Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

It was a hand-out from DeaStu calling for information. She grabbed it before it could blow away and stuffed it into the pocket of her coat. She headed towards the river.

At this time of day, none of the rowing teams were out on the water. They generally used the morning for their practices. But the individual boathouses were themselves still open, a row of elegant facades fronting nothing more than capacious sheds. Inside these, some oarsmen and women were ending their day in the way they had begun it, with talk about the season that would come with the end of Lent term. Everything now was focussed upon preparation for that time of competition. Self-confidence and hopes had not yet been dashed by the sight of an unexpected eight flying by as if air and not water were the element against which they matched their strength.

Justine and Townee followed the slow curve of the river, the dog straining at the lead and eager to make the acquaintance of four mallards who swam away from the bank at his approach. He bounded and barked, and Justine wrapped his lead round her hand and gave it a quick tug.

“Behave,” she told him. “This isn’t a run.”

But of course, he would think they were meant to run here. It was water after all. It was what he was used to.

Ahead of them, a lone rower was bringing in a scull, moving against the wind and the current at a furious clip. Justine could imagine that she heard him breathing, for even at this distance and in the failing light she could see the sheen of sweat on his face and she could well envision the heaving of chest that must accompany it. She walked to the edge of the river.

He didn’t look up at once as he brought the craft in. Rather, he remained bent over the oars, his head resting on his hands. His hair- thinning at the top and curly elsewhere-was damp and clung to his skull like a new-born’s ringlets. Justine wondered how long he had been rowing and whether the activity had done anything at all to assuage whatever emotion he might have felt when first he heard about Elena’s death. And he had heard about it. Justine knew that from watching him. Although he rowed daily, he wouldn’t have still been here in the dusk, the wind, and the stinging cold, had he not needed to find a physical manner in which he could purge himself of his feelings.

At Townee’s whimper to be off and running, the man looked up. For a moment, he said nothing. Nor did Justine. The only sound between them was the scuffling of the dog’s nails on the path, the warning honk of ducks who felt the other animal’s proximity, and the blare of rock and roll music coming from one of the boathouses. U2, Justine thought, a song she recognised but could not have named.

He got out of the scull and stood on the bank next to her, and she realised, irrelevantly, that she’d forgotten how short he was, perhaps two inches shorter than her own five feet nine.

He said with a futile gesture at the scull, “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You might have gone home.”

He gave a virtually soundless laugh. It was a reply not of humour, but affirmation. He touched his fingers to Townee’s head. “He looks good. Healthy. She took good care of him.”

Justine reached into her pocket and pulled out the hand-out which had fl own against her. She gave it to him. “Have you seen this?”

He read it. He ran his fingers over the black print and then across the picture of Elena.

“I’ve seen it,” he said. “That’s how I found out. No one phoned. I didn’t know. I saw it in the senior combination room when I went in for coffee about ten o’clock this morning. And then-” He looked across the river to Midsummer Common where the girl was leading her horse in the direction of Fort St. George. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“Were you home Sunday night, Victor?”

He didn’t look at her as he shook his head.

“Was she with you?”

“For a time.”

“And then?”

“She went back to St. Stephen’s. I stayed in my rooms.” He finally looked her way. “How did you know about us? Did she tell you?”

“Last September. The drinks party. You made love to Elena during the party, Victor.”

“Oh God.”

“In the bathroom upstairs.”

“She followed me up. She came in. She…” He rubbed his hand along his jawline. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved that day, for the stubble was thick, like a bruise on his skin.

“Did you take off all your clothes?”

“Christ, Justine.”

“Did you?”

“No. We stood against the wall. I lifted her up. She wanted it that way.”

“I see.”

“All right. I wanted it as well. Against the wall. Just like that.”

“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

“Yes. She told me.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did you plan to do about it?”

He’d been looking at the river, but now he turned back to her. “I planned to marry her,” he said.

It wasn’t the answer she had come prepared to hear, although the more she thought about it, the less it surprised her. It did leave, however, a slight problem unresolved.

“Victor,” she said, “where was your wife Sunday night? What was Rowena doing while you were having Elena?”

Lynley was relieved to fi nd Gareth Randolph in the offices of DeaStu, Cambridge University’s odd acronym for the Deaf Students’ Union. He had tried his room at Queens’ College first, only to be directed to Fenners, the central gymnasium for University sports where the boxing team worked out for two hours each day. There, however, in the smaller of the two gyms where he was assailed by the eye-prickling smells of sweat, damp leather, athletic tape, chalk, and unwashed workout clothes, Lynley had questioned a lorry-sized heavyweight who had pointed his side-of-beef fist in the direction of the exit and said that the Bant-apparently a reference to Gareth’s bantam-weight-was sitting by the phones at DeaStu, hoping for a call about the bird who got killed.

“She was his woman,” the heavyweight said. “He’s taking it hard.” And he drove his fi sts like battering rams into the punching bag which hung from the ceiling, putting his shoulders into each blow with such force that it seemed as if the floor shook beneath him.

Lynley wondered if Gareth Randolph was as powerful a fighter in his own weight class. He considered this question on the way to DeaStu. Anthony Weaver had made allegations about the boy that he could not avoid coupling with Havers’ report from the Cambridge police: Whatever Elena had been beaten with, it had left no trace.

DeaStu was housed in the basement of the Peterhouse Library not far from the University Graduate Centre, just at the bottom of Little St. Mary’s Lane, little more than two blocks from Queens’ College where Gareth Randolph lived. Its offices were tucked at the end of a low-ceilinged corridor illuminated by bright round globes of light. They had two means of access, one through the Lubbock Room on the ground floor of the library, and the other directly from the street at the rear of the building, not fifty yards away from the Mill Lane footbridge across which Elena Weaver had to have run on the morning of her death. The main office door of opaque glass bore the words Deaf Students of Cambridge University and beneath that the less formal DeaStu was superimposed over two hands crossed, fingers extended, palms outward.

Lynley had given lengthy thought to how he was going to communicate with Gareth Randolph. He had played round with the idea of calling Superintendent Sheehan to see if he had an interpreter associated with the Cambridge police. He’d never spoken with anyone deaf before, and from what he had gathered over the last twenty-four hours, Gareth Randolph did not have Elena Weaver’s facility for reading lips. Nor did he have her spoken language.