For the Sake of Elena

6

Cambridge police headquarters faced Parker’s Piece, a vast green crisscrossed by intersecting paths. Joggers ran here, their breaths gusting out in fibrous clouds, while on the grass two dalmatians-tongues flapping happily- chased after an orange Frisbee thrown by a whip-thin bearded man whose bald head shone in the morning sun. All of them seemed to be rejoicing in the disappearance of the fog. Even pedestrians rushing by on the pavement held up their faces to let the sunlight strike them for the first time in days. Although the temperature was no higher than it had been on the previous morning, and a brisk wind made the chill cut close, the fact that the sky was blue and the day was bright served to make the cold stimulating instead of insufferable.

Lynley paused outside the dun brick-andconcrete structure that housed the main offices of the local police. A glass-enclosed notice board stood in front of the doors, on which were fastened posters about child safety in cars, drinking and driving, and an organisation called Crime-stoppers. Over this last had been taped a hand-out giving the superfi cial details of Elena Weaver’s death and asking for information from anyone who might have seen her yesterday morning or Sunday night. It was a hastily composed document with a grainy, photocopied picture of the dead girl upon it. And it had not been generated by the police. DeaStu and a telephone number were printed prominently at the bottom of the page. Lynley sighed when he saw this. The deaf students were launching their own investigation. That wouldn’t make his job any less complicated.

A blast of warm air hit him when he opened the doors and entered the lobby where a young man garbed in black leather was arguing with a uniformed receptionist about a traffi c ticket. On one of the chairs, his companion waited, a girl in moccasins and what appeared to be an Indian bedspread. She kept murmuring, “Come on, Ron. Cripes. Come on,” with her feet drumming impatiently on the black tile fl oor.

The constable working reception cast a thankful look in Lynley’s direction, perhaps appreciative of the diversion. He broke into the young man’s “You listen here, mate. I bloody don’t intend to-” with “Sit down, lad. You’re getting in a twist over nothing,” after which he nodded to Lynley, saying, “CID? Scotland Yard?”

“It’s that obvious, then?”

“Colour of the skin. Police pallor, we call it. But I’ll have a glance at your ID all the same.”

Lynley produced his warrant card. The constable examined it before pressing the release on the locked door which separated the lobby from the station proper. A buzzer sounded, he nodded Lynley inside. “First floor,” he said. “Just follow the signs.” He resumed his argument with the boy in leather.

The superintendent’s office was at the front of the building, overlooking Parker’s Piece. As Lynley approached it, the door opened and an angular woman with a geometric haircut took up a position within its frame. Arms akimbo, elbows pointed like spikes, she scrutinised him from head to foot. Obviously, reception had phoned ahead.

“Inspector Lynley.” She spoke with the same sort of infl ection one uses when naming a social disease. “The superintendent’s scheduled for a meeting with Chief Constable in Huntingdon at half past ten. I shall ask you to keep that in mind when you-”

“That’ll do, Edwina,” a voice called from the inner offi ce.

Her lips minced their way round a glacial smile. She stepped to one side and allowed Lynley to pass her. “Of course,” she said. “Coffee, Mr. Sheehan?”

“Yes.” As he spoke, Superintendent Daniel Sheehan came across the room to meet Lynley at the door. He offered a large beefy hand, a companion in bulk to the rest of him. His grip was firm, and in spite of the fact that Lynley represented a Scotland Yard invasion into his patch, his smile offered fellowship. “Coffee for you, Inspector?”

“Thank you. Black.”

Edwina nodded curtly and disappeared. Her high heels cracked sharp reports in the hall. Sheehan snorted a chuckle. “Come in. Before the lions have at you. Or at least the lioness. Not all of my troops are taking your visit well.”

“That’s a reasonable reaction.”

Sheehan motioned him not to one of the two plastic chairs which faced his desk but to a blue vinyl-covered sofa which along with a pressed wood coffee table apparently constituted the conference area of his office. A map of the city centre hung on the wall there. Each of the colleges was outlined in red.

While Lynley took off his overcoat, Sheehan went to his desk where, in apparent defiance of gravity, a stack of folders leaned precariously towards the rubbish container on the floor. As the superintendent gathered up a loose collection of papers and fastened them together with a paperclip, Lynley regarded him, caught between curiosity and admiration at finding Sheehan so calm in the face of what could easily be interpreted as a declaration of his CID’s incompetence.

Sheehan certainly didn’t appear unfl appable on the surface. His ruddy complexion suggested a quick temper. His thick fi ngers promised notable fists. His barrel chest and massive thighs seemed suitable to a brawler. And yet his easy manner contradicted his physique. As did his words, which were perfectly dispassionate. His choice of topic suggested that he and Lynley had spoken to each other before, establishing some sort of camaraderie. It was an oddly non-political approach to what could have been an uneasy situation. Lynley liked him for choosing it. It revealed him to be direct and confident of who and what he was.

“I can’t say we didn’t bring this on ourselves,” Sheehan said. “It’s a problem in forensic that should have been resolved two years back. But my CC doesn’t like to get involved in departmental squabblings, and as a result the chickens, if you’ll pardon the cliché and don’t mind wearing feathers, have come home to roost.”

He snagged one of the plastic chairs, returned to the sofa, and dropped his collection of papers onto the table where a manila folder labeled Weaver already lay. He sat. The chair creaked under his weight.

“I’m not happy as a sod myself about having you here,” he admitted. “But I wasn’t surprised when the Vice Chancellor rang me and said the University wanted the Yard.

Forensic made a real balls-up of an undergraduate suicide last May. The University doesn’t want a replay. I can’t say I blame them. What I don’t much like is the implication of bias, though. They seem to think that if a student pops off, the local CID are as likely to say good riddance to another gown as they are to investigate.”

“I was told you had a leak in the department that caused the University bad press last term.”

Sheehan gave a grunt of confi rmation. “A leak from forensic. We’ve got two prima donnas out there. And when one disagrees with the other’s conclusions, they fight it out in the press instead of the lab. Drake-the senior man-called the death a suicide. Pleasance- the junior-called it murder, based on the propensity for a suicide to stand before a mirror to cut his throat. This suicide did it while lying on his bed, and Pleasance wouldn’t buy it. The trouble started from there.” Sheehan lifted a thigh with another grunt and drove his hand into his trouser pocket. He brought out a packet of chewing gum and balanced it on his palm. “I’ve been after my CC to separate those two-or fire Pleasance-for exactly twenty-one months now. If the Yard’s involvement in this case can manage to bring that about, I’ll be a happy man.” He offered the gum. “Sugarless,” he said, and when Lynley shook his head, “Don’t blame you a bit. Stuff tastes like rubber.” He popped a folded piece into his mouth. “But it manages to give the illusion of food. If only I could convince my stomach.”

“Dieting?”

Sheehan smacked his palm against his bulging waistline where his stomach overhung the belt on his trousers. “It’s got to go. I’d a heart attack last year. Ah. Here’s the coffee.”

Edwina marched into the room with a cracked wooden tray held in front of her on which plumes of steam rose from two brown mugs. She set the coffee on the table, looked at her watch, and said with a brief, meaningful glance in Lynley’s direction, “Shall I buzz you in time to leave for Huntingdon, Mr. Sheehan?”

“I’ll manage, Edwina.”

“Chief Constable expects you-”

“-at half past ten. Yes.” Sheehan reached for his coffee and raised it to his secretary in a salute. He offered a smile of both thanks and dismissal. Edwina looked as if she wished to say more, but she left the room instead. The door, Lynley saw, did not quite catch behind her.

“We don’t have much more than the preliminaries for you,” Sheehan said with a lift of his coffee mug towards the papers and the folder on the table. “We can’t get her into autopsy until late this morning.”

Lynley put on his spectacles, saying, “What do you know?”

“Not much so far. Two blows to the face causing a sphenoidal fracture. That was the initial damage. Then she was strangled with the tie cord of her tracksuit’s hood.”

“All this occurred on an island, as I understand it.”

“Only the killing itself. We’ve got a good-sized blood splatter on the footpath that runs along the riverbank. She would have been attacked there first, then dragged across the footbridge onto the island. When you go out there, you’ll see that it’d be no problem. The island’s only separated from the west bank of the river by a bit of a ditch. Dragging her off the footpath would have been a matter of fi f-teen seconds or less, once she was unconscious.”

“Did she put up a fi ght?”

Sheehan blew across the top of his coffee mug and took a gusty slurp. He shook his head. “She was wearing mittens, but we’ve got no hairs or skin caught in the material. It looks to us like someone caught her by surprise. But forensic are taping her tracksuit to see what’s what.”

“Other evidence?”

“A plethora of crap that we’re sorting through. Disintegrating newspapers, half a dozen empty cigarette packs, a wine bottle. You name it, it’s there. The island’s a local hang-out, has been for years. We’ve probably got two generations of rubbish to sift through.”

Lynley opened the folder. “You’ve narrowed time of death between half past five and seven,” he noted and looked up. “According to the college, the porter saw her leaving the grounds at a quarter past six.”

“And the body was found not long after seven. So you’ve actually less than an hour to play with. Nice and narrow,” Sheehan said.

Lynley flipped through to the crime scene photographs. “Who found her?”

“Young woman called Sarah Gordon. She’d gone there to sketch.”

Lynley raised his head sharply. “In the fog?”

“My thought as well. You couldn’t see ten yards. I don’t know what she was thinking. But she had a whole kit of stuff with her- couple of easels, a case of paints and pastels-so she was obviously setting up for a good long stay. Which was cut a bit short when she found the body instead of inspiration.”

Lynley looked through the pictures. The girl lay mostly covered by a mound of sodden leaves. She was on her right side, her arms in front of her, her knees bent, and her legs slightly drawn up. She might have been sleeping save for the fact that her face was turned towards the earth, her hair falling forward to leave her neck bare. Round this, the ligature cut into her skin, so deeply in places that it seemed to disappear, so deeply in places that it suggested a rare, brutal, and triumphant sort of strength, a surging of adrenaline through a killer’s muscles. Lynley studied the pictures. There was something vaguely familiar about them, and he wondered if the crime were a copy of another.

“She certainly doesn’t look like an arbitrary body dump,” he said.

Sheehan leaned forward to get a look at the picture. “She wouldn’t be, would she? Not at the hour in the morning. This wasn’t any arbitrary killing. This was a lying-in-wait.”

“Quite. There’s some evidence of that.” He told the superintendent about Elena’s alleged call to her father’s house the night before she died.

“So you’re looking for someone who knew her movements, what her schedule would be that morning, and the fact that her stepmother wouldn’t go running along the river at a quarter past six if she had the chance not to. Someone close to the girl, I should guess.” Sheehan picked up a picture and then another, looking at them with an expression of marked regret on his face. “I always hate to see a young girl like this die. But especially this way.” He tossed the pictures back. “We’ll do what we can at our end to help you-matters being what they are in forensic. But if the body’s any indication, Inspector, aside from someone who knew the girl well, I should say you’re looking for a killer who’s craw-fi lled with hate.”

Sergeant Havers emerged from the buttery and descended the stairs from the terrace only moments after Lynley emerged from the library passage which connected Middle Court to North Court. She flipped her cigarette into a bed of asters and sank both hands into the pockets of her coat. Pea-soup green, it hung open to reveal navy trousers going baggy at the knees, a purple pullover, and two scarves-one brown and one pink.

“You’re a vision, Havers,” Lynley said when she joined him. “Is this the rainbow effect? You know the sort of thing. Rather like the greenhouse effect but more immediately apparent?”

She rummaged in her bag for a packet of Players. She shook one out, lit it, and refl ectively blew smoke in his face. He did his best not to lap up the aroma. Ten months without smoking and he still felt the urge to rip the cigarette from his sergeant’s hand and smoke it to the nub.

“I thought I ought to blend in with the environment,” Havers said. “You don’t like it? Why? Don’t I look academic?”

“You do. Certainly. By someone’s defi nition.”

“What could I hope to expect from a bloke who spent his formative years at Eton?” Havers asked the sky. “If I’d shown up in a top hat, striped trousers, and cutaway, would I have passed muster with you?”

“Only if you had Ginger Rogers on your arm.”

Havers laughed. “Sod you.”

“Sentiments returned.” He watched her flick a bit of ash to the ground. “Did you get your mother settled at Hawthorn Lodge?”

Two girls passed them, holding a muted conversation, their heads together over a piece of paper. Lynley saw that it was the same hand-out which had been posted in front of the police station. His eyes went back to Havers, who kept her own on the two girls until they disappeared round the herbaceous border that marked the entrance to New Court.

“Havers?”

She waved him off, puffing on her cigarette. “I changed my mind. It didn’t work out.”

“What have you done about her?”

“Carrying on with Mrs. Gustafson for a bit. I’ll see how it goes.” She brushed her hand aimlessly over the top of her head, ruffl ing her short hair. The cold air made it crackle. “So. What d’we have here?”

For the moment, he submitted himself to her desire for privacy and gave her what facts he had gleaned from Sheehan. When he was fi nished telling her what he knew so far, she said:

“Weapons?”

“For beating her, they don’t know yet. Nothing was left at the scene, and they’re still working on possible trace evidence on the body.”

“So we’ve got the ubiquitous unidentifi ed blunt object,” Havers said. “And the strangulation?”

“The tie from the hood of her jacket.”

“The killer knew what she would wear?”

“Possibly.”

“Photos?”

He handed her the folder. She put her cigarette between her lips, opened the folder, and squinted through the smoke at the pictures that lay on top of the report. “Have you ever been to Brompton Oratory, Havers?”

She looked up. The cigarette bobbed as she spoke. “No. Why? Are you getting some of that old-time religion?”

“There’s a sculpture there. The martyred St. Cecilia. I couldn’t quite put my fi nger on what it was about this body when I fi rst saw the pictures, but on the way back here it came to me. It’s the sculpture of St. Cecilia.” Over her shoulder, he fingered through the pictures to find the one he wanted. “It’s the way her hair sweeps forward, the position of her arms, even the ligature round her neck.”

“St. Cecilia was strangled?” Havers asked. “I thought martyrdom was more your basic lion-attack in front of a crowd of cheering, down-thumbing Romans.”

“In this case-if I recall it correctly-her head was half-severed and she waited two days to die. But the sculpture only shows the cut itself, which looks like a ligature.”

“Jesus. No wonder she got into heaven.” Havers dropped her cigarette to the ground and crushed it out. “So what’s your point, Inspector? Do we have a killer hot after duplicating all the sculptures in Brompton Oratory? If that’s what’s going on, when he gets to the crucifi x-ion, I hope I’m off the case. Is there a crucifi xion sculpture in the Oratory, by the way?”

“I can’t remember. But all the Apostles are there.”

“Eleven of them martyrs,” she said refl ectively. “We’ve got big trouble. Unless the killer’s only looking for females.”

“It doesn’t matter. I doubt anyone would buy the Oratory theory,” he said and guided her in the direction of New Court. As they walked, he listed the points of information he had gathered from Terence Cuff, the Weavers, and Miranda Webberly.

“The Penford Chair, blighted love, a good dose of jealousy, and an evil stepmother,” Havers commented when he was done. She looked at her watch. “All that in only sixteen hours by yourself on the case. Are you sure you need me, Inspector?”

“No doubt of that. You pass for an undergraduate better than I. I think it’s the clothes.” He opened the door to L staircase for her. “Two flights up,” he said and took the key from his pocket.

From the fi rst floor, they could hear music playing. It grew louder as they climbed. The low moan of a saxophone, the answering call of a clarinet. Miranda Webberly’s jazz. In the second-floor corridor, they could hear a few tentative notes blown from a trumpet as Miranda played along with the greats.

“It’s here,” Lynley said and unlocked the door.

Unlike Miranda’s, Elena Weaver’s was a single room, and it overlooked the buff brick terrace of North Court. Also unlike Miranda’s, it was largely a mess. Cupboards and drawers gaped open; two lights burned; books lay strewn across the desk, their pages fl uttering in the sudden breeze from the door. A green robe formed a heap on the fl oor along with a pair of blue jeans, a black camisole, and a balled-up bit of nylon that seemed to be dirty underwear.

The air felt close and overheated, fusty with the odour of clothes needing to be washed. Lynley walked to the desk and cracked open a window as Havers took off her coat and scarves, dumping them on the bed. She went to the walled-in fireplace in the corner of the room where a row of porcelain unicorns lined the mantel. Fanning out above them, posters hung, again depicting unicorns, the occasional maiden, and an excessive amount of phantasmagorical mist.

Across the room, Lynley glanced into the clothes cupboard which was largely a jumble of neon-coloured, elasticised garments. The odd exception of a pair of neat tweed trousers and a floral dress with a delicate lace collar hung away from the rest.

Havers came to his side. Wordlessly, she examined the clothing. “Better bag all this to make a match of any fibres they pull off her tracksuit,” Havers said. “She would have kept it in here.” She began removing the clothing from its hangers. “Odd, though, isn’t it?”

“What?”

She flicked a thumb towards the dress and the trousers at the end of the rod. “Which part of her was playing dress-up, Inspector? The vamp in neon or the angel in lace?”

“Perhaps both.” At the desk, he saw that a large calendar served as a blotter, and he moved the texts and the notebooks to one side to have a look at it. “A stroke of possible good fortune here, Havers.”

She was stuffing garments into a plastic sack which she’d removed from her shoulder bag. “What sort?”

“A calendar. She hasn’t removed the old months. She’s merely folded them back.”

“Score a point for our side.”

“Quite.” He reached for his spectacles in the breast pocket of his jacket.

The first six months of the calendar represented the latter two-thirds of Elena’s fi rst year at the University, Lent and Easter terms. Most of her notations were clear. Lectures were listed by subject: from Chaucer-10:00 on every Wednesday to Spenser-11:00 the following day. Supervisions seemed to bear the name of the senior fellow with whom she would be meeting, a conclusion Lynley reached when he saw the name Thorsson blocking out the same period of time every week in Easter term. Other notations patched in more details of the dead girl’s life. DeaStu appeared with increasing regularity from January through May, indicating Elena’s adherence to at least one of the guidelines set down by the senior tutor, her supervisors, and Terence Cuff for her social rehabilitation. Attended by specific times, the titles Hare and Hounds and Search and Pellet suggested her membership in two of the University’s other societies. And Dad’s, sprinkled liberally throughout every month, gave evidence of the amount of time Elena spent with her father and his wife. There was no indication that she saw her mother in London at any time other than on holidays.

“Well?” Havers asked as Lynley searched through the months. She popped the last piece of clothing from the floor into the sack, twisted it closed, and wrote a few words on a label.

“It looks fairly straightforward,” he said. “Except…Havers, tell me what you make of this.” When she joined him at the desk, he pointed out a symbol that Elena used repeatedly throughout the calendar, a simple pencil-sketch of a fish. It first appeared on the eighteenth of January and continued with regularity three or four times each week, generally on a weekday, only sporadically on a Saturday, rarely on a Sunday.

Havers bent over it. She dropped the sack of clothes to the floor. “Looks like the Christianity symbol,” she said at last. “Perhaps she’d decided to be born again.”

“That would have been a quick recovery from reprobation,” Lynley replied. “The University wanted her in DeaStu, but no one’s mentioned a word about religion.”

“Perhaps she didn’t want anyone to know.”

“That’s clear enough. She didn’t want someone to know something. I’m just not sure it had anything to do with discovering the Lord.”

Havers seemed willing to pursue another tack. “She was a runner, wasn’t she? Maybe it’s a diet. These are the days she had to eat fish. Good for the blood pressure, good for the cholesterol, good for the…what? Muscle tone or something? But she was thin anyway-you can tell that much from the size of her clothes-so she wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know.”

“Heading towards anorexia?”

“Sounds good to me. Body weight. Something a girl like her-with everyone’s fi ngers in her personal pie-could control.”

“But she would have had to cook it herself in the gyp room,” Lynley said. “Surely Randie Webberly would have noticed that and mentioned it to me. And anyway, don’t anorexics simply stop eating?”

“Okay. It’s the symbol of some society then. A secret group that’s up to no good. Drugs, alcohol, stealing government data. This is Cambridge after all, alma mater of the UK’s most prestigious group of traitors. She may have been hoping to follow in their footsteps. Fish could have been an acronym for their group.”

“Foolish Intellectuals Squashing Hedonism?”

Havers grinned. “You’re a fi ner detective than ever I thought.”

They continued flipping through the calendar. The notations were unchanging from month to month, tapering off in the summer when only the fish appeared-and that a mere three times. Its final appearance was the day before her murder, and the only other marking of any note was a single address written on the Wednesday before she died: 31 Seymour Street and the time 2:00.

“Here’s something,” Lynley said, and Havers jotted it down in her notebook along with Hare and Hounds, Search and Pellet, and a rough copy of the fish. “I’ll handle it,” she said, and began to go through the drawers of the desk as he turned to the cupboard that housed the washbasin. This contained a cornucopia of possessions and illustrated the manner in which one usually stores belongings when space is at a minimum. There was everything from laundry detergent to a popcorn popper. But nothing revealed very much about Elena.

“Look at this,” Havers said as he was closing the cupboard and moving on to one of the drawers built into the wardrobe next to it. He looked up to see that she was holding out a slim, white case decorated with blue fl owers. A prescription label was affixed to its centre. “Birth control pills,” she said, sliding out the thin sheet still encased in its plastic cover.

“Hardly something surprising to find in the room of a twenty-year-old college girl,” Lynley said.

“But they’re dated last February, Inspector. And not one of them taken. Looks like there was no man in her life at the present. Do we eliminate a jealous lover as the killer?”

This was, Lynley thought, certainly support for what both Justine Weaver and Miranda Webberly had said last night about Gareth Randolph: Elena hadn’t been involved with him. The pills, however, also suggested a consistent refusal to get involved with anyone, something which might have set the wheels of a killer’s rage in motion. But surely she would have talked about that with someone, looking to someone for support or advice if she had been having trouble with a man.

Across the hall, the music ended. A few last wavering, live notes sounded on the trumpet before, after a moment of muffl ed activity, the squeak of a door replaced the other sounds.

“Randie,” Lynley called.

Elena’s door swung inward. Miranda stood there, bundled up for the outdoors in her heavy pea jacket and navy sweat suit with a lime-green beret perched rakishly on her head. She was wearing high-topped black athletic shoes. Socks decorated to look like slices of watermelon peeked out from the top of them.

Glancing at her attire, Havers said meaningfully, “I rest my case, Inspector,” and then to the girl, “Good to see you, Randie.”

Miranda smiled. “You got here early.”

“Necessity. I couldn’t let his lordship muddle through on his own. Besides”-this with a sardonic look in Lynley’s direction-“he hasn’t quite got the flavour of modern university life.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Lynley said. “I’d be lost without you.” He indicated the calendar. “Will you look at this fi sh, Randie? Does it mean anything to you?”

Miranda joined him at the desk and inspected the sketches on the calendar. She shook her head.

“She hadn’t been doing any cooking in the gyp room?” Havers asked, obviously testing out her diet theory.

Miranda looked incredulous. “Cooking. Fish, you mean? Elena cooking fi sh?”

“You would have known it, right?”

“I would have got sick. I hate the smell of fi sh.”

“Then some society that she belonged to?” Havers was going for theory number two.

“Sorry. I know she was in DeaStu and Hare and Hounds and probably one or two other societies as well. But I’m not sure which.” Randie looked through the calendar as they themselves had done, chewing absently on the edge of her thumb. “It’s too often,” she said when she’d gone back to January. “No society has this many meetings.”

“A person, then?”

Lynley saw her cheeks flush. “I wouldn’t know. Really. She never said that there was anyone that special. I mean special enough for three or four nights a week. She never said.”

“You can’t know for certain, you mean,” Lynley said. “You don’t know for a fact. But you lived with her, Randie. You knew her far better than you think. Tell me the sorts of things Elena did. Those are merely facts, nothing more. I’ll build upon them.”

Miranda hesitated a long moment before saying, “She went out a lot at night by herself.”

“For entire nights?”

“No. She couldn’t do that because after last December they made her check in and out with the porter. But she got back to her room late whenever she went out…I mean when it was one of those secret going-outs. She was never here when I went to bed on those nights.”

“Secret going-outs?”

Miranda’s ginger hair bobbed as she nodded. “She went by herself. She always wore perfume. She didn’t take books. I thought there must have been someone she was seeing.”

“But she never told you who it was?”

“No. And I didn’t like to pry. I don’t think she wanted anyone to know.”

“That doesn’t suggest a fellow undergraduate, does it?”

“I suppose not.”

“What about Thorsson?” Her eyes dropped to the calendar. She touched the edge of it reflectively. “What do you know about his relationship with Elena? There’s something to it, Randie. I can see that on your face. And he was here Thursday night.”

“I only know…” Randie hesitated, sighed. “This is what she said. It’s only what she said, Inspector.”

“All right. That’s understood.” Lynley saw Havers flip over a page of her notebook.

Miranda watched the sergeant write. “She said he was trying to make it with her, Inspector. He’d been after her last term, she said. He was after her again. She hated him for it. She called him smarmy. She said she was going to turn him over to Dr. Cuff for sexual harassment.”

“And did she do so?”

“I don’t know.” Miranda twisted the button on her jacket. It was like a little talisman, infusing her with strength. “I don’t know that she ever got the chance, you see.”

Lennart Thorsson was in the process of completing a lecture in the English Faculty on Sidgwick Avenue when Lynley and Havers finally caught him up. The popularity of both his material and his manner of presenting it was attested by the size of the hall in which he spoke. It held at least one hundred chairs. All of them were filled, mostly by women. Ninety percent of them appeared to be hanging upon Thorsson’s every word.

There was much to hang on, all of it delivered in perfect, virtually unaccented English.

The Swede paced as he talked. He didn’t use notes. He seemed to take inspiration from intermittently running his right hand through the thick, strawberry-blond hair which tumbled onto his forehead and round his shoulders in an appealing mess, a complement to the drooping moustache that curved round his mouth in a style that befitted the early 1970’s.

“So in the royalty plays, we examine the issues that Shakespeare himself was intent upon examining,” Thorsson was saying. “Monarchy. Power. Hierarchy. Authority. Dominion. And in our examination of these issues we cannot avoid a scrutiny of that which comprised the question of status quo. How far is Shakespeare writing from a perspective to conserve the status quo? How does he do it if he does it? And if he’s cleverly spinning an illusion in which he merely wears the guise of adherence to these social constrictions of his day-while all the time espousing an insidious subversion of the social order-how is he doing that?”

Thorsson paused to let the furious note-takers catch up with the fl ow of his thoughts. He turned on his heel briskly and paced again. “And then we go further to begin our examination of the obverse position. We ask to what extent is Shakespeare openly contesting the existing social hierarchies? From what standpoint is he contesting them? Is he implying an alternative set of values-a subversive set of values-and if he is, what are they? Or”- Thorsson pointed a meaningful finger at his audience and leaned towards them, his voice more intense-“is Shakespeare doing something even more complex? Is he questioning and challenging the foundation of this country-his country-itself-authority, power, and hierarchy-in order to imply a refutation of the premise on which his entire society was founded? Is he projecting different ways of living, arguing that if possibility is circumscribed only by existing conditions, then man makes no progress and effects no change? Because is not Shakespeare’s real premise-present in every play-that all men share equality? And does not every king in every play reach that point at which his interests are in alignment with humanity at large and no longer with kingship? ‘I think the King is but a man, as I am.’ As…I…am. This, then, is the point we examine. Equality. The king and I are equals. We are but men. There is no defensible social hierarchy, here or anywhere. So we agree that it was possible for Shakespeare, as an imaginative artist, to store and dwell upon ideas which would not be talked about for centuries, projecting himself into a future he did not know, allowing us to see at last that the reason his works are valid today is simply because we have not yet even begun to catch up to his thinking.”

Thorsson strode to the podium and picked up a notebook which he closed decisively. “Next week then. Henry V. Good morning.”

For a moment, no one stirred. Paper crackled. A pencil dropped. Then, with what appeared to be reluctance, the audience roused itself with a collective sigh. Conversation rose as people headed for the exits while Thorsson stuffed his notebook and two texts into a haversack. As he removed his black academic gown and balled it up to join the textbooks, he spoke to a tousle-haired young woman still sitting in the front row. Then, after taking a moment to tap one finger against her cheek and laugh at something she’d said, he came up the aisle towards the door.

“Ah,” Havers said, sotto voce. “Your basic Prince of Darkness.”

It was a particularly apt sobriquet. Thorsson didn’t favour black, he wallowed in it, as if in the attempt to generate a deliberate contrast to his fair skin and hair. Pullover, trousers, herringbone jacket, overcoat, and scarf. Even his boots were black, with pointed toes and high heels. If he was intent upon playing the role of youthful, indifferent rebellion, he couldn’t have chosen a more successful costume. However, when he reached Lynley and Havers and began, with a sharp nod, to move past them, Lynley saw that while Thorsson might well have been a rebel, he wasn’t a youth. Crow’s feet shot out from the corners of his eyes, and a few grey strands wove through his abundant hair. Middle thirties, Lynley decided. He and the Swede were of an age.

“Mr. Thorsson?” He offered his warrant card. “Scotland Yard CID. Do you have a few minutes?”

Thorsson looked from Lynley to Havers and back to Lynley, who made the introductions. He said, “Elena Weaver, I take it?”

“Yes.”

He slung his haversack over one shoulder and, with a sigh, roughly drove a hand through his hair. “We can’t talk here. Have you got a car with you?” He waited for Lynley’s nod. “Let’s go to the college.” He turned abruptly and walked out the door, flinging his scarf back over his shoulder.

“Nice exit, that,” Havers said.

“Why do I imagine he excels at them?”

They followed Thorsson down the hall, down the stairs, and into the open cloister which had been created by a well-intentioned modern architect who had designed the three-sided faculties building to stand upon columns of reinforced concrete round a rectangle of lawn. The resulting structure hovered above the ground, suggesting impermanence and offering no protection from the wind which at this moment was gusting through the columns.

“I’ve a supervision next hour,” Thorsson informed them.

Lynley smiled pleasantly. “I certainly hope we’re done by then.” He motioned Thorsson in the general direction of his car which he’d parked illegally at the northeast entrance to Selwyn College. They walked to it three abreast on the pavement, with Thorsson merely nodding indifferently to students who called out to him from passing bicycles.

It wasn’t until they reached the Bentley that the Shakespearean lecturer addressed them again. And then it was only to say, “This is what the British police are driving? Fy fan! No wonder the country’s going to hell.”

“Ah, but my motor makes up for it,” Havers replied. “Average a ten-year-old Mini with a four-year-old Bentley and you come up with seven years of equality, don’t you?”

Lynley smiled inwardly. Havers had taken Thorsson’s lecture directly into her caustic little heart. “You know what I mean,” she continued. “A car by any other name rolls down the street.”

Thorsson didn’t look amused.

They got into the car. Lynley headed up Grange Road to make the circuit that would take them back into the centre of the city. At the end of the street, as they waited to make the right turn onto the Madingley Road, a lone bicyclist rolled past them, heading out of town. It took more than a moment for Lynley to recognise the rider, Helen’s brother-in-law, the absent Harry Rodger. He was pedalling towards his home, his coat flapping like great woollen wings round his legs. Lynley watched him, wondering if he’d spent the entire night at Emmanuel. Rodger’s face seemed pasty, save for his nose which was red and matched the colour of his ears. He looked perfectly miserable. Seeing him, Lynley felt a quick surge of concern only indirectly related to Harry Rodger. It centred itself on Helen and a need to get her away from her sister’s home and back to London. He shoved the thought aside and made himself concentrate on the conversation between Havers and Lennart Thorsson.

“His writing illustrates the artist’s struggle to work out a utopian vision, Sergeant. A vision that goes beyond a feudal society and deals with all mankind, not just a select group of individuals who happen to be born with a silver spoon on which to suck. As such, the body of his work is prodigiously-no, miraculously-subversive. But most critical analysts don’t wish to see it that way. It scares them witless to think that a sixteenth-century writer might have had more social vision than they… who of course have no social vision at all.”

“Shakespeare was a closet Marxist then?”

Thorsson made a snort of derision. “Simplistic snobbery,” he responded. “And hardly what I’d expect from-”

Havers turned in her seat. “Yes?”

Thorsson didn’t finish his thought. There was no need. Someone of your class hung among them like an echo, four words that robbed his liberal literary criticism of virtually all of its meaning.

They rode the rest of the distance without conversation, threading through the lorries and taxis on St. John’s Street to make their way down the narrow gorge of Trinity Lane. Lynley parked near the end of Trinity Passage, just outside the north entrance to St. Stephen’s College. Unlocked and pushed open during the day, it offered immediate access to New Court.

“My rooms are this way,” Thorsson said, striding towards the west range of the court which was built on the river. He slid back a slat of wood to uncover his name, painted in white on a black sign by the door, and he entered to the left of the crenellated tower where woodbine grew thickly on the smooth stone walls. Lynley and Havers followed, Lynley having acknowledged Havers’ knowing look at L staircase directly across the lawn on the east range of the court.

Ahead of them, Thorsson pounded up the stairs, his boots barking in staccato against the bare wood. When they caught him up, he was unlocking a door upon a room whose windows overlooked the river, the blazing autumn of the Backs, and Trinity Passage Bridge where at this moment a group of tourists were taking pictures. Thorsson crossed to the windows and dropped his haversack onto a table beneath them. Two ladder-back chairs faced each other there, and he draped his overcoat across the back of one of them and went to a large recess in one corner of the room where a single bed stood.

“I’m done for,” he said, and lay down on his back across the plaid counterpane. He winced as if the position were uncomfortable for him. “Sit if you want.” He gestured to an easy chair and a matching sofa at the foot of the bed, both of them covered with material the colour of wet mud. His intention was clear. The interview that he wished to be conducted on his turf would also be conducted precisely on his terms.

After nearly thirteen years on the force, Lynley was used to encountering displays of bravado, specious or otherwise. He ignored the invitation to sit and took a moment to inspect the collection of volumes in a breakfront bookcase at one side of the room. Poetry, classic fiction, literary criticism printed in English, French, and Swedish, and several volumes of erotica, one of which lay open to a chapter entitled “Her Orgasm.” Lynley smiled wryly. He liked the subtle touch.

At the table, Sergeant Havers was opening her notebook. She produced a pencil from her shoulder bag, and looked at Lynley expectantly. On the bed, Thorsson yawned.

Lynley turned from the bookcase. “Elena Weaver saw a lot of you,” he said.

Thorsson blinked. “Hardly a cause for suspicion, Inspector. I was one of her supervisors.”

“But you saw her outside of her supervisions.”

“Did I?”

“You’d been to her room. More than once, I understand.” Speculatively and as obviously as possible, Lynley ran his eyes the length of the bed. “Did she have her supervisions in here, Mr. Thorsson?”

“Yes. But at the table. I find that young ladies do far better thinking on their bums than on their backs.” Thorsson chuckled. “I can see where you’re heading, Inspector. Let me put your mind at rest. I don’t seduce school girls, even when they invite seduction.”

“Is that what Elena did?”

“They come in here and sit with their pretty legs spread and I get the message. It happens all the time. But I don’t take them up on it.” He yawned again. “I admit I’ve had three or four of them once they’ve graduated, but they’re adults by then and they know the score proper. A bit of dirty hard cock for the weekend, that’s all. Then off they go, warm and tingly, with no questions asked and no commitments made. We have a good time-they probably have a far better time than I, to be frank-and that’s the end of it.”

Lynley wasn’t blind to the fact that Thorsson hadn’t answered his question. The other man was continuing.

“Cambridge senior fellows who have affairs with school girls fit a profile, Inspector, and it never varies. If you’re looking for someone likely to stuff Elena, look for middle-aged, look for married, look for unattractive. Look for generally miserable and outstandingly stupid.”

“Someone completely unlike you,” Havers said from the table.

Thorsson ignored her. “I’m not a madman. I’m not interested in being ruined. And that’s what’s in store for any djavlar typ who makes a mess of himself with an undergraduate-male or female. The scandal’s enough to make him miserable for years.”

“Why do I have the impression that scandal wouldn’t bother you in the least, Mr. Thorsson?” Lynley asked.

Havers added, “Did you actually harass her for sex, Mr. Thorsson?”

Thorsson turned onto his side. He put his eyes on Havers and kept them there. Contempt drew down the corners of his mouth.

“You went to see her Thursday night,” Havers said. “Why? To keep her from doing what she threatened she’d do? I don’t imagine you much wanted her to give your name over to the Master of the College. So what did she tell you? Had she already filed a formal complaint for harassment? Or were you hoping to stop her from doing that?”

“You’re a fucking stupid cow,” Thorsson replied.

Lynley felt quick anger shoot blood to his muscles. But Sergeant Havers, he saw, was not reacting. Instead, she twirled an ashtray slowly beneath her fingers, studying its contents. Her expression was bland.

“Where do you live, Mr. Thorsson?” Lynley asked.

“Off the Fulbourn Road.”

“Are you married?”

“Thank God, no. English women don’t exactly heat my blood.”

“Are you living with someone?”

“No.”

“Did anyone spend the night with you Sunday? Was anyone with you Monday morning?”

Thorsson’s eyes danced away for a fractional instant. “No,” he said. But like most people he did not lie well.

“Elena Weaver was on the cross country team,” Lynley went on. “Did you know that?”

“I might have known. I don’t recall.”

“She ran in the morning. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“She called you ‘Lenny the Lech.’ Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Why did you go to see her Thursday night?”

“I thought we could sort things out if we talked like two adults. I discovered I was wrong.”

“So you knew she was intending to turn you in for harassing her. Is that what she told you Thursday night?”

Thorsson hooted a laugh. He dropped his legs over the side of the bed. “I see the game now. You’re too late, Inspector, if you’re here to sniff up a motive for her murder. That one won’t do. The bitch had already turned me in.”

“He’s got motive,” Havers said. “What happens to one of these University blokes if he gets caught with his hands in some pretty thing’s knickers?”

“Thorsson was fairly clear on that. At the least, I imagine he finds himself ostracised. At the most, dismissed. No matter its politics, ethically the University’s a conservative environment. Academics won’t tolerate one of their fellows becoming entangled with a junior member of his college. Especially a student he’s seeing for supervisions.”

“But why would Thorsson even care what they thought? When d’you think he’d ever fi nd the need to go rubbing elbows with his fellow scholars?”

“He may not need to rub social elbows with them, Havers. He may not even want to. But he’s got to rub academic elbows all the time, and if his colleagues cut him off, he’s ruined his chances for advancement here. That would be the case for all the senior fellows, but I imagine Thorsson has a finer line to walk to move along in his career.”

“Why?”

“A Shakespearean scholar who’s not even English? Here? At Cambridge? I dare say he’s fought hard to get where he is.”

“And might fight even harder to keep himself there.”

“True enough. No matter Thorsson’s superficial disdain for Cambridge, I can’t think he’d want to endanger himself. He’s young enough to have his eye on an eventual professorship, probably a chair. But that’s lost to him if he’s involved with a student.”

Havers dumped some sugar into her coffee. She munched thoughtfully on a toasted teacake. At three other steel-legged tables in the airy buttery, seven junior members of the college huddled over their own mid-morning snacks with sunlight from the wall of windows streaking down their backs. The presence of Lynley and Havers did not appear to interest them.

“He had opportunity as well,” Havers pointed out.

“If we discount his claim that he didn’t know Elena ran in the morning.”

“I think we can, Inspector. Look how many times her calendar indicates she met with Thorsson. Are we supposed to believe that she never once mentioned the cross country team to him? That she never talked about her running? What utter rot.”

Lynley grimaced at the bitterness of his own coffee. It tasted cooked-like a soup. He added sugar and borrowed his sergeant’s spoon.

“If an investigation was pending, he’d want to put an end to it, wouldn’t he?” Havers was continuing. “Because once Elena Weaver came forward to put the thumbscrews to him, what was to stop a dozen other sweet young things from doing the same?”

“If a dozen other sweet young things even exist. If, in fact, he’s guilty at all. Elena may have charged him with harassing her, Sergeant, but let’s not forget that it remained to be proved.”

“And it can’t be proved now, can it?” Havers pointed a knowing finger at him. Her upper lip curled. “Are you actually taking the male position in this? Poor Lenny Thorsson’s been falsely accused of dandling some girl because he rejected her when she tried to get him to take off his trousers? Or at least unzip them?”

“I’m not taking any position at all, Havers. I’m merely gathering facts. And the most cogent one is that Elena Weaver had already turned him in, and as a result an investigation was pending. Look at it rationally. He’s got motive spelled out in neon lights above his head. He may talk like an idiot, but he doesn’t strike me as a fool. He would have known he’d be placed at the top of the list of suspects as soon as we learned about him. So if he did kill her, I imagine he’d have set himself up with an ironclad alibi, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.” She waved her teacake at him. One of its raisins dropped with a plop into her coffee. She ignored it and continued. “I think he’s clever enough to know we’d be having a conversation just like this. He knew we’d be saying he’s a Cambridge don, he’s a far sight off dim, he’d never kill Elena Weaver and hand himself over to the rozzers on a platter now, would he? And look at us, will you. Playing right into his hands.” She bit into her teacake. Her jaws worked it furiously.

Lynley had to admit that there was a certain skewed logic to what Havers was suggesting. Still, he didn’t like the fire with which she suggested it. That hot edge of feeling nearly always implied a loss of objectivity, the bane of effective policework. He had encountered it too often in himself to let it go ignored in his partner.

He knew the source of her anger. But to address it directly would be to give a distinction to Thorsson’s words that was undeserved. He sought another tack.

“He would know about the Ceephone in her room. There’s that. And according to Miranda, Elena left the room prior to the time Justine received the call. If he’d been in her room before-and he admits that he had-then he probably knew how to use the phone as well. So he could have made the call to the Weavers.”

“Now you’re onto something,” Havers said.

“But unless Sheehan’s forensic team give us trace evidence that we can connect to Thorsson, unless we can pin down the weapon used to beat the girl before she was strangled, and unless we can connect that weapon to Thorsson, we’ve got nothing much more than our natural dislike of him.”

“And we’ve plenty of that.”

“In spades.” He shoved his coffee cup to one side. “What we need is a witness, Havers.”

“To the killing?”

“To something. To anything.” He stood. “Let’s look up this woman who found the body. If nothing else, at least we’ll fi nd out what she was planning to paint in the fog.”

Havers drained her coffee cup and wiped the greasy crumbs from her hands onto a paper napkin. She headed for the door, shrugging into her coat, with her two scarves dragging along the floor behind her. He said nothing else until they were outside on the terrace above North Court. And even then he chose his words carefully.

“Havers, as to what Thorsson said to you.”

She looked at him blankly. “What he said, sir?”

Lynley felt an odd strip of sweat on the back of his neck. Most of the time he didn’t give a thought to the fact that his partner was a woman. At the moment, however, that fact couldn’t be avoided. “In his room, Havers. The…” He sought a euphemism. “The bovine reference?”

“Bo…” Under her thick fringe of hair, her brow creased in perplexity. “Oh, bovine. You mean when he called me a cow?”

“Ah…yes.” Even as he said it, Lynley wondered what on earth he could possibly come up with to soothe her feelings. He needn’t have worried.

She chuckled quietly. “Don’t give it a thought, Inspector. When an ass calls me a cow, I always consider the source.”