For the Sake of Elena (22 page)

Glyn halted in front of a simple grey coffin with a plain satin lining. She tapped her fingers against it. As if this gesture bade him to do so, Mr. Beck hurried to join them. His lips were pursed tightly. He was pulling at his chin.

“What is this?” Glyn asked. A small sign on the lid said
Nonprotective exterior
. Its price tag read £200.

“Pressed wood.” Mr. Beck made a nervous adjustment to his Pembroke tie and rapidly continued. “This is pressed wood beneath a flannel covering, a satin interior, which is quite nice, of course, but the exterior has no protection at all save for the flannel itself and to be frank if I may, considering our weather, I wouldn’t be at all comfortable recommending this particular coffin to you. We keep it for cases where there are difficulties…Well, difficulties with finances. I can’t think you’d want your daughter..” He let the drifting quality of his voice complete the thought.

Anthony began to say, “Of course,” but Glyn interrupted with, “This coffin will do.”

For a moment, Anthony did nothing more than stare at his former wife. Then he found the will to say, “You can’t think I’ll allow her to be buried in this.”

She said quite distinctly, “I don’t care what you intend to allow. I’ve not enough money for—”

“I’ll pay.”

She looked at him for the first time since they’d arrived. “With your wife’s money? I think not.”

“This has nothing to do with Justine.”

Mr. Beck took a step away from them. He straightened out the small price sign on a coffin lid. He said, “I’ll leave you to talk.”

“There’s no need.” Glyn opened her large black handbag and began shoving articles this way and that. A set of keys clanked. A compact snapped open. A ballpoint pen slipped out onto the floor. “You’ll take a cheque, won’t you? It’ll have to be drawn on my bank in London. If that’s a problem, you can phone for some sort of guarantee. I’ve been doing business with them for years, so—”

“Glyn. I won’t have it.”

She swung to face him. Her hip hit the coffin, jarring it on its pedestal. The lid fell shut with a hollow thud. “You won’t have what?” she asked. “You have no rights here.”

“We’re talking about my daughter.”

Mr. Beck began to edge towards the door.

“Stay where you are.” Angry colour patched Glyn’s cheeks. “You walked out on your daughter, Anthony. Let’s not forget that. You wanted your career. Let’s not forget that. You wanted to chase skirts. Let’s not forget that. You got what you wanted. All of it. Every bit. You have no more rights here.” Chequebook in hand, she stooped to the floor for the pen. She began to write, using the pressed wood coffin lid as support.

Her hand was shaking. Anthony reached for the chequebook, saying, “Glyn. Please. For God’s sake.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll pay for this. I don’t want your money. You can’t buy me off.”

“I’m not trying to buy you off. I just want Elena—”

“Don’t say her name! Don’t you say it!”

Mr. Beck said, “Let me leave you,” and without acknowledging Glyn’s immediate “No!” he hurried from the room.

Glyn continued to write. She clutched the pen like a weapon in her hand. “He said two hundred pounds, didn’t he?”

“Don’t do this,” Anthony said. “Don’t make this another battle between us.”

“She’ll wear that blue dress Mum got her last birthday.”

“We can’t bury her like a pauper. I won’t let you do it. I can’t.”

Glyn ripped the cheque from the book. She said, “Where’d that man get off to? Here’s his money. Let’s go.” She headed for the door.

Anthony reached for her arm.

She jerked away. “You bastard,” she hissed. “Bastard! Who brought her up? Who spent years trying to give her some language? Who helped her with her schoolwork and dried her tears and washed her clothes and sat up with her at night when she was puling and sick? Not you, you bastard. And not your ice queen wife. This is my daughter, Anthony. My daughter. Mine. And I’ll bury her exactly as I see fit. Because unlike you, I’m not hot after some big poncey job, so I don’t have to give a damn what anyone thinks.”

He examined her with sudden, curious dispassion, realising that he saw no evidence of grief. He saw no mother’s devotion to her child and nothing that illustrated the magnitude of loss. “This has nothing to do with burying Elena,” he said in slow but complete understanding. “You’re still dealing with me. I’m not sure you even care much that she’s dead.”

“How dare you,” she whispered.

“Have you even cried, Glyn? Do you feel any grief? Do you feel anything at all beyond the need to use her murder for a bit more revenge? And how can anyone be surprised by that? After all, that’s how you used most of her life.”

He didn’t see the blow coming. She slammed her right hand across his face, knocking his spectacles to the floor.

“You filthy piece of—” She raised her arm to strike again.

He caught her wrist. “You’ve waited years to do that. I’m only sorry you didn’t have the audience you’d have liked.” He pushed her away. She fell against the grey coffin. But she was not spent.

She spit out the words: “Don’t talk to me of grief. Don’t you ever—
ever
—talk to me of grief.”

She turned away from him, flinging her arms over the coffin lid as if she would embrace it. She began to weep.

“I have nothing. She’s gone. I can’t have her back. I can’t find her anywhere. And I can’t…I can never..” The fingers of one hand curled, pulling at the flannel that covered the coffin. “But you can. You still can, Anthony. And I want you to die.”

Even through his outrage, he felt the sudden stirring of a horrified compassion. After the years of their enmity, after these moments in the funeral home, he wouldn’t have believed it possible that he should feel anything for her save outright loathing. But in those words
you can
, he saw the extent and the nature of his former wife’s grief. She was forty-six years old. She could never have another child.

No matter that the thought of bringing another child into the world to take Elena’s place was beyond unthinkable, that he’d lost his reason for living the moment he’d looked on his daughter’s corpse. He’d spend the rest of his life in a ceaseless involvement in academic affairs so that he would never again have a free moment in which he might have to remember the ruin of her face and the mark of the ligature round her neck, but that was no more than a point of indifference. He could still have another child, whatever the wilderness of his current grief. He still had that choice. But Glyn did not. Her sorrow was doubled by the incontrovertible fact of her age.

He took a step towards her, placing his hand on her shuddering back. “Glyn, I’m—”

“Don’t you touch me!” She rolled away from him, lost her footing, and fell to one knee.

The flimsy flannel covering on the coffin tore. The wood was thin and vulnerable beneath it.

Heart pounding in both his chest and his ears, Lynley staggered to a halt within sight of Fen Causeway. He dug in his pocket for his watch. He flipped it open, panting, and checked the time. Seven minutes.

He shook his head, bent nearly double with his hands on his knees, wheezing like an undiagnosed case of emphysema. Less than a mile’s run and he felt completely done for. Sixteen years of cigarette smoking had taken its toll. Ten months of abstinence was not enough to redeem him.

He stumbled onto the worn wooden planks that bridged the stream between Robinson Crusoe’s Island and Sheep’s Green. He leaned against the metal rail, threw his head back, and gulped in air like a man saved from drowning. Sweat beaded his face and dampened his jersey. What a wonderful experience it was to run.

With a grunt, he turned to rest his elbows against the rail, letting his head hang while he caught his breath. Seven minutes, he thought, and not quite a mile. She would have run the same course in not much more than five.

There could be no doubt about it. She ran daily with her stepmother. She was a long-distance runner. She ran with the Cambridge cross country team. If her calendar was any indication of reality, she’d been running with the University Hare and Hounds as far back as last January and probably before. Depending on the distance she had planned to go that morning, her pacing might have been different. But he couldn’t imagine her taking any longer than ten minutes to run to the island, no matter the course she had intended to follow. That being the case, unless she stopped off somewhere along the route, she would have reached the site of her murder no later than six-twenty-five.

Respiration finally slowing, he raised his head. Even without the fog which had shrouded most of the region on the previous day, he had to admit that this was an exceptional spot for a murder. Crack willows, alders, and beeches—none of them yet leafless—created an impenetrable screen which shielded the island not only from the causeway bridge which arched above its south end on the way into the town but also from the public footpath that ran along the stream—Sheehan’s bit of a ditch—not ten feet away. Anyone wishing to carry off a crime reaped the benefit of virtual privacy here. And although the occasional pedestrian crossed over the larger bridge from Coe Fen to the island and from there to the footpath, although bicycle riders pedalled across Sheep’s Green or along the river, in the nighttime darkness of half past six on a cold November morning the killer could have been fairly certain that no witness would come upon the beating and strangulation of Elena Weaver. At half past six in the morning no one would even be in the area, except her stepmother. And her presence had been eliminated with a simple call placed on the Ceephone, a call made by someone who presumed on a personal knowledge of Justine to assume that, given the opportunity, she wouldn’t run by herself the next morning.

Of course, she had run anyway. But it was the killer’s luck that she had chosen a different route. If, indeed, it had been luck at all.

Lynley pushed himself off the railing and walked across the footbridge onto the island. A tall wooden gate leading to the north end stood open, and Lynley entered to see a workshed with punts piled to one side of it and three old bicycles leaning against its green doors. Inside, bundled in heavy pullovers against the cold, three men were examining a hole in a punt. Fluorescent lights along the ceiling yellowed their skin. The scent of marine varnish made a weight of the air. It wafted from a crowded workbench where two gallon cans stood open with paintbrushes resting across their tops. It spread from two other punts, freshly refurbished, that rested on sawhorses, waiting to dry.

“Bloomin idiots, they are,” one of the men was saying. “Lookit this bash, will you? It’s carelessness, that is. They none of them have a stitch of respect.”

One of the other men looked up. Lynley saw that he was young—no more than twenty. His face was spotty, his hair was long, and his earlobe sported a glittering zircon stud. He said, “Help you, mate?”

The other two ceased working. They were middle-aged and tired-looking. One gave Lynley a once-over look that took in his makeshift running clothes of brown tweed, blue wool, and white leather. The other went to the far end of the shed where he fired up an electric sander and began to savage the side of a canoe.

Having seen the official crime-scene notice still marking off the south end of the island, Lynley wondered why Sheehan had done nothing about this section. He discovered soon enough when the younger man said:

“No one shuts
us
out just ’cause some slag’s in the shit.”

“Leave off, Derek,” the older man said. “It’s a killing they’re dealing with, not some lady in distress.”

Derek tossed his head derisively. He pulled a cigarette from his blue jeans and lit one with a kitchen match which he threw to the floor, casually oblivious of the proximity of several cans of paint.

Identifying himself, Lynley asked if any of them had known the dead girl. Just that she was from the University, they told him. They had no more information than what the police had given them upon their arrival at the workshop yesterday morning. They knew only that a college girl’s body had been found on the south end of the island, with her face mashed up and some string round her neck.

Had the police conducted a search of this northern area? Lynley wanted to know.

“Poked their faces everywhere, they did,” Derek replied. “Cut right through the gate before we even got here. Ned was right cheesed off about that all day.” He shouted through the noise that screeched from the sander at the end of the building, “Weren’t you, mate?”

If he heard him, Ned gave no sign. He was fully intent upon the canoe.

“You noticed nothing out of the ordinary?” Lynley said.

Derek blew cigarette smoke from his mouth and sucked it up with his nostrils. He grinned, apparently pleased with the effect. “You mean aside from about two dozen coppers crawling round through the bushes trying to pin what they can on blokes like us?”

“How’s that?” Lynley asked.

“It’s the regular story. Some college tart got bagged. The coppers are looking to nab a local because if the University nits don’t like the nature of the collar, all hell’s go’n to break loose. Just ask Bill here how it works.”

Bill didn’t appear to be willing to hold forth on this particular topic. He busied himself at the workbench where he picked up a hacksaw and went after a narrow piece of wood being held steady by an old red vice.

Derek said, “His boy works on the local rag, he does. Was following a story ’bout some bloke who supposably offed himself last spring. Uni didn’t like the way the story was developing and bang on the button they tried to quash it straight away. That’s the way it runs round here, mister.” Derek stabbed a dirty thumb in the direction of the centre of town. “Uni like the locals to toe the Uni line.”

“Isn’t that sort of thing dead and gone?” Lynley asked. “I mean the town-and-gown strife.”

Bill finally spoke. “Depends on who you ask.”

Derek added, “Yeah. It’s dead and gone, all right, when you’re talking with the toffs down river. They don’t see trouble till it smacks them in the face. But it’s a bit different, isn’t it, when you’re rubbing your elbows with the likes of us.”