“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.