“What were they exactly?”
“That he’d tried to talk her into sex, that he’d made physical overtures—touching her breasts and thighs and buttocks—that he’d engaged her in discussions about his sex life and a woman he’d once been engaged to and the difficulties she’d had with the enormous size of his erection.”
Lynley lifted an eyebrow. “Fairly imaginative material for a young girl to have cooked up, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not in this day and age. But it makes no difference because every bit of it was impossible to prove. Unless more than one girl was willing to come forward with an accusation against Thorsson, there was virtually nothing that I could do save speak to the man and warn him off, which I did.”
“And you didn’t see the harassment accusation as a motive for murder? If there are other girls who might have come forward once the word went out that Elena had turned him in, Thorsson would have been in deeper water then.”
“If there are other girls, Inspector. But Thorsson’s been a part of the English faculty—and a senior fellow at St. Stephen’s—for ten years now without the slightest breath of scandal associated with him. Why this all at once? And why with this one girl who’d already shown herself to be troubled enough to require special regulations just to see that she wasn’t sent down?”
“A girl who ended up murdered, Dr. Cuff.”
“Not by Thorsson.”
“You seem certain enough of that.”
“I am.”
“She was pregnant. Eight weeks. And she knew it. She seems to have found out the day before Thorsson made a visit to her room. How do you account for that?”
Cuff’s shoulders dropped fractionally. He rubbed his temples. “God,” he said. “I didn’t know about the pregnancy, Inspector.”
“Would you have told me about the harassment charges had you known? Or would you have continued to protect him?”
“I’m protecting all three of them. Elena, her father, Thorsson.”
“But would you agree that we’ve just strengthened his motive to kill her?”
“If he’s the father of the child.”
“But you don’t believe he is.”
Cuff dropped his hand. “Perhaps I simply don’t want to believe it. Perhaps I want to see ethics and morals where they no longer exist. I don’t know.”
They walked beneath the gatehouse where the porter’s lodge stood watch over the comings and goings of the members of the college. They stopped there briefly. The night porter was on duty, and from a room behind the counter that marked his work space, a television was showing scenes from an American cop programme, with lots of fierce gunfire and bodies falling in slow motion, accompanied by fast licks played on an electric guitar. Then a long, slow shot of the hero’s face, emerging from the haze, surveying the carnage, mourning its necessity in the life he led as a noble seeker of justice. And a fade-out until next week when more corpses would pile up in the name of justice and entertainment again.
“You’ve a message,” Cuff said from the pigeonholes where he had gone to collect his own. He handed it over, a small piece of paper which Lynley unfolded and read.
“It’s from my sergeant.” He looked up. “Lennart Thorsson’s nearest neighbour saw him outside his house just before seven o’clock yesterday morning.”
“That’s hardly a crime. He was probably setting off to work a bit early.”
“No, Dr. Cuff. He pulled up to the house in his car as the neighbour was opening her bedroom curtains. He was coming home. From somewhere.”
12
Rosalyn Simpson climbed the final flight of stairs to her room at Queens’ College and not for the first time cursed the choice she had made when her name had been drawn second in the rooms pool last term. Her cursing had nothing to do with the climb itself although she knew that anyone with good sense would have chosen something on the ground floor or something nearer the loo. Instead, she had chosen the L-shaped chamber up under the eaves, with its sloping walls suitable for the dramatic display of her Indian tapestries, its creaking oak floor periodically marred by gaps in the wood, and its extra little room—hardly more than a large cupboard—in which a wash basin stood and into which she and her father had wrestled her bed. It had the added features of half a dozen nooks and crannies where she had placed everything from plants to books, a large storage garret tucked under the eaves into which she sometimes crawled when she wished to disappear from the world—which was generally once a day—and a trap door in the ceiling leading to a passage that gave her access to Melinda Powell’s room. This last feature had seemed the most blessed originally, a rather Victorian way in which she and Melinda could be close to each other without everyone knowing the exact nature of their relationship, which at the time was something that Rosalyn had wished to keep to herself. So the passage had been the main reason why she’d chosen the room. It placated Melinda while it preserved her own peace of mind. But now she wasn’t so sure about the decision, or about Melinda, or even about their love.
She felt burdened by weights. First was the haversack on her back and the “little package of goodies for you, dear” that her mother had pressed upon her before she left, with tears in her eyes and lips quivering. She had said, “We had such dreams for you, Ros,” in a fashion that indicated the full extent to which Rosalyn’s news—growing out of a mindless birthday promise to Melinda—had hurt her.
“It’s just a phase,” her father had said more than once during the gruelling thirty-two hours that they’d spent together. And he said it again as Rosalyn left, but this time to her mother. “The dreams are still there, dammit. This is just a phase.”
Rosalyn didn’t try to disabuse them of the notion. She more than wished it was a phase herself, so she didn’t try to tell them that if it was a peculiar, bohemian stage she was going through, she’d been living it actively since she was fifteen years old. She didn’t even consider telling them that. It had taken all her energy and courage to bring the subject up in the first place. Arguing against the likelihood of its fading from significance was more than she was willing to take on.
Rosalyn shifted the haversack, felt her mother’s package dig into her left shoulder blade, and tried to slough off the heavier, more loathsome weight of her guilt. It seemed to slip and slide round her neck and shoulders like an enormous octopus with tentacles that grew from every part of her life. Her church said it was wrong. Her upbringing said it was wrong. As children, she and her friends had whispered and giggled and shuddered just to think of it. Her own expectations had always called for a man, a marriage, and a family. And still she continued to live in defiance.
Most of the time, she dealt with her life by simply moving forward, one day at a time, filling her time with distractions, keeping her attention focussed upon lectures, supervisions, and practicals, while never giving thought to what the future held for someone like herself. Or if she thought of the future at all, she tried to think of it in the global terms of her childhood when her only dream had been to go to India, to teach and do good and live solely for others.
It was a dream, however, that had lost its definitive clarity on the afternoon five years ago when her fifth form biology mistress had invited her to tea and, along with the cake and scones and clotted cream and strawberry jam, had offered seduction, rich, dark, and mysterious. For a while on the bed in that cottage near the Thames, Rosalyn had felt the contradictory powers of terror and ecstasy driving the blood through her veins. But as the other woman murmured and kissed and explored and caressed, soon enough fear gave way to arousal, which prepared her body for its most acute delight. She hovered on the cutting edge of pain and pleasure. And when pleasure finally took her, she was unprepared for the power of its accompanying joy.
No man had ever been an intimate part of her life since that moment. And no man had ever been as devoted, as loving and concerned as was Melinda. So it had seemed like such a reasonable request, really, that she should tell her parents, coming forward with pride instead of dissembling through paralysis and fear.
“Lesbian,” Melinda had said, enunciating each syllable with especial care. “Lesbian, lesbian. It doesn’t mean leper.”
Entwined in bed one night with Melinda’s arms round her and Melinda’s slender, splendid, knowing fingers making her body ache with increasing desire, she had made the promise. And she’d just spent the last thirty-two hours at home in Oxford, living through the consequences. She was exhausted.
At the top floor, she paused in front of her door, groping in the pocket of her jeans for the key. It was time for formal dinner—she’d missed the earlier meal—and although she gave a moment’s thought to donning her academic gown and joining the others for what was left of the meal, she dismissed the idea. She didn’t feel like seeing or talking to anyone.
For that reason primarily, when she opened the door, her spirits drooped further. Melinda was coming across the room. She looked rested and lovely, and her thick sienna hair had been recently washed, for it lay round her face in a wavy mass of natural curls. Rosalyn noted immediately that Melinda wasn’t dressed in her usual garb of mid-calf skirt, boots, pullover, and scarf. Instead, she wore white: wool trousers, cowl-necked sweater, and a long gauzy coat that reached just above her ankles. She looked as if she had dressed for celebration. Indeed, she looked disturbingly bridal.
“You’re back,” she said, coming to Rosalyn’s side and grasping her hand as she brushed a kiss across her cheek. “How did it go? Did Mum have apoplexy? Was Dad rushed to hospital clutching weakly at his chest? Did they shriek out dyke or just settle for pervert? Come on. Tell me. How did it go?”
Rosalyn slipped the haversack from her shoulders and dropped it to the floor. She found that her head was throbbing, and she couldn’t remember exactly when it had begun to do so. “It went,” she said.
“That’s it? No tantrums? No ‘How could you do this to your family’? No bitter accusations? No asking what you think granny and the aunts are going to say?”
Rosalyn tried to block from her mind the memory of her mother’s face and the look of confusion that had pinched her features. She wanted to forget the sadness in her father’s eyes, but more than that she longed to dismiss the guilt that accompanied her realisation of how her parents both were struggling to dismiss their own feelings in the matter, in the process making her feel only so much worse.
“I should think it was quite a scene between you,” Melinda was saying with a knowing smile. “Lots of weeping, lots of hair pulling, lots of gnashing of teeth, the requisite blame, not to mention the predictions of hell-fire and damnation. The typical middle-class thing. Poor darling, did they abuse you?”
Melinda, Rosalyn knew, had told her own family when she was seventeen in a matter-of-fact, take-it-or-leave-it announcement so typical of her, made during Christmas dinner, sometime between the crackers and the pudding. Rosalyn had heard the story often enough: “Oh, by the way, I’m gay if anyone’s particularly interested.” They hadn’t been. But that was the sort of family Melinda had. So she couldn’t imagine what it was like to be the only child of parents who dreamed among other things of a son-in-law and grandchildren and the fragile line of a family continuing into the future for just a bit longer.
“Did your mum push every guilt button there is? She probably did, and I hope you expected it. I did tell you how to answer when she trotted out the ‘what about us’ line, didn’t I? And if you used it properly, then she must have—”
“I really don’t want to talk about it, Mel,” Rosalyn said. She knelt on the floor, unzipped the haversack, and began unpacking it. Her mother’s “goodies from home” she set to one side.
“They really must have gone after you, then. I told you to let me go with you. Why didn’t you let me? I could have held my own with both of your parents.” She squatted next to Rosalyn. She smelled fresh and clean. “They didn’t…Ros, they didn’t get physical with you, did they? God, your dad didn’t hit you?”
“Of course not. Look, I just don’t want to talk about it. That’s it, all right? It’s nothing more than that.”
Melinda rested back on her heels. She shoved a thick mass of hair behind one ear. She said, “You’re sorry you did it, aren’t you? I can tell.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. It had to be done, but you were hoping you could avoid it forever. You were hoping they’d just eventually think you’d become an old maid, weren’t you? You didn’t want to take a stand. You didn’t want to come out.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Or maybe you’ve been hoping to take the cure. Wake up some morning and whoopee, you’re straight. Shove Melinda out of bed and make room for some bloke. Mum and Dad wouldn’t ever know anything then.”
Rosalyn looked up. She could see the bright shining in Melinda’s eyes and the high gloss of colour in her cheeks. It always amazed her that someone so clever and beautiful could also be someone so unsure and afraid.
She said, “I’m not planning on leaving you, Mel.”
“You’d like a man, wouldn’t you?” Melinda said. “If you could have one. If you could go straight. You’d like it. You’d prefer it. Wouldn’t you?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Rosalyn asked. She felt terribly weary.
Melinda laughed. The sound was high and giddy. “Men have only one use and we don’t even need them for that any longer. Just find a donor and inseminate yourself at home in the loo. They’re doing it, you know. I read about it somewhere. In a few more centuries, we’ll be generating sperm in laboratories and men as we know them will be completely extinct.”
Rosalyn knew it was wiser to say nothing when Melinda felt the spectre of abandonment hovering round her too closely. But she was tired. She was disheartened. She had just endured a marathon session of guilt with her parents largely to please her lover, and she was feeling as most people feel when they have been manipulated into acting in a fashion they might otherwise eschew: resentful. So she replied, against her better judgement:
“I don’t hate men, Melinda. I never have. If you do, that’s your problem. But it’s not one of mine.”
“Oh, they’re peachy, men are. They’re real bricks, the lot of them.” Melinda got to her feet and went to Rosalyn’s desk. From it she took a bright orange piece of paper, waved it, and said, “These are all over the University today. I saved one for you. This is what men are all about, Ros. Take a look if you like them so much.”
“What is it?”
“Just look.”
Rosalyn pushed herself to her feet, and, rubbing her shoulders where the haversack had dug into them, she took the piece of paper from Melinda. It was a hand-out, she saw. And then she saw the name in large black letters underneath a grainy photograph: Elena Weaver. And then another word: Murdered.
A cold chill zig-zagged the length of her spine. She said, “Melinda, what is this?”
“What’s been going on round here while you and Mum and Dad were nattering in Oxford.”
Numbly, Rosalyn carried the paper to her old rocking chair. She stared at the picture, at the face so familiar to her, at the grin, the chipped tooth, the long flow of hair. Elena Weaver. Her chief competitor. She ran like a god.
“She’s in Hare and Hounds,” Rosalyn said. “Melinda, I know her. I’ve been to her room. I’ve—”
“Knew her, you mean.” Melinda snatched the paper back, crumpled it, and tossed it into the rubbish basket.
“Don’t throw it away! Let me see it! What happened?”
“She was out running by the river early yesterday morning. Someone got her near the island.”
“Near the…Crusoe’s Island?” Rosalyn felt her heart’s beating grow heavy and fast. “Mel, that’s—” A sudden memory, unbidden, tugged at the fabric of her consciousness, like a shadow becoming substance, like the fragment of a tune. She said slowly, waiting to feel more certain, “Melinda, I need to phone the police.”
No matter the fashion she had hoped to use the information about Elena Weaver, colour drained from Melinda’s face. Comprehension took its place. “The island. That’s where you’ve been running this term, isn’t it? Right along the river. Just like this girl. Rosalyn, promise me you won’t run there again. Swear to it, Ros. Please.”
Rosalyn was scooping her shoulder bag from the floor. She said, “Come on.”
Melinda seemed suddenly to assimilate the intention behind Rosalyn’s decision to speak to the police. She said, “No! Ros, if you saw something…if you know something…Listen to me, you can’t do this. Ros, if someone finds out…if someone knows you saw something…Please. We need to think what might happen. We need to think this through. Because if you saw someone, that means someone probably saw you as well.”
Rosalyn was at the door. She was zipping her jacket. Melinda cried out again, “Rosalyn, please! Let’s think this through!”
“There’s nothing to think about,” Rosalyn said. She opened the door. “You can stay here if you want to. I won’t be long.”
“But where are you going? What are you doing? Rosalyn!” Melinda ran after her frantically.