Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

“Basing their decision upon…?”

“Certainly not basing it upon the behaviour of the applicants’ children, no matter how outrageous that behaviour may be.”

Lynley drew his conclusion from Cuff’s use of the adjective. “So you don’t really believe Thorsson harassed her. You believe she cooked up this tale because he wouldn’t have her when she wanted him.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m merely saying there’s nothing to investigate. It’s his word against hers and she has no word to give us.”

“Had you spoken to Thorsson about the charges prior to her death?”

“Of course I’d spoken to him. He denied every one of her accusations.”

“What were they exactly?”

“That he’d tried to talk her into sex, that he’d made physical overtures-touching her breasts and thighs and buttocks-that he’d engaged her in discussions about his sex life and a woman he’d once been engaged to and the difficulties she’d had with the enormous size of his erection.”

Lynley lifted an eyebrow. “Fairly imaginative material for a young girl to have cooked up, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not in this day and age. But it makes no difference because every bit of it was impossible to prove. Unless more than one girl was willing to come forward with an accusation against Thorsson, there was virtually nothing that I could do save speak to the man and warn him off, which I did.”

“And you didn’t see the harassment accusation as a motive for murder? If there are other girls who might have come forward once the word went out that Elena had turned him in, Thorsson would have been in deeper water then.”

“If there are other girls, Inspector. But Thorsson’s been a part of the English faculty-and a senior fellow at St. Stephen’s-for ten years now without the slightest breath of scandal associated with him. Why this all at once? And why with this one girl who’d already shown herself to be troubled enough to require special regulations just to see that she wasn’t sent down?”

“A girl who ended up murdered, Dr. Cuff.”

“Not by Thorsson.”

“You seem certain enough of that.”

“I am.”

“She was pregnant. Eight weeks. And she knew it. She seems to have found out the day before Thorsson made a visit to her room. How do you account for that?”

Cuff’s shoulders dropped fractionally. He rubbed his temples. “God,” he said. “I didn’t know about the pregnancy, Inspector.”

“Would you have told me about the harassment charges had you known? Or would you have continued to protect him?”

“I’m protecting all three of them. Elena, her father, Thorsson.”

“But would you agree that we’ve just strengthened his motive to kill her?”

“If he’s the father of the child.”

“But you don’t believe he is.”

Cuff dropped his hand. “Perhaps I simply don’t want to believe it. Perhaps I want to see ethics and morals where they no longer exist. I don’t know.”

They walked beneath the gatehouse where the porter’s lodge stood watch over the comings and goings of the members of the college.

They stopped there briefly. The night porter was on duty, and from a room behind the counter that marked his work space, a television was showing scenes from an American cop programme, with lots of fi erce gunfi re and bodies falling in slow motion, accompanied by fast licks played on an electric guitar. Then a long, slow shot of the hero’s face, emerging from the haze, surveying the carnage, mourning its necessity in the life he led as a noble seeker of justice. And a fade-out until next week when more corpses would pile up in the name of justice and entertainment again.

“You’ve a message,” Cuff said from the pigeonholes where he had gone to collect his own. He handed it over, a small piece of paper which Lynley unfolded and read.

“It’s from my sergeant.” He looked up. “Lennart Thorsson’s nearest neighbour saw him outside his house just before seven o’clock yesterday morning.”

“That’s hardly a crime. He was probably setting off to work a bit early.”

“No, Dr. Cuff. He pulled up to the house in his car as the neighbour was opening her bedroom curtains. He was coming home. From somewhere.”

Rosalyn Simpson climbed the fi nal fl ight of stairs to her room at Queens’ College and not for the first time cursed the choice she had made when her name had been drawn second in the rooms pool last term. Her cursing had nothing to do with the climb itself although she knew that anyone with good sense would have chosen something on the ground floor or something nearer the loo. Instead, she had chosen the L-shaped chamber up under the eaves, with its sloping walls suitable for the dramatic display of her Indian tapestries, its creaking oak floor periodically marred by gaps in the wood, and its extra little room-hardly more than a large cupboard-in which a wash basin stood and into which she and her father had wrestled her bed. It had the added features of half a dozen nooks and crannies where she had placed everything from plants to books, a large storage garret tucked under the eaves into which she sometimes crawled when she wished to disappear from the world-which was generally once a day-and a trap door in the ceiling leading to a passage that gave her access to Melinda Powell’s room. This last feature had seemed the most blessed originally, a rather Victorian way in which she and Melinda could be close to each other without everyone knowing the exact nature of their relationship, which at the time was something that Rosalyn had wished to keep to herself. So the passage had been the main reason why she’d chosen the room. It placated Melinda while it preserved her own peace of mind. But now she wasn’t so sure about the decision, or about Melinda, or even about their love.

She felt burdened by weights. First was the haversack on her back and the “little package of goodies for you, dear” that her mother had pressed upon her before she left, with tears in her eyes and lips quivering. She had said, “We had such dreams for you, Ros,” in a fashion that indicated the full extent to which Rosalyn’s news-growing out of a mindless birthday promise to Melinda-had hurt her.

“It’s just a phase,” her father had said more than once during the gruelling thirty-two hours that they’d spent together. And he said it again as Rosalyn left, but this time to her mother. “The dreams are still there, dammit. This is just a phase.”

Rosalyn didn’t try to disabuse them of the notion. She more than wished it was a phase herself, so she didn’t try to tell them that if it was a peculiar, bohemian stage she was going through, she’d been living it actively since she was fifteen years old. She didn’t even consider telling them that. It had taken all her energy and courage to bring the subject up in the fi rst place. Arguing against the likelihood of its fading from significance was more than she was willing to take on.

Rosalyn shifted the haversack, felt her mother’s package dig into her left shoulder blade, and tried to slough off the heavier, more loathsome weight of her guilt. It seemed to slip and slide round her neck and shoulders like an enormous octopus with tentacles that grew from every part of her life. Her church said it was wrong. Her upbringing said it was wrong. As children, she and her friends had whispered and giggled and shuddered just to think of it. Her own expectations had always called for a man, a marriage, and a family. And still she continued to live in defi ance.

Most of the time, she dealt with her life by simply moving forward, one day at a time, fi lling her time with distractions, keeping her attention focussed upon lectures, supervisions, and practicals, while never giving thought to what the future held for someone like herself. Or if she thought of the future at all, she tried to think of it in the global terms of her childhood when her only dream had been to go to India, to teach and do good and live solely for others.