Glyn Weaver positioned herself just to the left of the window in her daughter’s bedroom and flicked the sheer material away from the glass so that she could have an unimpaired glimpse of the front lawn. The Irish setter was gambolling there, yelping joyfully in expectation of a run. He was circling frantically round Justine who had changed into a tracksuit and running shoes and who was bending and stretching through a series of warm-ups. She’d taken the dog’s lead outside with her, and Townee scooped it up from the lawn on one of his passes by her. He carried it like a banner. He cavorted and pranced.
Elena had sent her a dozen pictures of the dog: as a furry baby curled into her lap asleep, a long-legged pup rooting for his gifts beneath the Christmas tree in her father’s house, a sleek adolescent leaping over a dry-stone wall. On the back of each she had written Townee’s age—six weeks, two days; four months, eight days; ten months today!—like an indulgent mother. Glyn wondered if she would have done the same for the baby she’d carried or if Elena would have opted for abortion. A baby, after all, was different from a dog. And no matter her reasons for getting herself pregnant—and Glyn knew her daughter well enough to realise that Elena’s pregnancy had probably been a calculated act—Elena was not so much the fool as to believe her life would be unchanged as a result of bringing a child into it. Children always altered one’s existence in unaccountable ways, and their unwavering devotion could hardly be relied upon as could a dog’s. They took and took and rarely gave. And only the most selfless sort of adult could continually enjoy the sensation of being drained of every resource and bled of every dream.
And for what reward? Just the nebulous hope that this lovely creature—this complete individual over whom one had absolutely no control—would somehow not make the same mistakes, repeat the same patterns, or know the same pain that the parents had lived through and inflicted on each other.
Outside, Justine was tying back her hair at the nape of her neck. Glyn took note of the fact that to do so she used a scarf that matched both the colour of her tracksuit and the colour of her shoes. Idly, she wondered if Justine ever left the house in anything less than a complete ensemble, and she chuckled at the sight of her. Even if one wished to criticise the fact that Justine chose to go exercising just two days after her stepdaughter’s murder, one certainly couldn’t condemn her for her choice of colour. It was thoughtfully appropriate.
Such a hypocrite, Glyn thought, her lower lip curling. She turned from the sight of her.
Justine had left the house without a word, sleek and cool and utterly patrician, but no longer as controlled as she liked to be. Their confrontation this morning in the breakfast room had taken care of that, with the real woman smoked out from beneath the guise of dutiful hostess and professor’s perfect wife. So now she would run, to tone up that lovely, seductive body, to work up a fragrant rose-scented sweat.
But it was more than that. She had to run now. And she had to hide. Because the fact beneath the fiction that was Justine Weaver had finally been revealed in the breakfast room in that fleeting moment when her normally guileless, butter-wouldn’t-melt features became rigid with the culpability that lay beneath them. The truth was out.
She had hated Elena. And now that she was off for her run, Glyn was ready to search out the evidence which would prove that Justine’s facade of well-bridled feelings skilfully hid the desperation of a killer.
Outside the house, she heard the dog barking, a happy sound of excitement that rapidly faded towards Adams Road. They were off, the two of them. Whatever time she had until Justine’s return, Glyn was determined to use every moment.
She bustled to the master bedroom with its sleek Danish furniture and shapely brass lamps. She went to the long, low chest and began opening drawers.
“Georgina Higgins-Hart.” The weasel-faced constable squinted at his notebook, the cover of which bore a stain that looked suspiciously like pizza sauce. “A member of Hare and Hounds. Working on an M.Phil. in Renaissance Literature. Newcastle girl.” He snapped the notebook closed. “President of the College and the senior tutor had no trouble identifying the body, Inspector. They’ve both known her since she came up to Cambridge three years back.”
The constable stood posted outside the closed door of the girl’s bed-sitting room. He was positioned like a guard, legs spread and arms folded across his chest, and his expression—flickering indecisively between smug judgement and outright derision—indicated the degree to which he considered the inadequacies of New Scotland Yard CID responsible for this latest Cambridge killing.
Lynley said only, “Do you have the key, Constable?” and took it from the man’s palm when he handed it over.
Georgina, he saw, had been a devotee of Woody Allen, and most of the bed-sit’s limited wall space was given over to posters celebrating his films. Bookshelves took up the rest of the space, and on them sat an eclectic display of the girl’s possessions, everything from a collection of ancient Raggedy Ann dolls to a seriously extensive selection of wine. She had lined up what few books she owned onto the mantel of the bricked-in fireplace. They were held in place on either end by a dispirited-looking miniature palm.
With the constable outside and the door closed upon him, Lynley sat on the edge of the single bed. A pink duvet covered it, with a large bouquet of yellow paeonies embroidered into its centre. His fingers traced the pattern of flowers and leaves as his mind traced the pattern of the two killings.
The outline comprised the most obvious details: a second runner from Hare and Hounds; a second girl; a second victim who was tall and lithe and long-haired and engaged—in the darkness—in an early morning’s workout. Those were the superficial similarities. But if the killings were connected, there had to be others.
And there were, of course. The most immediately apparent was the fact that Georgina Higgins-Hart, like Elena Weaver, had a relationship with the English Faculty. Although she was a postgraduate, Lynley could not overlook the fact that, in her fourth year at the University, she would have known many of the professors, most of the lecturers, and everyone associated with her own field of Renaissance Literature, those writings—both European and British—of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. He knew what Havers was going to make of this information when she learned of it, and he couldn’t deny the connection it suggested.
But he also couldn’t ignore the fact that Georgina Higgins-Hart was a member of Queens’ College. Nor could he deny the additional connection that Queens’ College implied.
He got to his feet and went to the desk which was tucked into an alcove whose walls were hung with a collection of framed stills from Sleeper, Bananas, and Take the Money and Run. He was reading the opening paragraph of an essay on The Winter’s Tale when the door opened and Sergeant Havers came into the room.
She joined him at the desk. “Well?”
“Georgina Higgins-Hart,” he said. “Renaissance Literature.” He could sense her smile as she matched the period of time with its most significant author.
“I knew it. I knew it. We need to get back to his house and have a go at finding that shotgun, Inspector. I say we get some of Sheehan’s blokes to tear the place apart.”
“You can hardly think that a man of Thorsson’s intelligence would blast a young girl into oblivion and then simply replace the gun among his belongings. He knows he’s under suspicion, Sergeant. He isn’t a fool.”
“He doesn’t need to be a fool,” she said. “He just needs to be desperate.”
“Beyond that, as Sheehan pointed out, we’re standing on the threshold of the pheasant season. Shotguns abound. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the University itself has an outdoor society devoted to hunting. If there’s a student handbook on the mantel, you can check on that yourself.”
She didn’t move. “You can’t mean to suggest that these killings aren’t related.”
“I don’t mean to suggest that. I think they are. But not necessarily in the most obvious fashion.”
“Then how? What other connection is there but the most obvious ones which, by the way, we’ve been handed on a platter? Okay, I know you’re going to argue that she was a runner so there’s another connection for us to play with. And I know she had the same general appearance as the Weaver girl. But frankly, Inspector, trying to build a case on those two facts seems a lot shakier than building a case on Thorsson.” She seemed to sense his inclination to dispute the position she was taking. She went on more insistently. “We know there was some truth in what Elena Weaver claimed about Thorsson. He as much as demonstrated that this morning. So if he was harassing her, why not this girl as well?”
“There’s another connection, Havers. Beyond Thorsson. Beyond running.”
“What?”
“Gareth Randolph. He’s a member of Queens’.”
She didn’t look either pleased with or intrigued by this piece of information. She said, “Right. Quite. And his motive, Inspector?”
Lynley fingered through the items on Georgina’s desk. He catalogued them mentally and considered his sergeant’s question, trying to develop a hypothetical response that would fit both murders.
“Perhaps we’re looking at a primary rejection that’s begun seeping into the rest of his life.”
“Elena Weaver brushed him off so he killed her and then finding that single killing not enough to wipe the rejection out of his memory, he’s bent on killing her again and again? Wherever he finds her?” Havers made no effort to hide her incredulity. She ran a restless hand back through her hair and grabbed onto a fistful which she tugged at impatiently. “I can’t even begin to swallow that, sir. The means are too different. The Weaver girl may have been killed in a well-planned attack, but attack is the watchword. There was real rage behind what happened to her, a need to hurt as well as to kill. This other—” She waved her hand over the top of the desk as if an indication of its scattering of books and papers would stand as symbol for the death of the second girl—“I think this other was the need to eliminate. Do it fast. Do it simple. But just do it.”
“Why?”
“Georgina was in Hare and Hounds. She probably knew Elena. And if that’s the case, it stands to reason that she probably also knew what Elena intended to do.”
“About Thorsson.”
“And perhaps Georgina Higgins-Hart was just the corroboration Elena needed to make that sexual harassment charge stick. Perhaps Thorsson knew it. If he went to argue with Elena about it on Thursday night, she might well have told him that she wasn’t the only one going to the authorities. And if that was the case, it wasn’t going to be her word against his any longer. It was going to be his against theirs. Those aren’t very sweet odds, are they, Inspector? And that wouldn’t have looked good to anyone.”
Lynley had to admit that Havers’ hypothesis was grounded more solidly in reality than was his. And yet unless they could come up with a viable piece of hard evidence, they were stymied. She seemed to realise this.
“We’ve got the black fibres,” she persisted. “If his clothes make a match, we’re on our way.”
“Do you really think Thorsson would have handed his things over this morning—no matter his frame of mind—had he had even the slightest concern that forensic could match them to the fibres from Elena Weaver’s body?” Lynley closed an open text on the desk. “He knows he’s clear on that, Havers. We need something else.”
“The primary weapon used on Elena.”
“Did you get St. James on the phone?”
“He’ll be up sometime round noon tomorrow. He was in the middle of messing about with some sort of a polymorphic what-have-you, mumbling about isoenzymes and getting generally bleary-eyed from having looked through his microscopes for more than a week. He’ll be glad of the diversion.”
“That’s what he said?”
“No. Actually, he said, ‘Tell Tommy he owes me,’ but that’s pretty much par for the course with you two, isn’t it?”
“Quite.” Lynley was looking at Georgina’s engagement diary. She was less active than Elena Weaver had been, but like Elena she had kept a record of her appointments. Seminars and supervisions were listed, by subject and by name of supervisor. Hare and Hounds had its places as well. But it took only a moment for him to ascertain that Lennart Thorsson’s name appeared nowhere. Nor was there anything that resembled the small fish that Elena had regularly sketched upon her calendar. Lynley riffled through all the pages of the book to find something that suggested the sort of intrigue implied by that fish, but it was completely straightforward. If Georgina Higgins-Hart had secrets, she hadn’t hidden them here.
They had little enough to go on, he realised. Mostly a series of unprovable conjectures. Until Simon Allcourt-St. James arrived in Cambridge and unless he gave them something else to work with, they would have to rely on the evidence at hand.