, opened the volume, and leafed through a few of the densely worded pages. Arbitrarily, his eyes fell on the words but it was in the abysmal treatment of women as chattels subjugated to the political whims of their fathers and brothers that the age developed its reputation for a diplomatic manoeuvring far superseding any transitory—or spurious—demotic concerns it may have actively promulgated. Having not read university writing in years, Lynley smiled in amusement. He’d forgotten that tendency of the academician to voice his pronouncements with such egregious pomposity.
He read the book’s dedication, For my darling Elena, and tapped the cover closed. He removed his spectacles.
“You’re Dr. Weaver’s graduate student,” he said.
“Yes.” Adam Jenn shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Beneath his black academic gown, he wore a white shirt and freshly laundered jeans that had been carefully pressed with creases down the front. He drove his fists into the rear pockets of these and waited without speaking, standing next to an oval table across which were spread three open texts and half a dozen handwritten essays.
“How do you come to be studying under Dr. Weaver?” Lynley removed his overcoat and placed it over the back of one of the old armchairs.
“Decent luck for once in my life,” Adam said.
It was a curious non-answer. Lynley raised an eyebrow. Adam read this as Lynley intended and continued.
“I’d read two of his books as an undergraduate. I’d heard him lecture. When he was short-listed for the Penford Chair at the beginning of Easter term last year, I came to ask him if he’d direct my research. To have the Penford Chair as advisor..” He gazed round the room as if its jumble of contents would provide him with an adequate explanation of the importance of Weaver’s place in his life. He settled with, “You can’t go higher.”
“Then this is all a bit of a risk on your end, isn’t it, hooking yourself up with Dr. Weaver so soon? What if he doesn’t get the appointment?”
“It’s worth the risk as far as I’m concerned. Once he gets the Chair, he’ll be flooded with requests to direct graduates’ studies. So I got to him first.”
“You seem relatively sure of your man. I’d always gathered these appointments are largely political. A change in the academic climate and a candidate’s finished.”
“That’s true enough. Candidates walk a tight-rope. Alienate the search committee, offend some muckety-muck, and they’re done for. But committee’d be fools not to award it to him. As I said, he’s the best medievalist in the country and they’re not going to find anyone to argue with that.”
“I take it he’s unlikely to alienate or offend?”
Adam Jenn laughed boyishly. “Dr. Weaver?” was his reply.
“I see. When should the announcement take place?”
“That’s the odd thing.” Adam shook a heavy lock of sandy hair off his forehead. “It should have been announced last July, but the committee went on and on about extending the deadline, and they started checking everyone out like they were looking for red skeletons in somebody’s closet. Stupid, they are.”
“Perhaps merely cautious. I’ve been given to understand that the Chair’s a fairly coveted advancement.”
“It represents historical research at Cambridge. It’s the place they put the best.” Two thin lines of crimson ran along Adam’s cheekbone. No doubt he pictured himself in the Chair in the distant future when Weaver retired.
Lynley moved to the table, glancing down at the essays that were spread across it. “You share these rooms with Dr. Weaver, I’ve been told.”
“I put in a few hours most days, yes. I run my supervisions here as well.”
“And that’s been going on for how long?”
“Since the beginning of term.”
Lynley nodded. “It’s an attractive environment, far nicer than what I remember from my days at university.”
Adam looked round the study at the general mess of essays, books, furniture, and equipment. Obviously, attractive wouldn’t have been the first word to spring to his lips had he been asked to evaluate the room. Then he seemed to combine Lynley’s comment with his initial sight of him a few moments earlier. His head turned towards the door. “Oh, you mean the gyp and the bedroom. Dr. Weaver’s wife fixed them up for him last spring.”
“In anticipation of the Chair? An elevated professor needs a proper set of rooms?”
Adam grinned ruefully. “That sort of thing. But she didn’t manage to get her way in here. Dr. Weaver wouldn’t let her.” He added this last as if to explain the difference between the study and its companion rooms and concluded with a mildly sardonic, “You know how it is,” in a brotherhood-of-men fashion in which the connotation was clear: Women need to have their fancies tolerated, men are the ones with the sainted toleration.
That Justine Weaver’s hand had not seen to the study was apparent to Lynley. And while it did not actually resemble the disordered sanctum at the rear of Weaver’s house, the similarities to it could not be ignored. Here was the same mild chaos, the same profusion of books, the same air of habitation which the Adams Road room possessed.
One form of academic work or another seemed to be in progress everywhere. A large pine desk served as the heart for labour, holding everything from a word processor to a stack of black binders. The oval table in the room’s centre had the function of conference area, and the gable recess acted as a retreat for reading and study, for in addition to the table which displayed Weaver’s own book, a small case beneath the window, within an arm’s length of both the chairs, held additional volumes. Even the fireplace with its cinnamon tiles served a purpose beyond providing heat from an electric fire, for its mantel functioned as a clearing house for the post, and more than a dozen envelopes lined up across it, all bearing Anthony Weaver’s name. A solitary greeting card stood like a bookend at the far side of the serried collection of letters, and Lynley picked it up, a humorous birthday card with the word Daddy written above the greeting and the round-lettered signature Elena beneath it.
Lynley replaced it among the envelopes and turned to Adam Jenn, who still stood by the table, one hand in his pocket and the other curved round the shoulder rail of one of the chairs. “Did you know her?”
Adam pulled out the chair. Lynley joined him at the table, moving aside two essays and a cup of cold tea in which a thin, unappetising film was floating.
Adam’s face was grave. “I knew her.”
“Were you here in the study when she phoned her father Sunday night?”
His eyes went to the Ceephone which sat on a small oak desk next to the fireplace. “She didn’t phone here. Or if she did, it was after I left.”
“What time was this?”
“Round half past seven?” He looked at his watch as if for verification. “I had to meet three blokes at the University Centre at eight, and I stopped by my digs first.”
“Your digs?”
“Near Little St. Mary’s. So it must have been somewhere round half past seven. It might have been a bit later. Perhaps a quarter to eight.”
“Was Dr. Weaver still here when you left?”
“Dr. Weaver? He wasn’t here at all Sunday evening. He’d been in for a while in the early afternoon, but then he went home for dinner and didn’t come back.”
“I see.”
Lynley reflected on this piece of information, wondering why Weaver had lied about his whereabouts on the night before his daughter’s death. Adam appeared to realise that for some reason this detail was important in the investigation, for he went on earnestly.
“He could have come in later, though. It’s out of line for me to claim that he didn’t come back in the evening. Actually, I might have missed him. He’s been working on a paper for about two months now—the role of monasteries in medieval economics—and he might have wanted to go over a bit of the research again. Most of the documents are in Latin. They’re hard to read. It takes forever to sort everything out. I imagine that’s what he was doing here Sunday evening. He does that all the time. He’s always concerned about getting the details right. He’d want to have them perfect. So if something was on his mind, he probably came back on the spur of the moment. I wouldn’t have known and he wouldn’t have told me.”
Outside of Shakespeare, Lynley couldn’t recall having heard anyone protest quite so much. “Then he usually didn’t tell you if he’d be coming back?”
“Well, now let me think.” The young man drew his eyebrows together, but Lynley saw the answer in the manner in which he pressed his hands nervously against his thighs.
He said, “You think a great deal of Dr. Weaver, don’t you?” Enough to protect him blindly remained unspoken, but there was no doubt that Adam Jenn recognised the implied accusation behind Lynley’s question.
“He’s a great man. He’s honest. He has more natural integrity than any half a dozen other senior fellows at St. Stephen’s College or anywhere else.” Adam pointed at the envelopes lining the mantelpiece. “All of those have come in since yesterday afternoon when the word went out about what happened to…what happened. People love him. People care. You can’t be a bastard and have people care about you so much.”
“Did Elena care for her father?”
Adam’s gaze flicked to the birthday card. “She did. Everyone does. He involves himself with people. He’s always here when someone has a problem. People can talk to Dr. Weaver. He’s straight with them. Sincere.”
“And Elena?”
“He worried about her. He took time with her. He encouraged her. He went over her essays and helped her with her studies and talked to her about what she was going to do with her life.”
“It was important to him that she be a success.”
“I can see what you’re thinking,” Adam said. “A successful daughter implies a successful father. But he’s not like that. He didn’t just take time with her. He took time with everyone. He helped me get my housing. He lined up my undergraduate supervisions. I’ve applied for a research fellowship and he’s helping me with that. And when I’ve a question with my work, he’s always here, ready. I’ve never got the feeling that I’m taking up his time. D’you know how valuable a quality that is in a person? The streets round here aren’t exactly paved with it.”
It wasn’t the panegyric to Weaver which Lynley found interesting. That Adam Jenn should so admire the man who was directing his graduate studies was reasonable. But what underlay Adam Jenn’s avowals was something far more telling: He’d managed to deflect every question about Elena. He’d even managed to avoid using her name.
Outside, faint laughter from the wedding party floated up from the graveyard. Someone shouted, “Give us a kiss!” and someone else, “Don’t you wish!” and the splintering sound of breaking glass suggested a champagne bottle’s abrupt demise.
Lynley said, “Obviously, you’re quite close to Dr. Weaver.”
“I am.”
“Like a son.”
Adam’s face took on more colour. But he looked pleased.
“Like a brother to Elena.”
Adam ran his thumb rapidly back and forth along the edge of the table. He reached up and rubbed his fingers along his jaw.
Lynley said, “Or perhaps not really like a brother. She was an attractive girl, after all. You would have seen a great deal of each other. Here in the study. At the Weavers’ house as well. And no doubt in the combination room from time to time. Or at formal dinner. And in her own room.”
Adam said, “I never went inside. Just to get her. That’s all.”
“I understand you took her out.”
“To foreign films at the Arts. We went to dinner occasionally. We spent a day in the country.”
“I see.”
“It’s not what you’re thinking. I didn’t do it because I wanted…I mean I couldn’t have…Oh hell.”
“Did Dr. Weaver ask you to take Elena out?”
“If you have to know. Yes. He thought we were suited.”
“And were you?”
“No!” The vehemence driving the word seemed to cause it to reverberate in the room for an instant. As if with the need to disguise the strength of his reply in some way, Adam said, “Look, I was like a hired escort to her. There was nothing more to it than that.”
“Did Elena want a hired escort?”
Adam gathered up the essays that lay on the table. “I’ve too much work here. The supervisions, my own studies. I’ve no time in my life for women at the moment. They add complications when one least expects it, and I can’t afford the distraction. I’ve hours of research every day. I’ve essays to read. I’ve meetings to attend.”
“All of which must have been difficult to explain to Dr. Weaver.”
Adam sighed. He crossed his ankle on his knee and picked at the lace of his gym shoe. “He invited me to his house the second weekend of term. He wanted me to meet her. What could I say? He’d taken me on as a graduate. He’d been so willing to help me. How could I not give him help in return?”
“In what way were you helping him?”
“There was this bloke he preferred she didn’t see. I was supposed to run interference between them. A bloke from Queens’.”
“Gareth Randolph.”
“That’s him. She’d met him through the deaf students’ union last year. Dr. Weaver wasn’t comfortable with them going about together. I imagine he hoped she might…you know.”
“Learn to prefer you?”
He dropped his leg to the floor. “She didn’t really fancy this bloke Gareth anyway. She told me as much. I mean, they were mates and she liked him, but it was no big deal. All the same, she knew what her father was worrying about.”
“What was that?”
“That she’d end up with…I mean marry..”
“Someone deaf,” Lynley finished. “Which, after all, wouldn’t be that unusual a circumstance since she was deaf herself.”
Adam pushed himself off his chair. He walked to the window and stared into the courtyard. “It’s complicated,” he said quietly to the glass. “I don’t know how to explain him to you. And even if I could, it wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever I’d say would just make him look bad. And it wouldn’t have anything to do with what happened to her.”
“Even if it did, Dr. Weaver can’t afford to look bad, can he? Not with the Penford Chair hanging in the balance.”
“That’s not it!”
“Then it really can’t hurt anyone if you talk to me.”
Adam gave a rough laugh. “That’s easy to say. You just want to find a killer and get back to London. It doesn’t make any difference to you whose lives get destroyed in the process.”
The police as Eumenides. It was an accusation he’d heard before. And while he acknowledged its partial accuracy—for there had to be a disinterested hand of justice or society crumbled—the convenience of the allegation afforded him a moment’s sour amusement. Pushed right to the edge of truth’s abyss, people always clung tenaciously to the same form of denial: I’m protecting someone else by withholding the truth, protecting someone from harm, from pain, from reality, from suspicion. It was all a variation of an identical theme in which denial wore the guise of self-righteous nobility.
He said, “This isn’t a singular death taking place in a void, Adam. It touches everyone she knew. No one stays protected. Lives have already been destroyed. That’s what murder does. And if you don’t know that, it’s time you learned.”
The young man swallowed. Even across the room, Lynley could hear him do so.
“She took it all as a joke,” he said finally. “She took everything as a joke.”
“In this case, what?”
“That her father was worried she’d marry Gareth Randolph. That he didn’t want her to hang round the other deaf students so much. But most of all, that he…I think it was that he loved her so much and that he wanted her to love him as much in return. She took it as a joke. That’s the way she was.”
“What was their relationship like?” Lynley asked, even though he knew how unlikely it was that Adam Jenn would say anything to betray his mentor.
Adam looked down at his fingernails and began to worry the cuticles by pushing his thumb against them. “He couldn’t do enough for her. He wanted to be involved in her life. But it always seemed—” He shoved his hands back into his pockets. “I don’t know how to explain.”
Lynley recalled Weaver’s description of his daughter. He recalled Justine Weaver’s reaction to the description. “Not genuine?”
“It was like he felt he had to keep pouring on the love and devotion. Like he had to keep showing her how much she meant to him so that maybe she’d come to believe it someday.”