“He’s lying.” Havers paused in the doorway to drape Gareth’s boxing gloves round the strap of her shoulder bag. “Because if anyone ever had a motive to bag her, he’s the one, Inspector.”
“I can’t disagree with that,” Lynley said.
She pulled her cap firmly down over her forehead and drew up the hood of her coat. “But you can—and no doubt will—disagree with something else. I’ve heard that tone of yours before. What?”
“I think he knows who killed her. Or thinks he knows.”
“Of course he does. Because he did it himself. Directly after he pounded her face in with these.” She flipped the gloves in his direction. “What have we been looking for as a weapon all along? Something smooth? Have a feel of this leather. Something heavy? Imagine being on the receiving end of a boxer’s punch. Something capable of inflicting face-shattering damage? Look at a few post-prize-fight photos for the proof if you want it.”
He couldn’t disagree. The boy had all the necessary requirements. Save one.
“And the gun, Sergeant?”
“What?”
“The shotgun used on Georgina Higgins-Hart. What about that?”
“You said yourself that the University probably has a gun club. To which, I have no doubt, Gareth Randolph belongs.”
“So why follow her?”
She frowned, jabbing the toe of her shoe against the icy stone floor.
“Havers, I can understand why he would lie in wait at Crusoe’s Island for Elena Weaver. He was in love with her. She’d rejected him. She’d made it plain that their lovemaking was just a bit of sweaty frolic on her mother’s kitchen floor. She’d declared her attachment to another man. She’d teased and humiliated and made him feel a perfect fool. I agree with all that.”
“So?”
“What about Georgina?”
“George…” Havers only stumbled over the thought for a moment before going on stoutly. “Perhaps it’s what we thought before. Symbolically killing Elena Weaver again and again by seeking out all the young women who resemble her.”
“If that’s the case, why not go to her room, Havers? Why not kill her in the college? Why follow her all the way out past Madingley? And how did he follow her?”
“How…”
“Havers, he’s deaf.”
That stopped her.
Lynley pressed his advantage. “It’s the country, Havers. It was pitch dark out there. Even if he got a car and followed her at a distance until they were safely out of town and then drove beyond her to lie in wait in that field, wouldn’t he have had to hear something—her footfalls, her breathing, anything, Havers—in order to know exactly when to shoot? Are you going to argue that he went out there before dawn on Wednesday morning and blithely relied upon there being adequate starlight in this weather—which, frankly, would have been a fairly bad bet—to see a running girl well enough and soon enough to aim at her, discharge the weapon, and kill her? That’s not premeditated murder. That’s pure serendipity.”
She lifted one of the boxing gloves with the palm of her hand. “So what’re we doing with these, Inspector?”
“Making St. James work for his money this morning. As well as hedging our bets.”
She pushed open the door with a weary grin. “I just love a man who keeps his options open.”
They were heading towards the turreted passage and Queens’ Lane beyond it when a voice called out to them. They turned back into the court. A slender figure was coming along the path, the mist breaking before her like a curtain as she jogged in their direction.
She was tall and fair, with long silky hair that was held back from her face by two tortoise shell combs. These glittered with damp in the light that shone from one of the buildings. Beads of moisture clung to her eyelashes and skin. She was wearing only an unmatched sweatsuit whose shirt, like Georgina’s, was emblazoned with the name of the college. She looked terribly cold.
“I was in the dining hall,” she told them. “I saw you come for Gareth. You’re the police.”
“And you’re…?”
“Rosalyn Simpson.” Her eyes fell to the boxing gloves, and her brow furrowed in consternation. “You don’t think Gareth’s had anything to do with this?”
Lynley said nothing. Havers crossed her arms. The girl continued.
“I would have come to you sooner, but I was in Oxford until Tuesday evening. And then…Well, it gets a bit complicated.” She cast a glance in the direction of Gareth Randolph’s room.
“You have some information?” Lynley asked.
“I went to see Gareth at first. It was the DeaStu handout he’d printed, you see. I saw it when I got back, so it seemed logical to talk to him. I thought he’d pass the information on. Besides, there were other considerations at the time that…Oh, what does it matter now? I’m here. I’m telling you.”
“What, exactly?”
Like Sergeant Havers, Rosalyn too crossed her arms, although it seemed more in a need to keep warm than a desire to project implacability. She said, “I was running along the river Monday morning. I went by Crusoe’s Island round half past six. I think I saw the killer.”
Glyn Weaver edged part way down the stairs, just far enough to hear the conversation between her former husband and his current wife. They were still in the morning room—although it had been some hours since breakfast—and their voices were just polite and formal enough to give a clear indication of the state of things between them. Cool, Glyn decided, frosting over into glacial. She smiled.
“Terence Cuff wants to give some sort of eulogy,” Anthony was saying. He spoke without any evident feeling, the information given like a recitation. “I’ve talked to two of her supervisors. They’ll also speak, and Adam’s said he’d like to read a poem she was fond of.” There was a clink of china, a cup being placed carefully into a saucer. “We might not have the body back from the police before tomorrow, but the funeral parlour will have a coffin there all the same. No one will know the difference. And as everyone’s been told she’s to be buried in London, no one will be expecting an interment tomorrow.”
“As to the funeral, Anthony. In London…” Justine’s voice was calm. Glyn felt her spine tingle when she heard that tone of cool determination.
“There can’t be a change in the plans,” Anthony said. “Try to understand. I have no choice in the matter. I must respect Glyn’s wishes. It’s the least I can do.”
“I’m your wife.”
“As she was once. And Elena was our daughter.”
“She was your wife for less than six years. Six miserable years, as I recall your telling me. More than fifteen years ago at that. While you and I—”
“This situation has nothing to do with how long I was married to either of you, Justine.”
“It has everything to do with it. It has to do with loyalty, with vows I made and promises I’ve kept. I’ve been faithful to you in every way, while she slept around like a whore and you know it. And now you say that respecting her wishes is the least you can do? Respecting hers over mine?”
Anthony had begun to respond with, “If you still can’t see that there are times when the past—” when Glyn got to the doorway. She took only a moment to survey them before speaking. Anthony was sitting in one of the wicker chairs, unshaven, desiccated. Justine was at the bank of windows where the fog that shrouded the wide front garden pressed long streaks of moisture against the glass. She was dressed in a black suit and pearl grey blouse. A black leather briefcase leaned against her chair.
Glyn said, “Perhaps you’d like to say the rest, Justine. Like mother, like daughter. Or don’t you have the nerve to carry your special brand of honesty to its logical conclusion?”
Justine began to move towards her chair. She brushed a strand of blonde hair off her cheek. Glyn caught her arm, dug her fingers into the fine wool of her suit, and enjoyed a fleeting moment of delight when she saw Justine flinch.
“I said why don’t you finish what you were saying?” she insisted. “Glyn put Elena through her paces, Anthony. Glyn turned your daughter into a little deaf whore. Elena gave a poke to anyone who wanted it, just like her mum.”
“Glyn,” Anthony said.
“Don’t try to defend her, all right? I was standing on the stairs. I heard what she said. My only child dead for just three days, myself struggling to make some kind of sense of it, and she can’t wait to tear into the both of us. And she chooses sex to do it. I find that most interesting.”
“I won’t listen to this,” Justine said.
Glyn tightened her grip. “Can’t you bear to hear the truth? You use sex as a weapon, and not merely against me.”
Glyn felt Justine’s muscles go rigid. She knew that her dagger had hit the mark. She drove it in farther. “Reward him when he’s been a good little boy, punish him when he’s bad. Is that how it is? So. How long will he pay for keeping you from the funeral?”
“You’re pathetic,” Justine said. “You can’t see beyond sex any more than—”
“Elena?” Glyn dropped Justine’s arm. She looked at Anthony. “Ah. There it is.”
Justine brushed at her sleeve as if to cleanse herself of the contact she’d had with her husband’s former wife. She picked up her briefcase.
“I’m off,” she said calmly.
Anthony stood, his eyes going from the briefcase to her, moving his gaze from her head to her feet as if he had only just become aware of the manner in which she had dressed for the day. “You can’t be intending—”
“To go back to work just three days after Elena was murdered? To expose myself to public censure for having done so? Oh yes, Anthony, that’s exactly what I intend.”
“No. Justine, people—”
“Stop it. Please. I’m not at all like you.”
For a moment, Anthony stared after her as she left the house, taking her coat from round the newel post on the stairway and closing the front door behind her. He watched her walk through the fog towards her grey Peugeot. Glyn kept her eyes on him warily, wondering if he would run out and try to stop her. But he seemed, if anything, too exhausted to care about changing anyone’s mind. He turned from the window and trudged towards the back of the house.
She went to the table upon which the breakfast things still lay: bacon congealing in slim jackets of grease, egg yolks drying and splitting like yellow mud. A piece of toast still stood in the silver rack, and Glyn reached for it thoughtfully. Dry and abrasive beneath her fingers, it crumbled easily, leaving a shower of dust upon the clean parquet floor.
From the back of the house, she could hear the metallic sound of file drawers sliding open. And over it, the high whine of Elena’s Irish setter, longing to be allowed into the house. Glyn walked to the kitchen from whose window she could see the dog sitting on the back step, his black nose pressed into the doorjamb, his feathery tail sweeping back and forth in innocent anticipation. He took a step backwards, looked up, and saw her watching him through the window. His tail picked up rhythm, he gave a joyful bark. She regarded him evenly—taking a small degree of pleasure in allowing his hopes to rise—before she turned and made her way to the rear of the house.
At the doorway to Anthony’s study, she paused. He was crouched by an open drawer of the filing cabinet. The contents of two manila folders lay on the floor, comprising perhaps two dozen pencil sketches. Next to them was a canvas rolled like a tube.
For a moment, Glyn watched as Anthony’s hand passed slowly over the drawings in a gesture like an incomplete caress. Then he began to go through them. His fingers seemed clumsy. Twice he gasped for breath. When he paused to remove his spectacles and wipe their lenses on his shirt, she realised that he was crying. She entered the room to get a better look at the drawings on the floor and saw that they were all sketches of Elena.
“Dad’s got himself into drawing these days,” Elena had told her. She’d pronounced it dawing, and she’d laughed about the idea. They’d often chuckled over Anthony’s attempts to find himself through one activity or another as he approached middle age. First it had been long distance running, after that he had begun to swim, then he’d taken up bicycling like a zealot, and finally he had learned to sail. But of all the activities which he had pursued, drawing amused them the most. “Dad t’inks he’s got the soul of Van Gogh,” Elena would say. And she’d mimic her father’s wide-legged stance with sketch pad in hand, eyes squinting towards the distance, hand shading her brow. She’d draw a moustache like his on her upper lip and pull her face into a contorted frown of concentration. “Doe move an inch, Glynnie,” she would command of her mother. “Hol’ that pose. Hol’—that—pose.” And they would laugh together.
But now Glyn could see that the sketches were quite good, that he had managed to achieve something far more in them than was depicted in the still lifes that hung in the sitting room, or the sailboats, the harbours, and the fishing villages here on the study walls. For in the series of drawings he’d spread out on the floor, she could see that he had managed to capture the essence of their daughter. Here were the exact tilt of her head, the elfin shape of her eyes, the wide chipped-tooth grin, the contour of a cheekbone, of nose, and of mouth. These were studies only, they were quick impressions. But they were lovely and true.
As she took a step closer, Anthony looked up. He gathered the drawings together and replaced them in their respective folders. Along with the canvas which fit into the back, he shoved them into the drawer.
“You don’t have any of them framed,” she said.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he closed the drawer and went to the desk, where he played restlessly with the computer, switching on the Ceephone and watching the screen. A series of menu instructions appeared. He stared at them but did nothing with the keyboard.
“Never mind,” Glyn said. “I know why you hide them.” She went to stand behind him. She spoke near his ear. “How many years have you lived like this, Anthony? Ten? Twelve? How on earth have you managed?”
His head lowered. She studied the back of his neck, remembering unexpectedly how soft his hair was and how, when overlong, it curled like a child’s against his skin. It was greying now, with scattered strands like white threads woven against black.
“What did she hope to gain? Elena was your daughter. She was your only child. What on earth did she hope to gain?”
His reply was a whisper. He spoke as if answering someone not in the room. “She wanted to hurt me. There was nothing else she could do to make me understand.”
“Understand? What?”
“How it felt to be devastated. How I’d devastated her. Through cowardice. Selfishness. Egocentricity. But mostly through cowardice. You want the Penford Chair only for your ego, she said. You want a beautiful house and a beautiful wife and a daughter who’ll be your marionette. So that people will look at you with admiration and envy. So that people will say the lucky bloke’s got it all. But you don’t have it all. You have practically nothing. You have less than nothing. Because what you have is a lie. And you don’t even have the courage to admit it.”
A sudden fist of knowledge squeezed at Glyn’s heart as the full meaning of his words slowly dawned upon her, even though he spoke them in a fugue. “You could have prevented it. If only you’d given her what she wanted. Anthony, you could have stopped her.”
“I couldn’t. I had to think of Elena. She was here in Cambridge, in this home, with me. She was starting to come round, to be free with me at last, to let me be her father. I couldn’t run the risk of losing her again. I couldn’t take the chance. And I thought I would lose her if I—”
“You lost her anyway!” she cried, shaking his arm. “She’s not going to walk through that door. She’s not going to say Dad, I understand, I forgive you, I know you did your best. She’s gone. She’s dead. And you could have prevented it.”
“If she had a child, she might have understood what it felt like to have Elena here. She might have known why I couldn’t face the thought of doing anything that might have resulted in losing her again. I’d lost her once. How could I face that agony again? How could she expect me to face it?”
Glyn saw that he wasn’t really responding to her. He was ruminating. He was speaking in tongues. Behind a barrier that shielded him from the worst of the truth, he was talking in a canyon where an echo exists, but throws back different words. Suddenly, she felt the same degree of anger towards him that she’d felt during the worst years of their marriage when she’d greeted his blind pursuit of his career with pursuits of her own, waiting for him to notice the late nights she was keeping, wanting him to notice the nature of the bruises on her neck, her breasts, and her thighs, anticipating the moment when he would finally speak, when he’d give an indication that he really did care.
“This is all about you, isn’t it?” she asked him. “It always has been. Even having Elena here in Cambridge was for your benefit, not for herself. Not for her education, but to make you feel better, to give you what you want.”
“I wanted to give her a life. I wanted us to have a life together.”
“How would that have been possible? You didn’t love her, Anthony. You only loved yourself. You loved your image, your reputation, your wonderful accomplishments. You loved being loved. But you didn’t love her. And even now you can stand here and look at your daughter’s death and think about how you caused it and how you feel about it now and how devastated you are and what kind of statement it all makes about you. But you won’t do anything about any of it, will you, you won’t make any declaration, you won’t take any stand. Because how might that reflect upon you?”
Finally, he looked at her. The rims of his eyes appeared bloody and sore. “You don’t know what happened. You don’t understand.”
“I understand perfectly. You plan to bury your dead, lick your wounds, and go on. You’re as much a coward as you were fifteen years ago. You ran out on her then in the middle of the night. You’ll run out on her now. Because it’s the easiest thing to do.”
“I didn’t run out on her,” he said carefully. “I stood firm this time, Glyn. That’s why she died.”
“For you? Because of you?”
“Yes. Because of me.”
“The sun rises and sets on the same horizon in your world. It always has.”
He shook his head. “Perhaps once,” he said. “But it only sets now.”