For the Sake of Elena

19

“What is it, Tommy?” Lady Helen asked when she came at his beckoning from the doorway to the JCR.

“A premature ending to the concert. For us, at least. Come with me.”

She followed him back to the bar where the crush of people was beginning to thin as the jazz audience wandered once again in the direction of the music. The man called Troughton was still sitting at the corner table, but one of his companions had left and the other was getting ready to do the same, donning a green anorak and a black and white scarf. Troughton himself stood and cupped his hand round his ear to hear something that the younger man was saying, and after a moment of further conversation, he too put on a jacket and started across the room to the door.

As he approached, Lynley eyed the older man, taking his measure as the potential lover of a twenty-year-old girl. Although Troughton had a youthful, pixie-like face, he was otherwise perfectly nondescript, an ordinary man no more than five feet eight inches tall whose toast-coloured hair looked soft and was curly but was also decidedly thinning on the top. He appeared to be somewhere in his late forties, and aside from the width of his shoulders and the depth of his chest-both of which suggested that he was a rower-Lynley had to admit that he didn’t look at all the type of man to have attracted and seduced someone like Elena Weaver.

As the other man began to pass by them on his way to the door, Lynley said, “Dr. Trough-ton?”

Troughton paused, looked surprised to have a stranger addressing him by name. “Yes?”

“Thomas Lynley,” he said and introduced Lady Helen. He reached into his pocket and produced his police identifi cation. “May we go somewhere to talk?”

Troughton didn’t appear the least bewildered by the request. Instead, he looked both resigned and relieved. “Yes. This way,” he said and led them out into the night.

He took them to his rooms in the building that comprised the north range of the college garden, two courtyards away from the JCR. On the second floor, situated in the southwest corner, they overlooked the River Cam on one side and the garden on the other. They consisted of a small bedroom and a study, the former furnished only with an unmade single bed and the latter crowded with ancient, overstuffed furniture and a vast and undisciplined number of books. These lent to the room the sort of mouldy mustiness associated with paper too long exposed to air that is heavy with damp.

Troughton picked up a sheaf of essays from one of the chairs and put it on his desk. He said, “May I offer you a brandy?” and when Lynley and Lady Helen accepted, he went to a glass-fronted cabinet to one side of the fi replace where he took out three plain balloon glasses and carefully held each one up to the light before pouring. He didn’t say anything until he had taken a seat in one of the heavy, overstuffed chairs.

“You’ve come about Elena Weaver, haven’t you?” He spoke quietly, calmly. “I suppose I’ve been expecting you since yesterday afternoon. Did Justine give you my name?”

“No. Elena herself did, after a fashion. She’d been making a curious mark on her calendar ever since last January,” Lynley said. “A small line drawing of a fi sh.”

“Yes. I see.” Troughton gave his attention to his balloon glass. His eyes fi lled, and he pressed his fingers to them before he raised his head. “Of course, she didn’t call me that,” he said unnecessarily. “She called me Victor.”

“But it was her shorthand method of noting when you’d meet, I should guess. And, no doubt, a way to keep the knowledge from her father should he ever happen to glance at her calendar on a visit to her room. Because, I imagine, you know her father quite well.”

Troughton nodded. He took a swallow of his brandy, setting the balloon glass on the low table that separated his chair from Lady Helen’s. He patted the breast pocket of his grey tweed jacket and brought out a cigarette case. It was made of pewter, dented in one corner. It bore some sort of crest upon its cover. He offered it round and then lit up, the match flickering in his fingers like an uneasy beacon. He had large hands, Lynley noted, strong-looking with smooth, oval nails. They were his best feature.

Troughton kept his eyes on his cigarette as he said, “The hardest part these last three days has been the pretence of it all. Coming to the college, seeing to my supervisions, taking my meals with the others. Having a glass of sherry before dinner last night with the Master and making small talk while all the time I wanted to throw my head back and howl.” When his voice wavered slightly on the last word, Lady Helen leaned forward in her chair as if she would offer him sympathy, but she stopped herself when Lynley lifted his hand in quick admonition. Troughton steadied himself by drawing in on his cigarette and placing it into a pottery ashtray on the table next to him where its smoke rose in a snaking plume. Then he went on.

“But what right have I to any one of the externals of grief? I have duties, after all. I have responsibilities. A wife. Three children. I’m supposed to think of them. I ought to be engaged in picking up the pieces and going on and being thankful that my marriage and my career didn’t come crashing down round me because I’ve spent the last eleven months screwing a deaf girl twenty-seven years my junior. In fact, inside my ugly little soul where no one would ever know the feeling is even there, I ought to be secretly thankful Elena’s out of the way. Because there’ll be no mess now, no scandal, no titters and whispers behind my back. It’s completely over and I’m to go on. That’s what men my age do, isn’t it, when they’ve puffed themselves up with a successful seduction that, over time, grows just a little bit tedious. And it was supposed to grow tedious, wasn’t it, Inspector? I was supposed to start finding her a sexual millstone, living evidence of an ego-boosting peccadillo that promised to come back to haunt me if I didn’t take care of her in one way or another.”

“It wasn’t like that for you?”

“I love her. I can’t even say loved because if I put it in the past tense, I’m going to have to face the fact that she’s gone and I can’t stand the thought of it.”

“She was pregnant. Did you know that?”

Troughton closed his eyes. The weak overhead light, which shone down from a cone-shaped shade, cast shadows from his eyelashes onto his skin. It glittered beneath the lashes on the crescent of tears which he appeared to be willing himself not to shed. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. When he could, he said, “I knew.”

“I should think that offered the possibility of serious difficulties for you, Dr. Troughton. No matter how you felt about the girl.”

“The scandal, you mean? The loss of lifelong friendships? The damage to my career? None of that mattered. Oh, I knew I was likely to be ostracised by virtually everyone if I walked out on my family for a twenty-year-old girl. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to realise that I simply didn’t care. The sorts of things that matter to my colleagues, Inspector-prestigious appointments, the building of a political base, a stellar academic reputation, invitations to speak at conferences and to chair committees, requests to serve the college, the University, even the nation-those things ceased mattering to me a long time ago when I reached the conclusion that connection to another person is the only item of real value in life. And I felt I’d found that connection with Elena. I wasn’t about to give her up.

I would have done anything to keep her. Elena.”

The saying of her name seemed a necessity to Troughton, a subtle form of release that he had not allowed himself-that the circumstances of their relationship had not allowed him-since her death. But still he didn’t cry, as if he believed that to give in to sorrow was to lose control over the few aspects of his life that remained unshattered by the girl’s murder.

As if she knew this, Lady Helen went to the cabinet by the fireplace and found the bottle of brandy. She poured a bit more into Troughton’s glass. Her own face, Lynley saw, was grave and composed.

“When did you see Elena last?” Lynley asked the other man.

“Sunday night. Here.”

“But she didn’t spend the night, did she? The porter saw her leaving St. Stephen’s to go running in the morning.”

“She left me…it must have been just before one. Before the gates close here.”

“And you? Did you go home as well?”

“I stayed. I do that most weeknights, and have done for some two years now.”

“I see. Your home isn’t in the city, then?”

“It’s in Trumpington.” Troughton appeared to read the expression on Lynley’s face, adding, “Yes, I know, Inspector. Trumpington’s hardly such a distance from the college to warrant having to spend the night here. Especially having to spend most weeknights over a two-year period. Obviously, my reasons for dossing here had to do with a distance of a very different sort. Initially, that is. Before Elena.”

Troughton’s cigarette had burnt itself to nothing in the ashtray by his chair. He lit another and took more of the brandy. He appeared to have himself once more under control.

“When did she tell you she was pregnant?”

“Wednesday night, not long after she’d got the results of the test.”

“But prior to that, she’d told you there was a possibility? She’d told you she suspected?”

“She hadn’t said anything to me about pregnancy before Wednesday. I had no suspicion.”

“Did you know she wasn’t taking precautions?”

“It wasn’t something I felt we had to discuss.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Lynley saw Lady Helen stir, turning to face Troughton, saying, “But surely, Dr. Troughton, a man of your education wouldn’t have left the sole responsibility of contraception to the woman with whom you intended to sleep. You would have discussed it with her before you took her to bed.”

“I didn’t see the need.”

“The need.” Lady Helen said the two words slowly.

Lynley thought of the unused birth control pills which Sergeant Havers had found in Elena Weaver’s desk drawer. He recalled February’s date upon them and the conjectures he and Havers had developed regarding that date. He asked, “Dr. Troughton, did you assume she was using a contraceptive of some sort? Did she tell you she was?”

“As entrapment, you mean? No. She never said a word about contraception one way or another. And she didn’t need to, Inspector. It wouldn’t have made any difference to me if she had.” He picked up his brandy glass and turned it on his palm. It seemed a largely meditative gesture.

Lynley watched the play of uncertainty on his face. He felt irritated at the delicacy with which the circumstances suggested he probe for the truth. He said, “I have the distinct impression that we’re caught between talking at cross purposes and engaging in outright prevarication. Perhaps you’d care to tell me what you’re holding back.”

In the silence, the distant sound of the jazz concert beat rhythmically against the windows in the room, the high wild notes of the trumpet improvising as Randie took another ride with the band. And then the drummer soloed. And then the melody resumed. When it did so, Victor Troughton raised his head, as if the music beckoned him to do so.

He said, “I was going to marry Elena. Frankly, I welcomed the opportunity to do so. But her baby wasn’t mine.”

“Wasn’t-”

“She didn’t know that. She thought I was the father. And I let her believe it. But I wasn’t, I’m afraid.”

“You sound certain of that.”

“I am, Inspector.” Troughton offered a smile of infinite sadness. “I had a vasectomy nearly three years ago. Elena didn’t know. And I didn’t tell her. I’ve never told anyone.”

Just outside the building in which Victor Troughton had his study and bedroom, a terrace overlooked the River Cam. It rose from the garden, partially hidden by a brick wall, and it held several planters of verduous shrubs and a few benches on which-during fine weather-members of the college could take the sun and listen to the laughter of those who tried their luck punting down the river towards the Bridge of Sighs. It was to this terrace that Lynley directed Lady Helen. Although he recognised his need to lay before her each singular realisation that the circumstances of the evening had forced upon him, he said nothing at the moment. Instead, he tried to give defi nition to what those realisations were causing him to feel.

The wind of the previous two days had subsided considerably. All that remained of it was an occasional brief, weak gust of cold that puffed across the Backs, as if the night were sighing. But even those brief gusts would eventually dissipate, and the heaviness of the chill air suggested that fog would replace them tomorrow.

It was just after ten. The jazz concert had ended moments before they left Victor Troughton, and the voices of students calling to one another still rose and fell in the college grounds as the crowd dispersed. No one came in their direction, however. And considering both the hour and the temperature, Lynley knew it was unlikely that anyone would join or disturb them on the secluded river terrace.

They chose a bench at the south end of the terrace where a wall that separated the fellows’ garden from the rest of the grounds also afforded them protection from what remained of the wind. Lynley sat, pulling Lady Helen down next to him, drawing her into the curve of his arm. He pressed his lips to the side of her head in what was more a need of physical contact than an expression of affection, and in response her body seemed to yield to his, creating a gentle, constant pressure against him. She didn’t speak, but he had little doubt as to where her thoughts lay.

Victor Troughton had seemed to recognise an opportunity to speak for the first time about what had been his most closely guarded secret. And like most people who’ve lived a lie, when the opportunity presented itself to reveal reality, he was more than willing to do so. But as he began to tell his story, Lynley had seen Lady Helen’s initial sympathy towards Trough-ton-so characteristic of her, really-transform slowly. Her posture changed, drawing her fractionally away from the man. Her eyes grew cloudy. And despite the fact that he was in the midst of an interview crucial to a murder investigation, Lynley found himself watching Lady Helen as much as he was listening to Troughton’s story. He wanted to excuse himself to her-to excuse all men-for the sins against women which Troughton was listing without an apparent twinge of conscience.

The historian had lit a third cigarette from the smouldering butt of his second. He had taken more brandy, and as he spoke, he kept his eyes fixed on the liquor in the glass and on the small, swimming oval of yellow-gold that was the reflection in the brandy of the light that hung above him. He never spoke in anything other than a low, frank voice.

“I wanted a life. That’s really the only excuse I have, and I know it isn’t much of one. I was willing to stay in my marriage for my children’s sake. I was willing to be a hypocrite and keep up the pretence of happiness. But I wasn’t willing to live like a priest. I did that for two years, dead for two years. I wanted a life again.”

“When did you meet Elena?” Lynley asked him.

Troughton waved the question off. He seemed determined to tell the story in his own way, in his own time. He said, “The vasectomy had nothing to do with Elena. I’d merely made a decision about my life-style. These are the days of sexual profligacy, after all, so I decided to make myself available to women. But I didn’t want to run the risk of an unwanted pregnancy-or the risk of some scheming female’s entrapment-so I had myself fixed up. And I went on the prowl.”

He lifted his glass and smiled sardonically. “It was, I must admit, a rather rude awakening. I was just short of forty-five years old, in fairly good condition, in a somewhat admirable and ego-massaging career as a relatively well-known and well-respected academic. I had expectations of scores of women being more than willing to accept my attentions just for the sheer, intellectual thrill of knowing they’d been to bed with a Cambridge don.”

“I take it you found that wasn’t the case.”

“Not among the women I was pursuing.” Troughton looked long at Lady Helen, as if he were evaluating the opposing forces at battle within him: the wisdom of saying nothing more versus the overwhelming need to say it all at last. He gave in to need, turning back to Lynley. “I wanted a young woman, Inspector. I wanted to feel young, resilient flesh. I wanted to kiss breasts that were full and firm. I wanted unveined legs and feet without callosity and hands like silk.”

“And what about your wife?” Lady Helen asked. Her voice was quiet, her legs were crossed, her hands were folded and relaxed in her lap. But Lynley knew her well enough to imagine how her heart had begun to pound angrily-as any woman’s would-when Troughton calmly and rationally offered his list of sexual requirements: not a mind, not a soul, just a body that was young.

Troughton was not reluctant to answer her. “Three children,” he replied. “Three boys. Each time, Rowena let herself go a little more. First it was her clothes and her hair, then her skin, then her body.”

“What you mean to say is that a middle-aged woman who has borne three children no longer excited you.”

“I admit to the worst of it,” Troughton replied. “I felt an aversion when I looked at what was left of her stomach. I was mildly disgusted over the size of her hips, and I hated the drooping sacks that her breasts had become and the loose flesh hanging beneath her arms. But most of all I hated the fact that she didn’t intend to do a thing about herself. And that she was perfectly happy when I began to leave her alone.”

He got up and walked across the room to the window that overlooked the college garden. He pulled back the curtain and studied the outdoors, sipping his brandy.

“So I made my plans. I had the vasectomy to protect myself from any unexpected diffi culties, and I began to go my own way. The only problem was that I found I really didn’t have the right…What do they call it? The right moves? The technique?” He chuckled derisively. “I’d actually thought it would be easy. I’d be joining the sexual revolution two decades too late, but I’d be joining it nonetheless. A middle-aged pioneer. What a nasty surprise it all was for me.”

“And then Elena Weaver came along?” Lynley asked.

Troughton stayed by the window, back-dropped by the black glass of night. “I’ve known her father for years, so I’d met her before, on one visit or another when she was up from London. But it wasn’t until he brought her to my house last autumn to choose a puppy that I really thought of her as anything other than Anthony’s little deaf girl. And even then, it was just admiration on my part. She was lively, good-humoured, a mass of energy and enthusiasm. She got on well in life in spite of being deaf, and I found that-along with everything else about her-immensely attractive. But Anthony’s a colleague, and even if a score of young women hadn’t already given me sufficient evidence of my undesirability, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to approach a colleague’s daughter.”

“She approached you?”

Troughton made a gesture that encompassed the room. “She dropped by here several times during Michaelmas term last year. She’d tell me about how the dog was doing and chat in that odd-voiced way of hers. She’d drink tea, pinch a few cigarettes when she thought I wasn’t looking. I enjoyed her visits. I began to look forward to them. But nothing happened between us until Christmas.”

“And then?”

Troughton returned to his chair. He crushed out his cigarette but did not light another. He said, “She came to show me the gown she’d bought for one of the Christmas balls. She said, I’ll try it on for you, shall I, and she turned her back and began to undress right here in the room. Of course, I’m not entirely a fool. I realised later that she’d done it deliberately, but at the time, I was horrified. Not only at her behaviour but at what I felt-no, what I knew in an instant that I wanted to do-in the face of her behaviour. She was down to her underthings when I said, For God’s sake, what do you think you’re doing, girl? But I was across the room and her head was turned, so she couldn’t read my lips. She just kept undressing. I went to her, made her face me, and repeated the question. She looked me straight in the eye and said, I’m doing what you want me to do, Vittor. And that was that. We made love in the very chair you’re sitting in, Inspector. I was so desperate to have her that I didn’t even bother to lock the door.” He drank the rest of his brandy, set the balloon glass on the table. “Elena knew what I was after. I’ve no doubt she’d known the moment her father brought her to my house to see those dogs. If she was nothing else, she was brilliant at reading people. Or at least she was brilliant at reading me. She always knew what I wanted and when I wanted it and just exactly how.”

“So you’d found that resilient fl esh you’d been seeking,” Lady Helen said. Cool condemnation comprised the undercurrent of the statement.

Troughton didn’t avoid admitting the worst. “I found it. Yes. But not the way I thought. I didn’t count on falling in love. I thought it would just be sex between us. Good, vigorous sex anytime we felt the urge. We were, after all, serving each other’s needs.”

“In what way?”

“She was accommodating my need to savour her youth and perhaps recapture a bit of my own. I was accommodating her need to hurt her father.” He poured himself more brandy and added to the other glasses as well. He looked from Lynley to Lady Helen as if gauging on their faces a response to his final statement. He went on with, “As I said, Inspector, I’m not a complete fool.”

“Perhaps you’re judging yourself too harshly.”

Troughton placed the bottle on the table next to his chair and drank deeply of the brandy, saying, “Not at all. Look at the facts. I’m forty-seven years old and on the downhill plunge. She was twenty, surrounded by hundreds of young men with their entire lives ahead of them. Why on earth would she decide to set her sights on me unless she knew it was the perfect way to strike out at her father? And it was perfect, after all. To choose one of his colleagues-indeed, to choose one of his friends. To choose a man who was even older than her father. To choose a man who was married. To choose a man with children. I couldn’t actually delude myself with the idea that Elena wanted me because she found me more attractive than any other man she knew, and I never did so. I knew from the fi rst what she had in mind.”

“The scandal we were speaking of earlier?”

“Anthony always had too much of himself tied into Elena’s performance here in Cambridge. He involved himself in every aspect of her life. How she acted and dressed, how she took notes in her lectures, how she comported herself in her supervisions. These were weighty matters to him. I think he believed that he would be judged-as a man, a parent, an academic even-dependent upon her success or failure here.”

“Was the Penford Chair tied into all this?”

“In his mind, I should think so. In reality, no.”

“But if he thought judgement of himself was going to be connected to Elena’s performance and behaviour-”

“Then he would want to see to it that she performed and behaved as the daughter of a respected professor should. Elena knew that. She could sense that attitude in everything her father did, and she resented him for it. So you can imagine the vast and-to Elena- amusing possibilities for his humiliation and her revenge when it became known that his daughter was having it off on a regular basis with one of his close colleagues.”

“Didn’t you mind being used in this way?”

“I was living every fantasy I’d ever entertained about making love to a woman and having a woman make love to me. We met at least three times a week from Christmas on and I loved every moment of it. I didn’t care about her motives in the least as long as she kept coming round to see me and taking off her clothes.”

“You met here, then?”

“Generally. I managed to get to London several times during the summer break to see her as well. And on a few weekend afternoons and evenings at her father’s house during term.”

“When he was home?”

“Only once, during a party. She found that particularly exciting.” He shrugged although his cheeks had begun to flush. “I found it rather exciting as well. I suppose it was the sheer terror of thinking we might be caught going at it.”

“But you weren’t?”

“Never. Justine knew-she’d found out somehow, she may well have guessed or Elena may have told her-but she never actually caught us in the act.”

“She never told her husband?”

“She wouldn’t have wanted to bear that sort of witness against Elena, Inspector. As far as Anthony was concerned, it would have been a case of kill the messenger, and Justine knew that better than anyone. So she held her tongue. I imagine she was waiting for Anthony to find things out on his own.”

“Which he never did.”

“Which he never did.” Troughton shifted his position in his chair, crossing one leg over the other and pulling out his cigarette case once again. He merely played it from hand to hand, however. He didn’t open it. “Of course, he would have been told eventually.”

“By you?”

“No. I imagine Elena would have wanted that pleasure.”

Lynley found it hard to believe that Trough-ton had no conscience in the matter of Elena. He had obviously felt no need to guide her. He had seen no necessity for urging her to deal with her resentment towards her father in another way. “But, Dr. Troughton, what I don’t understand is-”

“Why I went along with the game?” Trough-ton set the cigarette case next to the balloon glass. He studied the picture they made, side by side. “Because I loved her. At first it was her body-the incredible sensation of holding and touching that beautiful body. But then it was her. Elena. She was wild and ungovernable, laughing and alive. And I wanted that in my life. I didn’t care about the cost.”

“Even if it meant posing as the father of her child?”

“Even that, Inspector. Once she told me she was pregnant, I nearly convinced myself that the vasectomy had gone wrong all those years ago and that the child was really mine.”

“Have you any idea who the father was?”

“No. But I’ve spent hours since last Wednesday wondering about it.”

“Where have your thoughts led you?”

“To the same conclusion again and again. If she slept with me to have revenge on her father, whomever else she slept with, it was for the same reason. It didn’t have anything to do with love.”

“Yet you were willing to take up a life with her in spite of knowing all this?”

“Pathetic, isn’t it? I wanted passion again. I wanted to feel alive. I told myself that I would be good for her. I thought that with me she would be able to let go of her grievances against Anthony eventually. I believed I’d be enough for her. I’d be able to heal her. It was an adolescent little fantasy that I clung to till the end.”

Lady Helen placed her balloon glass on the table next to Troughton’s. She kept her fi ngers carefully on its rim. She said, “And what about your wife?”

“I hadn’t told her about Elena yet.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” he said. “You meant what about the fact that Rowena bore my children and did my laundry and cooked my meals and cleaned my house. What about those seventeen years of loyalty and devotion. What about my commitment to her, not to mention my responsibilities to the University, to my students, to my colleagues. What about my ethics and my morals and my values and my conscience. That’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is.”

He looked away from them, eyes focussed on nothing. “Some kinds of marriages wear at a person until the only thing left is a body that’s simply going through the motions.”

“I wonder if that’s your wife’s conclusion as well.”

“Rowena wants out of this marriage as much as I do. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

Now, in the darkness on the terrace, Lynley felt burdened not only by Troughton’s assessment of his marriage but also by the mixture of revulsion and indifference he had expressed towards his wife. More than anything, he wished Helen had not been with him to hear the story of his attachment to Elena Weaver and his maddeningly level-headed rationale for that attachment. For as the historian had calmly outlined his reasons for turning away from his wife and seeking the company and the love of a woman young enough to be his daughter, Lynley believed he had fi nally come to understand at least part of what lay at the root of Helen’s refusal to marry him.

The understanding had been an uneasiness churning within him-asking to be noticed- since the start of the evening in Bulstrode Gardens. It had demanded some sort of spoken release in the musty confines of Victor Troughton’s study.

What we ask of them, he thought. What we expect, what we demand. But never what we will give in return. Never what they want. And never a moment’s thorough consideration of the burdens which our desires and requirements place upon them.

He looked up at the vast grey darkness of the cloud-heavy sky. A distant light winked in it.

“What are you seeing?” Lady Helen asked him.

“A shooting star, I think. Close your eyes, Helen. Quickly. Make a wish.” He did so himself.

She laughed at him quietly. “You’re wishing on a plane, Tommy. It’s heading for Heath-row.”

He opened his eyes, saw that she was right. “I’ve no viable future in astronomy, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t believe that. You used to point out all the constellations to me. In Cornwall. Don’t you remember?”

“It was all show, Helen darling. I was trying to impress you.”

“Were you? Well, I was suitably impressed.”

He turned to look at her. He reached for her hand. In spite of the cold, she wasn’t wearing gloves, and he pressed her cool fi ngers against his cheek. He kissed her palm.

“I sat there and listened and realised that he may as well have been me,” he said, “because it all boils down to what men want, Helen. And what we want is women. But not as individuals, not as living, breathing, vulnerable human beings with a set of desires and dreams of their own. We want them-you-as extensions of ourselves. And I’m among the worst.”

Her hand moved in his, but she didn’t withdraw it. Rather, her fingers entwined with his.

“And as I listened to him, Helen, I thought of all the ways I’ve wanted you. As my lover, as my wife, as the mother of my children. In my bed. In my car. In my home. Entertaining my friends. Listening to me talk about my work. Sitting next to me quietly when I don’t feel like speaking. Waiting up for me when I’m out on a case. Opening your heart to me. Making yourself mine. And those are the operative words I kept hearing: I, me, my, mine.” He looked across the Backs to the smudgy forms of English oaks and common alders that were little more than shadows against a charcoal sky. When he turned back to her, her expression was grave, but her eyes were still on him. They were dark and kind.

“There’s no sin in that, Tommy.”

“You’re right,” he replied. “There’s only self in it. What I want. When I want it. And you’re meant to cooperate because you’re a woman. That’s how I’ve been, isn’t it? No better than your brother-in-law, no better than Troughton.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not like them. I’ve not seen you that way.”

“I’ve wanted you, Helen. And the hell of it is that I want you right now as much as I ever have. I sat there and listened to Troughton and had my own eyes opened in a thousand different ways about what goes wrong between men and women and it all comes down to the same damned fact with absolutely no change in it. I love you. I want you.”

“If you had me once, could you let it all go? Could you let me go?”

His answering laugh was mordant and painful. He looked away. “I wish it were as simple as taking you to bed. But you know it isn’t. You know I-”

“But could you, Tommy? Could you let me go?”

He turned back to her slowly, recognising something in her voice, an urgency, a plea, an inherent call for a degree of understanding he’d never been able to establish with her. It seemed to him as he studied her face-and saw the thin line of worry between her brows- that the attainment of every dream he’d ever harboured depended upon his ability to know what she meant.

He looked at her hand, still held in his own. So fragile, he could feel the bones of her fi ngers. So smooth that he could easily conceive of its tender passage against his skin.

“How do I answer that?” he said at last. “I feel you’ve placed my whole future on the line.”

“I don’t mean to do that.”

“But you’ve done it, haven’t you?”

“I suppose I have. In a way.”

He released her hand and walked to the low brick wall that edged the river terrace. Below, the Cam glinted in the darkness, green-black ink drifting lazily towards the Ouse. It was an inexorable progress-this movement of water-slow and sure and as unstoppable as time.

“My longings are the same as every other man’s,” he said. “I want a home, a wife. I want children, a son. I want to know at the end that my life hasn’t been for nothing, and the only way I can know that for a certainty is to leave something behind, and to have someone to leave it to. All I can say right now is that I finally understand what kind of burden that places on a woman, Helen. I understand that no matter how the load is shifted between partners, or divided or shared, the woman’s burden will always be greater. I do know that. But I can’t lie to you about the reality that remains. I still want those things.”

“You can have them with anyone.”

“I want them with you.”

“You don’t need them with me.”

“Need?” He tried to read the expression on her face, but she was just a pale blur in the darkness beneath the tree that threw a cavernous shadow over the terrace bench. He pondered the oddity of the word she had chosen, reflecting on her decision to remain with her sister in Cambridge. He considered the canvas of the fourteen years he had known Lady Helen. And finally, the realisation struck him.

He sank onto the concrete ledge that comprised the top of the brick river wall. He regarded her evenly. Faintly, he heard the click-clacking of a bicycle passing across Garret Hostel Bridge, the grinding clang of a lorry shifting gears as it made its way down the distant Queens’ Road. But neither sound did more than stir against his consciousness as he studied Lady Helen.

He wondered how he could have come to love her so much and all the time know her so very little. She had been before him for more than a decade, never attempting to disguise who and what she was. Yet for all that time, he had failed to see her in the light of reality, imbuing her instead with a set of qualities which he wished her to possess while all along, her every relationship had been acting as a cogent illustration of what she saw as her role, her way of getting on. He couldn’t believe he had been such a fool.

He spoke more to the night than to her. “It’s all because I can function by myself. You won’t marry me because I don’t need you, Helen, not the way you want me to. You’ve decided I don’t need you to stand on my own, or to get on in life, or even to be whole. And it’s the truth, you know. I don’t need you that way.”

“So you see,” she said.

He heard the finality in her three quiet words and felt his own quick anger in response to them. “I see. I do. I see that I’m not one of your projects. I see that I don’t need you to save me. My life is more or less in order now, and I want to share it with you. As your equal, your partner. Not as some emotional mendicant, but as a man who’s willing to grow at your side. That’s the beginning and end of it. Not what you’re used to, not even what you’ve had in mind for yourself. But it’s the best I can do. It’s the best I can offer. That and my love.

And God knows that I love you.”

“Love isn’t enough.”

“God damn it, Helen, when are you going to see it’s the only thing there is!”

In answer to his angry words, a light snapped on in the building behind them. A curtain flicked back and a disembodied face appeared at one window. Lynley pushed himself off the concrete ledge and rejoined Lady Helen beneath the tree.

“What you’re thinking,” he said to her, quietly now for he could see how she had begun to withdraw from him, “is that if I need you enough, I’ll never think of leaving you. You’ll always be safe. That’s how it is, isn’t it?”

She averted her head. Gently, he caught her chin with his fingers and turned her back towards him.

“Helen, isn’t it?”

“You’re not being fair.”

“You’re in love with me, Helen.”

“Don’t. Please.”

“Every bit as much as I’m in love with you. You want me as much, you long for me as much. But I’m not like all the rest of the men you’ve involved yourself with. I don’t need you in a way that makes it safe for you to love me. I don’t depend upon you. I stand on my own. If you take up life with me, you jump into the void. You risk it all, without a single guarantee.”

He felt her tremble slightly. He saw her throat work. He felt his heart open.

“Helen.” He drew her into his arms. He took strength from knowing each gentle curve of her, from feeling the rise and fall of her chest, from the feathering touch of her hair against his face, from the slender hand that caught at his jacket. “Darling Helen,” he whispered and ran his hand along the length of her hair. When she looked up, he kissed her. Her arms slipped round him. Her lips softened and opened beneath his. She smelled of perfume and Troughton’s cigarette smoke. She tasted of brandy.

“Do you understand?” she whispered.

In reply, he drew her mouth back to his, giving himself over to nothing more than the separate sensations attendant to kissing her: the soft warmth of her lips and her tongue, the faint sound of her breathing, the heady pleasure of her breasts. Desire built in him, slowly obliterating everything but the knowledge that he had to have her. Now. Tonight. He wasn’t prepared to wait another hour. He would take her to bed and to hell with the consequences. He wanted to taste her, to touch her, to know her completely. He wanted to take every lovely part of her body and to make her body his. He wanted to lower himself between her upraised thighs and hear her gasp and cry out when he sank inside her and…

I wanted to feel young resilient flesh I wanted to kiss breasts that were full and firm I wanted unveined legs and feet without callosity and IwantedIwantedIwanted…

He released her. “Good Christ,” he whispered.

He felt her hand touch his cheek. Her skin was so cool. His own, he knew, was probably burning.

He stood. He felt shaken. He said, “I ought to get you back to Pen’s.”

“What is it?” she asked.

He shook his head blindly. It was, after all, so easy to construct lofty, intellectual, self-denigrating comparisons between himself and Victor Troughton, especially when he felt relatively sure that her response would be a loving and generous reassurance that he was not like other men. It was far more difficult to look at the matter when his own behaviour-his desires and his intentions-delineated the truth. He felt as if he’d spent the last few hours earnestly gathering the seeds of understanding, all of which he’d just flung mindlessly into the wind.

They started walking back across the lawn, towards the porter’s lodge and Trinity Lane beyond it. She was silent beside him, although her question still hung in the air, waiting for an answer. He knew she deserved one. Still, he didn’t reply until they’d reached his car and he’d unlocked the door and opened it for her. And then, he stopped her just before she got inside. He touched her shoulder. He fumbled for words.

“I was standing in judgement of Trough-ton,” he said. “I was naming the sin and deciding the punishment.”

“Isn’t that what police are meant to do?”

“Not when they’re guilty of the same crime, Helen.”

She frowned. “The same-”

“Wanting. Not giving, not even thinking. Just wanting. And blindly taking what they want. And not caring a damn about anything else.”

She touched her hand to his. For a moment, she looked to the rise of the footbridge and the Backs beyond it where the first ghost puffs of fog were beginning to curl like misty fi ngers round the trunks of the trees. Then her eyes moved back to his. “You weren’t alone in the wanting,” she said. “You never have been, Tommy. Not before this. And certainly not tonight.”

It was an absolution that filled his heart with a sense of completion that he’d never had with her before. “Stay in Cambridge,” he said. “Come home when you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” she whispered-to him, to the night.