For the Sake of Elena

5

In the London suburb of Greenford, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers slowly drove her rusting Mini down Oldfi eld Lane. In the passenger’s seat, her mother huddled like an unstrung marionette within the many folds of a dusty black coat. Round her neck Barbara had tied a jaunty red and blue scarf before they’d left Acton. But sometime during the drive, Mrs. Havers had worked the big square knot loose, and now she was using the scarf as a muff, twirling it tighter and tighter round her hands. Even in the lights from the dashboard, Barbara could see that behind her spectacles her mother’s eyes were large and frightened. She hadn’t been this far from her home in years.

“There’s the Chinese take-away,” Barbara pointed out. “And see, Mum, there’s the hair dresser’s and the chemist’s. I wish it was daylight so we could go to the common and have a sit on one of the benches there. But we’ll do it soon enough. Next weekend, I should guess.”

In response, her mother hummed. Half-shrunk into the door, she made an unconsciously inspired choice of music. Barbara couldn’t have named the origin of the song, but she could put the first seven words to the tune. Think of me, think of me fondly… Something she’d heard on the radio enough times over the past few years, something which her mother had doubtless heard as well and had called upon in this moment of uncertainty to give definition to what she was feeling behind the muddled facade of her dementia.

I am thinking of you, Barbara wanted to say. This is for the best. It’s the only option left.

Instead, she said with a desperately forced heartiness, “Just look how wide the pavement is here, Mum. You don’t see that sort of pavement in Acton, do you?”

She didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. She turned the car onto Uneeda Drive.

“See the trees along the street, Mum? They’re bare now, but in the summer think how pretty they’ll be.” They wouldn’t, of course, create that sort of leafy tunnel one often saw along the streets of the fi ner neighbourhoods in London. They were planted too far apart for that. But they managed to break the bleak monotony created by the line of stucco-and-brick, semi-detached houses, and for this reason alone Barbara noted them with gratitude. As she did the front gardens, pointing them out to her mother as they slowly cruised by, pretending to see details that the darkness obscured. She chatted amiably about a family of trolls, some plaster ducks, a birdbath, and a fl owerbed of winter pansies and phlox. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t seen any of this. Her mother wouldn’t recall that in the morning. She wouldn’t even recall it in a quarter of an hour.

Indeed, Barbara knew that her mother didn’t remember the conversation they’d had about Hawthorn Lodge soon after her arrival home this afternoon. She had telephoned Mrs. Flo, had made the arrangements for her mother to become one of the lodge “visitors,” and had gone home to pack her mother’s belongings.

“Now Mummy won’t need everything with her at first,” Mrs. Flo had said kindly. “Just bring a suitcase with a bit of this and that, and we’ll move her in gradual. Call it a little visit, if you think she’ll take to that.”

After years of listening to her mother plan holidays which they would never take, Barbara wasn’t oblivious of the irony of packing the suitcase and talking about a visit to Green-ford. It was a far cry from the exotic destinations that had occupied her mother’s disjointed thinking for so long. But the very fact that she had given herself so much to the idea of taking a holiday had made the sight of the suitcase less frightening than it otherwise might have been.

Her mother had noticed, however, that Barbara wasn’t packing any of her own things into the large vinyl case. She’d even gone to Barbara’s room and rustled through her clothes, bringing back an armload of trousers and pullovers that comprised the staple of Barbara’s wardrobe.

“You’ll be wanting these, lovey,” she’d said. “Especially if it’s Switzerland. Is it Switzerland? I’ve wanted to go there for such a long time. Fresh air. Barbie, think of the air.”

She’d explained to her mother that it wasn’t to be Switzerland, adding the fact that she herself could not go. She’d ended with the lie: “But it’s only a visit. Only for a few days. I’ll be with you at the weekend,” and with the hope that somehow her mother would hold on to those thoughts long enough to get her installed in Hawthorn Lodge without trouble.

But now Barbara saw that confusion had vanquished the moment of rare lucidity during which she’d listed the advantages of a stay with Mrs. Flo and the disadvantages of any further reliance upon Mrs. Gustafson. Her mother was chewing at her upper lip as her bewilderment increased. As if from the primary chink in a sheet of glass from which a starburst of breakage grows, dozens of tiny lines radiated from her mouth and formed a fretwork up her cheeks to her eyes. Her hands twisted in the muff of the scarf. The tempo of her humming accelerated. Think of me, think of me fondly…

“Mum,” Barbara said as she pulled to the kerb at the nearest spot she could find to Hawthorn Lodge. There was no response other than the humming. Barbara felt her spirits plummet. For a time this afternoon, she had thought this transition was going to be easy. Her mother had even seemed to greet the idea with anticipation and excitement, as long as it was labelled a holiday. Now Barbara saw that it promised to be as wrenching an experience as she had previously expected.

She thought about praying for the strength to carry her plans through to their completion. But she didn’t particularly believe in God, and the thought of calling upon Him at convenient moments to suit her own needs seemed as useless as it was hypocritical. So she garnered what little resolution she had, pushed open her door, and walked round to help her mother from the car.

“Here we go, Mum,” she said with a cheerful bravado that she summoned from a repertoire of inadequate coping skills. “Let’s meet Mrs. Flo, shall we?”

In one hand she grasped her mother’s suitcase. In the other, she held her mother’s arm. She eased her down the pavement towards the grey stucco promise of permanent salvation.

“Listen, Mum,” she said as she rang the front bell. From inside the house, Deborah Kerr was singing “Getting to Know You,” perhaps in preparation for the new visitor. “They’ve got music on. Hear it?”

“Smells of cabbage,” her mother said. “Barbie, I don’t think a cabbage-house is suitable for a holiday. Cabbage is common. This won’t do at all.”

“It’s coming from next door, Mum.”

“I can smell cabbage, Barbie. I wouldn’t book us a room in a cabbage-hotel.”

Barbara heard the growing, querulous anxiety in her mother’s voice. She prayed for Mrs. Flo to come to the door and rang the bell again.

“We don’t serve cabbage in our home, Barbie. Never to guests.”

“It’s all right, Mummy.”

“Barbie, I don’t think-”

Mercifully, the porchlight snapped on. Mrs. Havers blinked in surprise and shrank back against Barbara.

Mrs. Flo still wore her neat shirtwaister with the pansy pin at her throat. She looked as fresh as she had that morning. “You’ve arrived. Splendid.” She stepped out into the night and took Mrs. Havers’ arm. “Come and meet the dears, love. We’ve been talking about you and we’re dressed and ready and excited to meet you.”

“Barbie…” Her mother’s voice was a plea.

“It’s all right, Mum. I’m right behind you.”

The dears were in the sitting room, where a videotape of The King and I was playing. Deborah Kerr sang melodiously to a group of precious-looking Oriental children. The dears-on the couch-swayed in time to the music.

“Here we are, my dears,” Mrs. Flo announced, her arm going round Mrs. Havers’ shoulders. “Here’s our new visitor. And we’re all ready to get to know her, aren’t we? Oh I wish Mrs. Tilbird were here to share the pleasure, don’t you?”

Introductions were made to Mrs. Salkild and Mrs. Pendlebury, who remained, shoulder to shoulder, on the couch. Mrs. Havers hung back, casting a panicked glance in Barbara’s direction. Barbara smiled at her reassuringly. The suitcase she carried seemed to pull upon her arm.

“Shall we take off your nice coat and scarf, dear?” Mrs. Flo reached for the top button of the coat.

“Barbie!” Mrs. Havers shrilled.

“Now it’s all right, isn’t it?” Mrs. Flo said. “There’s not a thing to worry about. We’re all so anxious to have you join us for a bit.”

“I smell cabbage!”

Barbara placed the suitcase on the fl oor and came to Mrs. Flo’s rescue. Her mother was clutching onto the top button of her coat as if it were the Hope diamond. Spittle gathered at the corners of her mouth.

“Mum, it’s the holiday you’ve wanted,” Barbara said. “Let’s go upstairs so you can see your room.” She took her mother’s arm.

“It’s usually a bit difficult for them at fi rst,” Mrs. Flo said, perhaps noting Barbara’s own incipient panic. “They get riled a bit at the change. It’s perfectly normal. You’re not to worry about it.”

Together they guided her mother from the room as all the Oriental children chimed “day…by…day” in unison. The stairway was too narrow to allow them to climb it three abreast, so Mrs. Flo led the way, continuing to chat in a light-hearted manner. Underneath her words, Barbara heard the calm determination in her voice, and she marvelled at the woman’s patient willingness to spend her life caring for the elderly and infi rm. She herself only wanted to get out of the house as quickly as possible, and she despised that feeling of emotional claustrophobia.

Guiding her mother up the stairway did nothing to ameliorate Barbara’s need for escape. Mrs. Havers’ body had gone rigid. Each step was a project. And although Barbara murmured, encouraged, and kept a supportive hand fixed round her mother’s arm, it was like leading an innocent animal to its death in a slaughterhouse in those last horrible moments when it first catches on the air the unmistakable scent of blood.

“The cabbage,” Mrs. Havers whimpered.

Barbara tried to steel herself against the words. She knew there was no smell of cabbage in the house. She understood that her mother’s mind was clinging to the last rational thought it had produced. But when her mother’s head lolled back against Barbara’s shoulder and she saw the milky pattern tears made through the face powder which she had donned impulsively in girlish preparation for her long-coveted holiday, Barbara felt the crushing grip of guilt.

She doesn’t understand, Barbara thought. She’ll never understand.

She said, “Mrs. Flo, I don’t think-”

At the top of the stairs, Mrs. Flo turned and held up a hand, palm out, to stop her words. “Give it a moment, dear. This isn’t easy for anyone, is it?”

She crossed the landing and opened one of the doors at the rear of the house where a light was already burning to welcome the new dear. The room had been furnished with a hospital bed. Otherwise it was as normal-looking as any other bedroom Barbara had ever seen and, admittedly, far more cheerful than her mother’s room in Acton.

“Look at the lovely wallpaper, Mummy,” she said. “All those daisies. You like daisies, don’t you? And the rug. Look. There’re daisies on the rug as well. And you’ve got your own basin. And a rocker by the window. Did I tell you that you can see the common from this window, Mum? You’ll be able to watch the children playing ball.” Please, she thought, please. Just give me a sign.

Clinging to her arm, Mrs. Havers mewled.

“Give me her case, dear,” Mrs. Flo said. “If we pop things away quickly, she’ll settle all the sooner. The less disruption, the better for Mum. You’ve brought photos and little mementoes for her, haven’t you?”

“Yes. They’re on the top.”

“Let’s have them out first, shall we? Just the photos for now, I think. A quick bit of home.”

There were only two photos, together in a hinged frame, one of Barbara’s brother and the other of her father. As Mrs. Flo fl ipped open the suitcase, took the frame out, and opened it upon the chest of drawers, Barbara realised suddenly that she’d been in such a hurry to clear her mother out of her life that she hadn’t thought to include a picture of herself. She grew hot with the shame of it.

“Now, doesn’t that look nice?” Mrs. Flo said, stepping back from the chest of drawers and cocking her head to one side to admire the photographs. “What a sweet little boy. Is he-”

“My brother. He’s dead.”

Mrs. Flo clucked sympathetically. “Shall we have her coat off now?”

He was ten, Barbara thought. There was no member of the family at his bedside, not even a nurse to hold his hand and make his passing gentle. He died alone.

Mrs. Flo said, “Let’s just slip this off, dearie.”

Next to her, Barbara felt her mother cringe.

“Barbie…” A note of unquestionable defeat sounded in the two syllables of her name.

Barbara had often wondered what it had been like for her brother, whether he’d slipped away easily without rising from his final coma, whether he’d opened his eyes at the last to fi nd himself abandoned by everyone and everything save the machines and tubes and bottles and gadgets that had been industriously prolonging his life.

“Yes. That’s a good girl. A button. Now another. We’ll get you settled and have a nice cup of tea. I expect you’d like that. A slice of cake as well?”

“Cabbage.” Mrs. Havers drew the word out. It was nearly indistinguishable, like a faint cry, distorted, from a great distance.

Barbara made the decision. “Her albums,” she said. “Mrs. Flo, I’ve forgotten my mother’s albums.”

Mrs. Flo looked up from the scarf which she’d managed to untangle from Mrs. Havers’ hands. “You can bring them later, dear. She won’t want everything all at once.”

“No. These are important. She’s got to have her albums. She’s collected…” Barbara stopped for a moment, knowing in her mind that what she was doing was foolish, feeling in her heart that there was no other answer. “She’s planned holidays. She’s got them done up in albums. She works on them every day. She’ll be lost and-”

Mrs. Flo touched her arm. “My dear, do listen. What you’re feeling is natural. But this is for the best. You must see that.”

“No. It’s bad enough, isn’t it, that I forgot a picture of myself. I can’t leave her here without those albums. I’m sorry. I’ve taken up your time. I’ve made a mess of everything. I’ve just…” She wouldn’t cry, she thought, not with her mother needing her and Mrs. Gustafson to be spoken to and arrangements to be made.

She went to the chest of drawers, snapped closed the framed photographs, and returned them to the suitcase which she swung off the bed. She took a tissue from her pocket, using it to wipe her mother’s cheeks and her nose.

“Okay, Mum,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

The choir was singing the Kyrie as Lynley crossed Chapel Court and approached the chapel itself which, fronted by an arcade, comprised most of the court’s west range. Although it clearly had been built to be admired from Middle Court, which stood to its east, eighteenth-century calls for college expansion had enclosed the seventeenth-century chapel into a quadrangle of buildings of which it was the focal point. Even through the mist and the darkness, it could hardly have been otherwise.

Ground lights glowed against the Weldon stone ashlar exterior of the building, which- if it hadn’t been designed by Wren-was surely a monument to his love of classical ornamentation. The facade of the chapel rose from the middle of the arcade, defined by four Corinthian pilasters which supported a pediment both broken and penetrated by a clock and a lantern cupola. Decorative swags looped from the pilasters. An oeil-de-boeuf glittered on each side of the clock. At the centre of the building hung an oval entablature. And all of it represented the concrete reality of Wren’s classical ideal, balance. Where, at its north and south ends, the chapel did not fill in the entirety of the west range of the court, the arcade framed the river and the backs beyond it. The effect was lovely at night with the river mist rising to swirl round the low wall and lap at the columns. In sunlight, it would have been magnifi cent.

Like a coincidental accent to this thought, a trumpet fanfare played. The notes were pure and sweet on the cold night air. As Lynley pulled open the chapel door at the southeast corner of the building-unsurprised to fi nd that the middle entry was merely an architectural device unintended for use-the choir answered the fanfare with another Kyrie. He entered the chapel as a second fanfare began.

To the height of the arched windows which rose to a plaster dog-tooth cornice, the walls were panelled in golden oak beneath which matching pews faced the solitary central aisle. Lined up in these were the members of the college choir, their attention fixed on a solitary trumpeter who stood at the foot of the altar, completing the fanfare. She was quite dwarfed by the gilded baroque reredos, framing a painting of Jesus calling Lazarus from the dead. She lowered her instrument, saw Lynley, and grinned at him as the choir burst into the fi nal Kyrie. A few crashing bars from the organ followed. The choir master jotted notes in his music.

“Altos, rubbish,” he said. “Sopranos, screech-owls. Tenors, howling dogs. The rest of you, a pass. The same time tomorrow evening, please.”

General moaning greeted his evaluation of their work. The choir master ignored this, shoved his pencil into his thatch of black hair, and said, “The trumpet was excellent, however. Thank you, Miranda. That will be all, ladies and gentlemen.”

As the group disbanded, Lynley walked down the aisle to join Miranda Webberly, who was cleaning her trumpet and repacking it into its case. “You’ve gone off jazz, Randie,” he said.

Her head popped up. Her top knot of curly ginger hair bounced and bobbled. “I never!” she answered.

She was dressed in her usual style, Lynley noted, a baggy sweat suit which she hoped would both elongate and camouflage her short, plump body at the same time as its colour-a deep heliotrope blue-would darken the shade of her own pale eyes.

“Still in the jazz society then?”

“Absolutely. We have a gig on Wednesday night at Trinity Hall. Will you come?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

She grinned. “Good.” She snapped the trumpet case closed and set it on the edge of a pew. “Dad phoned. He said I ought to expect one of his men to come crawling round this evening. Why’re you alone?”

“Sergeant Havers is handling some personal business. She’ll be along later. Tomorrow morning, I should guess.”

“Hmmm. Well. D’you want a coffee or something? I expect you want to talk. The buttery’s still open. Or we could go to my room.” Despite the casual sound of the latter invitation, Miranda’s cheeks coloured. “I mean if you want to talk privately. You know.”

Lynley smiled. “Your room.”

She struggled into a huge pea jacket-tossing a “Ta, Inspector” over her shoulder when he helped her get it on-wrapped a scarf round her neck, and picked up her trumpet case. She said, “Right. Come on, then. I’m over in New Court,” and headed down the aisle.

Instead of crossing Chapel Court and using the formal passageway between the east and south buildings-“These’re called the Randolph digs,” Miranda informed him. “After the architect. Ugly, aren’t they?”-she led him along the arcade and into a doorway at its north end. They went up a short flight of stairs, down a corridor, through a fi re door, down another corridor, through another fi re door, down another flight of stairs. All the time Miranda talked.

“I don’t know yet how I feel about what’s happened to Elena,” she said. It sounded like a discourse she’d been having with herself most of the day. “I keep thinking I should feel outrage or anger or grief, but so far I’ve not felt anything at all. Except guilty for not feeling what I ought to feel and sort of disgustingly self-important now that Daddy’s involved- through you, of course-and that puts me ‘in the know.’ How despicable really. I’m a Christian, aren’t I? Shouldn’t I mourn her?” She didn’t wait for Lynley to reply. “You see, the essential problem is that I can’t quite grasp that Elena’s dead. I didn’t see her last night. I didn’t hear her leave this morning. That’s a fair description of how we lived on a regular basis anyway, so everything seems perfectly normal to me. Perhaps if I had been the one to find her, or if she’d been killed in her room and our bedder had found her and come screaming in to get me-kind of like a fi lm, you know?-I would have seen and known and been moved somehow. It’s the absence of feeling that’s worrying me. Am I turning to stone? Don’t I even care?”

“Were you particularly close to her?”

“That’s just it. I should have been closer than I was. I should have made a bigger effort. I’ve known her since last year.”

“But she wasn’t a friend?”

Miranda paused at the doorway that led out of the north Randolph building and into New Court. She wrinkled her nose. “I wasn’t a runner,” she said obscurely, and shoved open the door.

A terrace overlooked the river to their left. A cobbled path to their right ran between the Randolph building and a lawn. An enormous sweet chestnut tree stood in the lawn’s centre, beyond which loomed the horseshoe-shaped building that comprised New Court, three storeys of blazing Gothic revival decorated with two-centred cusp windows, arched doorways whose doors wore heavy iron studs, battlements on the roofline, and a steepled tower. Although it was constructed from the same ashlar stone as the Randolph building which it faced, it could not have been stylistically more dissimilar.

“It’s this way,” Miranda said, and led him along the path to the southeast corner of the building. There, winter jasmine was growing enthusiastically up the walls. Lynley caught its sweet fragrance the instant before Miranda opened a door next to which the discreet letter L was carved into a small block of stone.

They went up two flights of stairs at Miranda’s quick pace. Her room was one of two bed-sitting rooms that faced each other on a short corridor, sharing a gyp room, a shower, and a toilet.

Miranda paused in the gyp room to fi ll a kettle and put it on to boil. “It’ll have to be instant,” she said with a little grimace. “But I’ve a bit of whisky and we can tart it up with that if you like. As long as you don’t tell Mummy.”

“That you’ve taken to drink?”

She rolled her eyes. “That I’ve taken to anything. Unless it’s a man. You can tell her what you’d like about that. Make up something good. Put me in a black lace negligee. It’ll give her hope.” She laughed and went to the door of her room. She’d wisely locked it, he noted with approval. She wasn’t the only daughter of a superintendent of police for nothing.

“I see you’ve managed to snare yourself deluxe accommodations,” he said as they entered, and indeed by Cambridge standards she had. For the bed-sit comprised two rooms, not one: a small inner chamber where she slept; a larger outer chamber for sitting. This latter was capacious enough to accommodate two undersized sofas and a small walnut dining table that acted as substitute for a desk. There was a bricked-in fireplace in one corner of the room and an oak window seat overlooking Trinity Passage Lane. On the seat itself a wire cage stood. Lynley went to inspect the tiny prisoner who was engaged in running furiously on a squeaking exercise wheel.

Miranda set her trumpet case next to the armchair and dumped her coat nearby. She said, “That’s Titbit,” and went to the fi replace to fiddle with an electric fi re.

Lynley looked up from removing his own coat. “Elena’s mouse?”

“When I heard what happened, I fetched him from her room. It seemed the right thing to do.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. Perhaps…a bit after two.”

“Her room wasn’t locked?”

“No. Not yet at least. Elena never locked up.” On a set of shelves in an alcove were several bottles of spirits, five glasses, three cups and saucers. Miranda fetched two of the cups and one of the bottles and took them to the table. “That could be important, couldn’t it?” she said. “That she didn’t lock her room.”

The little mouse left off running and scampered from the wheel to the side of the cage. His whiskers twitched, his nose quivered. His paws grasping the slender metal bars, he raised himself up and sniffed eagerly at Lynley’s fi ngers.

“It could be,” he said. “Did you hear anyone in her room this morning? Later on, I imagine, perhaps at seven or half past.”

Miranda shook her head. She looked regretful. “Earplugs,” she said.

“You wear earplugs to bed?”

“Have done since…” She hesitated, appearing embarrassed for a moment before she sloughed the feeling off and continued with, “It’s the only way I can sleep, Inspector. Got used to them, I suppose. Unappealing as the devil, but there it is.”

Lynley filled in the blanks of Miranda’s awkward justification, admiring her for the plucky effort at bravado. The struggle that was the Webberly marriage was no particular secret to anyone who knew the superintendent well. His daughter would have begun wearing earplugs at home, wanting to block out the worst of her parents’ nighttime quarrels.

“What time did you get up this morning, Randie?”

“Eight,” she said. “Give or take ten minutes.” She smiled wryly. “Give ten minutes, then. I had a lecture at nine.”

“And when you got up, what did you do? Shower? Bathe?”

“Hmm. Yes. Had a cup of tea. Ate some cereal. Made some toast.”

“Her door was shut?”

“Yes.”

“Everything seemed normal? No sign that anyone had been in?”

“No sign. Except…” The kettle began to whistle in the gyp room. She hooked the two cups and a small jug over her fi ngers and went to the door, where she paused. “I don’t know that I would have noticed. I mean, she had more visitors than I did, you see.”

“She was popular?”

Miranda picked at a chip in one of the cups. The pitch of the kettle’s whistle seemed to intensify a degree. She looked uncomfortable.

“With men?” Lynley asked.

“Let me get the coffee,” she said.

She ducked out of the room, leaving the door open. Lynley could hear her movements in the gyp room. He could see the closed door across the hall. From the porter, he’d obtained the key to that now-locked door, but he felt no inclination to use it. He considered this sensation, so at odds with how he believed he ought to feel.

He was going at the case backwards. The rational dictates of his job told him that, despite the hour of his arrival, he should have spoken to the Cambridge police first, to the parents next, to the finder of the body third. That accomplished, he should have sifted through the victim’s belongings for a possible clue to her killer’s identity. All textbook stuff, labelled proper procedure, as Sergeant Havers would have undoubtedly pointed out. He couldn’t have listed reasons why he wasn’t adhering to it. He merely felt that the nature of the crime itself suggested a personal involvement, perhaps, more than that, a settling of scores. And only an understanding of the central fi gures involved could reveal exactly what those personal involvements and those settled scores were.

Miranda returned, cups and jug on a pink tin tray. “Milk’s gone off,” she announced, putting the cups into their saucers. “Sorry. We’ll have to make do with the whisky. But I’ve a bit of sugar. Would you like some?”

He demurred. “Elena’s visitors?” he asked. “I assume they must have been men.”

She looked as if she’d been hoping he’d forgotten the question while she was making the coffee. He joined her at the table. She sloshed some whisky into both of their cups, stirred them with the same spoon, which she licked and then continued to hold, slapping it into her palm as she spoke.

“Not all,” she said. “She was best mates with the girls in Hare and Hounds. They came by now and then. Or she’d go off with them to a party somewhere. She was a great one for parties, Elena was. She liked to dance. She said she could feel the vibrations from the music if it was loud enough.”

“And the men?” Lynley asked.

The spoon slapped noisily against her palm. She screwed up her face. “Mummy would be happy if I had only a tenth of whatever Elena had. Men liked her, Inspector.”

“Something which you find difficult to understand?”

“No. I could see why they did. She was lively and funny and she liked to talk and to listen, which is awfully odd when you think she couldn’t really do either, could she? But somehow she always gave the impression that when she was with you, she was only and completely interested in you. So I could see how a man…You know.” She flipped the spoon back and forth to complete her sentence.

“Creatures of ego that we are?”

“Men like to believe they’re the centre of things, don’t they? Elena was good at letting them think they are.”

“Particular men?”

“Gareth Randolph for one,” Miranda said. “He was here to see her lots. Two or three times every week. I could always tell when Gareth came to call because the air got heavy, he’s so intense. Elena said she could feel his aura the moment he opened the door to our staircase. Here comes trouble, she’d say if we were in the gyp room. And thirty seconds later, there he would be. She said she was psychic when it came to Gareth.” Miranda laughed. “Frankly, I think she could smell his cologne.”

“Were they a couple?”

“They went about together. People paired their names.”

“Did Elena like that?”

“She said he was just a friend.”

“Was there someone else special?”

She took a drink of her coffee and added more whisky to it, shoving the bottle across to him when she was through. “I don’t know if he was special, but she saw Adam Jenn. Her father’s graduate student. She saw a good bit of him. And her dad stopped by lots, but I suppose he doesn’t count, does he, because he was only here to keep tabs on her. She hadn’t done well last year-have they told you that?- and he wanted to make sure there was no repeat performance. That’s how Elena put it, at least. Here comes my keeper, she’d say when she saw him from the window. Once or twice she hid in my bed-sit just to tease him and came out laughing when he started to react because she wasn’t in her room when she’d said she’d be there to meet him.”

“I take it she didn’t like the plan they’d come up with to keep her at the University.”

“She said the best part about it was the mouse. Tibbit, she called him, companion of my cell. She was like that, Inspector. She could make a joke out of anything.”

Miranda seemed to have completed her recital of information, for she sat back in her chair Indian style with her legs tucked under her on the seat, and she drank more coffee.

But her look at him was a chary one which indicated that something was being withheld.

“Was there someone else, Randie?”

Miranda squirmed. She examined a small basket of apples and oranges on the table, and after that the posters on the wall above it. Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Wynton Marsalis in concert, Dave Brubeck at the piano, Ella Fitzgerald at the mike. She hadn’t abandoned her love of jazz. She glanced at him again, poking the handle of the teaspoon into her mop of hair.

“Someone else?” Lynley repeated. “Randie, if you know something more-”

“I don’t know anything else absolutely for sure, Inspector. And I can’t tell you every little thing, can I, because something I tell you- some little detail-might not even mean anything. But if you took it to heart, people might get hurt, mightn’t they? Dad says that’s the biggest danger in policework.”

Lynley made a mental note to discourage Webberly from waxing philosophical with his daughter in the future. “That’s always possible,” he agreed. “But I’m not about to arrest someone just because you mention his name.” When she said nothing, he leaned across the table and tapped his finger against her coffee cup. “Word of honour, Randie. All right? Do you know something else?”

“What I know about Gareth and Adam and her father came from Elena,” she said. “That’s why I told you. Anything else in my head is nothing but gossip. Or something I maybe saw and didn’t understand. And that can’t be helpful. That could make things go wrong.”

“We’re not gossiping, Randie. We’re trying to get at the truth behind her death. The facts, not conjectures.”

She didn’t immediately respond. She stared at the bottle of whisky on the table. Its label bore a greasy fingerprint stain. She said, “Facts aren’t conclusions. Dad always says that.”

“Absolutely. Agreed.”

She hesitated, even looked over her shoulder as if to make sure they were still alone. “This is about seeing, nothing more,” she said.

“Understood.”

“All right.” She straightened her shoulders as if in preparation, but she still didn’t look as if she wanted to part with the information. “I think she had a row with Gareth on Sunday evening. Only,” she added in a rush, “I can’t know for sure because I didn’t hear them, they talked with their hands. I just caught a glimpse of them in Elena’s room before she shut the door and when Gareth left he was in quite a temper. He banged his way out. Only it could mean nothing because he’s so intense anyway that he’d be acting like that even if they’d been discussing the poll tax.”

“Yes. I see. And after their argument?”

“Elena left as well.”

“What time was this?”

“Round twenty to eight. I never heard her come back.” Miranda seemed to read heightened interest in his face, for she went on hastily. “I don’t think Gareth had anything to do with what’s happened, Inspector. He has a temper, true, and he’s on a tight string, but he wasn’t the only one…” She gnawed at her lip.

“Someone else was here?”

“Noooo…not exactly.”

“Randie-”

Her body slumped. “Mr. Thorsson then.”

“He was here?” She nodded. “Who is he?”

“One of Elena’s supervisors. He lectures in English.”

“When was this?”

“I saw him here twice, actually. But not on Sunday.”

“Day or night?”

“Night. Once probably round the third week of the term. Then again last Thursday.”

“Could he have been here more often?”

She looked reluctant to answer, but she said, “I suppose, yes. But I just saw him twice. Twice is all, Inspector.” Twice is the fact, her voice implied.

“Did she tell you why he came to see her?”

Miranda shook her head slowly. “I think she didn’t much like him because she called him Lenny the Lech. Lennart. He’s Swedish, see. And that’s all I know. Truly. Really.”

“That’s the fact, you mean.” Even as he said it, Lynley felt sure that Miranda Webberly- daughter of her father-could have produced half a dozen conjectures to go with it.

Lynley went through the gatehouse, stopping briefly in the porter’s lodge before stepping out into Trinity Lane. Terence Cuff had wisely seen to it that the rooms set aside for visitors to the college were in St. Stephen’s Court, which along with Ivy Court was across the narrow lane from the rest of the college.

And unlike the rest of the college, it had neither porter nor gatehouse, so it wasn’t locked at night, thereby giving visitors more freedom of movement than the junior members of the college had.

A plain wrought iron fence separated this part of the college from the street. It ran north to south, forming a line of demarcation that was interrupted by the west wall of St. Stephen’s Church. This random rubble building was one of the original parish churches in Cambridge, and its stone quoins, buttresses, and Norman tower seemed strangely at odds with the neat Edwardian brick building that partially encircled it.

Lynley pushed open the iron gate. A second fence inside marked the boundary of the churchyard. There, graves lay dimly illuminated by the same ground lights that shone cones of yellow against the walls of the church where moths fluttered weakly with sodden wings in the glow. The fog had grown even heavier during the time he had spent with Miranda, and it transformed sarcophagi, gravestones, tombs, bushes, and trees into colourless silhouettes laid against a slowly shifting background of mist. Along the wrought iron fence that separated St. Stephen’s Court from the churchyard, perhaps a hundred or more bicycles stood, their handlebars gleaming, slick with the damp.

Passing these, Lynley made his way to Ivy Court, where the porter had earlier shown him to his room at the top of O staircase. It was quiet inside the building itself. These rooms, the porter had told him, were used only by the senior members of the college. They comprised studies and conference rooms where supervisions took place, gyp rooms and smaller rooms with beds for kipping. Since most of the senior fellows lived away from the college, the building was largely unpopulated at night.

Lynley’s room encompassed one of the building’s Dutch gables, and it looked out into Ivy Court and St. Stephen’s graveyard. With brown carpet squares on the fl oor, stained yellow walls, and faded floral curtains at the window, it wasn’t a particularly uplifting environment. Clearly, St. Stephen’s did not expect visitors to embark upon an extended stay.

Left alone there earlier by the porter, he’d found himself slowly examining its contents, touching a musty-smelling armchair, opening a drawer, running his fingers along the empty, adjustable bookshelves that lined one wall. He ran water in the basin. He tested the strength of the single steel rod in a cupboard for holding clothes. He thought about Oxford.

The room had been different but the feeling was the same, that sensation of having the entire world opening up before him, revealing its mysteries even as it held out the promise of satisfactions to come. The blessing of relative anonymity had filled him with the sense of having been newly born. Empty shelves, blank walls, drawers that held nothing. Here, he had thought, he would make his mark. No one need know of his title and background, no one need know of his risible angst. The secret lives of one’s parents had no place in Oxford. Here, he had thought, he would be safe from the past.

He chuckled now to think of how tenaciously he had held on to that fi nal, adolescent belief. He had actually seen himself moving into a golden future in which he had to do absolutely nothing to deal with what had led up to it. How we flee our personal realities, he thought.

His suitcase was still on the desk in the recess made by the gable. It took him less than five minutes to unpack, after which he sat, feeling the room’s chill and his own restless need to be elsewhere. He sought distraction by writing out his fi rst day’s report, a job that would usually be completed by Sergeant Havers but one that he set upon automatically now, grateful for a diversion that would keep thoughts of Helen at bay, if only for an hour or so.

“One call. Yes, sir,” the porter had said as he passed through the lodge.

She’s phoned, Lynley thought. Harry’s come home. And his mood began to lift accordingly, only to plummet to earth when the porter handed him the message. Superintendent Daniel Sheehan of the Cambridge Constabulary would meet with him at half past eight in the morning.

There was nothing from Helen.

He wrote steadily, filling in page after page with the details of his meeting with Terence Cuff, with the impressions he’d formed after his conversation with Anthony and Justine Weaver, with a description of the Ceephone and the possibilities it presented, with the facts he’d managed to glean from Miranda Webberly. He wrote far more than he needed to write, forcing himself to address the murder in a stream-of-consciousness fashion which Havers would rightfully scorn but which also served to focus his mind on the killing and kept it from wandering to areas that would only intensify his nerve-aching frustration. At the end, however, the effort was a failure. For after an hour of writing, he set down his pen, removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, and thought immediately of Helen.

He could sense that he was fast approaching the limit of his capacity for friendship with her. She’d wanted time. He’d given it, month after month, believing that any false move on his part would cause him to lose her forever. As much as possible, he’d tried to refashion himself into the man who had once been her comrade in laughter, a casual companion willing to engage in whatever madcap adventure she’d cared to propose, from hot-air ballooning in the Loire to spelunking in the Burren. It didn’t particularly matter, as long as she was there. But he was finding that the pretence of fraternal affection was growing daily more difficult to maintain, and the words I love you were no longer a means of defining the nature of the close friendship between them. Instead, they were fast becoming a gauntlet which he repeatedly threw down before her, demanding a satisfaction that she did not appear willing to give.

She continued to see other men. She never told him this directly, but he knew it intuitively. He read it in her eyes when she spoke of a play she had seen, a drinks party she’d attended, a gallery she’d visited. And while he sought out other women in what amounted to a momentarily successful effort to drive the thought of Helen from his mind, he could not drive her spirit from his heart any more than he could obliterate the connection that tied her to his soul. He had closed his eyes upon more than one lover, imagining the body beneath his to be Helen’s, hearing Helen’s cries, feeling Helen’s arms, tasting the miracle of Helen’s mouth. And more than once, he had cried out with the pleasure of his body’s fleeting moment of release, only to be fi lled with desolation in the very next instant. It was no longer enough to take and give pleasure. He wanted to make love. He wanted to own love. But not without Helen.

His nerves felt strung. His arms and legs ached. He pushed away from the desk and went to the basin where he splashed water on his face and examined himself dispassionately in the mirror.

Cambridge would be their battleground, he decided. Whatever was to be won or lost, it would happen here.

Back at the desk, he flipped through the pages he had written, reading his words but assimilating nothing. He closed the notebook with a snap and slapped it down.

The air in the room seemed suddenly close, too much hung with the opposing odours of fresh disinfectant and old tobacco smoke. It felt oppressive. He leaned over the desk top, shoved the window up all the way, and let the damp night air wash over his cheeks. Below him the graveyard-half-hidden by the fog- cast up a faint, fresh scent of pine from its trees. The ground there would spring with fallen needles, and as he breathed in their fragrance, he could almost imagine the spongy feel of them beneath his feet.

A movement at the fence caught his attention. At first he thought the wind was rising to shift the fog away from bushes and trees. But as he watched, a figure melted out of the shadow of one of the spruces, and he saw that the movement had not come from within the graveyard at all, but from its perimeter where someone was easing stealthily between the bicycles, away from him, head lifted to examine the windows of the court’s east range. Woman or man, Lynley couldn’t tell, and when he switched off his desk lamp to have a better look, the fi gure froze as if preternaturally aware of being watched even at a distance of some twenty yards. Then Lynley heard the sound of a car’s engine idling in Trinity Lane. Voices called out a laughing good night. A horn tooted happily in response. With a grinding of gears, the car roared off. The voices faded as their owners walked away, and the shadow below became both substance and movement again.

Whoever it was, stealing one of the bicycles didn’t appear to be its objective. It headed for a doorway on the east range of the court. A lantern-shaped lamp, overhung with the ivy for which the court was named, provided scant illumination there, and Lynley waited for the fi gure to enter the milky penumbra directly in front of the door, hoping that whoever it was might toss a quick look over a shoulder and give him a glimpse of face. It didn’t happen. Instead, the figure hurried soundlessly to the doorway, shot out a pale hand to grasp the knob, and disappeared into the building. But just for a moment as the shadowy form passed beneath the light, Lynley saw hair, rich, dark, and plentiful.

A woman suggested an assignation, with someone no doubt anxiously waiting behind one of those sightless, darkened windows. He waited for one of them to brighten with light. It did not happen. Instead, less than two minutes after she had disappeared into the building, the door opened again and the woman re-emerged. This time she paused for an instant beneath the light in order to pull the door shut behind her. The faint glow outlined the curve of a cheek, the shape of a nose and chin. But only for a moment. Then she was gone, moving across the court, fading back into the darkness by the graveyard. She was as silent as the mist.