Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

A cold chill zig-zagged the length of her spine. She said, “Melinda, what is this?”

“What’s been going on round here while you and Mum and Dad were nattering in Oxford.”

Numbly, Rosalyn carried the paper to her old rocking chair. She stared at the picture, at the face so familiar to her, at the grin, the chipped tooth, the long flow of hair. Elena Weaver. Her chief competitor. She ran like a god.

“She’s in Hare and Hounds,” Rosalyn said. “Melinda, I know her. I’ve been to her room. I’ve-”

“Knew her, you mean.” Melinda snatched the paper back, crumpled it, and tossed it into the rubbish basket.

“Don’t throw it away! Let me see it! What happened?”

“She was out running by the river early yesterday morning. Someone got her near the island.”

“Near the…Crusoe’s Island?” Rosalyn felt her heart’s beating grow heavy and fast. “Mel, that’s-” A sudden memory, unbidden, tugged at the fabric of her consciousness, like a shadow becoming substance, like the fragment of a tune. She said slowly, waiting to feel more certain, “Melinda, I need to phone the police.”

No matter the fashion she had hoped to use the information about Elena Weaver, colour drained from Melinda’s face. Comprehension took its place. “The island. That’s where you’ve been running this term, isn’t it? Right along the river. Just like this girl. Rosalyn, promise me you won’t run there again. Swear to it, Ros. Please.”

Rosalyn was scooping her shoulder bag from the floor. She said, “Come on.”

Melinda seemed suddenly to assimilate the intention behind Rosalyn’s decision to speak to the police. She said, “No! Ros, if you saw something…if you know something…Listen to me, you can’t do this. Ros, if someone fi nds out…if someone knows you saw something… Please. We need to think what might happen. We need to think this through. Because if you saw someone, that means someone probably saw you as well.”

Rosalyn was at the door. She was zipping her jacket. Melinda cried out again, “Rosalyn, please! Let’s think this through!”

“There’s nothing to think about,” Rosalyn said. She opened the door. “You can stay here if you want to. I won’t be long.”

“But where are you going? What are you doing? Rosalyn!” Melinda ran after her frantically.

Having been to Lennart Thorsson’s rooms at St. Stephen’s and finding them unoccupied, Lynley drove out to the man’s house off the Fulbourn Road. It wasn’t in an area that seemed at all suited to Thorsson’s bad boy, Marxist image, for the trim brick building with its neat tile roof was in a relatively new housing estate, sitting on a street called Ash-wood Court. There were perhaps two dozen houses of similar design dotting an area that had once been farmland. Each had its own patch of front lawn, its walled-off rear garden, and its spindly tree, recently planted in the probable hope of creating a neighbourhood that lived up to the street names its developer had chosen: Maple Close, Oak Lane, Paulownia Court.

Somehow, Lynley had expected to find Thorsson’s residence in a setting more in line with the political philosophy which he espoused-perhaps one of the terrace houses not far from the railway station or a dimly lit flat above a shop in the city. But he hadn’t expected to find his address in the midst of a middle-class neighbourhood whose streets and driveways held Metros and Fiestas and whose pavements were taken up by tricycles and toys.

Thorsson’s house at the west end of the culde-sac was identical to his neighbour’s, and it sat at an angle to the other house so that anyone looking out a front window-from either upstairs or downstairs-would have an unobstructed view of Thorsson’s movements. For someone watching for more than a few moments, it would have been difficult to mistake a departure for an arrival. Thus, it would have been impossible to conclude that Thorsson’s hurried homecoming at seven in the morning had been anything else.

The lights weren’t on in any part of Thorsson’s house that could be seen from the street. But Lynley tried the front door anyway, ringing the bell several times. It reverberated hollowly behind the closed door, as if the house held neither furniture nor carpeting to absorb the sound. He stepped back, looked at the upper windows for signs of life. There were none.

He returned to his car and sat for a moment, thinking about Lennart Thorsson, observing the neighbourhood, and refl ecting upon the nature of the man himself. He thought of all the young minds, listening to Thorsson expound about his version of Shakespeare, utilising literature more than four hundred years old to promote a political bent that was appearing more and more to be only a convenient guise to hide the basic mundanity of the man beneath. And how dazzling it all was. To take a piece of literature as familiar as one’s childhood prayers, to pick and choose lines, to pick and choose scenes, and upon them to hang an interpretation that-under close scrutiny-was potentially more myopic than all the other interpretations it sought to refute. Yet Thorsson’s presentation of his material was undeniably beguiling. Lynley had seen that much in the brief time he had stood at the back of the lecture hall in the English Faculty. The man’s commitment to his theory was palpable, his intelligence irrefutable, and his manner just dissident enough to encourage a camaraderie that might otherwise not exist with the undergraduates. For what young person could really resist the temptation of rubbing elbows with a rebel?

If this were the case, how unlikely was the possibility that Elena Weaver might have sought out Thorsson, found herself rejected, and cooked up a charge of harassment against him as a bit of revenge? Or how unlikely was the alternative possibility that Thorsson had intentionally involved himself with Elena Weaver, only to discover that she was no easy tumble but rather a woman with entrapment on her mind?

Lynley stared at the house, waiting for answers and knowing that ultimately everything in the case narrowed down to one fact: Elena Weaver was deaf. Narrowed down to one object: the Ceephone.

Thorsson had been to her room. He knew about the Ceephone. All that remained was for him to place the call that had kept Justine Weaver from meeting Elena in the morning. If, in fact, Thorsson knew that Elena ran with her stepmother. If, in fact, he knew how to use the phone in the first place. If, in fact, someone else already with access to a Ceephone hadn’t placed the call. If, in fact, there had been a call at all.

Lynley started the Bentley, wound slowly through the streets of the housing estate, and began to evaluate the almost instant antipathy that had developed between Sergeant Havers and Lennart Thorsson. Havers’ instincts were generally sound when it came to hypocrisy in her fellow men, and she was anything but xenophobic. She hadn’t needed to see Thorsson’s home in suburbia to recognise the extent of his affectation. Her play upon Shakespeare earlier in the day indicated that. And Lynley knew her well enough to realise that, having ascertained that Thorsson had been missing from his home in the early hours of the previous day, she would be hot to give him the caution and pin him to the wall of one of Sheehan’s interrogation rooms upon her return to Cambridge in the morning. And that’s what would happen-that’s what solid policework dictated at this point-unless he came up with something else.

In spite of the manner in which their store of facts pointed ineluctably towards Thorsson, Lynley felt discomfited by the very neatness with which everything was falling into place. He knew from experience that murder was often an obviously cut-and-dried affair in which the likeliest suspect was indeed the perpetrator of the crime. But he also knew that some deaths grew from darker places in the soul and from motives far more convoluted than were suggested by the initial evidence. And as the facts and the faces from this particular case drifted in and out of his field of consciousness, he began to weigh the other possibilities, all of them darker than that which was defined by the mere need to dispose of a girl because she was pregnant: