For the Sake of Elena (7 page)

The mound of coals shifted slightly as the fire took them. Cuff rearranged them deftly with a poker. “No doubt you can see why we were willing to make allowances for Elena. She was caught between two worlds. And as you yourself have pointed out, she wasn’t brought up to fit completely into either.”

“It’s such an odd decision for an educated person to make. What’s Weaver like?”

“A brilliant historian. A fine mind. A man of deep, committed professional integrity.”

Lynley didn’t miss the oblique nature of the answer. “I understand he’s in line for some sort of advancement as well.”

“The Penford Chair? Yes. He’s been short-listed for it.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“The University’s main chair in the area of history.”

“An offer of prestige?”

“More. An offer to do exactly what he wants for the rest of his career. Lecture when and if he wants, write when and if he wants, take on graduate students when and if he wants. Complete academic freedom along with national recognition, the highest possible honours, and the esteem of his fellows. If he’s selected, it shall be the finest moment of his career.”

“And would his daughter’s spotty record here at the University have impeded his chances of being selected?”

Cuff shrugged off both question and implication, saying, “I haven’t been a member of the search committee, Inspector. They’ve been reviewing potential candidates since last December. I can’t tell you exactly what they’re looking into.”

“But might Weaver have thought the committee would judge him in an ill light because of her problems?”

Cuff replaced the poker and ran his thumb over its dull, brass head. “I’ve always felt it’s wise to stay clear of the interior lives and beliefs of the senior fellows,” he replied. “I’m afraid I can’t be of any help to you in this direction of enquiry.”

Only after he finished speaking did Cuff look up from the handle of the poker. And once again in their interview, Lynley clearly read the other man’s reluctance to part with information.

“You’ll be wanting to see where we’ve put you, no doubt,” Cuff said politely. “Let me ring the porter.”

It was shortly after seven when Lynley rang the bell at Anthony Weaver’s home off Adams Road. With an expensive-looking metallic blue Citroën parked in its drive, the house was not a great distance from St. Stephen’s College, so he had walked, crossing the river on the modern concrete and iron crescent of Garret Hostel Bridge and passing beneath the horse chestnut trees that littered Burrell’s Walk with enormous yellow leaves sodden with the fog. The occasional bicycle rider passed him, muffled against the cold in knit hat, scarf, and gloves, but otherwise the path that connected Queen’s Road with Grange Road was largely deserted. Lampposts provided sporadic illumination. Holly, fir, and box hedgerows—broken up by intermittent fencing that ran the gamut from wood to brick to iron—served as boundaries for the walk. Beyond them stood the russet mass of the University Library, into which shadowy figures scurried for last minutes of work prior to its closing.

The houses in Adams Road were all set behind hedges. Trees surrounded them, leafless silver birches that stood like pencil sketches against the fog, poplars whose bark displayed every variation of the colour grey, alders not yet offering their leaves to the coming winter. It was quiet here. Only the gurgle of water pouring into an outdoor drain broke into the stillness. The night air was tinged with the friendly fragrance of wood-smoke, but at the Weaver house the only scent outdoors came from the dampening wool of Lynley’s own overcoat.

It was largely no different inside.

The door was opened by a tall, blonde woman with a face of chiselled, refined composure. She looked far too young to be Elena’s mother, and she didn’t appear particularly struck by grief. Lynley thought, as he looked at her, that he’d never seen anyone with such perfect posture. Every limb, bone, and muscle seemed locked into position, as if an unseen hand had arranged her stance at the door just moments before he knocked upon it.

“Yes.” She said it as a statement, not a question. No part of her face moved other than her lips.

He produced his warrant card, introduced himself, and asked to see the dead girl’s parents.

At this the woman stepped back from the door. She said only, “I’ll fetch Anthony,” and left him standing on the bronze and peach Oriental carpet of a parquet-floored entrance hall. To his left a door opened into a sitting room. To his right a glass-enclosed morning room held a wicker table that was set with linen and china for breakfast.

Lynley took off his overcoat, laid it over the polished handrail of the stairway, and went into the sitting room. He paused, feeling unaccountably put off by what he saw. Like the hall, the sitting room was floored in parquet, and like the hall the parquet was covered with an Oriental carpet. On it sat grey leather furniture—a sofa, two chairs, and a chaise longue—and tables with pedestals of peach-veined marble and tops of glass. The watercolours on the walls had obviously been chosen, mounted, and framed to match the room’s colour scheme, and they hung precisely centred over the sofa: the first, a bowl of apricots on a windowsill behind which shone a sky of robin’s egg blue and the second, a slim grey vase of salmon-coloured oriental poppies with three blooms fallen to the ivory surface upon which the vase stood. Both of them were signed with the single word
Weaver
. Either husband, wife, or daughter had an interest in art. A slender glass tea table against one wall held an arrangement of silk tulips. Next to this was a single copy of
Elle
and a photograph in a silver frame. Other than these last two objects and the watercolours, there was nothing in the room to indicate that anyone actually lived in it. Lynley wondered what the rest of the house was like, and walked to the tea table to look at the photograph. It was a wedding portrait, perhaps ten years old, judging from the length of Weaver’s hair. And the bride—looking solemn and celestial and surprisingly young—was the woman who had just answered the door.

“Inspector?” Lynley turned from his perusal of the picture as the dead girl’s father came into the room. He walked quite slowly. “Elena’s mother is asleep upstairs. Shall I wake her for you?”

“She’s taken a pill, darling.” Weaver’s wife had come to the doorway where she hesitated, one hand touching the silver lily pinned to the lapel of her jacket.

“I’ve no need to see her at the moment if she’s asleep,” Lynley said.

“The shock,” Weaver said and added unnecessarily, “She’s just come up from London this afternoon.”

“Shall I make coffee?” Weaver’s wife asked. She’d ventured no further into the room.

“Nothing for me,” Lynley said.

“Nor for me. Thank you, Justine. Darling.” Weaver smiled at her briefly—the effort it cost him rode directly on the surface of the behaviour itself—and he held out a hand to indicate that she was to join them. She entered the sitting room. Weaver went to the fireplace where he lit a gas fire beneath an artful arrangement of artificial coals. “Please sit down, Inspector.”

As Weaver himself chose one of the two leather chairs and his wife took the other, Lynley observed the man who had lost his daughter that day and saw in him the subtleties that illustrate the manner in which men are permitted to face before strangers the worst of their grief. Behind his thick wire-rimmed spectacles, his brown eyes were blood-shot, with crescents of red lining their lower lids. His hands—rather small for a man of his height—trembled when he gestured, and his lips, which were partially obscured by a dark, clipped moustache, quivered as he waited for Lynley to speak.

He was, Lynley thought, so different from his wife. Dark, his body thickening at the waist with advancing middle age, his hair beginning to show strands of scattered grey, his skin creasing on the forehead and webbing beneath the eyes. He wore a three-piece suit and a pair of gold cufflinks, but despite his rather formal attire, he managed to seem completely out of place in the cool, crafted elegance that surrounded him.

“What can we tell you, Inspector?” Weaver’s voice was as unsteady as his hands. “Tell me what we can do to help. I need to know that. I need to find this monster. He strangled her. He beat her. Have they told you that? Her face was…She was wearing her gold chain with the little unicorn I’d given her last Christmas, so I knew it was Elena the moment I saw her. And even if she hadn’t been wearing the unicorn, her mouth was partly open and I saw her front tooth. I saw that much. I saw that tooth. The little chip in it. That tooth.”

Justine Weaver lowered her eyes and clasped her hands in her lap.

Weaver pulled his spectacles from his face. “God help me. I can’t believe that she’s dead.”

Despite his presence in their home as a professional come to deal with the crime, Lynley was not untouched by the other man’s anguish. How many times had he witnessed this very scene played out in the last thirteen years? And still he felt no more able to assuage grief than he had as a detective constable, facing his first interview with the hysterical adult daughter of a woman who’d been bludgeoned to death by her own, drunk husband. In every case, he’d allowed grief free rein, hoping by this means to offer victims the meagre solace of knowing that someone shared their need to see justice done.

Weaver continued to speak. As he did so, his eyes filled with tears. “She was tender. Fragile.”

“Because she was deaf?”

“No. Because of me.” When Weaver’s voice cracked, his wife looked his way, pressed her lips together, and once more lowered her eyes. “I left her mother when Elena was five, Inspector. You’re going to learn that eventually, so you may as well know it right now. She was in bed, asleep. I packed my bags and I left and I never went back. And I had no way to explain to a five-year-old child—who couldn’t even
hear
me—that I wasn’t leaving her, that it wasn’t her fault, that the marriage itself was so filled with unhappiness that I couldn’t bear to live in it any longer. And Glyn and I were at fault for that. Not Elena, never once Elena. But I was her father. I left her, betrayed her. And she struggled with that—and with the idea that somehow
she
was at fault—for the next fifteen years. Anger, confusion, lack of confidence, fear. Those were her demons.”

Lynley didn’t even need to formulate a question to guide Weaver’s discourse. It was as if the man had only been waiting for an appropriate opportunity for self-flagellation.

“She could have chosen Oxford—Glyn was determined she’d go to Oxford, she didn’t want her here with me—but Elena chose Cambridge instead. Can you know what that meant to me? All those years she’d been in London with her mother. I’d tried to be there for her as best I could, but she held me at a distance. She’d only let me be a father in the most superficial ways. Here was my chance to be a real father to her again, to mend our relationship, to bring to some sort of”—he searched for a word—“some sort of fulfillment the love I felt for her. And my greatest happiness was feeling the bond begin to grow between us over this last year and sitting here and watching while Justine helped Elena with her essays. When these two women…” He faltered. “These two women in my life…these two women together, Justine and Elena, my wife and my daughter…” And finally he allowed himself to weep. It was a man’s horrible, humiliated sobbing, one hand covering his eyes, the other clutching his spectacles.

Justine Weaver didn’t stir in her chair. She looked incapable of movement, carved out of stone. Then a single breath eased from her and she raised her eyes and fastened them on the bright, artificial fire.

“I understand Elena had difficulties in the University at first,” Lynley said as much to Justine as to her husband.

“Yes,” Justine said. “The adjustment for her…from her mother and London…to here…” She glanced uneasily at her husband. “It took a bit of time for her to—”

“How could she have made the change easily?” Weaver demanded. “She was struggling with her life. She was doing her best. She was trying to be whole.” He wiped his face with a crumpled handkerchief which afterwards he continued to grasp—crushed—in his hand. He placed his spectacles back on his nose. “But that didn’t matter. Not a bit of it to me. Because she was a joy. An innocent. A gift.”

“Her troubles didn’t cause you embarrassment, then? Professional embarrassment?”

Weaver stared at him. His expression altered in a single instant from ravaged sorrow to disbelief. Lynley found the sudden change disquieting, and despite the occasion for both grief and outrage, he found himself wondering if he was being entertained by a performance of some sort.

“My God,” Weaver said. “What are you suggesting?”

“I understand you’ve been short-listed for a rather prestigious position here at the University,” Lynley said.

“And what does that have to do with—”

Lynley leaned forward to interrupt. “My job is to obtain and evaluate information, Dr. Weaver. In order to do that, I have to ask questions you might otherwise prefer not to hear.”

Weaver worked this over, his fingers digging into the handkerchief balled into his fist. “Nothing about my daughter was an embarrassment, Inspector. Nothing. Not a single part of her. And nothing she did.”

Lynley tallied the denials. He reflected upon the rigid muscles in Weaver’s face. He said, “Had she enemies?”

“No. And no one who knew her could have hurt Elena.”

“Anthony,” Justine murmured hesitantly, “you don’t think she and Gareth…Might they have had a falling out?”

“Gareth Randolph?” Lynley said. “The president of DeaStu?” When Justine nodded, he went on with, “Dr. Cuff told me he’d been asked to act as a guardian to Elena last year. What can you tell me about him?”

“If he was the one, I’ll kill him,” Weaver said.

Justine took up the question. “He’s an engineering student, a member of Queens’ College.”

Weaver said, more to himself than to Lynley, “And the engineering lab is next to Fen Causeway. He has his practicals there. His supervisions as well. What is it, a two-minute walk from Crusoe’s Island? Across Coe Fen, a one-minute run?”