For the Sake of Elena

2

Mercifully, the arm was attached to a body. In his twenty-nine years with the Cambridge Constabulary, Superintendent Daniel Sheehan had never had a dismemberment occur upon his patch, and he didn’t want that dubious investigatory distinction now.

Upon receiving the telephone call from the station house at twenty past seven, he’d come barrelling down from Arbury with lights fl ashing and siren sounding, grateful for an excuse to leave the breakfast table where the tenth straight day of grapefruit wedges, one boiled egg, and one thin slice of unbuttered toast provoked him into snarling at his teenaged son and daughter about their clothing and their hair, as if they were not both wearing school uniforms, as if their heads were not well-groomed and tidy. Stephen glanced at his mother, Linda did the same. And the three of them tucked into their own breakfasts with the martyred air of a family too long exposed to the unexpected mood-swings of the chronic dieter.

Traffic had been locked at the Newnham Road round-about, and only by driving half on the pavement was Sheehan able to reach the bridge of Fen Causeway at something other than the hedgehog speed at which the rest of the cars were moving. He could envision the clogged mess which every southern artery into the city had probably become by now, and when he braked his car behind the constabulary’s scenes-of-crime van and heaved himself into the damp, cold air, he told the constable stationed on the bridge to radio the dispatcher for more men to help move traffic along. He hated rubberneckers and thrill seekers equally. Accidents and murders brought out the worst in people.

Tucking his navy scarf more securely into his overcoat, Sheehan ducked under the yellow ribbon of the established police line. On the bridge, a half a dozen undergraduates leaned over the parapet, trying to get a look at the activity below. Sheehan growled and waved the constable over to deal with them. If the victim was a member of one of the colleges, he wasn’t about to let the word out any sooner than he had to. An uneasy peace had reigned between the local constabulary and the University since a cocked-up investigation at Emmanuel last term. He didn’t particularly want anything to disturb it.

He crossed the footbridge to the island, where a female constable was hovering over a woman whose face and lips were the colour of unbleached linen. She was sitting on one of the bottom iron steps of Crusoe’s Bridge, one arm curved round her stomach and one fi st bearing the weight of her head. She wore an old blue overcoat that looked as if it would dangle to her ankles, the front of it crusted with brown and yellow specks. Apparently, she’d been sick on herself.

“She found the body?” Sheehan asked the constable, who nodded in reply. “Who’s made it so far?”

“Everyone but Pleasance. Drake kept him at the lab.”

Sheehan snorted. Just another little tiff in forensic, no doubt. He raised his chin sharply at the woman in the overcoat. “Get her a blanket. Keep her here.” He went back to the gate and entered the southern section of the island.

Depending upon how one looked at it, the place was either a dream-come-true or a crime-scene nightmare. Evidence abounded, everything from disintegrating newspapers to partially filled and discarded plastic sacks. The whole area looked like a common dumping ground with at least a dozen good-and obviously different-footprints pressed into the soggy earth.

“Hell,” Sheehan muttered.

Wooden planks had been laid down by the scenes-of-crime team. They started at the gate and travelled south, disappearing into the fog. He picked his way along these, avoiding the regular splattering of water from the trees overhead. Fogdrops, his daughter Linda would have called them with that passion for linguistic accuracy which always surprised him into thinking that his real daughter had somehow been left behind at the hospital sixteen years ago and a pixy-faced poet left in her place.

He paused by a clearing where two canvases and an easel leaned against a poplar and a wooden case gaped open, collecting a skin of condensation on a neat row of pastels and eight hand-lettered tubes of paint. He frowned at this, looking from the river to the bridge to the great puffs of fog rising like a gas from the fen. As the subject for a painting, it reminded him of that French stuff he’d seen at the Courtauld Institute years ago, dots and swirls and dashes of colour that you could only fi gure out if you stood forty feet away and squinted like the devil and thought about how things might look if you needed specs.

Further along, the planks veered to the left, and he came upon his police photographer and the forensic biologist. They were bundled against the cold in overcoats and knitted caps, and they pranced about like two Russian dancers, hopping from foot to foot to keep the circulation going. The photographer looked as pale as he usually did prior to having to document a killing. The forensic biologist looked peeved. She hugged her arms to her chest, shifted from one foot to the other in a bobbling fashion, and glanced repeatedly and restlessly in the direction of the causeway as if in the belief that the killer lingered beyond them in the fog and only by plunging through it immediately could they hope to apprehend him.

As Sheehan reached them and began to ask his customary question-“What d’we have this time?”-he saw the reason for the forensic biologist’s impatience. A tall fi gure was emerging from the mist beneath the crack willows, walking carefully with his eyes on the ground. In spite of the cold, his cashmere greatcoat was slung indifferently round his shoulders like a cape, and he wore no scarf to detract from the crisp, clean lines of his Italian suit. Drake, the head of Sheehan’s forensic department, one-half of a bickering duo of scientists that had been aggravating him for the last fi ve months. He was indulging in his flair for costume this morning, Sheehan noted.

“Anything?” he asked the scientist.

Drake paused to light a cigarette. He pinched the match with his gloved fingers, and deposited it in a small jar which he took from his pocket. Sheehan refrained from comment. The bloody man never went anywhere unprepared.

“We appear to be missing a weapon,” he said. “I should think we’re going to have to drag the river for a look.”

Wonderful, Sheehan thought, and counted up the men and the hours it would take to complete the operation. He went to have a look at the body.

“Female,” the biologist said. “Just a kid.”

As Sheehan gazed down at the girl, he refl ected upon the fact that there was none of the hush which one would expect to attend a death. Horns bellowed from the causeway; idling engines bawled; brakes squealed; voices called. Birds chirruped in the trees, and a dog yelped sharply in pain or play. Life was continuing, despite the proximity and the evidence of violence.

That the girl’s death had been violent was unquestionable. Although much of her had been deliberately covered with fallen leaves, enough of her body was exposed to allow Sheehan to see the worst. Someone had beaten in her face. The tie of her track jacket’s hood was wound round her neck. Whether she had died from head wounds or from strangulation would ultimately have to be determined by the pathologist, but one thing was clear: No one would be able to identify her from a simple glance at her face. It was battered.

Sheehan squatted for a careful, closer look. She lay on her right side, her face turned into the earth and her long hair falling forward and coiling on the ground. Her arms were in front of her, wrists together but unbound. Her knees were bent.

He gnawed thoughtfully at his lower lip, glanced at the river five feet away, looked back at the body. She was wearing a stained brown tracksuit and white athletic shoes with dirty laces. She looked trim. She looked fi t. She looked like the political nightmare he had hoped she wouldn’t be. He lifted her arm to see if there was any insignia on her jacket. His breath puffed out of him in a sigh of despair when he saw that a shield surmounted by the words St. Stephen’s College had been sewn onto the material that covered her left breast.

“God damn,” he muttered. He replaced her arm and nodded at the photographer. “Shoot her,” he said and moved away.

He looked across Coe Fen. The fog seemed to be lifting, but it might have been the effect of growing daylight, a momentary illusion, or wishful thinking. Still, it didn’t matter if the fog was there or not, for Sheehan was Cambridge born and bred, and he knew what lay beyond that opaque veil of shifting mist. Peter-house. Across the street, Pembroke. To Pembroke’s left, Corpus Christi. From there, to the north, the west, and the east sprang college after college. Surrounding them, servicing them, owing its very existence to the presence of the University was the city itself. And all of it-colleges, faculties, libraries, businesses, homes, and inhabitants-represented more than six hundred years of uneasy symbiosis.

A movement behind him and Sheehan turned to look into Drake’s moody grey eyes. Obviously, the forensic scientist had known what to expect. He’d been long anticipating the opportunity to put the thumbscrews to his subordinate back in the lab.

“Unless she beat in her own face and made the weapon disappear, I doubt anyone will argue this a suicide,” he said.

In his London office, New Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Malcolm Webberly mashed out his third cigar in as many hours and surveyed his divisional DI’s, wondering how merciful they would be about ignoring the egg which he was about to splatter upon his own face. Considering the length and volume of his diatribe only two weeks ago, he knew he could probably expect the worst. He certainly deserved it. He had expostulated with his team for at least thirty minutes about what he had caustically referred to as the Cross-Country Crusaders, and now he was about to ask one of his men to join them.

He evaluated the possibilities. They were sitting round the central table in his offi ce. As usual, Hale was giving way to nervous energy, playing with a pile of paperclips which he appeared to be fashioning into a form of lightweight mail, perhaps with the anticipation of doing battle with someone armed with toothpicks. Stewart-the divisional compulsive-was using the pause in conversation to work on a report, a behaviour that was typical to him. Rumour had it that Stewart had somehow managed to perfect making love to his wife and filling out police reports simultaneously, and with just about the same degree of enthusiasm. Next to him, MacPherson was cleaning his fingernails with a broken-tipped pen knife, a this-too-shallpass expression on his face, while on his left Lynley polished his reading spectacles with a snow-coloured handkerchief on which the heavily embroidered letter A adorned one corner.

Webberly had to smile at the irony of the situation. A fortnight ago, he had been expounding on the country’s current penchant for peripatetic policing, using as fodder a piece in the Times which consisted of an expose on the amount of public funds being poured into the unnatural workings of the criminal justice system.

“Look at this,” he had snarled, bunching the newspaper in his hand in such a way that made looking at it impossible. “We’ve got the Greater Manchester Force investigating Sheffield on suspicion of bribery because of that Hillsborough football cock-up. We’ve got Yorkshire in Manchester, looking at complaints against some senior officers. We’ve got West Yorkshire peeping at the serious crimes squad in Birmingham; Avon and Somerset dabbling round the Guilford Four in Surrey; and Cambridgeshire mucking out Northern Ireland, looking for dust under the beds of the RUC. No one’s patrolling his own patch any longer and it’s time that stopped!”

His men had nodded in thoughtful agreement, although Webberly wondered if any of them had really been listening. Their hours were long, their burdens tremendous. Thirty minutes given to their superintendent’s political maundering were thirty minutes they could ill afford. That latter thought came to him later, however. At the moment, the craving for debate was upon him, his audience was captive, he was compelled to continue.

“This is miserable rubbish. What’s happened to us? CC’s are running like bashful milkmaids at the first sign of trouble from the press. They ask anyone and everyone to investigate their men rather than run their own force, conduct their own investigation, and tell the media to eat cow dung in the meantime. Who are these idiots that they don’t have the gumption to wash their own dirty laundry?”

If anyone took umbrage with the superintendent’s display of mixed metaphors, no one commented upon it. Instead, they bowed to the rhetorical nature of his question and waited patiently for him to answer it, which he did, in an oblique fashion.

“Just let them ask me to become part of this nonsense. I’ll give them all a real piece of what-for.”

And now he had come to it, with a special request from two separate parties, direction from Webberly’s own superior officer, and neither time nor opportunity to give anyone what-for.

Webberly pushed himself back from the table and lumbered to his desk where he pressed the intercom for his secretary. In response the slender box chattered with static and conversation. The former he was used to. The intercom had not worked properly since the hurricane of 1987. The latter, unfortunately, he was used to as well: Dorothea Harriman waxing warmly eloquent on the object of her not inconsiderable admiration.

“They’re dyed, I tell you. Have been for years. That way there’s no mascara to smudge up her eyes in pictures and such…” An interruption of static. “…can’t tell me Fergie’s anything…I don’t care how many more babies she decides-”

“Harriman,” Webberly interrupted.

“White tights would look the best…when she used to favour those god-awful spots. Thank God, she’s given them a rest.”

“Harriman.”

“…darling hat she had on at Royal Ascot this summer, did you see?…Laura Ashley? No! I wouldn’t be seen dead…”

Speaking of death, Webberly thought and resigned himself to a more primitive, stentorian, and decidedly effective manner of getting his secretary’s attention. He strode to the door, yanked it open, and shouted her name.

Dorothea Harriman popped into the doorway as he returned to the table. She’d had her hair cut recently, quite short in the back and on the sides, a long glossy bit of blonde mane in the front that swept across her brow in a glitter of artifi cial gold highlighting. She wore a red wool dress, matching pumps, and white tights. Unfortunately, red favoured her as little as it did the Princess. But, like the Princess, she had remarkable ankles.

“Superintendent Webberly?” she asked, with a nod at the officers sitting round the table. It was a butter-wouldn’t-melt look. All business, it declared. Every moment of her day was spent with her nose pressed directly upon the grindstone of her job.

“If you can tear yourself away from your current evaluation of the Princess…” Webberly said. His secretary’s expression was a study in guilelessness. Princess who? was telegraphed across her innocent face. He knew better than to engage her in indirect combat. Six years of her adulation of the Princess of Wales had taught him he would lose in any attempt to shame her away from wallowing in it. He resigned himself to saying, “There’s a FAX due from Cambridge. See about it. Now. If you get any calls from Kensington Palace, I’ll keep them on hold.”

Harriman pressed the very front of her lips together, but an imp’s smile curled both corners of her mouth. “FAX,” she said. “Cambridge. Right. In a tick, Superintendent.” And she added as a parting shot, “Charles went there, you know.”

John Stewart looked up, tapping the top of his pen reflectively against his teeth. “Charles?” he asked in some confusion, as if wondering whether the attention he had been giving to his report had somehow caused him to lose the drift of the conversation.

“Wales,” Webberly said.

“Whales in Cambridge?” Stewart asked. “What sort of whales? Where? Have they opened an aquarium?”

“Wales as in princes of,” Phillip Hale barked.

“The Prince of Wales is in Cambridge?” Stewart asked. “But that should be handled by Special Branch, not by us.”

“Jesus.” Webberly took Stewart’s report from him and used it to gesture with as he spoke. Stewart winced when Webberly rolled it into a tube. “No Prince. No Wales. Just Cambridge. Got it?”

“Sir.”

“Thank you.” Webberly noted with gratitude that MacPherson had put away his pocket knife and that Lynley was regarding him evenly with those unreadable dark eyes that were so much at odds with his perfectly clipped blond hair.

“There’s been a killing up in Cambridge that we’ve been asked to take on,” Webberly said and brushed away both their objections and their comments with a quick, vertical chopping motion of his hand. “I know. Don’t remind me. I’m eating my own words. I don’t much like it.”

“Hillier?” Hale asked astutely.

Sir David Hillier was Webberly’s Chief Superintendent. If a request for the involvement of Webberly’s men came from him, it was no request at all. It was law.

“Not altogether. Hillier approves. He knows about the case. But the request came directly to me.”

Three of the DI’s looked at each other curiously. The fourth, Lynley, kept his eyes on Webberly.

“I temporised,” Webberly said. “I know your plates are full at the moment, so I can get one of the other divisions to take this. But I’d rather not do that.” He returned Stewart his report, and watched as the DI assiduously smoothed the pages against the table top to remove the curled edges. He continued speaking. “A student’s been murdered. A girl. She was an undergraduate at St. Stephen’s College.”

All four men reacted to that. A movement in the chair, a question cut off quickly, a sharp look in Webberly’s direction to read his face for signs of worry. All of them knew that the superintendent’s own daughter was a junior member of St. Stephen’s College. Her photograph-giggling as she inexpertly punted both parents in an endless circle on the River Cam-stood on one of the filing cabinets in the room. Webberly saw the concern on their faces.

“It’s nothing to do with Miranda,” he reassured them. “But she knew the girl. That’s part of the reason I got the call.”

“But not the only reason,” Stewart said.

“Right. The calls-there were two of them-didn’t come from Cambridge CID. They came from the Master of St. Stephen’s College and the University’s Vice Chancellor. It’s a tricky situation as far as the local police are concerned. The killing didn’t occur in the college, so Cambridge CID have the right to pursue it on their own. But since the victim’s a college girl, they need the University’s cooperation to investigate.”

“Th’ University won’t gie it?” MacPherson sounded incredulous.

“They prefer an outside agency. From what I understand, they got their feathers ruffl ed over the way the local CID handled a suicide last Easter term. Gross insensitivity towards everyone concerned, the Vice Chancellor said, not to mention some sort of leaking of information to the press. And since this girl is apparently the daughter of one of the Cambridge professors, they want everything handled with delicacy and tact.”

“Detective Inspector Empathy,” Hale said with a curl of his lip. It was, they all knew, a poorly veiled attempt to imply antagonism and lack of objectivity. None of them were unaware of Hale’s marital troubles. The last thing he wanted at the moment was to be sent out of the city on a lengthy case.

Webberly ignored him. “Cambridge CID aren’t happy about the situation. It’s their patch. They prefer to handle it. So whoever goes can’t expect them to start killing the fatted calf. But I’ve spoken briefly to their superintendent-a bloke called Sheehan…he seems a decent sort-and they’ll cooperate. He sees the University implying this is a town-and-gown situation and he’s miffed about the idea that his team might be accused of prejudice against the students. But he knows that without the University’s cooperation, any man he sends in will spend the next six months sifting through sawdust in order to find sand.”

The sound of her light footsteps heralded Harriman. She presented Webberly with several sheets of paper on which the words Cambridgeshire Constabulary were printed along the top and in the right-hand corner a badge surmounted by a crown. She frowned at the collection of plastic coffee cups and foul-smelling ashtrays that sat on the table amid folders and documents. She clucked, tossed the cups into the waste bin by the door, and carried the ashtrays at arm’s length from the room.

As Webberly read the report, he passed on the pertinent information to his men.

“Not much to work with so far,” he said. “Twenty years old. Elena Weaver.” He gave the girl’s Christian name a Mediterranean pronunciation.

“A foreign student?” Stewart asked.

“Not from what I gathered from the Master of the College this morning. The mother lives in London and as I’ve said, the dad’s a professor at the University, a bloke short-listed for something called the Penford Chair of His-tory-whatever the hell that is. He’s a senior fellow at St. Stephen’s. A major reputation in his field, I was told.”

“Thus the red carpet treatment,” Hale interjected.

Webberly continued. “They’ve done no autopsy yet, but they’re giving us an initial rough estimate of the time of death between midnight last night and seven this morning. Face beaten in with a heavy, blunt instrument-”

“Isn’t it always?” Hale asked.

“-after which-according to the preliminaries-she was strangled.”

“Rape?” Stewart asked.

“No indication of that yet.”

“Midnight and seven?” Hale asked. “But you said she wasn’t found in college?”

Webberly shook his head. “She was found by the river.” He frowned as he read the rest of the information Cambridge Constabulary had sent. “She was wearing a tracksuit and athletic shoes, so they assume she was out running when somebody jumped her. The body was covered with leaves. Some sketch artist stumbled on her round a quarter past seven this morning. And, according to Sheehan, got sick on the spot.”

“Nae on the body, I hope,” MacPherson said.

“That certainly plays hell with trace evidence,” Hale noted.

The others laughed quietly in response. Webberly didn’t mind the levity. Years of exposure to murder hardened the softest of his men.

He said, “According to Sheehan they had enough evidence at the scene to keep two or three crime scene teams busy for weeks.”

“How’s that?” Stewart asked.

“She was found on an island, and it’s used as a general trysting place, evidently. So they’ve at least half a dozen sacks of rubbish to analyse along with their tests on the body itself.” He tossed the report onto the table. “That’s the limit of what we know right now. No autopsy. No record of interviews. Whoever takes the case will be working from the bottom.”

“It’s a nice little mairder, nonetheless,” MacPherson said.

Lynley stirred, reaching out for the report. He put on his spectacles, read it over, and having done so, he spoke for the fi rst time.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

“I thought you were working on that rent boy case in Maida Vale,” Webberly said.

“We tied it up last night. This morning, rather. Brought the killer in at half past two.”

“Good God, laddie, take a breather sometime,” MacPherson said.

Lynley smiled and rose. “Have any of you seen Havers?”

Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers sat at one of the green computers in the Information Room on the ground floor of New Scotland Yard. She stared at the screen. She was supposed to be scanning the PNC for information on missing persons-at least five years missing, if the forensic anthropologist was to be believed-in an attempt to narrow down the possibilities on a set of bones found beneath the basement foundation of a building being torn down on the Isle of Dogs. It was a favour for a mate at the Manchester Road police station, but her mind wasn’t up to assimilating the facts on the screen, let alone comparing them to a list of dimensions of radius, ulna, femur, tibia, and fibula. Roughly, she rubbed her index finger and thumb through both eyebrows and glanced at the telephone on a nearby desk.

She ought to phone home. She needed to get her mother on the line or at least to speak with Mrs. Gustafson and see if everything was under control in Acton. But punching in those seven numbers and waiting with mounting anxiety for the phone to be answered and then facing the possible knowledge that things weren’t working out any better than they had been for the last week…She couldn’t do it.

Barbara told herself that there was no point to phoning Acton anyway. Mrs. Gustafson was nearly deaf. Her mother existed in her own cloudy world of long-term dementia. The chance of Mrs. Gustafson hearing the phone was as remote as her mother’s ability to understand that the shrill double ringing coming from the kitchen meant that someone somewhere wanted to speak through that peculiar black instrument that hung from the wall. Hearing the noise, she was as likely to open the oven or go to the front door as she was to pick up the telephone receiver. And even if she managed that much, it was doubtful she’d recognise Barbara’s voice or even remember who she was without endless, frustrating, hair-pulling prodding.

Her mother was sixty-three years old. Her health was excellent. It was only her mind that was dying.

Employing Mrs. Gustafson to stay with Mrs. Havers during the day was, Barbara knew, only at best a temporary and unsatisfactory measure. Seventy-two years old herself, Mrs. Gustafson had neither the energy nor the resources to care for a woman whose day had to be programmed and monitored as carefully as a toddler’s. Three times already Barbara had come face-to-face with the impediments inherent to giving Mrs. Gustafson even limited guardianship over her mother. Twice she had arrived home later than usual to find Mrs. Gustafson sound asleep in the sitting room. While the television shrieked out a programme’s laugh track, her mother floated in a mental fugue, once wandering at the bottom of the back garden, once swaying aimlessly outside on the front steps.

But the third incident, just two days ago, had rocked Barbara severely. An interview connected to the Maida Vale rent boy case had brought her close to her own neighbourhood, and she had gone home unexpectedly to see how things were going. The house was empty. At first she felt no panic, assuming Mrs. Gustafson had taken her mother for a walk and, in fact, feeling quite grateful that the older woman was even up to the challenge of controlling Mrs. Havers in the street.

Gratitude disintegrated with Mrs. Gustafson’s appearance on the front steps less than five minutes later. She’d just popped home to feed her fish, she said, and added, “Mum’s all right, i’nt she?”

For a moment, Barbara refused to believe what Mrs. Gustafson’s question implied. “She isn’t with you?” she asked.

Mrs. Gustafson raised one liver-spotted hand to her throat. A tremor shook the grey curls of her wig. “Just popped home to feed the fish,” she said. “No more’n a minute or two, Barbie.”

Barbara’s eyes flew to the clock. She felt panic sweeping over her and with it came the wild scattering of a dozen different scenarios comprising her mother lying dead in the Uxbridge Road, her mother floundering through the crowds on the Tube, her mother trying to find her way to South Ealing Cemetery where both her son and her husband were buried, her mother thinking she were twenty years younger with an appointment at the beauty parlour to keep, her mother being assaulted, being robbed, being raped.

Barbara rushed from the house, leaving Mrs. Gustafson wringing her hands and wailing “It was just the fish” as if that could somehow excuse her negligence. She gunned her Mini and roared in the direction of the Uxbridge Road. She tore down streets and crisscrossed alleys. She stopped people. She ran into local stores. And she finally found her on the grounds of the local primary school where both Barbara and her long-dead younger brother had once been pupils.

The Headmaster had already phoned the police. Two uniformed constables-one male and one female-were talking with her mother when Barbara arrived. Against the windows of the school building itself, Barbara could see curious faces pressed. And why not, she thought. Her mother certainly presented a spectacle, wearing a thin summer house dress and slippers and nothing else at all save her spectacles, which were not on her nose but for some reason perched on the top of her head. Her hair was uncombed, her body smelled unwashed. She babbled, protested, and argued like a madwoman. When the female constable reached out for her, she dodged away adroitly and began running towards the school, calling for her children.

That had been just two days ago, yet another indication that Mrs. Gustafson was not the answer.

In the eight months since her father’s death, Barbara had tried a variety of solutions to the problem of her mother. At first, she’d taken her to an adult day care centre, the very latest thing in dealing with the aged. But the centre couldn’t keep their “clients” after seven at night, and the calls of policework made her hours irregular. Had he known of her need to fetch her mother by seven, Barbara’s superior officer would have insisted that she take the time to do so. But that would have placed an unfair burden upon his shoulders, and Barbara valued her job and her partnership with Thomas Lynley too highly to jeopardise either by giving her personal problems priority.

She’d tried a variety of paid companions after that, four in succession who lasted a total of twelve weeks. She’d worked with a church group. She’d employed a series of visiting social workers. She’d contacted Social Services and arranged for home help. And at the last, she’d fallen back upon Mrs. Gustafson, their neighbour. Against the monitory recommendation of her own daughter, Mrs. Gustafson had stepped in as a temporary measure. But the fuse on Mrs. Gustafson’s ability to deal with Mrs. Havers was a short one. And the fuse on Barbara’s willingness to put up with Mrs. Gustafson’s lapses was even shorter. It was only a matter of days before something blew.

Barbara knew the answer was an institution. But she couldn’t live with the thought of placing her mother in a public hospital rife with inadequacies associated with the National Health. At the same time, she couldn’t afford a private hospital, unless she won the football pools like a female Freddie Clegg.

She felt in her jacket pocket for the business card she’d placed there this morning. Hawthorn Lodge, it said. Uneeda Drive, Greenford. A single call to Florence Magentry and her problems would be solved.

“Mrs. Flo,” Mrs. Magentry had said when she answered the door to Barbara’s knock at half past nine that morning. “That’s what my dears call me. Mrs. Flo.”

She lived in a two-storey semi-detached piece of uninspired postwar housing which she optimistically called Hawthorn Lodge. Grey stucco relieved by a brick facade on the ground floor, the house featured woodwork the colour of oxblood and a fi ve-paned bow window looking out on a front garden fi lled with trolls. The front door opened directly into a stairway. To the right of this a door revealed a sitting room into which Mrs. Flo led Barbara, chatting continually about the “amenables” which the house offered the dears who came to visit.

“I call it a visit,” Mrs. Flo said, patting Barbara’s arm with a hand that was soft and white and surprisingly warm. “Seems less permanent that way, doesn’t it? Let me show you round.”

Barbara knew she was looking for features that she could proclaim ideal. She ticked the items off in her mind. Comfortable furniture in the sitting room-worn but well-made- along with a television, a stereo, two shelves of books, and a collection of large and colourful magazines; fresh paint and wallpaper and gay prints on the walls; tidy kitchen and a dinette whose windows overlooked the back garden; four bedrooms upstairs, one for Mrs. Flo and the other three for the dears. Two loos, one up and one down, both glistening white with fi xtures shining like silver. And Mrs. Flo herself, with her large-framed spectacles and her modern wedge-cut hair and her neat shirtwaister with a pansy brooch pinned at its throat. She looked like a smart matron, and she smelled of lemons.

“You’ve phoned up at just the right time,” Mrs. Flo said. “We lost our dear Mrs. Tilbird last week. Ninety-three she was. Sharp as a pin. Went off in her sleep, bless her. Just as peaceful as ever you’d want someone’s passing to be. She’d been with me a month short of ten years.” Mrs. Flo’s eyes became misty in her plump-cheeked face. “Well, no one lives forever, and that’s a fact, isn’t it? Would you like to meet the dears?”

The residents of Hawthorn Lodge were taking a bit of morning sun in the back garden. There were only two of them, one an eightyfour-year-old blind woman who smiled and nodded at Barbara’s greeting after which she immediately fell asleep and the other a fright-ened-looking woman somewhere in her fi fties, who clutched Mrs. Flo’s hands and cowered back in her chair. Barbara recognised the symptoms.

“Can you cope with two?” she asked frankly.

Mrs. Flo smoothed down the hair of the hand clutcher. “They’re no trouble to me, dear. God gives everyone a burden, doesn’t He? But no one’s burden is more than he can bear.”

Barbara thought of that now with her fi ngers still touching the card in her jacket pocket.

Is that what she was trying to do, to slough off a burden that, from laziness or perverse selfishness, she didn’t want to bear?

She avoided the question by evaluating everything that made the placement of her mother at Hawthorn Lodge right. She enumerated the positives: the proximity to Greenford Station and the fact that she would only have to change trains once-at Tottenham Court Road-if she placed her mother in this situation and herself took the small studio she’d managed to find in Chalk Farm; the greengrocer’s stand right inside Greenford Station where she could buy her mother fresh fruit on the way to a visit; the common just a street away with its central walk lined with hawthorns which led to a play area of swings, see-saw, round-about, and benches where they could sit and watch the neighbourhood children romp; the string of businesses nearby-a chemist, a supermarket, a wine shop, a bakery, and even a Chinese take-away, her mother’s favourite food.

Yet even as she listed every feature that encouraged her to phone Mrs. Flo while she still had a vacancy, Barbara knew she was deliberately avoiding a few of the qualities of Hawthorn Lodge which she hadn’t been able to ignore. She told herself that nothing could be done about the unremitting noise from the A40, or about the fact that Greenford itself was a sandwich of a community squeezed between the railway and a motorway. Then there were the three broken trolls in the front garden. Why on earth should she even think of them, except that there was something so pathetic about the chipped nose on one, the broken hat on another, the armlessness of a third. And there was something chilling about the shiny patches on the sofa where oily, old heads had pressed against its back for too long. And the crumbs in the corner of the blind woman’s mouth…

Minor things, she told herself, little hooks digging into the skin of her guilt. One couldn’t expect perfection anywhere. Besides, all of these minor points of discomfiture were inconsequential when one compared them with the circumstances of their lives in Acton and the condition of the house in which they now lived.

The reality, however, was that this decision went far beyond Acton versus Greenford and far beyond keeping her mother at home or sending her away. The entire decision went right to the core of what Barbara herself wanted, which was simple enough: a life away from Acton, away from her mother, away from the burdens which, unlike Mrs. Flo, she did not believe she was equipped to bear.

Selling the house in Acton would give her the money to support her mother in Mrs. Flo’s house. She would have the funds to set herself up in Chalk Farm as well. No matter that the Chalk Farm studio was little more than twenty-five feet long and twelve feet wide, little more than a converted potting shed with a terra cotta chimney and missing slates on the roof. It had possibilities. And that’s all Barbara asked of life any longer, just the promise of possibility.

Behind her, the door opened as someone slipped an identification card through its locking device. She glanced over her shoulder as Lynley entered, looking quite rested despite their late night with the Maida Vale killer.

“Any luck?” he asked her.

“Next time I offer to do a bloke a favour, punch my lights, will you? This screen makes me blind.”

“Nothing then, I take it?”

“Nothing. But I haven’t exactly been giving it my all.” She sighed, made a note of the last entry she’d read, and exited the programme. She rubbed her neck.

“How was Hawthorn Lodge?” Lynley asked her. He swung a chair over and joined her at the terminal.

She did her best to avoid his eyes. “Nice enough, I suppose. But Greenford’s a bit out on the central line. I don’t know how Mum would make the adjustment. She’s used to Acton. The house. You know what I mean. She likes having her things about her.”

She felt him watching her, but knew that he would not offer advice. Their positions in life were far too different for him to presume to make a suggestion. Still, Barbara knew he was only too aware of her mother’s condition and the decisions she herself now faced because of it.

“I feel like a criminal,” she said hollowly. “Why?”

“She gave you life.”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

“No. But one always feels a responsibility to the giver. What’s the best course to take? we ask. And is the best course the right one, or is it just a convenient escape?”

“God doesn’t give burdens we cannot bear,” Barbara heard herself mouth.

“That’s a particularly ridiculous platitude, Havers. It’s worse than saying things always work out for the best. What nonsense. Things work out for the worst more often than not, and God-if He exists-distributes unbearable burdens all the time. You of all people ought to know that.”

“Why?”

“You’re a cop.” He pushed himself to his feet. “We’ve a job out of town. It’ll be a few days. I’ll go on ahead. You come when you can.”

His offer irked her, filled as it was with the implicit understanding of her situation. She knew he wouldn’t take another offi cer. He’d do his work and her own until she could join him. How utterly like him. She hated his easy generosity. It made her his debtor, and she did not possess-would never possess-the coin with which he might be repaid.

“No,” she said. “I’ll get things set up at home. I’ll be ready in…How much time do I have? An hour? Two?”

“Havers…”

“I’ll go.”

“Havers, it’s Cambridge.”

She jerked her head up, saw the undisguised satisfaction in his warm brown eyes. She shook her head darkly. “You’re a real fool, Inspector.”

He nodded, grinned. “But only for love.”