For the Sake of Elena (10 page)

“Yes. That’s a good girl. A button. Now another. We’ll get you settled and have a nice cup of tea. I expect you’d like that. A slice of cake as well?”

“Cabbage.” Mrs. Havers drew the word out. It was nearly indistinguishable, like a faint cry, distorted, from a great distance.

Barbara made the decision. “Her albums,” she said. “Mrs. Flo, I’ve forgotten my mother’s albums.”

Mrs. Flo looked up from the scarf which she’d managed to untangle from Mrs. Havers’ hands. “You can bring them later, dear. She won’t want everything all at once.”

“No. These are important. She’s got to have her albums. She’s collected…” Barbara stopped for a moment, knowing in her mind that what she was doing was foolish, feeling in her heart that there was no other answer. “She’s planned holidays. She’s got them done up in albums. She works on them every day. She’ll be lost and—”

Mrs. Flo touched her arm. “My dear, do listen. What you’re feeling is natural. But this is for the best. You must see that.”

“No. It’s bad enough, isn’t it, that I forgot a picture of myself. I can’t leave her here without those albums. I’m sorry. I’ve taken up your time. I’ve made a mess of everything. I’ve just…” She wouldn’t cry, she thought, not with her mother needing her and Mrs. Gustafson to be spoken to and arrangements to be made.

She went to the chest of drawers, snapped closed the framed photographs, and returned them to the suitcase which she swung off the bed. She took a tissue from her pocket, using it to wipe her mother’s cheeks and her nose.

“Okay, Mum,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

The choir was singing the
Kyrie
as Lynley crossed Chapel Court and approached the chapel itself which, fronted by an arcade, comprised most of the court’s west range. Although it clearly had been built to be admired from Middle Court, which stood to its east, eighteenth-century calls for college expansion had enclosed the seventeenth-century chapel into a quadrangle of buildings of which it was the focal point. Even through the mist and the darkness, it could hardly have been otherwise.

Ground lights glowed against the Weldon stone ashlar exterior of the building, which—if it hadn’t been designed by Wren—was surely a monument to his love of classical ornamentation. The facade of the chapel rose from the middle of the arcade, defined by four Corinthian pilasters which supported a pediment both broken and penetrated by a clock and a lantern cupola. Decorative swags looped from the pilasters. An
oeil-de-boeuf
glittered on each side of the clock. At the centre of the building hung an oval entablature. And all of it represented the concrete reality of Wren’s classical ideal, balance. Where, at its north and south ends, the chapel did not fill in the entirety of the west range of the court, the arcade framed the river and the backs beyond it. The effect was lovely at night with the river mist rising to swirl round the low wall and lap at the columns. In sunlight, it would have been magnificent.

Like a coincidental accent to this thought, a trumpet fanfare played. The notes were pure and sweet on the cold night air. As Lynley pulled open the chapel door at the southeast corner of the building—unsurprised to find that the middle entry was merely an architectural device unintended for use—the choir answered the fanfare with another
Kyrie
. He entered the chapel as a second fanfare began.

To the height of the arched windows which rose to a plaster dog-tooth cornice, the walls were panelled in golden oak beneath which matching pews faced the solitary central aisle. Lined up in these were the members of the college choir, their attention fixed on a solitary trumpeter who stood at the foot of the altar, completing the fanfare. She was quite dwarfed by the gilded baroque reredos, framing a painting of Jesus calling Lazarus from the dead. She lowered her instrument, saw Lynley, and grinned at him as the choir burst into the final
Kyrie
. A few crashing bars from the organ followed. The choir master jotted notes in his music.

“Altos, rubbish,” he said. “Sopranos, screech-owls. Tenors, howling dogs. The rest of you, a pass. The same time tomorrow evening, please.”

General moaning greeted his evaluation of their work. The choir master ignored this, shoved his pencil into his thatch of black hair, and said, “The trumpet was excellent, however. Thank you, Miranda. That will be all, ladies and gentlemen.”

As the group disbanded, Lynley walked down the aisle to join Miranda Webberly, who was cleaning her trumpet and repacking it into its case. “You’ve gone off jazz, Randie,” he said.

Her head popped up. Her top knot of curly ginger hair bounced and bobbled. “I never!” she answered.

She was dressed in her usual style, Lynley noted, a baggy sweat suit which she hoped would both elongate and camouflage her short, plump body at the same time as its colour—a deep heliotrope blue—would darken the shade of her own pale eyes.

“Still in the jazz society then?”

“Absolutely. We have a gig on Wednesday night at Trinity Hall. Will you come?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

She grinned. “Good.” She snapped the trumpet case closed and set it on the edge of a pew. “Dad phoned. He said I ought to expect one of his men to come crawling round this evening. Why’re you alone?”

“Sergeant Havers is handling some personal business. She’ll be along later. Tomorrow morning, I should guess.”

“Hmmm. Well. D’you want a coffee or something? I expect you want to talk. The buttery’s still open. Or we could go to my room.” Despite the casual sound of the latter invitation, Miranda’s cheeks coloured. “I mean if you want to talk privately. You know.”

Lynley smiled. “Your room.”

She struggled into a huge pea jacket—tossing a “Ta, Inspector” over her shoulder when he helped her get it on—wrapped a scarf round her neck, and picked up her trumpet case. She said, “Right. Come on, then. I’m over in New Court,” and headed down the aisle.

Instead of crossing Chapel Court and using the formal passageway between the east and south buildings—“These’re called the Randolph digs,” Miranda informed him. “After the architect. Ugly, aren’t they?”—she led him along the arcade and into a doorway at its north end. They went up a short flight of stairs, down a corridor, through a fire door, down another corridor, through another fire door, down another flight of stairs. All the time Miranda talked.

“I don’t know yet how I feel about what’s happened to Elena,” she said. It sounded like a discourse she’d been having with herself most of the day. “I keep thinking I should feel outrage or anger or grief, but so far I’ve not felt anything at all. Except guilty for not feeling what I ought to feel and sort of disgustingly self-important now that Daddy’s involved—through you, of course—and that puts me ‘in the know.’ How despicable really. I’m a Christian, aren’t I? Shouldn’t I mourn her?” She didn’t wait for Lynley to reply. “You see, the essential problem is that I can’t quite grasp that Elena’s dead. I didn’t see her last night. I didn’t hear her leave this morning. That’s a fair description of how we lived on a regular basis anyway, so everything seems perfectly normal to me. Perhaps if I had been the one to find her, or if she’d been killed in her room and our bedder had found her and come screaming in to get me—kind of like a film, you know?—I would have seen and known and been moved somehow. It’s the absence of feeling that’s worrying me. Am I turning to stone? Don’t I even care?”

“Were you particularly close to her?”

“That’s just it. I should have been closer than I was. I should have made a bigger effort. I’ve known her since last year.”

“But she wasn’t a friend?”

Miranda paused at the doorway that led out of the north Randolph building and into New Court. She wrinkled her nose. “I wasn’t a runner,” she said obscurely, and shoved open the door.

A terrace overlooked the river to their left. A cobbled path to their right ran between the Randolph building and a lawn. An enormous sweet chestnut tree stood in the lawn’s centre, beyond which loomed the horseshoe-shaped building that comprised New Court, three storeys of blazing Gothic revival decorated with two-centred cusp windows, arched doorways whose doors wore heavy iron studs, battlements on the roofline, and a steepled tower. Although it was constructed from the same ashlar stone as the Randolph building which it faced, it could not have been stylistically more dissimilar.

“It’s this way,” Miranda said, and led him along the path to the southeast corner of the building. There, winter jasmine was growing enthusiastically up the walls. Lynley caught its sweet fragrance the instant before Miranda opened a door next to which the discreet letter
L
was carved into a small block of stone.

They went up two flights of stairs at Miranda’s quick pace. Her room was one of two bed-sitting rooms that faced each other on a short corridor, sharing a gyp room, a shower, and a toilet.

Miranda paused in the gyp room to fill a kettle and put it on to boil. “It’ll have to be instant,” she said with a little grimace. “But I’ve a bit of whisky and we can tart it up with that if you like. As long as you don’t tell Mummy.”

“That you’ve taken to drink?”

She rolled her eyes. “That I’ve taken to anything. Unless it’s a man. You can tell her what you’d like about that. Make up something good. Put me in a black lace negligee. It’ll give her hope.” She laughed and went to the door of her room. She’d wisely locked it, he noted with approval. She wasn’t the only daughter of a superintendent of police for nothing.

“I see you’ve managed to snare yourself deluxe accommodations,” he said as they entered, and indeed by Cambridge standards she had. For the bed-sit comprised two rooms, not one: a small inner chamber where she slept; a larger outer chamber for sitting. This latter was capacious enough to accommodate two undersized sofas and a small walnut dining table that acted as substitute for a desk. There was a bricked-in fireplace in one corner of the room and an oak window seat overlooking Trinity Passage Lane. On the seat itself a wire cage stood. Lynley went to inspect the tiny prisoner who was engaged in running furiously on a squeaking exercise wheel.

Miranda set her trumpet case next to the armchair and dumped her coat nearby. She said, “That’s Titbit,” and went to the fireplace to fiddle with an electric fire.

Lynley looked up from removing his own coat. “Elena’s mouse?”

“When I heard what happened, I fetched him from her room. It seemed the right thing to do.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. Perhaps…a bit after two.”

“Her room wasn’t locked?”

“No. Not yet at least. Elena never locked up.” On a set of shelves in an alcove were several bottles of spirits, five glasses, three cups and saucers. Miranda fetched two of the cups and one of the bottles and took them to the table. “That could be important, couldn’t it?” she said. “That she didn’t lock her room.”

The little mouse left off running and scampered from the wheel to the side of the cage. His whiskers twitched, his nose quivered. His paws grasping the slender metal bars, he raised himself up and sniffed eagerly at Lynley’s fingers.

“It could be,” he said. “Did you hear anyone in her room this morning? Later on, I imagine, perhaps at seven or half past.”

Miranda shook her head. She looked regretful. “Earplugs,” she said.

“You wear earplugs to bed?”

“Have done since…” She hesitated, appearing embarrassed for a moment before she sloughed the feeling off and continued with, “It’s the only way I can sleep, Inspector. Got used to them, I suppose. Unappealing as the devil, but there it is.”

Lynley filled in the blanks of Miranda’s awkward justification, admiring her for the plucky effort at bravado. The struggle that was the Webberly marriage was no particular secret to anyone who knew the superintendent well. His daughter would have begun wearing earplugs at home, wanting to block out the worst of her parents’ nighttime quarrels.

“What time did you get up this morning, Randie?”

“Eight,” she said. “Give or take ten minutes.” She smiled wryly. “Give ten minutes, then. I had a lecture at nine.”

“And when you got up, what did you do? Shower? Bathe?”

“Hmm. Yes. Had a cup of tea. Ate some cereal. Made some toast.”

“Her door was shut?”

“Yes.”

“Everything seemed normal? No sign that anyone had been in?”

“No sign. Except…” The kettle began to whistle in the gyp room. She hooked the two cups and a small jug over her fingers and went to the door, where she paused. “I don’t know that I would have noticed. I mean, she had more visitors than I did, you see.”

“She was popular?”

Miranda picked at a chip in one of the cups. The pitch of the kettle’s whistle seemed to intensify a degree. She looked uncomfortable.

“With men?” Lynley asked.

“Let me get the coffee,” she said.

She ducked out of the room, leaving the door open. Lynley could hear her movements in the gyp room. He could see the closed door across the hall. From the porter, he’d obtained the key to that now-locked door, but he felt no inclination to use it. He considered this sensation, so at odds with how he believed he ought to feel.

He was going at the case backwards. The rational dictates of his job told him that, despite the hour of his arrival, he should have spoken to the Cambridge police first, to the parents next, to the finder of the body third. That accomplished, he should have sifted through the victim’s belongings for a possible clue to her killer’s identity. All textbook stuff, labelled
proper procedure
, as Sergeant Havers would have undoubtedly pointed out. He couldn’t have listed reasons why he wasn’t adhering to it. He merely felt that the nature of the crime itself suggested a personal involvement, perhaps, more than that, a settling of scores. And only an understanding of the central figures involved could reveal exactly what those personal involvements and those settled scores were.

Miranda returned, cups and jug on a pink tin tray. “Milk’s gone off,” she announced, putting the cups into their saucers. “Sorry. We’ll have to make do with the whisky. But I’ve a bit of sugar. Would you like some?”