For the Sake of Elena (39 page)

“Pathetic, isn’t it? I wanted passion again. I wanted to feel alive. I told myself that I would be good for her. I thought that with me she would be able to let go of her grievances against Anthony eventually. I believed I’d be enough for her. I’d be able to heal her. It was an adolescent little fantasy that I clung to till the end.”

Lady Helen placed her balloon glass on the table next to Troughton’s. She kept her fingers carefully on its rim. She said, “And what about your wife?”

“I hadn’t told her about Elena yet.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” he said. “You meant what about the fact that Rowena bore my children and did my laundry and cooked my meals and cleaned my house. What about those seventeen years of loyalty and devotion. What about my commitment to her, not to mention my responsibilities to the University, to my students, to my colleagues. What about my ethics and my morals and my values and my conscience. That’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is.”

He looked away from them, eyes focussed on nothing. “Some kinds of marriages wear at a person until the only thing left is a body that’s simply going through the motions.”

“I wonder if that’s your wife’s conclusion as well.”

“Rowena wants out of this marriage as much as I do. She just doesn’t know it yet.”

Now, in the darkness on the terrace, Lynley felt burdened not only by Troughton’s assessment of his marriage but also by the mixture of revulsion and indifference he had expressed towards his wife. More than anything, he wished Helen had not been with him to hear the story of his attachment to Elena Weaver and his maddeningly level-headed rationale for that attachment. For as the historian had calmly outlined his reasons for turning away from his wife and seeking the company and the love of a woman young enough to be his daughter, Lynley believed he had finally come to understand at least part of what lay at the root of Helen’s refusal to marry him.

The understanding had been an uneasiness churning within him—asking to be noticed—since the start of the evening in Bulstrode Gardens. It had demanded some sort of spoken release in the musty confines of Victor Troughton’s study.

What we ask of them, he thought. What we expect, what we demand. But never what we will give in return. Never what they want. And never a moment’s thorough consideration of the burdens which our desires and requirements place upon them.

He looked up at the vast grey darkness of the cloud-heavy sky. A distant light winked in it.

“What are you seeing?” Lady Helen asked him.

“A shooting star, I think. Close your eyes, Helen. Quickly. Make a wish.” He did so himself.

She laughed at him quietly. “You’re wishing on a plane, Tommy. It’s heading for Heathrow.”

He opened his eyes, saw that she was right. “I’ve no viable future in astronomy, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t believe that. You used to point out all the constellations to me. In Cornwall. Don’t you remember?”

“It was all show, Helen darling. I was trying to impress you.”

“Were you? Well, I was suitably impressed.”

He turned to look at her. He reached for her hand. In spite of the cold, she wasn’t wearing gloves, and he pressed her cool fingers against his cheek. He kissed her palm.

“I sat there and listened and realised that he may as well have been me,” he said, “because it all boils down to what men want, Helen. And what we want is women. But not as individuals, not as living, breathing, vulnerable human beings with a set of desires and dreams of their own. We want them—you—as extensions of ourselves. And I’m among the worst.”

Her hand moved in his, but she didn’t withdraw it. Rather, her fingers entwined with his.

“And as I listened to him, Helen, I thought of all the ways I’ve wanted you. As my lover, as my wife, as the mother of my children. In my bed. In my car. In my home. Entertaining my friends. Listening to me talk about my work. Sitting next to me quietly when I don’t feel like speaking. Waiting up for me when I’m out on a case. Opening your heart to me. Making yourself mine. And those are the operative words I kept hearing: I, me, my, mine.” He looked across the Backs to the smudgy forms of English oaks and common alders that were little more than shadows against a charcoal sky. When he turned back to her, her expression was grave, but her eyes were still on him. They were dark and kind.

“There’s no sin in that, Tommy.”

“You’re right,” he replied. “There’s only self in it. What I want. When I want it. And you’re meant to cooperate because you’re a woman. That’s how I’ve been, isn’t it? No better than your brother-in-law, no better than Troughton.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not like them. I’ve not seen you that way.”

“I’ve wanted you, Helen. And the hell of it is that I want you right now as much as I ever have. I sat there and listened to Troughton and had my own eyes opened in a thousand different ways about what goes wrong between men and women and it all comes down to the same damned fact with absolutely no change in it. I love you. I want you.”

“If you had me once, could you let it all go? Could you let me go?”

His answering laugh was mordant and painful. He looked away. “I wish it were as simple as taking you to bed. But you know it isn’t. You know I—”

“But could you, Tommy? Could you let me go?”

He turned back to her slowly, recognising something in her voice, an urgency, a plea, an inherent call for a degree of understanding he’d never been able to establish with her. It seemed to him as he studied her face—and saw the thin line of worry between her brows—that the attainment of every dream he’d ever harboured depended upon his ability to know what she meant.

He looked at her hand, still held in his own. So fragile, he could feel the bones of her fingers. So smooth that he could easily conceive of its tender passage against his skin.

“How do I answer that?” he said at last. “I feel you’ve placed my whole future on the line.”

“I don’t mean to do that.”

“But you’ve done it, haven’t you?”

“I suppose I have. In a way.”

He released her hand and walked to the low brick wall that edged the river terrace. Below, the Cam glinted in the darkness, green-black ink drifting lazily towards the Ouse. It was an inexorable progress—this movement of water—slow and sure and as unstoppable as time.

“My longings are the same as every other man’s,” he said. “I want a home, a wife. I want children, a son. I want to know at the end that my life hasn’t been for nothing, and the only way I can know that for a certainty is to leave something behind, and to have someone to leave it to. All I can say right now is that I finally understand what kind of burden that places on a woman, Helen. I understand that no matter how the load is shifted between partners, or divided or shared, the woman’s burden will always be greater. I do know that. But I can’t lie to you about the reality that remains. I still want those things.”

“You can have them with anyone.”

“I want them with you.”

“You don’t need them with me.”

“Need?” He tried to read the expression on her face, but she was just a pale blur in the darkness beneath the tree that threw a cavernous shadow over the terrace bench. He pondered the oddity of the word she had chosen, reflecting on her decision to remain with her sister in Cambridge. He considered the canvas of the fourteen years he had known Lady Helen. And finally, the realisation struck him.

He sank onto the concrete ledge that comprised the top of the brick river wall. He regarded her evenly. Faintly, he heard the click-clacking of a bicycle passing across Garret Hostel Bridge, the grinding clang of a lorry shifting gears as it made its way down the distant Queens’ Road. But neither sound did more than stir against his consciousness as he studied Lady Helen.

He wondered how he could have come to love her so much and all the time know her so very little. She had been before him for more than a decade, never attempting to disguise who and what she was. Yet for all that time, he had failed to see her in the light of reality, imbuing her instead with a set of qualities which he wished her to possess while all along, her every relationship had been acting as a cogent illustration of what she saw as her role, her way of getting on. He couldn’t believe he had been such a fool.

He spoke more to the night than to her. “It’s all because I can function by myself. You won’t marry me because I don’t need you, Helen, not the way you want me to. You’ve decided I don’t need you to stand on my own, or to get on in life, or even to be whole. And it’s the truth, you know. I don’t need you that way.”

“So you see,” she said.

He heard the finality in her three quiet words and felt his own quick anger in response to them. “I see. I do. I see that I’m not one of your projects. I see that I don’t need you to save me. My life is more or less in order now, and I want to share it with you. As your equal, your partner. Not as some emotional mendicant, but as a man who’s willing to grow at your side. That’s the beginning and end of it. Not what you’re used to, not even what you’ve had in mind for yourself. But it’s the best I can do. It’s the best I can offer. That and my love. And God knows that I love you.”

“Love isn’t enough.”

“God damn it, Helen, when are you going to see it’s the only thing there is!”

In answer to his angry words, a light snapped on in the building behind them. A curtain flicked back and a disembodied face appeared at one window. Lynley pushed himself off the concrete ledge and rejoined Lady Helen beneath the tree.

“What you’re thinking,” he said to her, quietly now for he could see how she had begun to withdraw from him, “is that if I need you enough, I’ll never think of leaving you. You’ll always be safe. That’s how it is, isn’t it?”

She averted her head. Gently, he caught her chin with his fingers and turned her back towards him.

“Helen, isn’t it?”

“You’re not being fair.”

“You’re in love with me, Helen.”

“Don’t. Please.”

“Every bit as much as I’m in love with you. You want me as much, you long for me as much. But I’m not like all the rest of the men you’ve involved yourself with. I don’t need you in a way that makes it safe for you to love me. I don’t depend upon you. I stand on my own. If you take up life with me, you jump into the void. You risk it all, without a single guarantee.”

He felt her tremble slightly. He saw her throat work. He felt his heart open.

“Helen.” He drew her into his arms. He took strength from knowing each gentle curve of her, from feeling the rise and fall of her chest, from the feathering touch of her hair against his face, from the slender hand that caught at his jacket. “Darling Helen,” he whispered and ran his hand along the length of her hair. When she looked up, he kissed her. Her arms slipped round him. Her lips softened and opened beneath his. She smelled of perfume and Troughton’s cigarette smoke. She tasted of brandy.

“Do you understand?” she whispered.

In reply, he drew her mouth back to his, giving himself over to nothing more than the separate sensations attendant to kissing her: the soft warmth of her lips and her tongue, the faint sound of her breathing, the heady pleasure of her breasts. Desire built in him, slowly obliterating everything but the knowledge that he had to have her. Now. Tonight. He wasn’t prepared to wait another hour. He would take her to bed and to hell with the consequences. He wanted to taste her, to touch her, to know her completely. He wanted to take every lovely part of her body and to make her body his. He wanted to lower himself between her upraised thighs and hear her gasp and cry out when he sank inside her and…

I wanted to feel young resilient flesh I wanted to kiss breasts that were full and firm I wanted unveined legs and feet without callosity and IwantedIwantedIwanted…

He released her. “Good Christ,” he whispered.

He felt her hand touch his cheek. Her skin was so cool. His own, he knew, was probably burning.

He stood. He felt shaken. He said, “I ought to get you back to Pen’s.”

“What is it?” she asked.

He shook his head blindly. It was, after all, so easy to construct lofty, intellectual, self-denigrating comparisons between himself and Victor Troughton, especially when he felt relatively sure that her response would be a loving and generous reassurance that he was not like other men. It was far more difficult to look at the matter when his own behaviour—his desires and his intentions—delineated the truth. He felt as if he’d spent the last few hours earnestly gathering the seeds of understanding, all of which he’d just flung mindlessly into the wind.

They started walking back across the lawn, towards the porter’s lodge and Trinity Lane beyond it. She was silent beside him, although her question still hung in the air, waiting for an answer. He knew she deserved one. Still, he didn’t reply until they’d reached his car and he’d unlocked the door and opened it for her. And then, he stopped her just before she got inside. He touched her shoulder. He fumbled for words.

“I was standing in judgement of Troughton,” he said. “I was naming the sin and deciding the punishment.”

“Isn’t that what police are meant to do?”

“Not when they’re guilty of the same crime, Helen.”

She frowned. “The same—”

“Wanting. Not giving, not even thinking. Just wanting. And blindly taking what they want. And not caring a damn about anything else.”

She touched her hand to his. For a moment, she looked to the rise of the footbridge and the Backs beyond it where the first ghost puffs of fog were beginning to curl like misty fingers round the trunks of the trees. Then her eyes moved back to his. “You weren’t alone in the wanting,” she said. “You never have been, Tommy. Not before this. And certainly not tonight.”

It was an absolution that filled his heart with a sense of completion that he’d never had with her before. “Stay in Cambridge,” he said. “Come home when you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” she whispered—to him, to the night.

20

The fog lay heavily on the city the next morning, a grey blanket of mist that rose like a gas from the surrounding fens and billowed into the air in amorphous clouds that shrouded trees, buildings, roadways, and open land, changing everything from common and recognisable substance into mere shape. Cars, lorries, buses, and taxis inched their way along the damp pavements of the city streets. Bicyclists slowly swayed through the gloom. Pedestrians huddled into heavy coats and dodged the constant spattering of the drops of condensation that fell from rooflines, window ledges, and trees. The two days of wind and sunshine might never have existed. Fog had returned like a pestilence in the night. This was Cambridge weather with a vengeance.

“Makes me feel like a case for the tubercular ward,” Havers said. Encased in her pea-soup coat with its hood pulled up and a pink knit cap on her head for additional protection, she beat her hands against her upper arms and stamped her feet as they walked to Lynley’s car. The heavy mist was creating a beadwork of damp on her clothing. Across her brow, her sandy fringe was beginning to curl as if exposed to steam. “No wonder Philby and Burgess went over to the Soviets while they were here,” she continued darkly. “They were probably looking for a better climate.”

“Indeed,” Lynley said. “Moscow in the winter. That’s certainly my idea of heaven on earth.”

He glanced at his sergeant as he spoke. She’d arrived nearly half an hour late and he’d been in the process of gathering his things to start without her when she’d clumped down the corridor to his room in Ivy Court and rapped on his door.

“Sorry,” she’d said. “Bleeding fog this morning. The M11 was a glorified car park.” But despite the deliberately casual tone of her voice, he noted the fact that her face was drawn with weariness and she sauntered about the room restlessly as she waited for him to don his coat and his scarf.

“Rough night?” he asked her.

She settled the strap of her bag high on her shoulder in what seemed to be a metaphorical gathering of personal resources before she replied. “Just a bit of the old insomnia. I’ll survive it.”

“And your mother?”

“Her as well.”

“I see.” He draped his scarf round his neck and shrugged into his overcoat. At the mirror, he ran a brush through his hair, but it was just an excuse to observe Havers in reflection rather than doing so directly. She was staring down at his open briefcase on the desk. She didn’t appear to be taking note of anything in it. He stood at the mirror, giving her time, saying nothing, wondering if she would speak.

He felt a mixture of guilt and shame, faced with the diversity of their positions. Not for the first time, he was forced to acknowledge that the differences between them were not confined to birth, class, and money. For her struggles took their definition from a range of circumstances that far exceeded the family into which she had been born and the manner in which she pronounced her words. These circumstances rose from simple ill-fortune, dominoes of bad luck that had tumbled one upon the other so quickly in the last ten months that she had not been able to stop their progress. That she could stop them now with a simple phone call was the single fact he wished her to acknowledge. Yet he had to admit that that very phone call, so easy for him to recommend, represented to her a sloughing off of responsibility, coveted salvation rather than obvious solution. And he could not deny that, in similar circumstances, he would not have found himself as equally tied to the idea of filial obligation.

When he reached the point that only narcissism could possibly explain why he was still admiring his own reflection, he set down his brush and turned to her. She heard his movement and looked up from her study of the briefcase.

“Look, sorry I was late,” she said in a rush. “I know you’re covering for me in all this, sir. I know you can’t do it indefinitely.”

“That’s not the point, Barbara. We cover for each other when things get rough personally. That’s understood.”

She reached out for the back of an armchair, not so much for support, it seemed, but for something to do with her hands, because she watched her fingers pick at a frayed cord of its upholstery. She said, “The funny thing is she was right as rain this morning. Last night was a real horror, but this morning she was fine. I keep thinking that must mean something. I keep telling myself it’s a sign.”

“If you’re looking for signs, you can find them in anything. They don’t tend to change reality, however.”

“But if there’s a chance she’s taken a turn for the better..”

“What about last night? And what about you? What sort of turns are you taking here, Barbara?”

She was working an entire section of the cording loose, twisting it round and round her fingers. “How can I move her from her home when she doesn’t understand what’s even going on? How can I do that to her? She’s my mother, Inspector.”

“It’s not a punishment.”

“Then why does it feel like one? Worse, why do I feel like a criminal who’s getting away scot free while she takes the rap?”

“Because you want to do it in your heart, I expect. And what greater source of guilt could there be than the guilt that arises from finally trying to decide if what you want to do—which seems momentarily and superficially selfish—is also the right thing to do? How can you tell if you’re really being honest or just trying to talk yourself into dealing with the situation in a way that meets with your own desires?”

She looked utterly defeated. “That’s the question, Inspector. And I’ll never have the answer. The whole situation goes too far beyond me.”

“No, it doesn’t. It starts and stops with you. You hold the power. You can make the decision.”

“I can’t stand to hurt her. She won’t understand.”

Lynley snapped the briefcase closed. “And what does she understand as things are now, Sergeant?”

That put an end to it. As they walked to his car, which was shoe-horned into the same narrow space he’d used last night on Garret Hostel Lane, he told her about his conversation with Victor Troughton. When he was finished, she said before getting into the Bentley:

“D’you suppose Elena Weaver felt real love for anyone?”

He switched on the ignition. The heater sent out a stream of cold air on their feet. Lynley thought of Troughton’s final words about the girl—“Try to understand. She wasn’t evil, Inspector. She was merely angry. And I, for one, can’t condemn her for that.”

“Even though, in reality, you were little more than her choice of weapons?” Lynley had asked him.

“Even though,” he’d replied.

Now, Lynley said, “We can never really come to know any victim’s heart completely, can we, Sergeant? In this sort of job, we look at a life backwards, starting with death and working forward from there. We patch pieces together and try to make truth from them. And with that truth we can only hope for an understanding of who the victim was and what provoked her murder. But as to her heart—as to the real, lasting truth of her—we can never really get to that. In the end, we have only facts and whatever conclusions we draw from them.” The little street was too narrow to turn the Bentley around, so he slowly reversed towards Trinity Lane, braking for a shadowy, well-bundled group of students who came out the side gate of Trinity Hall. Beyond them, fog lapped eagerly at the college garden.

“But why would he want to marry her, Inspector? He knew she wasn’t faithful. She didn’t love him. How could he believe that a marriage between them would have ever worked out?”

“He thought his love would be enough to change her.”

Havers scoffed at this. “People never change.”

“Of course they do. When they’re ready to grow.” He headed the car past St. Stephen’s Church and on towards Trinity College. The headlamps fought with the heavy bank of fog, and their illumination bounced uselessly back into the car. They moved at the pace of a somnolent insect. “It would be a fine and certainly less complicated world if people only had sex with those they loved, Sergeant. But the reality is that people use sex for a variety of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with love, marriage, commitment, intimacy, procreation, or any other lofty motive. Elena was one of them. And Troughton, evidently, was willing to accept that.”

“But what kind of marriage could he have expected to have with her?” Havers asked in protest. “They were starting life with a lie.”

“Troughton wasn’t bothered by that. He wanted her.”

“And she?”

“No doubt she wanted that triumphant moment of seeing her father’s face when she broke the news to him. But there would have been no news to break if she hadn’t been able to manoeuvre Troughton into marrying her in the first place.”

“Inspector.” Havers’ voice sounded thoughtful. “D’you think there’s a chance that Elena told her father? She got the news on Wednesday. She didn’t die till Monday morning. His wife was out running. He was home alone. D’you think…?”

“We certainly can’t discount it, can we?”

That appeared to be as close as the sergeant was willing to come to voicing her suspicions, for she went on in a more decided tone with, “They couldn’t have expected to be happy together, Elena and Troughton.”

“I think you’re right. Troughton was deluding himself about his ability to heal her anger and resentment. She was deluding herself into believing she’d get lasting pleasure from dealing her father such an excruciating blow. One can’t build a marriage on that sort of foundation.”

“Are you saying, in effect, that one can’t get on with living unless one puts ghosts from the past to rest?”

He glanced at her warily. “That’s a quantum leap, Sergeant. I think one can always muddle on through life. Most people do. I just couldn’t tell you how well they do it.”

Because of the fog, the traffic, and the capricious nature of Cambridge’s one-way streets, it took them just over ten minutes to drive to Queens’ College, the same time it would have taken them to walk it. Lynley parked in the same spot he had used the day before, and they entered the college through the turreted passage.

“So you think this is the answer to everything?” Havers asked, looking round Old Court as they walked across its central path.

“I think it may be one of them.”

They found Gareth Randolph in the college dining hall, a hideously unappealing combination of linoleum, long cafeteria tables, and walls panelled in what appeared to be mock golden oak. It was a modern architect’s salute to the utterly banal.

Although there were other students present, Gareth was at a table by himself, hunching disconsolately over the remains of a late breakfast which consisted of a half-eaten fried egg with its yolk punched out and a bowl of cornflakes and bananas grown, respectively, soggy and grey. A book was open on the table in front of him, but that seemed mostly for show since he wasn’t reading. Nor was he writing in the notebook next to it although he held a pencil poised as if to do so.

His head raised with a jerk when Lynley and Havers took seats across from him. He glanced round the hall as if for quick escape or assistance from the other members of the college who were present. Lynley took his pencil and dashed nine words across the top of the notebook:
You were the father of her baby, weren’t you?

Gareth raised a hand to his forehead. He squeezed his temples, then brushed the lank hair from his brow. His chest heaved once before he seemed to draw himself together by standing and canting his head in the direction of the door. They were meant to follow.

Like Georgina Higgins-Hart’s, Gareth’s bed-sitting room was tucked into Old Court. On the ground floor, it was a perfectly square room of white walls upon which were hung four framed posters advertising the London Philharmonic and three photographic enlargements of theatrical performances:
Les Miserables, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love
. The former featured the name Sonia Raleigh Randolph prominently above the words
at the piano
. The latter featured an attractive young woman in appropriate costume, singing.

Gareth pointed first to the posters, then to the photographs. “Mutha,” he said in his strange guttural voice. “Sisser.” He watched Lynley shrewdly. He seemed to be waiting for a reaction to the irony of his mother’s and sister’s modes of employment. Lynley merely nodded.

On a wide desk beneath the room’s only window, a computer sat. It was also, Lynley saw, a Ceephone, identical to the others he had already seen in Cambridge. Gareth switched the unit on and drew a second chair to the desk. He gestured Lynley into it and quickly accessed a word processing programme.

“Sergeant,” Lynley said, when he saw how Gareth intended them to communicate, “you’re going to have to make notes from the screen.” He took off his coat and scarf and sat at the desk. Havers came to stand behind him, the hood of her coat thrown back, her pink cap removed, a notebook in her hand.

Were you the father?
Lynley typed.

The boy looked long at the words before he replied with:
Didn’t know she was pg. She never said. Told you already
.

“Not knowing she was pregnant doesn’t mean sod-all,” Havers remarked. “He can’t take us for fools.”