Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

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.