For the Sake of Elena

11

Lynley was relieved to fi nd Gareth Randolph in the offices of DeaStu, Cambridge University’s odd acronym for the Deaf Students’ Union. He had tried his room at Queens’ College first, only to be directed to Fenners, the central gymnasium for University sports where the boxing team worked out for two hours each day. There, however, in the smaller of the two gyms where he was assailed by the eye-prickling smells of sweat, damp leather, athletic tape, chalk, and unwashed workout clothes, Lynley had questioned a lorry-sized heavyweight who had pointed his side-of-beef fist in the direction of the exit and said that the Bant-apparently a reference to Gareth’s bantam-weight-was sitting by the phones at DeaStu, hoping for a call about the bird who got killed.

“She was his woman,” the heavyweight said. “He’s taking it hard.” And he drove his fi sts like battering rams into the punching bag which hung from the ceiling, putting his shoulders into each blow with such force that it seemed as if the floor shook beneath him.

Lynley wondered if Gareth Randolph was as powerful a fighter in his own weight class. He considered this question on the way to DeaStu. Anthony Weaver had made allegations about the boy that he could not avoid coupling with Havers’ report from the Cambridge police: Whatever Elena had been beaten with, it had left no trace.

DeaStu was housed in the basement of the Peterhouse Library not far from the University Graduate Centre, just at the bottom of Little St. Mary’s Lane, little more than two blocks from Queens’ College where Gareth Randolph lived. Its offices were tucked at the end of a low-ceilinged corridor illuminated by bright round globes of light. They had two means of access, one through the Lubbock Room on the ground floor of the library, and the other directly from the street at the rear of the building, not fifty yards away from the Mill Lane footbridge across which Elena Weaver had to have run on the morning of her death. The main office door of opaque glass bore the words Deaf Students of Cambridge University and beneath that the less formal DeaStu was superimposed over two hands crossed, fingers extended, palms outward.

Lynley had given lengthy thought to how he was going to communicate with Gareth Randolph. He had played round with the idea of calling Superintendent Sheehan to see if he had an interpreter associated with the Cambridge police. He’d never spoken with anyone deaf before, and from what he had gathered over the last twenty-four hours, Gareth Randolph did not have Elena Weaver’s facility for reading lips. Nor did he have her spoken language.

Once inside the office, however, he saw that things would take care of themselves. For talking to a woman who sat behind a desk piled with pamphlets, papers, and books was a knobby-ankled, bespectacled girl with her hair in plaits and a pencil stuck behind her ear. As she chatted and laughed, she was signing simultaneously. She also turned in his direction at the sound of the door opening. Here, Lynley thought, would be his interpreter.

“Gareth Randolph?” the woman behind the desk said in answer to Lynley’s question and after an inspection of his warrant card. “He’s just in the conference room. Bernadette, will you…?” And then to Lynley, “I assume you don’t sign, Inspector.”

“I don’t.”

Bernadette adjusted the pencil more fi rmly behind her ear, grinned sheepishly at this momentary display of self-importance, and said, “Right. Come along with me, Inspector. We’ll see what’s what.”

She led him back the way he had come and then down a short corridor whose ceiling was lined with pipes painted white. She said, “Gareth’s been here most of the day. He’s not doing very well.”

“Because of the murder?”

“He had a thing for Elena. Everyone knew it.”

“Did you know Elena yourself?”

“Just to see her. The others”-with a jutting out of her elbows to encompass the area and presumably the membership of DeaStu- “they sometimes like to have an interpreter go with them to their lectures just to make sure they don’t miss anything important. That’s my function, by the way. Interpreting. I make extra money to see me through the term that way. I get to hear some pretty decent lectures as well. I did a special Stephen Hawking lecture last week. What a job that was trying to sign. Astrophysical whatevers. It was like a foreign language.”

“I can well imagine.”

“The lecture hall was so quiet you’d have thought God was putting in an appearance. And after it was over, everyone stood and applauded and-” She rubbed the side of her nose with her index finger. “He’s rather special. I quite felt like crying.”

Lynley smiled, liking her. “But you never interpreted for Elena Weaver?”

“She didn’t use an interpreter. I don’t think she liked to.”

“She wanted people to think she could hear?”

“Not so much that,” Bernadette said. “I think she was proud that she could read lips. It’s difficult to do, especially if someone’s born deaf. My mum and dad-they’re both deaf, you see-they never learned to read much beyond ‘three quid please’ and ‘ta.’ But Elena was amazing.”

“How involved was she with the Deaf Students Union?”

Bernadette wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. “I couldn’t really say. Gareth’ll be able to tell you, though. He’s in here.”

She led him into a conference room that was roughly the size of an academic classroom. It contained little more than a large, rectangular table covered by green linen. At this, a young man was sitting, bent over a notebook. Lank hair the colour of old wet straw fell across his wide brow and into his eyes. As he wrote, he paused to chew at the fingernails of his left hand.

Bernadette said, “Wait a sec,” and from the door she flashed the lights off and on.

Gareth Randolph looked up. He got slowly to his feet, and as he did so, he gathered up from the table a large pile of used tissues, crushing them into a wad in his fist. He was a tall boy, Lynley saw, with a pallid complexion against which the scattered pits of old acne scars stood out in crimson. He wore typical student garb: blue jeans and a sweatshirt onto which had been stencilled the words What’s your sign? superimposed over two hands making a gesture which Lynley couldn’t interpret.

The boy said nothing at all until Bernadette spoke. And even then, since his eyes were on Lynley, he made a rough gesture so that Bernadette had to repeat her fi rst remark.

“This is Inspector Lynley from New Scotland Yard,” she said a second time. Her hands fluttered like quick, pale birds just below her face. “He’s come to talk to you about Elena Weaver.”

The boy’s eyes went back to Lynley. He looked him over from head to toe. He replied, hands chopping the air, and Bernadette interpreted simultaneously. “Not in here.”

“Fine,” Lynley said. “Wherever he likes.”

Bernadette’s hands flew over Lynley’s words, but as they did she continued with, “Speak to Gareth directly, Inspector. Call him you, not him. Else it’s quite dehumanising.”

Gareth read and smiled. His gestures in response to Bernadette’s were fluid. She laughed.

“What did he say?”

“He said, Ta, Bernie. We’ll make you a deaf woman yet.”

Gareth led them out of the conference room and back down the hall to an unventilated office made overly warm by a wheezing radiator. Inside, there was not much space for more than a desk, metal bookshelves on the walls, three plastic chairs, and a separate birch veneer table on which stood a Ceephone identical to those that Lynley had seen elsewhere.

Lynley realised with his first question that he would be at a disadvantage in this sort of interview. Since Gareth watched Bernadette’s hands in order to read Lynley’s words, there would not be an opportunity to catch a revealing if fleeting expression quickly veiled in his eyes should a question take him unaware. Additionally, there would be nothing to read in his voice, in his tone, in what he stressed or what he deliberately left unaccentuated. Gareth had the advantage of the silence that defi ned his world. Lynley wondered how, and if, he would use it.

“I’ve been hearing a great deal about your relationship with Elena Weaver,” Lynley said. “Dr. Cuff from St. Stephen’s apparently brought you together.”

“For her own good,” Gareth replied, the hands again sharp and staccato in the air. “To help her. Maybe save her.”

“Through DeaStu?”

“Elena wasn’t deaf. That was the problem. She could have been, but she wasn’t. They wouldn’t allow it.”

Lynley frowned. “What do you mean? Everyone’s said-”

Gareth scowled and grabbed a piece of paper. With a green felt-tip pen he scrawled out two words: Deaf and deaf. He drew three heavy lines under the upper case D and shoved the paper across the desk.

Bernadette spoke as Lynley looked at the two words. Her hands included Gareth in the conversation. “What he means, Inspector, is that Elena was deaf with a lower case d. She was disabled. Everyone else round here- Gareth especially-is Deaf with an upper case D.”

“D for different?” Lynley asked, thinking how this assessment went legions to support Justine Weaver’s words to him that day.

Gareth’s hands took over. “Different, yes. How could we not be different? We live without sound. But it’s more than that. Being Deaf is a culture. Being deaf is a handicap. Elena was deaf.”

Lynley pointed to the first of the two words. “But you wanted her to be Deaf, like you?”

“Wouldn’t you want a friend to run instead of crawl?”

“I’m not sure I follow the analogy.”

Gareth shoved his chair backwards. It screeched against the linoleum fl oor. He went to the bookshelf and pulled down two large leather-bound albums. He dropped them onto the desk. Lynley saw that across each was imprinted the acronym DeaStu with the year beneath it.

“This is Deaf.” Gareth resumed his seat.

Lynley opened one of the albums at random. It appeared to be a record of the activities in which the deaf students had engaged during the previous year. Each term had its own identifying page on which Michaelmas, Lent, or Easter had been written in fi ne calligraphy.

The record consisted of both written documents and photographs. It encompassed everything from DeaStu’s American football team whose plays were called by students on the sidelines who beat an enormous drum to signal the team via vibration-code, to dances held with the aid of powerful speakers which conveyed the rhythm of the music in much the same way, to picnics and meetings in which dozens of hands moved at once and dozens of faces lit with animation.

Bernadette said over Lynley’s shoulder, “That’s called wind-milling, Inspector.”

“What?”

“When everyone signs at once like that. All their hands are going. Like windmills.”

Lynley continued through the book. He saw three rowing teams whose strokes were orchestrated by coxswains utilising small red fl ags; a ten-member percussion group who used the movement of an oversized metronome to keep their pulsating rhythm together; grinning men and women in camouflage setting out with banners that read DeaStu Search and Pellet; a group of flamenco dancers; another of gymnasts. And in every photograph, participants in an activity were surrounded and supported by people whose hands spoke the language of commonality. Lynley returned the album.

“It’s quite a group,” he said.

“It’s not a group. It’s a life.” Gareth replaced the albums. “Deaf is a culture.”

“Did Elena want to be Deaf?”

“She didn’t know what Deaf was until she came to DeaStu. She was taught to think that deaf meant disabled.”

“That’s not the impression I’ve been getting,” Lynley said. “From what I understand, her parents did everything possible to allow her to fit into a hearing world. They taught her to read lips. They taught her to speak. It seems to me that the last thing they thought was that deaf meant disabled, especially in her case.”

Gareth’s nostrils flared. He said, “Fug at sht, fug ’t,” and began to sign with hands that pounded through his words.

“There is no fitting into a hearing world. There’s only bringing the hearing world to us. Make them see us as people as good as they are. But her father wanted her to play at hearing. Read lips like a pretty girl. Talk like a pretty girl.”

“That can’t be a crime. It is, after all, a hearing world that we live in.”

“A hearing world you live in. The rest of us without sound get on fine. We don’t want your hearing. But you can’t believe that, can you, because you think you’re special instead of just different.”

Again, it was only a slight variation on the theme Justine Weaver had introduced. The deaf weren’t normal. But then, for God’s sake, neither were the hearing most of the time.

Gareth was continuing. “We are her people. DeaStu. Here. We can support. We can understand. But he didn’t want that. He didn’t want her to know us.”

“Her father?”

“He wanted to make believe she could hear.”

“How did she feel about that?”

“How would you feel if people wanted you to play at being something you weren’t?”

Lynley repeated his earlier question. “Did she want to be Deaf?”

“She didn’t know-”

“I understand that she didn’t know what it meant at first, that she had no way of understanding the culture. But once she did know, did she want to be Deaf?”

“She would have wanted it. Eventually.”

It was a telling response. The uninformed, once informed, had not become an adherent to the cause. “So she involved herself with DeaStu solely because Dr. Cuff insisted. Because it was the only way to avoid being sent down.”

“At first that was why. But then she came to meetings, to dances. She was getting to know people.”

“Was she getting to know you?”

Gareth yanked open the centre drawer of the desk. He took out a pack of gum and unwrapped a stick. Bernadette began to reach forward to get his attention, but Lynley stopped her, saying, “He’ll look up in a moment.” Gareth let the moment drag on, but Lynley felt it was probably harder for the boy to keep his eyes fixed upon and his fingers working over the silver wrapper of the Juicy Fruit than it was for himself to wait him out. When at last he looked up, Lynley said,

“Elena Weaver was eight weeks pregnant.”

Bernadette cleared her throat. She said, “My goodness.” Then, “Sorry.” And her hands conveyed the information.

Gareth’s eyes went to Lynley and then beyond him to the closed door of the offi ce. He chewed his gum with what looked like deliberate slowness. Its scent was liquid sugar in the air.

When he replied, his hands moved as slowly as his jaws. “I didn’t know that.”

“You weren’t her lover?”

He shook his head.

“According to her stepmother, she’d been seeing someone regularly since December of last year. Her calendar indicates that with a symbol. A fish. That wasn’t you? You would have first been introduced to her round then, wouldn’t you?”

“I saw her. I knew her. It was what Dr. Cuff wanted. But I wasn’t her lover.”

“A bloke at Fenners called her your woman.”

Gareth took a second stick of gum, unwrapped it, rolled it into a tube, popped it into his mouth.

“Did you love her?”

Again, his eyes dropped. Lynley thought of the wad of tissues in the conference room. He looked once again at the boy’s pallid face. He said, “You don’t mourn someone you don’t love, Gareth,” even though the boy’s attention was not on Bernadette’s hands.

Bernadette said, “He wanted to marry her, Inspector. I know that because he told me once. And he-”

Perhaps sensing the conversation, Gareth looked up. His hands fl ashed quickly.

“I was telling him the truth,” Bernadette said. “I said you wanted to marry her. He knows you loved her, Gareth. It’s completely obvious.”

“Past. Loved.” Gareth’s fists were on his chest more like a punch than a sign. “It was over.”

“When did it end?”

“She didn’t fancy me.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“She fancied someone else.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I thought we were together. And we weren’t. That was it.”

“When did she make this clear to you? Recently, Gareth?”

He looked sullen. “Don’t remember.”

“Sunday night? Is that why you were arguing with her?”

“Oh, dear,” Bernadette murmured, although she cooperatively continued to sign.

“I didn’t know she was pregnant. She didn’t tell me that.”

“But as to the other. The man she loved. She told you about that. That was Sunday night, wasn’t it?”

Bernadette said, “Oh, Inspector, you can’t really think that Gareth had anything to do-”

Gareth lunged across the desk and grabbed Bernadette’s hands. Then he jerked out a few signs.

“What’s he saying?”

“He doesn’t want me to defend him. He says there’s nothing for me to defend.”

“You’re an engineering undergraduate, aren’t you?” Lynley asked. Gareth nodded. He said, “And the engineering lab’s by Fen Causeway, isn’t it? Did you know Elena Weaver ran that way in the morning? Did you ever see her run? Did you ever go with her?”

“You want to think I killed her because she wouldn’t have me” was his reply. “You think I was jealous. You’ve got it figured that I killed her because she was giving some other bloke what she wouldn’t give me.”

“It’s a fairly solid motive, isn’t it?”

Bernadette gave a tiny mewl of protest.

Gareth said, “Maybe the bloke who got her pregnant killed her. Maybe he didn’t fancy her as much as she fancied him.”

“But you don’t know who he was?”

Gareth shook his head. Lynley had the distinct impression he was lying. And yet he couldn’t at the moment come up with a reason why Gareth Randolph would lie about the identity of the man who made Elena pregnant, especially if he truly believed that man might be her killer. Unless he intended to take care of dealing with the man himself, in his own time, on his own terms. And with a blue in boxing, he’d have the odds on his side if it came to taking another by surprise.

Even as Lynley dwelt on this thought, he realised there was yet another possible reason why Gareth might choose not to cooperate with the police. If he was savouring Elena’s death at the same time as he mourned it, what better way to prolong his enjoyment than to lengthen the time it would take to bring the criminal to justice. How often had a jilted lover believed that a crime of violence perpetrated by someone else was exactly what the loved one deserved?

Lynley rose to his feet and nodded to the boy. He said, “Thank you for your time,” and turned to the door.

On the back of it he saw what he hadn’t had the opportunity to notice when he had entered the room. It was hung with a calendar on which the entire year was visible at one glance. So it was not avoidance that had made Gareth Randolph shift his eyes to the door when Lynley had told him of Elena Weaver’s pregnancy.

He’d forgotten about the bells. They’d rung at Oxford as well when he was an undergraduate, but somehow the years had taken that memory from him. Now as he stepped out of the Peterhouse Library and began the walk back to St. Stephen’s College, the resonant calling of the faithful to Evensong formed an auditory backdrop-like antiphonal chanting-from college chapels across the city. It was, he thought, one of life’s most joyous sounds, this ringing of bells. And he found himself regretting the fact that the span of time in which he had given himself over to learning how to understand the criminal mind had allowed him to forget the sheer pleasure of church bells ringing into an autumn wind.

He let sound itself become his most conscious perception as he strolled past the old, overgrown graveyard of Little St. Mary’s Church and made the turn onto Trumpington where the jingle of bicycle bells and the metallic clicking of their unoiled gears joined the rumble of evening traffi c.

“Go on, Jack,” a young man shouted to a retreating bike rider from the doorway of a grocer’s shop as Lynley passed. “We’ll catch you up at the Anchor. All right?”

“Right.” A vague call in return, caught on the wind.

Three girls walked by, engaged in a heated discussion about “that sod, Robert.” They were followed by an older woman, high heels snapping against the pavement, pushing a crying baby in a pram. And then lurched by a black-garbed figure of uncertain sex from the folds of whose voluminous coat and trailing scarves came the plaintive notes of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” played on harmonica.

Through it all, Lynley heard Bernadette giving voice to Gareth’s angry words: We don’t want your hearing. But you can’t believe that, can you, because you think you’re special instead of just bloody different.

He wondered if this had marked the crucial difference between Gareth Randolph and Elena Weaver. We don’t want your hearing. For because of her parents’ well-intentioned if perhaps arguably misguided efforts on her behalf, Elena had been taught to know every moment of her life that something was missing. She had been given something to want. So how could Gareth ever have hoped to win her over to a life-style and a culture that she had been taught from birth to reject and overcome?

He wondered what it had been like for the two of them: Gareth dedicated to his people, seeking to make Elena one of them. And Elena merely following the dictates laid down by the Master of her College. Had she feigned interest in DeaStu? Had she feigned enthusiasm? And if she did neither, if she felt contempt, what kind of effect would this have had on the young man who had been given the unwanted assignment of steering her into a society so foreign to that which she had always known?

Lynley wondered what kind of blame-if any-ought to be assessed upon the Weavers for the efforts they had made with their daughter. For in spite of the manner in which they had apparently tried to create an inaccurate fantasy out of the reality of their daughter’s life, hadn’t they in fact given Elena what Gareth himself had never known? Hadn’t they given her her own form of hearing? And if that was the case, if Elena did move with a relative degree of comfort in a world in which Gareth felt himself an alien, how could he come to terms with the fact that he had fallen in love with someone who shared neither his culture nor his dreams?

Lynley paused in front of the multi-spired gatehouse of King’s College where lights shone brightly from the porter’s lodge. He stared, unseeing, at the collection of bicycles leaning this way and that. A young man was scrawling some sort of notice on a blackboard beneath the gate, while a chatting group of black-gowned academics hurried across the lawn towards the chapel with that self-important stride that appeared to be inherent to senior members of all the colleges who were blessed with the privilege of setting foot to grass. He listened to the continuing echo of the bells, with Great St. Mary’s just across King’s Parade calling out in a ceaseless, sonorous petition for prayer. Each note cast itself into the emptiness of Market Hill just beyond the church. Each building there caught the sound and flung it back into the night. He listened, he thought. He knew he was intellectually capable of getting to the root of Elena Weaver’s death. But as the evening continued to swell with sound, he wondered if he was unprejudicially capable of getting to the root of Elena’s life.

He was bringing to the job at hand the preconceptions of a member of the hearing world.

He wasn’t sure how to shed them-or even if he needed to do so-in order to get at the truth behind her killing. But he did know that only through coming to an understanding of Elena’s own vision of herself could he also understand the relationships she shared with other people. And-all previous thoughts on Crusoe’s Island aside-for the moment, at least, it seemed that these relationships had to be the key to what had happened to her.

At the far end of the north range of Front Court, an amber rhombus of light melted out onto the lawn as the south door to King’s College Chapel slowly opened. The faint sound of organ music drifted on the wind. Lynley shivered, turned up the collar of his overcoat, and decided to join the college for Evensong.

Perhaps a hundred people had gathered in the chapel where the chóir was just fi ling down the aisle, passing beneath the magnifi cent Florentine screen atop of which angels held brass trumpets aloft. They were led by cross- and incense-bearers, the latter filling the icy chapel air with the heady sweet scent of smoky perfume. And they, along with the congregation, were dwarfed by the breathtaking interior of the chapel itself, whose fanvaulted ceiling soared above them in an intricate display of tracery periodically bossed by the Beaufort portcullis and the Tudor rose. It formed a beauty that was at once both austere and exalted, like the arcing flight of a jubilant bird, but one who does his sailing against a winter sky.

Lynley took a place at the rear of the chancel from which he could meditate at a distance upon Adoration of the Magi, the Rubens canvas that served as the chapel’s reredos, softly lit above the main altar. In it, one of the Magi leaned forward, hand outstretched to touch the child while the mother herself presented the baby, as if with the serene confi dence that he wouldn’t be harmed. And yet even then she must have known what lay ahead. She must have had a premonition of the loss she would face.

A lone soprano-a small boy so tiny that his surplice hung just inches from the fl oor-sang out the first seven pure notes of a Kyrie Eleison, and Lynley lifted his eyes to the stained glass window above the painting. Through it moonlight shimmered in a muted corona, giving only one colour to the window itself, a deep blue faintly touched on its outer edge by white. And although he knew and could see that the crucifixion was what the window depicted, the only section which the moon brought to life was a single face-soldier, apostle, believer, or apostate-his mouth a black howl of some emotion eternally unnamed.

Life and death, the chapel said. Alpha and omega. With Lynley finding himself caught between the two and trying somehow to make sense of both.

As the choir filed out at the end of the service and the congregation rose to follow, Lynley saw that Terence Cuff had been among the worshippers. He had been sitting on the far side of the choir, and now he stood with his attention given to the Rubens, his hands resting in the pockets of an overcoat that was just a shade or two darker than the grey of his hair. Seeing his partial profile, Lynley was struck once again by the man’s self-possession. His features did not display the slightest trace of anxiety. Nor did they reveal any reaction to the pressures of his job.

When Cuff turned from the altar, he exhibited no surprise to find Lynley watching him. He merely nodded a greeting, left his pew, and joined the other man next to the chancel screen. He looked round the chapel before he spoke.

“I always come back to King’s,” he said. “At least twice a month like a prodigal son. I never really feel like a sinner in the hands of an angry God here. A minor transgressor, perhaps, but not a real miscreant. For what kind of God could honestly stay angry when one asks his forgiveness in such architectural splendour?”

“Have you a need to ask forgiveness?”

Cuff chuckled. “I’ve found it’s always unwise to admit one’s misdeeds in the presence of a policeman, Inspector.”

They left the chapel together, Cuff stopping at the brass collection tray near the door to drop in a pound coin which clanked heavily against an assortment of ten- and fi fty-pence pieces. Then they went out into the evening.

“This meets my occasional need to get away from St. Stephen’s,” Cuff said as they strolled round the west end of the chapel towards Senate House Passage and Trinity Lane. “My academic roots are here at King’s.”

“You were a senior fellow here?”

“Hmm. Yes. Now it serves as part refuge and part home, I suppose.” Cuff pointed towards the chapel spires that rose like sculptured shadows against the night sky. “This is how churches ought to look, Inspector. No one since the Gothic architects has known quite so well how to set fire to emotion with simple stone. You’d think the very material itself would quash the possibility that one might actually feel something at the sight of the finished building. But it doesn’t.”

Lynley took his lead from the other man’s first thought. “What sort of refuge does the master of a college need?”

Cuff smiled. In the weak light, he looked much younger than he had appeared in his library on the previous day. “From political machinations. The battle of personalities. The jockeying for position.”

“Everything attending the selection of the Penford Professor?”

“Everything in attendance on a community filled with scholars who have reputations to maintain.”

“You’ve a distinguished enough group set on doing the maintaining.”

“Yes. St. Stephen’s is lucky in that.”

“Is Lennart Thorsson among them?”

Cuff paused, turning to Lynley. The wind was ruffling his hair, and it blew at the charcoal scarf he wore slung round his neck. He cocked his head appreciatively. “You led into that well.”

They continued their walk past the back of the old law school. Their footsteps echoed in the narrow lane. At the entrance to Trinity Hall, a girl and boy were engaged in an intent discussion, the girl leaning against the ashlar wall with her head thrown back and tears glittering on her face while the boy spoke urgently in an angry voice, one hand flat against the wall by her head and the other on her shoulder.

“You don’t understand,” she was saying. “You never try to understand. I don’t even think you want to understand any longer. You only want-”

“Can’t you ever leave it, Beth? You act like I’m rolling in your knickers every night.”

As Lynley and Cuff passed, the girl turned away, her hand to her face. Cuff said quietly, “It always comes down to that sort of giveand-take, doesn’t it? I’m fi fty-five years old and I still wonder why.”

“I should think it’s based on the injunctions women grow up hearing,” Lynley said. “Protect yourself from men. They only want one thing, and once they get it from you, they’ll be fast on their way. Don’t give an inch. Don’t trust them. Don’t trust anyone in fact.”

“Is that the sort of thing you’d tell a daughter of yours?”

“I don’t know,” Lynley said. “I don’t have a daughter. I like to think I’d tell her to know her own heart. But then, I’ve always been a romantic when it comes to relationships.”

“That’s an odd predisposition in your line of work.”

“It is, isn’t it?” A car approached slowly, its indicator signalling for Garret Hostel Lane, and Lynley took the opportunity to glance at Cuff as the light from the headlamps struck his face. He said, “Sex is a dangerous weapon in an environment like this. Dangerous for anyone wielding it. Why didn’t you tell me about Elena Weaver’s charges against Lennart Thorsson?”

“It seemed unnecessary.”

“Unnecessary?”

“The girl’s dead. There didn’t seem to be a point to bringing up something unproved that would only serve to damage the reputation of one of the senior fellows. It’s been diffi cult enough for Thorsson to climb as far as he has at Cambridge.”

“Because he’s a Swede?”

“A University isn’t immune to xenophobia, Inspector. I dare say a British Shakespearean wouldn’t have had to jump the academic hurdles Thorsson’s had to jump in the last ten years to prove himself worthy. And that despite the fact that he did his graduate work here in the fi rst place.”

“Nonetheless, in a murder investigation, Dr. Cuff-”

“Hear me out, please. I don’t much like Thorsson personally. I’ve always had the feeling he’s at heart a womaniser, and I’ve never had time for men of that sort. But he’s a sound-if admittedly quixotic-Shakespearean with a solid future ahead of him. To drag his name through the muck in a situation that can’t be proved at this point seemed-still seems-a fruitless endeavour.”

Cuff shoved both hands back into his overcoat pockets and stopped walking when they came to the gatehouse of St. Stephen’s. Two undergraduates hurried by, calling out a hello to him which he acknowledged with a nod of his head. He continued to speak, his voice low, his face in shadow, his back turned to the gate-house itself.

“It goes beyond that. There’s Dr. Weaver to consider. If I bring this matter out into the open with a full investigation, do you think for a moment that Thorsson isn’t going to drag Elena’s name through the muck in order to defend himself? With his entire career on the line, what kind of tale will he tell about her alleged attempt to seduce him? About the clothes she wore when she came to her supervisions? About the way she sat? About what she said and how she said it? About everything she did to get him into bed? And with Elena not there to argue her case, how will her father feel, Inspector? He’s already lost her. Shall we set about destroying his memory of her as well? What purpose does that serve?”

“It might be wiser to ask what purpose it serves to keep everything quiet. I imagine you’d like the Penford Professor to be a senior fellow here at St. Stephen’s.”

Cuff locked eyes with his. “Your connotation is ugly.”

“So is murder, Dr. Cuff. And you can’t really argue that a scandal involving Elena Weaver wouldn’t cause the search committee for the Penford Chair to think about turning its eyes in another direction. That, after all, is the easiest course of action.”

“They’re not looking for the easiest. They’re looking for the best.”

“Basing their decision upon…?”

“Certainly not basing it upon the behaviour of the applicants’ children, no matter how outrageous that behaviour may be.”

Lynley drew his conclusion from Cuff’s use of the adjective. “So you don’t really believe Thorsson harassed her. You believe she cooked up this tale because he wouldn’t have her when she wanted him.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m merely saying there’s nothing to investigate. It’s his word against hers and she has no word to give us.”

“Had you spoken to Thorsson about the charges prior to her death?”

“Of course I’d spoken to him. He denied every one of her accusations.”

“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 fi erce gunfi re 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.”