Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

“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?”