Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

Anthony looked at his wife. Justine smiled fl eetingly, saying again with an airy motion at the table, “I’ve made tea.”

“Thank you, darling,” he said. The words felt unnatural, badly rehearsed.

“Glyn.” Justine waited for the other woman to turn. “May I offer you something?”

Glyn’s eyes slid to the table, from there to Anthony. “Thank you. No. I couldn’t possibly eat.”

Justine turned to her husband. “Anthony?”

He saw the trap. For a moment, he felt suspended in the air, like the rope in an endless tug-of-war. Then he went to the table. He chose a sandwich, a scone, a slice of cake. The food tasted like sand.

Justine came to his side and poured the tea. Its steam rose in the air with the fruity scent of the modern, herbal blend she preferred. The two of them stood there with the food spread out before them, the silver gleaming, and the flowers fresh. Glyn remained by the window in the other room. No one moved towards a chair.

“What did the police tell you?” Glyn asked. “They never phoned me.”

“I told them not to.”

“Why?”

“I thought I should be the one to-”

“ You? ”

Anthony saw Justine set down her teacup. He saw that her eyes remained on its rim.

“What happened to her, Anthony?”

“Glyn, sit down. Please.”

“I want to know what happened.”

Anthony set his plate down next to the cup of tea which he had not tasted. He returned to the sitting room. Justine followed. He sat on the sofa, motioned his wife down next to him, and waited to see if Glyn would move from the window. She did not do so. Next to him, Justine began twisting her wedding band.

Anthony recited the facts for Glyn. Elena was out running, someone killed her. She was beaten and strangled.

“I want to see the body.”

“No. Glyn. You don’t.”

Glyn’s voice wavered for the fi rst time. “She was my daughter. I want to see the body.”

“Not as she is now. Later. When the morticians-”

“I’ll see her, Anthony.”

He could hear the tight elevation in her voice and knew from experience where it would lead. He headed her off with, “One side of her face is bashed in. The bones are showing. She doesn’t have a nose. Is that what you want to see?”

Glyn fumbled in her handbag and brought out a tissue. “Damn you,” she whispered. Then, “How did it happen? You told me-you promised me-she wouldn’t run alone.”

“She phoned Justine last night. She said she wasn’t going to run this morning.”

“She phoned…” Glyn’s glance moved from Anthony to his wife. “You ran with Elena?”

Justine stopped twisting her wedding band, but she kept her fingers on it, as if it were a talisman. “Anthony asked me to. He didn’t like her running along the river when it was dark, so I ran as well. Last night she phoned and said she wouldn’t be running, but evidently, for some reason she changed her mind.”

“How long has this been going on?” Glyn asked, her attention going back to her former husband. “You said Elena wouldn’t be running alone, but you never said that Justine-” She abruptly shifted gears. “How could you do that, Anthony? How could you entrust your daughter’s well-being to-”

“Glyn,” Anthony interposed.

“She wouldn’t be concerned. She wouldn’t watch over her. She wouldn’t take care to see that she was safe.”

“Glyn, for God’s sake.”

“It’s true. She’s never had a child, so how could she know what it’s like to watch and wait and worry and wonder. To have dreams. A thousand and one dreams that won’t come to anything because she didn’t run with Elena this morning.”

Justine hadn’t moved on the sofa. Her expression was fixed, a glazed mask of good breeding. “Let me take you to your room,” she said and got to her feet. “You must be exhausted. We’ve put you in the yellow room at the back of the house. It’s quiet there. You’ll be able to rest.”

“I want Elena’s room.”

“Well, yes. Of course. That’s no trouble at all. I’ll just see to the sheets…” Her voice drifting off, Justine left the room.

Glyn said at once, “Why did you give her Elena?”

“What are you saying? Justine is my wife.”

“That’s the real point, isn’t it? How much do you care that Elena’s dead? You’ve got someone right here to cook up another.”

Anthony got to his feet. Against her words, he summoned up the image of Elena as he last had seen her from the window of the morning room, offering him a grin and a final wave from her bicycle as she pedalled off to a supervision after their lunch together. It had been just the two of them, eating their sandwiches, chatting about the dog, sharing an hour of love.

He felt anguish swell. Re-create Elena? Fashion another? There was only one. He himself had died with her.

Blindly, he pushed past his ex-wife. He could still hear her low, harsh words continue as he left the house even though he couldn’t distinguish one from another. He stumbled to his car, fumbled the keys into the ignition. He was reversing down the driveway when Justine ran outside.

She called his name. He saw her caught for a moment in the headlamps before he plunged his foot onto the accelerator and, with a sputter of gravel, clattered into Adams Road.

He felt his chest heaving, his throat aching as he drove. He began to weep-dry, hot, tear-less sobs for his daughter and his wives and the mess he’d made of every part of his life.

He was on Grange Road and then on Barton Road and then, blessedly, out of Cambridge itself. It had grown quite dark and the fog was thick, especially in this area of fallow, open fields and winter-dying hedges. But he drove without caution, and when the countryside gave way to a village, he parked and threw himself out of the car only to fi nd that the temperature had fallen further, encouraged by the bitter East Anglian wind. He’d left his overcoat at home. All he wore was a suit jacket. But that was of no account. He turned up its collar and began to walk, past a kissing gate, past half a dozen thatched cottages, stopping only when he came to her house. He crossed the street then to get some distance from the building. But even through the fog, he could see in the window.

She was there, moving across the sitting room with a mug in her hand. She was small, so slender. If he held her, she would be practically nothing in his arms, just a fragile heartbeat and a glowing life that consumed him, fired him, and had once made him whole.

He wanted to go to her. He needed to talk to her. He wanted to be held.

He stepped off the kerb. As he did so, a car skidded by, horn honking in warning, a stifl ed shout from inside. It brought him back to his senses.

He watched her go to the fi replace where she fed wood into the flames as he once had done, turning from the fire to find her eyes on him, her smile a benediction, her hand held out.

“Tonio,” she’d murmur, his name underscored with love.

And he’d answer her even as he did this moment. “ Tigresse .” Just a whisper. “ Tigresse. La Tigresse .”

Lynley arrived in Cambridge at half past five and drove directly to Bulstrode Gardens where he parked the Bentley in front of a house that reminded him of Jane Austen’s home in Chawton. Here was the same symmetry of design-two casement windows and a white front door below, three evenly spaced windows in the same positions above. Possessing a pantiled roof and several plain chimneys, the house was a rectangular, solid, uninteresting piece of architecture. Lynley didn’t, however, feel the same disappointment upon seeing it that he had felt in Chawton. One expected Jane Austen to have lived in a snug, whimsically atmospheric thatched cottage surrounded by a garden fi lled with fl owerbeds and trees. One didn’t expect a struggling lecturer from the divinity faculty to maintain a wife and three children in that kind of wattleand-daub heaven.