Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

“Never seen anything like it,” Jenkins said. “I di’ know what the ruddy world’s comin’ to.” He pulled at his nose, which was scarlet from the cold, and squinted against the northeast wind. It held the fog at bay-as it had done on the previous day-but it brought along with it the frigid temperatures of the grey North Sea. A hedgerow offered little protection against it.

“Damn” was Sheehan’s only remark as he squatted by the body. Lynley and Havers joined him.

It was a girl, tall and slender, with a fall of hair the colour of beechwood. She was wearing a green sweatshirt, white shorts, athletic shoes, and rather grimy socks, the left one of which had become rucked round her ankle. She lay on her back, with her chin tilted up, her mouth open, her eyes glazed. And her torso was a mass of crimson broken by the dark tattooing of unburnt particles of gunpowder. A single glance was enough to tell all of them that the only possible use the ambulance might serve would be to convey the corpse to autopsy.

“You haven’t touched her?” Lynley asked Bob Jenkins.

The man looked horrified by the very thought. “Didn’t touch nothing,” he said. “Shasta here snuffed her, but he backed up quick enough, didn’t he, when he caught the smell of the powder. Not one for guns, is Shasta.”

“You heard no shots this morning?”

Jenkins shook his head. “I was working over the engine of the tractor early on. I had it going off and on, playing with the carburettor and making a bit of a row. If someone took her down then-” He jerked his head at the body but didn’t look at it. “I wouldn’t have heard.”

“What about the dog?”

Jenkins’ hand automatically went for the dog’s head which was inches away from his own left thigh. Shasta blinked, panted briefl y, and accepted the caress with another single wag of his tail. “He did set to with a bit of barking,” Jenkins said. “I had the radio going over the engine noise and had to shout him down.”

“Do you remember what time this was?”

At first he shook his head. But then he lifted a gloved hand quickly-one fi nger skyward- as if an idea had suddenly struck him. “It was somewhere near half six.”

“You’re sure?”

“They were reading the news and I wanted to hear if the P.M.’s going to do something about this poll tax business.” His eyes shifted to the body and quickly away. “Girl could of been hit then, all right. But I have to tell that Shasta might of just been barking to bark. He does that some.”

Around them, the uniformed police were rolling out the crime scene tape and blocking off the lane as the scenes-of-crime team began unloading the van. The police photographer approached with his camera held before him like a shield. He looked a bit green under the eyes and round the mouth. He waited some feet away for the signal from Sheehan who was peering at the blood-soaked front of the dead girl’s sweatshirt.

“A shotgun,” he said. And then looking up, he shouted to the scenes-of-crime team, “Keep an eye out for the wad, you lot.” He rested on his thick haunches and shook his head. “This’s going to be worse than looking for dust in the desert.”

“Why?” Havers asked.

Sheehan cocked his head at her in surprise. Lynley said, “She’s a city dweller, Superintendent.” And then to Havers, “It’s pheasant season.”

Sheehan went on with, “Anyone wanting to have a bash at the pheasants is going to own a shotgun, Sergeant. The killings begin next week. It’s the time of year when every idiot with an itchy finger and a need to feel like some real blood sport’s just the way to get him back to his roots will be out blasting away at anything that moves. We’ll be seeing wounds every which way by the end of the month.”

“But not like this.”

“No. This was no accident.” He fumbled in his trouser pocket and brought out a wallet from which he extracted a credit card. “Two runners,” he said pensively. “Both of them women. Both of them tall, both fair, both long-haired.”

“You’re not thinking we’re looking at a serial killing?” Havers sounded a mixture of doubt and disappointment that the Cambridge superintendent might have reached such a conclusion.

Sheehan used the edge of his credit card to clean off a patch of dirt and leaves that clung to the front of the girl’s blood-soaked sweatshirt. Over the left breast the words Queens’ College, Cambridge were stencilled round the college coat of arms.

“You mean someone with a nasty little bent for bringing down fair-haired college runners?” Sheehan asked. “No. I don’t think so. Serial killers don’t vary their routines this much. The killing’s their signature. You know what I mean: I beat in another head with a brick, you coppers, are you any closer to fi nding me yet?” He cleaned off the credit card, wiped his fingers on a rust-coloured handkerchief, and pushed himself to his feet. “Shoot her, Graham,” he said over his shoulder, and the photographer came forward to do so. At that, the scenes-of-crime team began to move, as did the uniformed constables, beginning the slow process of examining every inch of the surrounding ground.

Bob Jenkins said, “Got to get in that fi eld, if you’ve a mind to let me,” and tilted his chin to direct their attention to where he had been heading in the first place when his dog had come upon the body.

Perhaps three yards away from the dead girl, a break in the hedge revealed a gate giving access to the nearest field. Lynley eyed it for a moment as the crime scene people began their work.

“In a few minutes,” he said to the farmer, and added to Sheehan, “They’ll need to look for prints all along the verge, Superintendent. Footprints. Tyre prints from a car or a bike.”

“Right,” Sheehan said, and went to speak with his team.

Lynley and Havers walked to the gate. It was only wide enough to accommodate the tractor, and hemmed in on both sides by a heavy growth of hawthorn. They climbed carefully over. The ground beyond was soft, trodden, and rutted as it gave way to the fi eld itself. But its consistency was crumbly and fragile, so although the imprints of feet were everywhere, nowhere did they leave an impression that was anything more than merely another indentation in the already choppy ground.

“Nothing decent,” Havers said as she scouted round the area. “But if it was a lying-in-wait-”

“Then the waiting had to be done right here,” Lynley concluded. He worked his eyes slowly over the ground, from one side of the gate to the other. When he saw what he was looking for-an indentation in the ground that didn’t fit with the rest-he said, “Havers.”

She joined him. He pointed out the smooth, circular impression in the earth, the barely discernible narrow, extended impression behind it, the sharp, deeper fissure that comprised its conclusion. As a unit, the impressions angled acutely perhaps two and a half feet beyond the gate itself, and less than a foot from the hawthorn hedge.

“Knee, leg, toe,” Lynley said. “The killer knelt here, hidden by the hedge, on one knee, resting the gun on the second bar of the gate. Waiting.”

“But how could anyone have known- ”

“That she’d be running this way? The same way someone knew where to find Elena Weaver.”

Justine Weaver scraped a knife along the burnt edge of the toast, watching the resulting black ash speckle the clean surface of the kitchen sink like a fine deposit of powder. She tried to find a place inside her where compassion and understanding still resided, a place like a well from which she could drink deeply and somehow replenish what the events of the past eight months-and the last two days- had desiccated. But if a well-spring of empathy had ever existed at her core, it had long since dried up, leaving in its place the barren ground of resentment and despair. And nothing fl owed from this.