For the Sake of Elena

7

“And what’s this one, Christian?” Lady Helen asked. She held up a piece of the large wooden puzzle that lay on the floor between them. Carved from mahogany, oak, fir, and birch, it was a softly hued map of the United States, a gift to the twins on their fourth birthday sent from America by their aunt Iris, Lady Helen’s oldest sister. The puzzle reflected Lady Iris’ taste more than it said anything about her devotion to her niece and nephew. “Quality and durability, Helen. That’s what one looks for,” she would say stolidly, as if in the expectation that Christian and Perdita would be playing with toys right into their dotage.

Bright colours would have attracted the children more strongly. They certainly would have gone further to hold their attention. But after a few false starts, Lady Helen had managed to turn putting the puzzle together into a game which Christian was playing like a zealot as his sister watched. Perdita sat snugly against Lady Helen’s side, her thin legs splayed out in front of her, her scuffed shoes pointed northeast and northwest.

“Cafilornia!” Christian announced triumphantly, after spending a moment studying the shape his aunt held for him. He beat his feet on the floor and crowed. He was always successful with the oddly shaped states. Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, Utah. No problem there. But Wyoming, Colorado, and North Dakota were blatant invitations to a fi t of temper.

“Wonderful. And its capital is…?”

“New York!”

Lady Helen laughed. “Sacramento, silly face.”

“Sackermenno!”

“Quite. Now put it in. Do you know where it goes?”

After a futile attempt to pound it into the spot left for Florida, Christian slid it across the board to the opposite coast. “’Nother, Auntie Leen,” he said. “I can do more.”

She selected the smallest piece and held it up. Wisely, Christian squinted down at the map. He plunged his finger into the empty spot to the east of Connecticut.

“Here,” he announced.

“Yes. But can you name it?”

“Here! Here!”

“Are you stalling, darling?”

“Auntie Leen! Here!”

Next to Lady Helen, Perdita stirred. “Roseila,” she whispered.

“Roads Island!” Christian shrieked. With a whoop of triumph, he lunged for the state which his aunt still held.

“And the capital?” Lady Helen kept the puzzle piece away from him. “Come along. You knew it yesterday.”

“Lantic Ocean!” he bellowed.

Lady Helen smiled. “Close enough, I suppose.”

Christian tugged the piece from her fingers and smashed it into the puzzle face downward. When it didn’t fit, he tried it upside down. He pushed his sister away when she leaned forward to help him, saying, “I c’n do it, Perdy,” and managing to get it right on a third clumsy, sticky-handed try.

“’Nother,” he demanded.

Before Lady Helen could accommodate him, the front door opened and Harry Rodger entered the house. He glanced into the sitting room, his eyes lingering on the baby who kicked and burbled on a heavy quilt next to Perdita on the fl oor.

“Hullo, everyone,” he said as he took off his overcoat. “Got a kiss for Dad?”

Squealing, Christian barrelled across the room. He flung himself against his father’s legs. Perdita didn’t move.

Rodger swung his son up, kissed him noisily on the cheek, and set him back on the fl oor. He pretended to paddle him, demanding, “Have you been bad, Chris? Have you been a bad boy?” Christian shrieked with glee. Lady Helen felt Perdita shrink closer beside her and glanced down to see that she was sucking her thumb, eyes fixed on her sister, fi ngers kneading her palm.

“We’re doing a puzzle,” Christian told his father. “Auntie Leen ’n me.”

“And what about Perdita? Is she helping you?”

“No. Perdita won’t play. But Auntie Leen and I play. Come see.” Christian dragged on his father’s hand, urging him into the sitting room.

Lady Helen tried to feel neither anger nor aversion as her brother-in-law joined them. He hadn’t come home last night. He hadn’t bothered to phone. And those two facts eradicated whatever sympathy she might have felt upon looking at him and seeing that, whether the illness was of the body or the spirit, he was obviously unwell. His eyes looked yellow. His face was unshaven. His lips were chapped. If he wasn’t sleeping at home, he certainly didn’t look as if he were sleeping anywhere else.

“Cafilornia.” Christian poked at the puzzle. “See, Daddy? Nevada. Puta.”

“Utah,” Harry Rodger said automatically, and to Lady Helen, “How’s everything here, then?”

Lady Helen was acutely aware of the presence of the children, especially of Perdita quivering against her. She was also aware of her own need to rail at her brother-in-law. But she said merely, “Fine, Harry. How lovely to see you.”

He responded with a vague smile. “Right. I’ll leave you to it, then.” Patting Christian on the head, he left the room, escaping in the direction of the kitchen.

Christian began to wail immediately. Lady Helen felt herself growing hot. She said, “It’s all right, Christian. Let me see about your lunch. Will you stay here with Perdita and little sister for a moment? Show Perdita how to put the puzzle together.”

“I want Daddy!” he screamed.

Lady Helen sighed. How well she had come to understand that fact. She turned the puzzle over and dumped it onto the floor, saying, “Look, Chris,” but he began fl inging pieces into the fireplace. They splattered into the ashes under the grate and spewed clouds of debris out onto the carpet. His screams grew louder.

Rodger stuck his head back into the room. “For God’s sake, Helen. Can’t you shut him up?”

Lady Helen snapped. She sprang to her feet, stalked across the room, and shoved her brother-in-law back into the kitchen. She closed the door upon Christian’s wailing.

If Rodger was surprised by her sudden vehemence, he did not react to it. He merely went back to the work top where he had been in the process of going through the collection of two days’ post. He held a letter up to the light, squinted at it, discarded it, picked up another.

“What’s going on, Harry?” she demanded.

He looked her way briefly before returning to the post. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you. I’m talking about my sister. She’s upstairs, by the way. You might want to look in on her before you trot back to the college. I take it that you are trotting back, aren’t you? Somehow this visit doesn’t quite have the aura of permanence round it.”

“I’ve a lecture at two.”

“And after that?”

“I’m attending formal dinner tonight. And really, Helen, you are beginning to sound rather drearily like Pen.”

Lady Helen marched to him, ripped the stack of letters from his hand, and threw them on the work top. “How dare you,” she said. “You egocentric little worm. Do you think we’re all of us here for your convenience?”

“How astute you are, Helen.” Penelope spoke from the doorway. “I wouldn’t have thought it.” She halted her way into the room, one hand against the wall and the other folded into the throat of her dressing gown. Two streaks of damp from her swollen breasts discoloured the pink material, turning it fuchsia. Harry’s eyes fell on these before shifting away. “Don’t like the sight?” Penelope asked him. “Too real for you, Harry? Not quite what you wanted?”

Rodger went back to his letters. “Don’t start, Pen.”

She gave a wavering laugh. “I didn’t start this. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you were the one. Wasn’t that you? All those days. All those nights. Talking and urging. They’re like a gift, Pen, our gift to the world. But if one of them should die…That was you, wasn’t it?”

“And you won’t let me forget it, will you? For the last six months you’ve been taking your revenge. Well, fine then. Do it. I can’t stop you. But I can decide not to stay for the abuse.”

Penelope laughed again, more weakly this time. She leaned for support against the refrigerator door. One hand climbed to her hair which lay, limp and oily, against her neck. “Harry, how amusing. If you want some abuse, climb into this body. Oh, but you did that, didn’t you? Any number of times.”

“We’re not going to-”

“Talk about it? Why? Because my sister’s here and you don’t want her to know? Because the children are playing in the other room? Because the neighbours might notice if I scream loud enough?”

Harry slapped down his letters. Envelopes slithered across the work top. “Don’t put this on me. You made up your mind.”

“Because you gave me no peace. I didn’t even feel like a woman any longer. You wouldn’t even touch me if I didn’t agree to-”

“No!” Harry shouted. “God damn it, Pen. You could have said no.”

“I was just a sow, wasn’t I? Fodder for the rut.”

“That’s not quite accurate. Sows wallow in the mud, not in self-pity.”

“Stop it!” Lady Helen said.

In the sitting room, Christian shrieked. The thin wail of the baby joined in his cries. Something hit the wall with a tremendous clatter, suggesting the body of the puzzle being hurled in a rage.

“Just look at what you’re doing to them,” Harry Rodger said. “Take a good long look.” He headed for the door.

“And what are you doing?” Penelope shrilled. “Model father, model husband, model lecturer, model saint. Running away as usual? Working up your revenge? She hasn’t let me have it for the last six months so I’ll make her pay now when she’s weak and ill and I can get her a good one? Just the moment when I can best let her know what a nothing she is?”

He whirled to face her. “I’ve had it with you. It’s time you decided what you want instead of constantly digging into me for what you have.” Before she could answer, he was gone. A moment later, the front door slammed. Christian howled. The baby cried. In response, fresh growing wet spots seeped through Penelope’s dressing gown. She began to weep.

“I don’t want this life!”

Lady Helen felt an answering rush of pity. Tears stung her eyes. Never had she felt so at a loss for something to say that might comfort.

For the first time she understood her sister’s long silences, her vigils at the window, and her wordless weeping. But what she could not understand was the initial act that had brought Penelope to this point. It constituted a kind of surrender so foreign to her that she found herself recoiling from its signifi cance.

She went to her sister, took her into her arms.

Penelope stiffened. “No! Don’t touch me. I’m leaking all over. It’s the baby…”

Lady Helen continued to hold her. She tried to frame a question and wondered where to start and what she could ask that would not betray her growing anger. The fact that her rage was multi-directional served to make the act of concealing it only that much more diffi cult.

She felt it first for Harry and for the needs of ego that would prompt a man to urge for the breeding of another child, as if what was being created were a demonstration of the father’s virility, and not an individual with decided needs of its own. She felt it also for her sister and for the fact that she had given in to that sense of duty inbred in women from the beginning of time, a duty which told them that the possession of a functioning womb necessarily served as a definition of self.

The initial decision to have children-one which no doubt had been made with joy and commitment by both Penelope and her husband-had proved her sister’s undoing. For in leaving behind her career to care for the twins, she had, over time, allowed herself to become a dependent, a woman who believed she had to hold onto her man. So when he had made the request for another child, she had acquiesced. She had done her duty. After all, what better way to keep him than to give him what he wanted?

That none of this had been necessary, that all of it rose from her sister’s inability or unwillingness to challenge the constrictive definition of womanhood to which she had decided to adhere, served to make her current situation even more untenable. For Penelope was wise enough at the heart of the matter to know that she was assenting to living a life in which she did not believe, and that was, undoubtedly, a large part of the wretchedness she was now experiencing. Her husband’s parting words had instructed her to make a decision. But until she learned to redefi ne herself, circumstances and not Penelope would do the deciding.

Her sister sobbed against her shoulder. Lady Helen held her and tried to murmur comfort.

“I can’t stand it,” Penelope wept. “I’m suffocating. I’m nothing. I don’t have an identity. I’m just a machine.”

You’re a mother, Lady Helen thought, while in the next room, Christian continued to scream.

It was noon when Lynley and Havers pulled to a stop on the twisting high street of the village of Grantchester, a collection of houses, pubs, a church, and a vicarage separated from Cambridge by the University’s rugby fi elds and a long stretch of farmland lying fallow for the winter behind a hawthorn hedgerow that was beginning to brown. The address on the police report had looked decidedly vague: Sarah Gordon, The School, Grantchester. But once they reached the village, Lynley realised that no further information was going to be necessary. For between a row of thatched cottages and the Red Lion Pub stood a hazel-coloured brick building with bright red woodwork and numerous skylights set into a pitched tile roof. From one of the pillars that stood on either side of the driveway hung a bronze-lettered sign that said merely The School.

“Not bad digs,” Havers commented, shouldering open her door. “Your basic loving renovation of an historical property. I’ve always hated people with the patience for preservation. Who is she, anyway?”

“An artist of some sort. We’ll find out the rest.”

The space for the original front door now accommodated four panels of glass through which they could see lofty white walls, part of a sofa, and the blue glass shade of an arching brass floorlamp. When they slammed the car doors and started to walk up the drive, a dog came to these windows and began to yap wildly.

The new front door was set towards the rear of the building, recessed into part of a low, covered passage which connected the house to the garage. As they approached, it was opened by a slender woman wearing faded jeans, a man-sized work shirt of ivory wool, and a rose-coloured towel like a turban on her head. One hand held this in place as with the other she restrained her dog, a scruffy mongrel with lopsided ears-one at attention and the other at ease-and a thatch of khaki hair fl opping into its eyes.

“Don’t be afraid. He never bites,” she said as the dog tried to lunge away from the hold she had on his collar. “He just likes visitors.”

And to the dog, “Flame, sit,” a mild command which he blithely ignored. His tail wagged frantically.

Lynley produced his warrant card, introducing himself and Havers. He said, “You’re Sarah Gordon? We’d like to talk to you about yesterday morning.”

At the request, her dark eyes seemed to grow even darker for an instant, although it may have been the result of her movement into a shadow cast by the overhanging roof. “I don’t know what more I can add, Inspector. I told the police as much as I could.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve read the report. But I fi nd it sometimes helps to hear everything fi rsthand. If you don’t mind.”

“Of course. Please. Come in.” She stepped back from the door. Flame made a leap of happy greeting in Lynley’s direction, planting mitt-sized paws against his thighs. Sarah Gordon said, “No! Flame, stop it at once!” and pulled the dog back. She picked him up-he was a frantic, squirming, tail-wagging arm-ful-and carried him into the room they had seen from the street, where she put him into a basket to one side of the fireplace, saying, “Stay,” and patting him on the head. His eager glance darted from Lynley to Havers to his mistress. When he saw that everyone intended to remain in the room with him, he gave one more delighted bark and settled his chin on his paws.

Sarah went to the fireplace where a haphazard stack of wood was burning. It crackled and popped as the flames hit pockets of resin and sap. She threw on another piece before turning to face them.

“Was this actually a school?” Lynley asked her.

She looked surprised. Obviously, she had expected him to plunge directly into her discovery of Elena Weaver’s corpse on the previous morning. Nonetheless, she smiled, glanced around, and answered. “The village school, yes. It was quite a mess when I bought it.”

“Did you remodel it yourself?”

“A room here and there, when I could afford it and when I had the time. It’s largely fi nished now except for the back garden. This”-she extended her hand to indicate the room in which they stood-“was the last. A bit different from what one would expect to see inside a building of this age, I suppose. But that’s why I like it.”

As Havers began unwrapping the first of her scarves from her throat, Lynley glanced around. The room was indeed an unexpected pleasure, with its extensive display of lithographs and oils. Their subjects were people: children, adolescents, old men playing cards, an elderly woman looking out a window. Their compositions were figurative and metaphorical at once; their colours were pure and bright and true.

In combination with a bleached oak fl oor and an oatmeal sofa, the overall effect of a room filled with this much art should have been much like a museum and just about as friendly. But as if with the intention of easing the unwelcoming nature of her environment, Sarah Gordon had draped a red mohair blanket across the back of the sofa and covered the floor with a motley braided rug. If this were not enough to declare the room lived in, a copy of The Guardian was spread out in front of the fireplace, a sketch box and easel lay near the door, and the air-most unmuseumlike of all-bore the unmistakable, rich odour of chocolate. This seemed to be emanating from a thick green jug on the bar at one end of the room. It sat next to a mug. A trail of steam rose from both.

Seeing the direction of his gaze, Sarah Gordon said, “It’s cocoa. An anti-depressant, I find. I’ve needed rather a lot of it since yesterday. May I offer you some?”

He shook his head. “Sergeant?”

Havers demurred and went to sit on the sofa, where she dropped her scarves, shed her coat, and wrestled her notebook from her shoulder bag. A large orange cat, materialising from behind the open front curtains, leaped agilely to join her and settled, paws working, directly on her lap.

Sarah fetched her cup of cocoa and hurried to Havers’ rescue. “Sorry,” she said, scooping the cat under one arm. She herself took a place at the other end of the sofa, putting her back to the light. She buried her free hand in the cat’s thick fur. The other-raising the cocoa to her lips-trembled noticeably. She spoke as if with the need to excuse this.

“I’ve never seen a dead body before. No, that’s not absolutely true. I’ve seen people in coffins but that’s after they’ve been scoured, washed, and painted by an undertaker. I suppose that’s the only way we can bear death, isn’t it, if it looks like a modestly altered state of life. But this other…I’d like to forget that I saw her, but she seems to be branded right into my brain.” She touched the towel wrapped round her head. “I’ve taken five showers since yesterday morning. I’ve washed my hair three times. Why am I doing that?”

Lynley sat in an armchair opposite the sofa. He didn’t bother to try to frame an answer to the question. Everyone’s reaction to an exposure to violent death was peculiar to his individual personality. He’d known young detectives who wouldn’t bathe until a case was solved, others who wouldn’t eat, still others who wouldn’t sleep. And while the vast majority of them became immune to death over time, seeing a murder investigation merely as a job to be done, the layman never saw it that way. The layman took it personally, like a deliberate insult. No one wanted a sudden reminder of life’s grim and remarkable transiency.

He said, “Tell me about yesterday morning.”

Sarah placed the mug on a side table and buried her other hand in the cat’s fur. It didn’t seem so much a gesture of affection as a means of holding onto something for solace or support. With typical feline sensitivity, the cat apparently knew this, for his ears fl attened and he gave a throaty growl which Sarah ignored. She began to pet him. He attempted to launch himself in the direction of the fl oor. She said, “Silk, be good,” and tried to hold onto him, but he yowled once, spit, and jumped off her lap. Sarah looked stricken. She watched the cat stroll over to the fi re where, completely indifferent to his act of desertion, he settled himself on the newspaper and began to wash his face.

“Cats,” Havers said in eloquent explanation. “Aren’t they just exactly like men.”

Sarah appeared to evaluate the comment gravely for its merit. She sat as if she held the cat in her lap, slightly bent forward, her hands on her thighs. It was a particularly self-protective position. “Yesterday morning,” she said.

“If you will,” Lynley said.

She went through the facts quickly, adding very little to what Lynley had read in the police report. Unable to sleep, she had risen at a quarter past five. She had dressed, eaten a bowl of cereal. She had read most of the previous day’s paper. She had sorted through and gathered up her equipment. She had arrived at Fen Causeway shortly before seven. She had gone onto the island to do some sketches of Crusoe’s Bridge. She had found the body.

“I stepped on her,” she said. “I…It’s awful to think about. I realise now that I should have wanted to help her. I should have tried to see if she was still alive. But I didn’t.”

“Where was she exactly?”

“At the side of a small clearing, towards the south end of the island.”

“You didn’t notice her at once?”

She reached for her cocoa and cradled the mug between her hands. “No. I’d gone there to do some sketching, and I was intent upon getting something done. I’d not worked-no, let me be truthful for once, I’d not produced anything of possible merit-in a number of months. I felt inadequate and paralysed, and I’d been harbouring a tremendous fear that I’d lost it altogether.”

“It?”

“Talent, Inspector. Creativity. Passion. Inspiration. What you will. Over time, I’d grown to believe it was gone. So I decided a number of weeks ago to stop procrastinating. I was determined to put an end to busying myself with projects round the house-being afraid of failure, really-and to start working again. I chose yesterday as the day.” She appeared to anticipate Lynley’s next question, for she went on with, “It was just an arbitrary choice of days, actually. I felt if I marked the calendar, I’d be making a commitment. I thought if I chose the date in advance, I could begin again without any further false starts. It was important to me.”

Lynley looked round the room again, more carefully this time, studying the collection of lithographs and oils. He couldn’t help comparing them to the watercolours he had seen in Anthony Weaver’s house. Those had been clever, nicely executed, safe. These were a challenge, both in colour and design.

“This is all your work,” he said, a statement, not a question, for it was obvious that everything had been created by the same gifted hand.

She used her cocoa mug to point towards one of the walls. “This is all my work, yes. None of it recent. But all of it mine.”

Lynley allowed himself to revel in an instant’s gratification which rose from the knowledge that he couldn’t have been handed a better potential witness. Artists were trained observers. They couldn’t create without observation. If there had been something to see on the island, an object out of kilter, a shadow worth noticing, Sarah Gordon would have seen it. Leaning forward, he said:

“Tell me what you recall about the island itself.”

Sarah looked into her cocoa as if replaying the scene there. “Well. It was foggy, very wet. Tree leaves were actually dripping. The boat repair sheds were closed. The bridge had been repainted. I remember noticing that because of the way it caught the light. And there was…” She hesitated, her expression thoughtful. “Near the gate, it was quite muddy, and the mud was…churned up. I’d call it furrowed, actually.”

“As if a body had been dragged through it? Heels to the ground?”

“I suppose. And there was rubbish on the ground by a fallen branch. And…” She looked up. “I think I saw the remains of a fire as well.”

“There by the branch?”

“In front of it, yes.”

“And on the ground, what sort of rubbish?”

“Cigarette packs, mostly. A few newspapers. A large wine bottle. A sack? Yes, there was an orange sack from Peter Dominic. I remember that. Could someone have spent some time waiting for the girl?”

He ignored the question, saying, “Anything else?”

“The lights from the Peterhouse lantern cupola. I could see them from the island.”

“Anything that you heard?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Birds. A dog, I think, somewhere in the fen. It all seemed perfectly normal to me. Except that the fog was heavy, but you’ll have been told that.”

“You heard no sound from the river?”

“Like a boat? Someone rowing away? No. I’m sorry.” Her shoulders sagged a bit. “I wish I could give you something more. I feel monumentally egocentric. When I was on the island, I was thinking only of my drawing. I’m still thinking mostly of my drawing, in fact. What an ugly little item in my personal make-up.”

“Unusual to go sketching in the fog,” Havers noted. She had been writing rapidly, but now she looked up, addressing their prime interest in coming to speak to the woman: What sort of artist goes sketching in the fog?

Sarah didn’t disagree. “It was more than unusual. It was a little bit mad. And anything I might have managed to create wouldn’t exactly be like the rest of my work, would it?”

There was truth in this. In addition to the use of bright, crisp, sun-inspired colours, Sarah Gordon’s images all were clearly defined, from a group of Pakistani children sitting on the worn front steps of a paint-peeling tenement to a nude woman reclining beneath a yellow umbrella. Not one of them featured the gauzy absence of definition or the lack of hue that drawing in the morning fog suggested. Not one of them, additionally, depicted a landscape.

“Were you attempting a change in style?” Lynley asked.

“From The Potato Eaters to Sunflowers?” Sarah got to her feet and went to the bar where she poured herself more cocoa. Flame and Silk looked up from their respective positions, alert to the possibility of a treat. She went to the dog, squatted next to him, ran her fi ngers across his head. His tail thumped appreciatively, and he settled his chin back onto his paws. She sat on the floor next to his basket, cross-legged, facing Lynley and Havers.

She said, “I was willing to try just about anything. I don’t know if you can understand what it feels like to believe you may have lost the ability and the will to create. Yes”-as if she expected disagreement-“the will, because it is an act of will. It’s more than being called upon by some convenient artistic muse. It’s making a decision to offer up a bit of one’s essence to the judgement of others. As an artist, I’d told myself that I didn’t care how my work was evaluated. I’d told myself that the creative act-and not how it was received or what anyone did with the finished product-was absolutely paramount. But somewhere along the line, I stopped believing in that. And when one stops believing that the act itself is superior to anyone’s analysis of it, then one becomes immobilised. That’s what happened to me.”

“Shades of Ruskin and Whistler, as I recall their story,” Lynley said.

For some reason, she flinched at the allusion. “Ah, yes. The critic and his victim. But at least Whistler had his day in court, didn’t he. He did have that much.” Her eyes went from one piece of art to another, slowly, as if with the need to convince herself that she indeed had been their creator. “I’d lost it: the passion. And without that, what you have is only mass, the objects themselves. Paint, canvas, clay, wax, stone. Only passion gives them life. Otherwise, they’re inert. Oh, you may draw or paint or sculpt something, anyway. People do it all the time. But what you draw or paint or sculpt without passion is an exercise in competence and nothing more. It’s not an expression of self. And that’s what I wanted back-the willingness to be vulnerable, the power to feel, the ability to risk. If it meant a change in technique, an alteration in style, a shift in media, I was more than willing to try it. I was willing to try anything.”

“Did it work?”

She bent over the dog and rubbed her cheek against the top of his head. Somewhere in the house, the telephone began to ring. An answering machine switched on. A moment later the low tones of a man’s voice floated to them, leaving a message that was indistinguishable from where they sat. Sarah seemed indifferent both to the identity of her caller and to the fact of the call itself. She said, “I hadn’t the chance to find out. I made several preliminary sketches in one location on the island. When they didn’t work out-they were dreadful, to be honest-I went to another spot and stumbled on the body.”

“What do you remember of that?”

“Just that I stepped backwards onto something. I thought it was a branch. I kicked it aside and saw it was an arm.”

“You hadn’t noticed the body?” Havers clarifi ed.

“She was covered by leaves. My attention was on the bridge. I can’t say I even watched where I was walking.”

“In what direction did you kick her arm?” Lynley asked. “Towards her? Away from her?”

“Towards her.”

“You didn’t touch her other than that?”

“God, no. But I should have done, shouldn’t I? She may have been alive. I should have touched her. I should have checked. But I didn’t. Instead, I was sick. And then I ran.”

“In what direction? Back the way you came?”

“No. Across Coe Fen.”

“In the fog?” Lynley asked. “Not back the way you’d come?”

At the opening of her shirt, Sarah’s chest and neck began to redden. “I’d just stumbled upon a girl’s body, Inspector. I can’t say I was feeling very logical at the time. I ran across the bridge and through Coe Fen. There’s a path that comes out next to the Department of Engineering. That’s where I’d left my car.”

“You drove from there to the police station?”

“I just kept running. Down Lensfi eld Road. Across Parker’s Piece. It isn’t very far.”

“But you could have driven.”

“I could have done. Yes.” She offered no defence. She looked at her painting of the Pakistani children. Flame stirred beneath her hand and gave a gusty sigh. Roused, she said, “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’d been in a welter of nerves already because I’d gone to the island in order to draw. To draw, you see. To do something I’d been unable to do for months. That was everything to me. So when I found the body, I simply didn’t think. I should have seen if the girl was still alive. I should have tried to help her. I should have kept to the paved path. I should have driven my car to the police station. I know all that. I’m fi lled with should’s. I have no excuse for behaving as I did. Except that I panicked. And believe me, I feel wretched enough about that.”

“At the Department of Engineering, were there lights on?”

She looked back at him although her eyes didn’t focus. She seemed to be trying to conjure up a picture of the events in her mind. “Lights. I think so. But I can’t be certain.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“On the island, no. And not on the Fen, there was too much fog. I passed some bicyclists when I got to Lensfield Road, and there was traffi c, of course. But that’s all I remember.”

“How did you come to choose the island? Why didn’t you do your sketching here in Grantchester? Especially once you saw the fog in the morning.”

The red flush on her skin deepened in hue. As if aware of this, she raised her hand to the neck of her shirt and played with the material in her fingers until she had buttoned it. “I don’t know how to explain it to you except to say that I’d chosen the day, I’d planned in advance on the island, and to do anything less than what I planned seemed like admitting defeat and running away. I didn’t want to do that. I just couldn’t face it. It sounds pathetic. Rigid and obsessive. But that’s the way it was.” She got to her feet. “Come with me,” she said. “There’s really only one way that you might understand completely.”

Leaving her cocoa and her animals behind, she led them to the rear of the house where she pushed open a door that was only partially closed and admitted them into her studio. It was a large, bright room whose ceiling comprised four rectangular skylights. Lynley paused before entering, letting his eyes wander over everything, seeing how the room acted as mute corroboration to all that Sarah Gordon had told them.

The walls were hung with enormous charcoal sketches-a human torso, a disembodied arm, two interlocking nudes, a man’s face in three-quarter profile-all the sort of preliminary studies an artist does before setting out upon a new work. But instead of acting as rough ideas for a finished product that was also on display, beneath them leaned a score of incomplete canvases, project after project begun and discarded. A large worktable held a mass of artistic paraphernalia: coffee tins fi lled with clean, dry brushes like camel-hair fl owers; bottles of turps, linseed oil, and Damar varnish; a box of unused dry pastels; more than a dozen hand-labelled tubes of paint. It should have been a chaotic mess, with daubs of paint on the table and smudgy fi ngerprints on the bottles and tins, and squeeze-points on the tubes. Instead, everything was arranged as neatly and precisely as if it were on display in a Castle Museum exhibit devoted to a fanciful day-in-the-life-of presentation.

The air held no odour of paint or turpentine. No sketches piled here and there on the floor to make the suggestion of rapid artistic inspiration and equally rapid artistic rejection. No finished paintings stood waiting for the varnish that would complete them. It was apparent that someone cleaned the room regularly, for the bleached oak floor shone as if it were under glass and nowhere was there the slightest sign of dust or dirt. Just signs of disuse, and they were everywhere. Only a single easel holding a canvas stood covered with a paint-splodged cloth beneath one of the skylights, and even it looked as if it hadn’t been touched in ages.

“This was once the centre of my world,” Sarah Gordon said with simple resignation. “Can you understand, Inspector? I wanted it to be the centre again.”

Sergeant Havers, Lynley saw, had wandered to one side of the room where above a work top had been built a series of storage shelves.

These held cartons of carousels for photographic slides, dog-eared sketch pads, fresh containers of pastels, a large roll of canvas, and a variety of tools-from a set of palette knives to a pair of stretching pliers. The work top itself was covered by a large sheet of plate glass with a roughened surface to which Sergeant Havers touched her fi ngertips tentatively, a question on her face.

“Grinding colours,” Sarah Gordon told her. “That’s what it’s for. I used to grind my own colours.”

“You’re a purist then,” Lynley said.

She smiled with much the same resignation as he had heard in her voice. “When I fi rst began to paint-this was years ago-I wanted to own each part of the finished piece. I wanted to be each painting. I even milled the wood to make the stretcher bars for my canvases. That’s how pure I was going to be.”

“You lost that purity?”

“Success taints everything. In the long run.”

“And you had success.” Lynley went to the wall where her large charcoal sketches were hanging, one on top of the other. He began to browse through them. An arm, a hand, the line of jaw, a face. He was reminded of the Queen’s collection of Da Vinci’s studies. She was very talented.

“After a fashion. Yes. I had success. But that meant less to me than peace of mind. And ultimately peace of mind was what I was seeking yesterday morning.”

“Finding Elena Weaver put an end to that,” Sergeant Havers remarked.

As Lynley was looking through her sketches, Sarah had gone to stand near the covered easel. She had raised a hand to adjust its linen shroud-perhaps with the hope of keeping them from seeing how far the quality of her work had disintegrated-but she stopped and said without looking in their direction: “Elena Weaver?” Her voice sounded oddly uncertain.

“The dead girl,” Lynley said. “Elena Weaver. Did you know her?”

She turned to them. Her lips worked without making any sound. After a moment, she whispered, “Oh no.”

“Miss Gordon?”

“Her father. Anthony Weaver. I know her father.” She felt for the tall stool at one side of the easel and sat upon it. She said, “Oh my God. My poor Tony.” And as if answering a question which no one had spoken, she gestured round the room. “He was one of my students. Until early last spring when he began all the politicking for the Penford Chair, he was one of my students.”

“Students?”

“I offered classes locally for a number of years. I don’t any longer, but Tony…Dr. Weaver took most of them. He was a private student of mine as well. So I knew him. For a time we were close.” Her eyes filled. She blinked the tears away quickly.

“And did you know his daughter?”

“After a fashion. I met her several times- early last Michaelmas term-when he brought her with him to act as a model for a life-drawing class.”

“But you didn’t recognise her yesterday?”

“How could I? I didn’t even see her face.” She lowered her head, raised a hand quickly, and brushed it over her eyes. “This is going to destroy him. She was everything to him. Have you talked to him yet? Is he…? But of course you’ve talked to him. What am I asking?” She raised her head. “Is Tony all right?”

“No one takes well the death of a child.”

“But Elena was more than a child to him. He used to say that she was his hope of redemption.” She looked round the room, her expression fi lling with self-contempt. “And here I’ve been-poor little Sarah-wondering if I can begin to draw again, wondering if I’ll ever create another piece of art, wondering… while all the while Tony…How could I possibly be any more selfi sh?”

“You’re not to blame for trying to get your career back on track.”

It was, he thought, the most rational of desires. He reflected on the work he had seen hanging in her sitting room. It was crisp and clean. One somehow expected that of a lithograph, but to achieve such purity of line and detail in oil seemed remarkable. Each image-a child playing with a dog, a weary chestnut seller warming himself over his metal-drum brazier, a bicyclist pumping along in the rain-spoke of assurance in every stroke of the brush. What would it be like, Lynley wondered, to believe one had lost the ability to produce work so palpably excellent? And how could a desire to recapture that ability ever be construed as an act of selfi shness?

It seemed odd to him that she would even consider it so, and as she led them back to the front of the house, Lynley became aware of a vague disquiet in his evaluation of her, the same sort of disquiet he had felt when confronted with Anthony Weaver’s reaction to his daughter’s death. There was something about her, something in her manner and her words, that gave him pause. He couldn’t put his fi nger on what it was about her that nagged at his subconscious, yet he knew intuitively that something was there, like a reaction that was too much planned in advance. A moment later, she gave him the answer.

As Sarah Gordon opened the front door for them, Flame leaped out of his basket, began to bark, and came tearing along the passage, intent upon a gambol in the outdoors. Sarah leaned forward, grabbed onto his collar. As she did so, the towel fell from her head, and damp curling hair the rich colour of coffee streamed round her shoulders.

Lynley stared at the image of her, caught in the doorway. It was the hair and the profi le, but mostly the hair. She was the woman he had seen last night in Ivy Court.

Sarah headed for the lavatory the moment after she closed and locked the front door. With a gasp of urgency, she hurried through the sitting room, through the kitchen beyond it, and barely made it to the toilet. She vomited. Her stomach seemed to twist as previously sweet cocoa, hot and sour now, burned in her throat. It shot up towards her nose when she attempted to breathe. She coughed, gagged, and continued to vomit. Cold sweat broke out on her forehead. The floor seemed to dip, the walls to sway. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Behind her, she heard a soft whimper of sympathy. A nudge on her leg followed it. Then a head rested on one of her extended arms, and warm breath wafted against her cheek.

“It’s all right, Flame,” she said. “I’m all right. Don’t worry. Have you brought Silk with you?”

Sarah chuckled weakly at the thought of the cat’s developing a sudden change in personality. Cats were so like people. Compassion and empathy were not exactly in their line. But dogs were different.

Blindly, she reached for the mongrel and turned her face towards him. She heard his tail thump against the wall. He licked her nose. She was struck by the thought that it didn’t matter to Flame who she was, what she’d done, what she’d managed to create, or whether she made a single lasting contribution to life at all. It didn’t matter to Flame if she never put brush to canvas again. And there was comfort in that. She wanted to feel it. She tried to believe that there was nothing more in her life which she had to do.

The last spasm passed. Her stomach settled uneasily. She got to her feet and went to the basin where she rinsed her mouth, raised her head, and caught sight of her reflection in the mirror.

She raised a hand to her face, traced the lines on her forehead, the incipient creases from her nose to her mouth, the matrix of small, scarlike wrinkles just above her lower jaw. Only thirty-nine. She looked at least fi fty. Worse, she felt sixty. She turned from the sight.

In the kitchen, she ran the water against her wrists until it felt cold. Then she drank from the tap, splashed her face again, and dried it on a yellow tea towel. She thought about brushing her teeth or trying to get some sleep, but it seemed like too much trouble to climb the stairs to her room and far too much trouble to smear toothpaste onto a brush and run it energetically round her mouth. Instead, she went back to the sitting room where the fi re still burned and Silk still basked in uninterested contentment before it. Flame followed, returning to his basket from which he watched her throw more wood on the fi re. Through his bushy fur, she could see that he’d scrunched up his face in what she always thought of as his worried expression, turning his eyes into shapes like roughly modifi ed diamonds.

“I’m all right,” she told him. “Really. It’s true.”

He didn’t look convinced-after all, he knew the truth since he’d witnessed most of it and she’d told him the rest-but he made four revolutions in his basket, dug around in his blanket, and sank into its folds. His eyelids began to droop at once.

“Good,” she said. “Have a bit of a kip.” She was grateful that at least one of them could.

To distract herself from the idea of sleep and from everything that conspired to keep her from sleeping, she went to the window. It seemed that with every foot away from the fire, the temperature in the room dropped another ten degrees. And while she knew that this couldn’t possibly be the case, her arms went round herself anyway. She looked outside.

The car was still there. Sleek, silver, it winked in the sun. For the second time, she wondered if they had really been the police. When she’d first opened the front door to them, she’d thought they’d come with a request to see her work. That hadn’t happened in ages and never without an appointment, but it seemed the only reasonable explanation for the appearance of two strangers who’d arrived in a Bentley. They’d been mismatched as a couple: the man tall, handsome in a refined sort of way, astonishingly well-dressed, and possessing an unmistakably public school voice; the woman short, quite plain, looking more thrown together than Sarah herself was, with an accent that bore the distinct infl ections of the working class. Still, even for a few minutes after they had identifi ed themselves, Sarah continued to think of them as man and wife. It was easier to talk to them that way.

But no matter her story, they hadn’t believed her. She could see it in their faces. And who could blame them? Why would anyone run across Coe Fen in the fog instead of dashing back the way she’d come? Why would someone who had just found a body tear by her own car and sprint to the police station instead of simply driving there? It didn’t make sense. She knew that very well. And so did they.

Which went far to explain why the Bentley was still parked in front of her house. The police officers themselves were not in sight. They’d be questioning her neighbours, verifying her story.

Don’t think of it, Sarah.

She forced herself away from the window and went back to the studio. On a table near the door, her answering machine stood, blinking to announce a message on the tape. She stared at it for a moment before she remembered having heard the phone ringing while she was talking to the police. She pressed the button to play.

“Sarah. Darling. I’ve got to see you. I know I have no right to ask. You’ve not forgiven me. I don’t deserve forgiveness. I’ll never deserve it. But I need to see you. I need to talk to you. You’re the only one who knows me completely, who understands, who has the compassion and tenderness and…” He began to weep. “I was parked in front of your house most of Sunday evening. I could see you through the window. And I…Monday I came by but I didn’t have the courage to come to the door. And now…Sarah. Please. Elena’s been murdered. Please see me. Please. Phone me at the college. Leave a message. I’ll do anything. Please see me. I beg you. I need you, Sarah.”

Numbly, she listened as the unit switched itself off. Feel something, she told herself. But nothing stirred in her heart. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and bit on it, hard. And then a second time and a third and a fourth until she tasted the vague salinity of her blood rather than the chalk and lotion of her skin. She forced a memory forward. Something, anything. It didn’t matter what. It merely had to suffice as a smokescreen to keep her mind occupied with thoughts she could bear to face.

Douglas Hampson, her foster brother, seventeen years old. Wanting him to notice her. Wanting him to talk to her. Wanting him. That musty shed at the bottom of his parents’ garden in King’s Lynn where even the smell from the sea couldn’t supplant the odours of compost, mulch, and manure. But they hadn’t cared, had they? She, desperate for an indication of someone’s approval and affection. He, eager to do it because he was seventeen and randy and if he returned from one more school holiday without having had a good roger to talk about with his mates he’d never live it down.

They’d chosen a day when the sun beat down on the streets and the pavements and most especially on the old tin roof of that garden shed. He’d kissed her with his tongue and as she wondered if this was what people called making love-because she was only twelve and although she should have known at least something about what men and women actually did with those parts of their bodies that were so different from each other’s, she didn’t at all-he grappled first with her shorts, then with her knickers and all the time he breathed like a dog who’s had a good run.

It was over quickly. He was hard and hot and she wasn’t ready, so there was nothing in it for her but blood, suffocation, and searing pain. And Douglas stifling a groan when he came.

He stood up immediately afterwards, cleaning himself on her shorts and tossing them back to her. He zipped his jeans and said, “This place smells like a toilet. I’ve got to get out of here.” And out he went.

He didn’t answer her letters. He responded with silence when she phoned the school and wept out a tedious declaration of her love. Of course, she hadn’t loved him at all. But she had to believe that she did. For nothing else excused that mindless invasion of her body which she had allowed without protest on that summer afternoon.

In her studio, Sarah moved away from the answering machine. For a smokescreen memory, she couldn’t have chosen better than to conjure Douglas Hampson up out of the pit. He wanted her now. Forty-four years old, twenty years married, an insurance adjuster well on his way into midlife crisis, he wanted her now.

Come on, Sarah, he would say when they met for lunch as they often did. I can’t just sit here and look at you and pretend I don’t want you. Come on. Let’s do it.

We’re friends, she’d respond. You’re my brother, Doug.

Bugger the brother business. You didn’t think about that once.

And she would smile at him fondly- because she was fond of him now-and not try to explain what that once had cost her.

It was not enough-the memory of Douglas. In spite of herself, she moved across the studio to the covered easel and gazed at the portrait she’d begun all those months ago to act as companion piece to the other. She’d intended it as a Christmas present for him. She hadn’t yet known there would be no Christmas.

He was leaning forward as she so often had seen him, one elbow on his knee, his spectacles dangling from his fingers. His face was lit with the zeal which always came upon him when he talked about art. His head cocked to one side, himself caught in the act of arguing a fine point of composition, he looked boyish and happy, a man living fully for the fi rst time in his life.

He wore no three-piece suit but a paint-splattered work shirt with half the collar turned up and a rip in the cuff. And as often as not when she stood close in front of him to study the way the light hit his hair, he’d reach out and pull her to him and laugh at her protest which wasn’t much of a protest and hold her in his arms. His mouth on her neck and his hands on her breasts and the painting forgotten in the shedding of clothes. And the way he looked at her, beautifying her body, every moment of the act his eyes upon hers. And his voice that whisper oh my god my dear love…

Sarah steeled herself against the force of the memory and made herself evaluate the painting as a simple piece of art. She thought about finishing it, dwelling on the idea of a possible exhibition and of finding a way to put paint to canvas and making it mean something beyond a neophyte’s obedient exercise in technique. She could do it, after all. She was a painter.

She reached towards the easel. Her hands were shaking. She drew them back, fists clenched into balls.

Even if she filled her mind with a dozen other thoughts, her body still betrayed her. At the end of everything, it would neither avoid nor deny.

She looked back at the answering machine, heard his voice and his plea.

But her hands still trembled. Her legs felt hollow.

And her mind had to accept what her body was telling her. There are things far worse than finding a dead body.