For the Sake of Elena

22

Sarah Gordon lay on her back and fi xed 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 fi re 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 fl oor 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 fi lled 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 fi rst, 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 fi ngers 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 fi nally 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 fl ute.” 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.

“Okay, I accept the fact that the muller looks like a go for the weapon,” Havers said as they watched the panda car pull away from the kerb, taking Lady Helen and her sister home. “But we know that Elena was dead round half past six, Inspector. At least, she was dead round half past six if we can trust what Rosalyn Simpson said, and I don’t know about you, but I think we can. And even if Rosalyn wasn’t definite about the time she reached the island, she knows for certain that she got back to her room by half past seven. So if she did make an error, it’s probably in the other direction, putting the killing earlier, not later. And if Sarah Gordon-whose account is supported by two of her neighbours, mind you-didn’t leave her house until just before seven…” She squirmed in her seat to face Lynley. “Tell me. How was she in two places at once, at home having her Wheetabix in Grantchester at the same time as she was on Crusoe’s Island?”

Lynley guided the Bentley out of the car park and slid it into the spotty traffi c heading southeast on Parkside. “You’re assuming that, when her neighbours saw her leaving at seven, it was the first time she left that morning,” he said. “Which is exactly what she wanted us to assume, exactly what she wanted her neighbours to assume. But by her own account, she was up that morning not long after fi ve-and she would have had to tell the truth about that because one of the very same neighbours who saw her leaving at seven might well have seen her lights on earlier and told us about that. So I think it’s safe to conclude that she had plenty of time to make another, earlier trip to Cambridge.”

“But why go a second time? If she wanted to play discoverer of the body once Rosalyn saw her, why not just head out to the police station right then?”

“She couldn’t,” Lynley said. “She had no real choice in the matter. She had to change her clothes.”

Havers stared at him blankly. “Right. Well. I’m a real looby, then. What have clothes got to do with it?”

“Blood,” St. James responded.

Lynley nodded at his friend in the rearview mirror before saying to Havers, “She could hardly go dashing into the police station to report having found a body if she was wearing a tracksuit whose jacket front was spotted with the victim’s blood.”

“Then why even go to the police station at all?”

“She had to place herself at the crime scene just in case-when the news broke about Elena Weaver’s death-Rosalyn Simpson remembered what she had seen and went to the police. As you said yourself, she had to play discoverer of the body. So that even if Rosalyn had been able to give the police an accurate description of the woman she’d seen that morning, even if the description led the local CID to Sarah Gordon-as it might have done once Anthony Weaver got wind of it-why on earth would anyone conclude that she had been to the island twice? Why on earth would anyone conclude that she’d kill a girl, go home, change her clothes, and return?”

“Right, sir. So why the hell did she?”

“To hedge her bets,” St. James said. “In case Rosalyn got to the police before she got to Rosalyn.”

“If she was wearing different clothes from those Rosalyn had seen the killer wear,” Lynley went on, “and if one or more of her neighbours could verify that she hadn’t left her house till seven, why would anyone think she was the killer of a girl who’d died round a half hour earlier?”

“But Rosalyn said that the woman she saw had light hair, sir. It was practically the only thing she remembered.”

“Quite. A scarf, a cap, a wig.”

“Why bother with that?”

“So that Elena would think she was seeing Justine.” Lynley circled through the roundabout at Lensfield Road before he continued. “Time has been the issue that we’ve stumbled over from the first, Sergeant. Because of it, we’ve spent two days following an assortment of blind leads about sexual harassment, pregnancy, unrequited love, jealousy, and illicit affairs when we should have recognised the single point of similarity which everyone shares, both of the victims and every last suspect. All of them can run.”

“But everyone can run.” And, with an apologetic glance at St. James who, in his best moments, could only manage a moderate hobble, “I mean, generally speaking.”

Lynley nodded grimly. “That’s exactly my point. Generally speaking.”

Havers gave a sigh of frustration. “I’m getting flummoxed. I see means. I see opportunity. But I don’t see motive. It seems to me that if anyone was going to get beat up and strangled by anyone else in this case-and if Sarah Gordon did it-it doesn’t make sense that the victim was Elena when our Justine is the far better bet. Look at the facts. Not bothering to consider that it probably took Sarah half an age to paint it in the first place, that portrait was probably worth hundreds of pounds- possibly more, although what I don’t know about the value of art could fill a good-sized library-and Justine destroyed it. Having a bit of a tantrum, some real splatter and slash on an original oil sounds like a motive for something, if you ask me. And, mind you, it wasn’t a bit of dabbling by her husband that she was venting her feelings on, but the real thing. By a real artist with a real reputation. Even Weaver himself couldn’t have been too chuffed by that. As a matter of fact, he might have been the one to do the killing once he saw what she’d done to the picture. So why bag Elena?” Her voice became thoughtful. “Unless, of course, Justine didn’t do the slashing at all. Unless Elena herself…Is that what you’re thinking, Inspector?”

Lynley didn’t reply. Instead, just before they reached the bridge that crossed the river on Fen Causeway, he pulled off the road and onto the pavement. Leaving the motor running, he turned to the others and said, “I’ll just be a moment.” Ten steps from the Bentley, he was enveloped by the fog.

He didn’t cross the street to look at the island for a third time. He knew it had no further secrets to reveal. From the causeway, he knew, he would see the shapes of trees, the mist-washed form of the footbridge that crossed the river, and perhaps the etching of birds on the water. He would see Coe Fen as an opaque screen of grey. And that would be all. If the lights of Peterhouse managed to cut through the vast and tenebrous expanse of fog on this day, they would be mere pinpricks, less substantial than stars. Even Whistler, he thought, would have found it a challenge.

For the second time, he walked to the end of the causeway bridge where the iron gate stood. And for the second time, he made note of the fact that anyone running along the lower river from Queens’-or from St. Stephen’s- would have three options upon reaching Fen Causeway. A turn to the left and she would run past the Department of Engineering. A turn to the right and she would head towards Newnham Road. Or, as he had seen for himself on Tuesday afternoon, she could proceed straight ahead, crossing the street to where he now stood, ducking through the gate, and continuing south along the upper river.

What he had failed to consider on Tuesday afternoon was that someone running into the city from the opposite direction would have had three options as well. What he had failed to consider on Tuesday afternoon was that someone could have run in the opposite direction in the first place, starting from the upper rather than the lower river, and hence following the upper rather than the lower path on which Elena Weaver had been running on the morning of her death. He observed this upper path now, noting how it disappeared into the fog like a thin line of pencil. As on Monday, visibility was poor-perhaps less than twenty feet-but the river and hence the path next to it flowed due north at this particular section, with scarcely a bend or a wrinkle to cause a walker or a runner-either of them familiar with the lay of the land-any need for marked hesitation.

A bicycle came wheeling towards him out of the mist, a headlamp affixed to the ten-speed’s handlebars providing a weak beam of light not much wider than an index fi nger. When the rider-a young, bearded man wearing a rakish trilby as an odd accent piece to his faded jeans and black oilskin jacket-dismounted to open the gate, Lynley spoke to him.

“Where does this path lead?”

Making an adjustment to his hat, the young man looked back over his shoulder as if a perusal of the path would help him answer the question. Thoughtfully, he pulled on the end of his beard. “Along the river for a bit.”

“How far?”

“Couldn’t say for certain. I always pick it up round Newnham Driftway. I’ve never headed in the other direction.”

“Does it go to Grantchester?”

“This path? No, mate. It doesn’t go there.”

“Blast.” Lynley frowned at the river, realising that he might have to reassess what he had thought of as a plausible explanation for how Elena Weaver’s death had been orchestrated on Monday morning.

“But you can get there from here if you’ve a mind for the walk,” the young man said, perhaps anticipating that Lynley was anxious for a fog-dampened stroll. He slapped a spattering of mud from his jeans and waved his arm vaguely from south to southwest. “Down the river path there’s a car park, just past Lammas Land. If you cut through there and nip down Eitsley Ave, there’s a public footpath that goes through the fields. It’s posted well enough, and it’ll take you straight to Grantchester. Although-” He eyed Lynley’s fine overcoat and his hand-tooled Lobbs shoes. “I don’t know if I’d try it in the fog if you don’t know the route. You could end up doing nothing but thrashing round in the mud.”

Lynley found his excitement quickening as the young man spoke. The facts were going to support him after all. “How far is it?” he asked.

“The car park’s under half a mile, I should guess.”

“I mean Grantchester itself. If you go through the fi elds.”

“Mile and a half, mile and three-quarters. No more than that.”

Lynley looked back at the path, at the untroubled surface of the sluggish river. Timing, he thought. It all centred round timing. He returned to the car.

“Well?” Havers said.

“She wouldn’t have driven her car on the first trip,” Lynley said. “She couldn’t have taken the risk that one of her neighbours might see her leaving-as two did later in the morn-ing-or that anyone might see it parked near the island.”

Havers looked in the direction from which he’d just come. “So she walked in on a footpath. But she must have had to run like the devil all the way back.”

He reached for his pocket watch and unhooked it from his waistcoat. “Who was it-Mrs. Stamford?-who said she was in a tearing hurry when she left at seven? At least now we know why. She had to fi nd the body before anyone else did.” He fl ipped the watch open and handed it to Havers. “Time the drive to Grantchester, Sergeant,” he said.

He slid the Bentley into the traffi c which, although slow-moving, was sparse at this time of afternoon. They descended the gentle slope of the causeway and, after one quick pause when an oncoming car veered into their lane in order to avoid hitting a postal van that was parked half on the pavement with its hazard lights blinking, they made their way into the Newnham Road roundabout. From there traffic diminished noticeably, and although the fog was still thick-swirling round the Granta King pub and a small Thai restaurant as if it were being stage-managed to do so-Lynley was able to increase his speed marginally.

“Time?” he asked.

“Thirty-two seconds so far.” She pivoted in her seat so that she faced him again, the watch still in her hand. “But she’s not a runner, sir. Not like the rest of them.”

“Which is why it took her nearly thirty minutes to get home, change her clothes, load her car, and get back to Cambridge. It’s little more than a mile and a half over the field to Grantchester,” he said. “A distance runner could have done the same course in less than ten minutes. And had Sarah Gordon been a runner, Georgina Higgins-Hart wouldn’t have needed to die.”

“Because she would have got home, changed clothes, and returned in good enough time that even if Rosalyn described her accurately, she could have said that she was stumbling off the island after having discovered the body?”

“Right.” He drove on.

She examined the watch. “Fifty-two seconds.”

They drove along the west side of Lam-mas Land, a broad green of picnic tables and play areas that sprawled for three-quarters of the length of Newnham Road. They swung through the dogleg where Newnham became Barton and spun past a line of dismal pensioners’ flats, past a church, past a steamy-windowed laundrette, past the newer, brick buildings of a city in the midst of economic growth.

“One minute fifteen,” Havers said as they made the turn south towards Grantchester.

Lynley looked in the rearview mirror at St. James. The other man had picked up the material which Pen had assembled at the Fitzwilliam Museum-welcomed by her former colleagues with the sort of delight one expects to greet only visiting royalty-and he was fl ipping through the X-rays and the infrared photographs in his usual deliberate and thoughtful fashion. “St. James,” Lynley asked, “what’s the best part of loving Deborah?”

St. James raised his head slowly. He looked surprised. Lynley understood. Considering their history, these were straits which they did not generally navigate. “That’s an unusual question to ask a man about his wife.”

“Have you ever considered it?”

St. James glanced out the window where two elderly women-one supporting herself by means of an aluminum walker-were making their way towards a cramped-looking green grocer’s where an outdoor display of fruit and vegetables wore a sequin covering of mist. Orange string sacks dangled limply from their arms.

“I don’t think I have,” St. James said. “But I suppose it’s that feeling of being thoroughly struck by life. Feeling alive, not just being alive.

I can’t merely go through the motions with Deborah. I can’t make do. She doesn’t allow it. She demands my best. She engages my soul.” He looked into the mirror once again. Lynley caught his gaze. Sombre, thoughtful, it seemed at odds with his words.

“That’s what I would imagine,” Lynley said.

“Why?”

“Because she’s an artist.”

The last buildings-a row of old terrace houses-on the outskirts of Cambridge melted away, enclosed by the fog. Country hedges replaced them, dusty grey hawthorn preparing for winter. Havers looked at the watch. “Two minutes, thirty seconds,” she said.

The road was narrow, undivided, and unmarked. It swept past fields where a nimbus seem-ed to rise from the land, creating a solid, two-dimensional, mouse-coloured canvas on which nothing was drawn. If farm buildings existed somewhere in the distance round which a farmer worked and animals grazed, the heavy fog hid them.

They drove into Grantchester, passing a man in tweeds and black Wellingtons who was watching his collie explore the verge as he himself leaned heavily on a cane. “Mr. Davies and Mr. Jeffries,” Havers said. “Doing their usual number, I expect.” As Lynley slowed through the turn into the high street, she examined the face of the watch again. Using her fingers to help her with her calculations, she said, “Five minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” and jerked forward in her seat with a “Whoa, what’re you doing, sir?” when Lynley abruptly applied the brakes.

A metallic blue Citroën was parked squarely in the drive of Sarah Gordon’s house. Seeing it with the mist lapping at its tyres, Lynley said, “Wait here,” and got out of the Bentley. He pressed the door closed to shut it without sound and walked the remaining distance to the remodelled school.

The curtains on the front panel of windows were closed. The house itself seemed calm and uninhabited.

One minute he was here in the house talking to me. The next moment he was gone. I expect he’s out there somewhere in the fog, trying to think what he’s going to do next.

What had she called it? Moral obligation versus cock-throbbing lust. It was, on fi rst and superficial glance, as much an inadvertent reference to the demise of her own marriage as it was an assessment of her former husband’s dilemma. But it was more than that. For while Glyn Weaver saw her words as relating to Weaver’s duty towards a daughter’s death versus his continuing desire for a beautiful wife, Lynley was certain now that they had another application, one of which Glyn could not possibly be aware, one which was presented pellucidly in the simple form of a car in a driveway.

I knew him. For a time we were close.

He’s always had trouble when it comes to confl ict.

Lynley approached the car and found it locked. It was also empty save for a small, tan and white carton that lay partially open on the passenger seat. Lynley froze momentarily when he saw it. His eyes snapped to the house, then back to the carton and the three red cartridges that were sliding out of it. He jogged back to the Bentley.

“What’s-?”

Before Havers could fi nish the question, he switched off the ignition and turned to St. James.

“There’s a pub just a bit beyond the house on the left,” he said. “Go there. Phone the Cambridge police. Tell Sheehan to get out here. No sirens. No lights. But tell him to come armed.”

“Inspector-”

“Anthony Weaver’s in her house,” Lynley said to Havers. “He’s got a shotgun with him.”

They waited until St. James had disappeared into the fog before they turned back to the house some ten yards beyond them in the high street.

“What do you think?” Havers said.

“That we can’t afford to wait for Sheehan.” He peered back the way they had come into the village. The old man and the dog were just ambling round the bend in the road. “There’s a footpath somewhere that she had to have used on Monday morning,” he said. “And it seems to me that if she got out of her house without being seen, she can’t have left the front way. So…” He looked back at the house, and then again down the road. “This way.”

They set off on foot in the direction from which they had just driven. But they hadn’t gone more than five yards when the old man and the dog accosted them, the man raising his cane and poking it at Lynley’s chest.

“Tuesday,” he said. “You lot were here Tuesday. I remember that sort of thing, you know. Norman Davies. Good with my eyes, I am.”

“Christ,” Havers muttered.

The dog sat at attention at Mr. Davies’ side, ears pricked forward and an expression of friendly anticipation on his face.

“Mr. Jeffries and I”-this with a nod at the dog who seemed to dip his head politely at the sound of his name-“have been out for an hour now-Mr. Jeffries having a bit of a time answering the calls of nature at his advanced age-and we saw you pass, didn’t we, Mister? And I said those folks have been here before. And I’m right, aren’t I? I don’t forget things.”

“Where’s the footpath to Cambridge?” Lynley asked without ceremony.

The man scratched his head. The collie scratched his ear. “Footpath, you ask? You can’t be meaning to take a walk in this fog. I know what you’re thinking: If Mr. Jeffries and I are out in it, why not you two? But we’re out taking a ramble in order to see to the necessary. Otherwise, we’d be snug inside.” He gestured with his cane to a small thatched cottage just across the street. “When we aren’t out seeing to the necessary, we mostly sit in our own front window. Not that we spy on the village, mind you, but we like to have a look at the high street now and again. Don’t we, Mr. Jeffries?” The dog panted agreeably.

Lynley felt his hands itch with the need to grab the old man by the lapels of his coat. “The footpath to Cambridge,” he said.

Mr. Davies rocked back and forth in his Wellingtons. “Just like Sarah, aren’t you? She used to walk to Cambridge most days, didn’t she? ‘I had my constitutional this morning already,’ she’d say when Mr. Jeffries and I would stop by of an afternoon and ask her out on a ramble with us. And I’d say to her, ‘Sarah, anyone as attached to Cambridge as you are ought to live there just to save yourself the walk.’ And she’d say, ‘I’m planning on it, Mr. Davies. Just give me a bit of time.’” He chuckled and settled into his story by digging his cane into the ground. “Two or three times a week she was heading over the fields and she never took that dog of hers with her which, frankly, is something I have never been able to understand. Now, Flame-that’s her dog- doesn’t get near enough exercise to my way of thinking. So Mr. Jeffries and I would-”

“Where’s the bloody path!” Havers snarled.

The man started. He pointed down the road. “Just there on Broadway.”

They set off immediately, only to hear him call, “You might express some appreciation, you know. Folks never do think…”

The fog shrouded his body and muffl ed his voice as they rounded the bend where the high street became Broadway, as misnamed as a country lane could possibly be, narrow and thickly hedged on either side. Just beyond the last cottage, not two-tenths of a mile past the old school, a wooden kissing gate-green with its growth of winter moss-hung from rusty hinges at a lopsided angle, its corner in the mud. A large English oak spread its branches above it, partially hiding a metal sign that was posted on a pole nearby. Public footpath, it said. Cambridge 1½ miles.

The gate opened onto pasture land, thick and lush with grass that bent under the weight of the day’s heavy fall of moisture. Drops showered their trouser legs and their shoes as they hurried down the track that ran along the rear garden fences and walls which marked the property boundaries of the cottages along the high street of the village.

“D’you really think she made a hike into Cambridge in fog like this?” Havers asked, jogging at Lynley’s side. “And then ran back? Without getting lost?”

“She knew the way,” he said. “You can see the path itself well enough. And it probably skirts the fields rather than heads across them. If you were familiar with the lay of the land, you could probably do it blindfolded.”

“Or in the dark,” she finished for him.

The rear garden of the old school was contained by a barbed wire fence, rather than a wall. It consisted of a vegetable garden gone extensively to seed and an overgrown lawn. Beyond this was the back door of the house, set above three steps. On the top one of these stood Sarah Gordon’s mongrel, pawing at the bottom of the door, giving a low, worried whine.

“He’s going to set up a row the moment he sees us,” Havers said.

“That depends on his nose and his memory,” Lynley replied. He gave a soft whistle. The dog’s head darted up. Lynley whistled again. The dog gave two rapid barks-

“Damn!” Havers said.

– and bounded down the steps. He trotted briskly across the lawn to the fence, one ear perked up and the other drooping over his forehead.

“Hello, Flame.” Lynley extended his hand. The dog sniffed and examined and began wagging his tail. “We’re in,” Lynley said and slipped through the barbed wire. Flame leaped up with a single yelp, eager to say hello. He planted muddy paws on the front of Lynley’s coat. Lynley grabbed him, lifted him, and turned back to the fence as the dog licked his face and squirmed in delight. He handed the animal over to Havers and pulled off his own muffl er.

“Put this through his collar,” he said. “Use it as a lead.”

“But I-”

“We’ve got to get him out of here, Sergeant. He’s willing to say hello, but I doubt he’s willing to sit on the back step quietly while we slip into the house.”

Havers was struggling with the animal who seemed to be mostly tongue and legs. Lynley looped his muffler through Flame’s leather collar and handed the ends to Havers as she set the dog on the ground.

“Take him to St. James,” he said.

“What about you?” She looked towards the house and came up with an answer that she clearly didn’t like. She said, “You can’t go in there alone, Inspector. You can’t go in at all. You said he’s armed. And if that’s the case-”

“Get out of here, Sergeant. Now.”

He turned away from her before she could speak again and, in a crouch, quickly crossed the lawn. On the far side of the house, lights were on in what had to be Sarah Gordon’s studio. But the rest of the windows stared blankly into the fog.

The door was unlocked. The knob was cold, wet, and slippery in his hand, but it turned without a sound, admitting him into a service porch beyond which was the kitchen where cupboards and work tops threw long shadows across the white linoleum fl oor.

Somewhere in the gloom nearby, a cat mewled. The sound was followed a moment later by the appearance of Silk, slithering in from the sitting room like a professional housebreaker. The cat paused abruptly when he saw Lynley in the doorway, scrutinising him with an undaunted stare. Then, he leapt onto one of the work tops where he sat with Egyptian-like tranquillity, his tail curling round his front feet. Lynley walked past him-his eyes on the cat, the cat’s eyes on him-and edged to the door which led into the sitting room.

Like the kitchen, the room was empty. And with the curtains drawn, it was filled with shadows and illuminated only by what little daylight made its way through the curtains and through a small chink that kept those same curtains from being completely closed. A fire was burning low in the fi replace, hissing gently as wood turned to ash. A small log rested next to this on the floor, as if Sarah Gordon had been in the act of adding it to the others that were already burning when Anthony Weaver had arrived to interrupt her.

Lynley shed his overcoat and passed through the sitting room. He entered the corridor that led to the rear of the house. Ahead of him, the door to the studio was partially closed, but light streamed out from the narrow aperture in a transparent triangle on the bleached oak fl oor.

He heard the murmur of their voices fi rst. Sarah Gordon was talking. Her voice was drained. She sounded exhausted.

“No, Tony, that isn’t how it was.”

“Then tell me, damn you.” In contrast Weaver’s voice was hoarse.

“You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? You never asked me to return the key.”

“Oh God.”

“Yes. After you ended things between us, I thought at first that you’d simply overlooked the fact that I could still get into your rooms. Then I decided you must have changed the locks because that would have been easier for you than asking me to give the key back and risking another scene between us. Then later, I”-a lifeless, brief laugh, sounding mostly self-directed-“I actually started to believe that you were just waiting until you’d secured the Penford Chair before you’d phone and ask me to meet you again. And I’d need the key for that, wouldn’t I?”

“How can you think what happened between us-all right, what I made happen between us-had anything to do with the Penford Chair?”

“Because you can’t lie to me, Tony. Not at the heart of things. No matter how much you lie to yourself and to everyone else. This is about the Chair. It always was. It always will be. You merely used Elena as an excuse that was nobler in your mind and far more attractive than academic greed. Better to end your affair with me because of your daughter than because you might lose a promotion if everyone knew you walked out on your second wife for another woman.”

“It was Elena. Elena. You know it.”

“Oh, Tony. Don’t. Please. Not now.”

“You never tried to understand anything about us. She’d finally begun to forgive me, Sarah. She’d finally begun to accept Justine. We were building something together. The three of us were a family. She needed that.”

“You needed it. You wanted the appearance it offered to your public.”

“I stood to lose her if I left Justine. They’d started to develop a relationship together, and if I left Justine-just as I’d left Glyn-I stood to lose Elena for good. And Elena came fi rst. She had to.” His voice grew louder as he moved in the room. “She came to our home, Sarah. She saw what a loving marriage could be like. I couldn’t destroy that-I couldn’t betray what she believed about us-by leaving my wife.”

“So you destroyed what was best about me instead. It was, after all, the more convenient thing to do.”

“I had to keep Justine. I had to accept her terms.”

“For the Penford Chair.”

“No! God damn you! I did it for Elena! For my daughter. For Elena. But you could never see that. You didn’t want to see it. You didn’t want to think I could possibly feel anything beyond-”

“Narcissism? Self-interest?”

In answer, metal slid savagely against metal. It was the unmistakable sound of a round being chambered within a shotgun. Lynley moved to within two inches of the studio door, but both Weaver and Sarah Gordon stood outside his line of vision. He tried to gauge their positions by listening to their voices. He rested one hand lightly against the wood.

“I don’t think you really want to shoot me, Tony,” Sarah Gordon was saying, “any more than you want to hand me over to the police. In either case, a scandal will come crashing down round you, and I don’t think you want that. Not after everything that’s happened already between us.”

“You killed my daughter. You phoned Justine from my rooms on Sunday night, you arranged that Elena would run alone, and then you killed her. Elena. You killed Elena.”

“Your creation, Tony. Yes. I killed Elena.”

“She never touched you or hurt you. She never even knew-”

“That you and I were lovers? No, she never knew. I was good about that. I kept my promise. I never told her. She died thinking you were devoted to Justine. And that’s what you wanted her to think, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you wanted everyone to think?”

Although enormously weary, her voice was more clearly defined than his. She would, Lynley thought, be facing the door. He pressed on it gently. It swung inward a few more inches. He could see the edge of Weaver’s tweed coat. He could see the gunstock resting at his waist.

“How could you bring yourself to it? You met her, Sarah. You knew her. She sat in this room and let you sketch her and pose her and talk to her and…” His voice caught on a sob.

“And?” she said. “And, Tony? And?” She gave a small, pain-stricken laugh when he didn’t respond. “And paint her. That’s how the story goes. But it doesn’t end there. Justine made certain of that.”

“No.”

“Yes. My creation, Tony. The only copy. Just like Elena.”

“I tried to tell you how sorry-”

“Sorry? Sorry?” For the first time, her own voice broke.

“I had to accept her terms. Once she knew about us. I had no choice.”

“Neither did I.”

“So you murdered my daughter-a human being, flesh and blood, not a lifeless piece of canvas-to get your revenge.”

“I didn’t want revenge. I wanted justice. But I wasn’t going to get it in a court of law because the painting was yours, my gift to you. What did it matter how much of myself I’d put into it because it no longer belonged to me. I had no case. So I had to balance the scales myself.”

“As I’m about to do now.”

There was movement in the room. Sarah Gordon passed in line with the door. Her hair matted, her feet bare, she was wrapped in a blanket. Her face was colourless, even to her lips. “Your car’s in the drive. No doubt someone saw you arrive. How do you intend to get away with killing me?”

“I don’t particularly care.”

“About the scandal? Oh, but there won’t be much of one, will there? You’re the grieving father driven to violence by his daughter’s death.” She straightened her shoulders and faced him directly. “You know, I think you ought to thank me for killing her. With public opinion so much on your side, you’re guaranteed the Chair now.”

“Damn you-”

“But how on earth will you manage to pull the trigger without Justine here to steady the gun?”

“I’ll manage it. Believe me. I will. With pleasure.” He took a step towards her.

“Weaver!” Lynley shouted and at the same instant threw open the door.

Weaver whirled in his direction. Lynley dived for the floor. The gun discharged. A deafening explosion roared through the room. The stench of gunpowder filled the air. A cloud of blue-black smoke seemed to rise out of nowhere. Through it, he could see Sarah Gordon’s crumpled form not five feet away from him, prone on the fl oor.

Before he could go to her, he saw rather than heard the click and slither of metal once again as Weaver reloaded. He surged to his feet a moment before the history professor turned the gun awkwardly on himself. Lynley leapt at the other man, shoving the gun to one side. It discharged a second time just as the front door to the house was kicked open. Half a dozen men from the police firearms unit stormed down the corridor and into the studio, guns extended, ready to fi re.

“Hold off,” Lynley shouted over the tremendous ringing in his ears.

And indeed there was no need for further violence. For Weaver sank dully onto one of the stools. He removed his spectacles and dropped them to the floor. He crushed their lenses.

“I had to do it,” he said. “For Elena.”

It was the same crime-scene team that had done the honours at Georgina Higgins-Hart’s death. They arrived only minutes after the ambulance had roared off towards the hospital, cutting a wide path through the curious who had gathered in a cluster at the foot of the drive where Mr. Davies and Mr. Jeffries were holding court, proud to name themselves fi rst at the scene, proud to be able to announce to all listeners that they’d known something was wrong the minute they’d seen that plump little lady leading Flame towards the pub.

“Sarah’d never give Flame to just anyone,” he said. “And him not even on his lead. I knew there was something wrong the minute I saw that, didn’t I, Mr. Jeffries?”

In other circumstances, Mr. Davies’ continued presence might have been irksome to Lynley. But as it was, the man was a godsend, for Sarah Gordon’s dog knew him, recognised his voice, and was willing to go with him even when his owner was carried out of the house, swathed in temporary bandages, with a pressure pack applied to stop arterial bleeding.

“I’ll take the cat as well,” Mr. Davies said as he shuffled down the drive with Flame in tow. “Not much for cats, Mr. Jeffries and I, but we won’t want to see the poor thing go begging for somewhere to lodge till Sarah comes home.” He gazed uneasily in the direction of her house where several members of the fi rearms unit stood talking together. “She’s coming home, Sarah is, isn’t she? She’ll be all right?”

“She’ll be all right.” But she’d taken the shot straight on in her right arm, and from the look the ambulance attendants had given the extent of the damage, Lynley wondered how all right would be defined. He walked back to the house.

From the studio, he could hear the sound of Sergeant Havers’ sharp questions and Anthony Weaver’s deadened responses. He could hear the crime-scene team gathering evidence. A cupboard closed and St. James said to Superintendent Sheehan: “This is the muller.” But Lynley didn’t join them.

Instead, he went into the sitting room and studied a few of the pieces of Sarah Gordon’s work that hung on the walls: five young blacks-three crouched, two standing-round a doorway in one of London’s most disastrous tower blocks; an old chestnut seller hawking his product outside the underground in Leicester Square as well-furred and well-garbed theatre-goers passed him by; a miner and his wife in the kitchen of their tumbledown Welsh cottage.

Some artists, he knew, make their work a mere showcase for a clever technique in which little is risked and less is communicated. Some artists merely become experts in their medium, working clay or stone or wood or paint as proficiently and effortlessly as an ordinary craftsman. And some artists try to make something out of nothing, order out of chaos, demanding of themselves that they ably communicate structure and composition, colour and balance, and that each piece they create serve to communicate a predetermined issue as well. A piece of art asks people to stop and look in a world of moving images. If people take the time to pause before canvas, bronze, glass, or wood, a worthy effort is one which does something more than act as nonverbal panegyric to the talents of its creator. It doesn’t call for notice. It calls for thought.

Sarah Gordon, he saw, was that kind of artist. She had played her passions out on canvas and stone. It was only when she had tried to play them out in life that she had failed.

“Inspector?” Sergeant Havers entered the room.

With his eyes on the painting of Pakistani children, he said, “I don’t know if he really intended to shoot her, Barbara. He was threatening her, yes. But the gun may well have gone off accidentally. I’ll have to say that in court.”

“It won’t look pretty for him no matter what you say.”

“His culpability is moot. All he needs is a decent lawyer and public sympathy.”

“Perhaps. But you did the best that you could.” She extended her hand. In it she held a folded piece of white paper. “One of Sheehan’s men found a shotgun in the boot of her car. And Weaver, he had this thing with him. He wouldn’t talk about it, though.”

Lynley took the paper from her and unfolded it to see a sketch, a beautifully rendered tiger pulling down a unicorn, the unicorn’s mouth opened in a soundless scream of terror and pain.

Havers went on. “All he said was that he found it in an envelope in his rooms at the college when he went by yesterday to talk to Adam Jenn. What do you make of it, sir? I remember that Elena had posters of unicorns all over her walls. But the tiger? I don’t get it.”

Lynley returned the paper to her. “It’s a tigress,” he said and fi nally understood why Sarah Gordon had reacted to his mention of Whistler on the first day they had spoken to her. It wasn’t about John Ruskin’s criticism, nor was it about art or painting the night or the fog. It was because of a woman who had been the artist’s mistress, the unnamed milliner he had called La Tigresse. “She was telling him that she’d murdered his daughter.”

Havers’ jaw dropped. She snapped it closed. “But why?”

“It was the only way to complete the circle of ruin they’d inflicted on each other. He destroyed her creation and her ability to create. She knew he’d done so. She wanted him to know that she’d destroyed his.”