Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

“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?”