For the Sake of Elena (26 page)

Lynley repeated his earlier question. “Did she want to be Deaf?”

“She didn’t know—”

“I understand that she didn’t know what it meant at first, that she had no way of understanding the culture. But once she did know, did she want to be Deaf?”

“She would have wanted it. Eventually.”

It was a telling response. The uninformed, once informed, had not become an adherent to the cause. “So she involved herself with DeaStu solely because Dr. Cuff insisted. Because it was the only way to avoid being sent down.”

“At first that was why. But then she came to meetings, to dances. She was getting to know people.”

“Was she getting to know you?”

Gareth yanked open the centre drawer of the desk. He took out a pack of gum and unwrapped a stick. Bernadette began to reach forward to get his attention, but Lynley stopped her, saying, “He’ll look up in a moment.” Gareth let the moment drag on, but Lynley felt it was probably harder for the boy to keep his eyes fixed upon and his fingers working over the silver wrapper of the Juicy Fruit than it was for himself to wait him out. When at last he looked up, Lynley said,

“Elena Weaver was eight weeks pregnant.”

Bernadette cleared her throat. She said, “My goodness.” Then, “Sorry.” And her hands conveyed the information.

Gareth’s eyes went to Lynley and then beyond him to the closed door of the office. He chewed his gum with what looked like deliberate slowness. Its scent was liquid sugar in the air.

When he replied, his hands moved as slowly as his jaws. “I didn’t know that.”

“You weren’t her lover?”

He shook his head.

“According to her stepmother, she’d been seeing someone regularly since December of last year. Her calendar indicates that with a symbol. A fish. That wasn’t you? You would have first been introduced to her round then, wouldn’t you?”

“I saw her. I knew her. It was what Dr. Cuff wanted. But I wasn’t her lover.”

“A bloke at Fenners called her your woman.”

Gareth took a second stick of gum, unwrapped it, rolled it into a tube, popped it into his mouth.

“Did you love her?”

Again, his eyes dropped. Lynley thought of the wad of tissues in the conference room. He looked once again at the boy’s pallid face. He said, “You don’t mourn someone you don’t love, Gareth,” even though the boy’s attention was not on Bernadette’s hands.

Bernadette said, “He wanted to marry her, Inspector. I know that because he told me once. And he—”

Perhaps sensing the conversation, Gareth looked up. His hands flashed quickly.

“I was telling him the truth,” Bernadette said. “I said you wanted to marry her. He knows you loved her, Gareth. It’s completely obvious.”

“Past. Loved.” Gareth’s fists were on his chest more like a punch than a sign. “It was over.”

“When did it end?”

“She didn’t fancy me.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“She fancied someone else.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I thought we were together. And we weren’t. That was it.”

“When did she make this clear to you? Recently, Gareth?”

He looked sullen. “Don’t remember.”

“Sunday night? Is that why you were arguing with her?”

“Oh, dear,” Bernadette murmured, although she cooperatively continued to sign.

“I didn’t know she was pregnant. She didn’t tell me that.”

“But as to the other. The man she loved. She told you about that. That was Sunday night, wasn’t it?”

Bernadette said, “Oh, Inspector, you can’t really think that Gareth had anything to do—”

Gareth lunged across the desk and grabbed Bernadette’s hands. Then he jerked out a few signs.

“What’s he saying?”

“He doesn’t want me to defend him. He says there’s nothing for me to defend.”

“You’re an engineering undergraduate, aren’t you?” Lynley asked. Gareth nodded. He said, “And the engineering lab’s by Fen Causeway, isn’t it? Did you know Elena Weaver ran that way in the morning? Did you ever see her run? Did you ever go with her?”

“You want to think I killed her because she wouldn’t have me” was his reply. “You think I was jealous. You’ve got it figured that I killed her because she was giving some other bloke what she wouldn’t give me.”

“It’s a fairly solid motive, isn’t it?”

Bernadette gave a tiny mewl of protest.

Gareth said, “Maybe the bloke who got her pregnant killed her. Maybe he didn’t fancy her as much as she fancied him.”

“But you don’t know who he was?”

Gareth shook his head. Lynley had the distinct impression he was lying. And yet he couldn’t at the moment come up with a reason why Gareth Randolph would lie about the identity of the man who made Elena pregnant, especially if he truly believed that man might be her killer. Unless he intended to take care of dealing with the man himself, in his own time, on his own terms. And with a blue in boxing, he’d have the odds on his side if it came to taking another by surprise.

Even as Lynley dwelt on this thought, he realised there was yet another possible reason why Gareth might choose not to cooperate with the police. If he was savouring Elena’s death at the same time as he mourned it, what better way to prolong his enjoyment than to lengthen the time it would take to bring the criminal to justice. How often had a jilted lover believed that a crime of violence perpetrated by someone else was exactly what the loved one deserved?

Lynley rose to his feet and nodded to the boy. He said, “Thank you for your time,” and turned to the door.

On the back of it he saw what he hadn’t had the opportunity to notice when he had entered the room. It was hung with a calendar on which the entire year was visible at one glance. So it was not avoidance that had made Gareth Randolph shift his eyes to the door when Lynley had told him of Elena Weaver’s pregnancy.

He’d forgotten about the bells. They’d rung at Oxford as well when he was an undergraduate, but somehow the years had taken that memory from him. Now as he stepped out of the Peterhouse Library and began the walk back to St. Stephen’s College, the resonant calling of the faithful to Evensong formed an auditory backdrop—like antiphonal chanting—from college chapels across the city. It was, he thought, one of life’s most joyous sounds, this ringing of bells. And he found himself regretting the fact that the span of time in which he had given himself over to learning how to understand the criminal mind had allowed him to forget the sheer pleasure of church bells ringing into an autumn wind.

He let sound itself become his most conscious perception as he strolled past the old, overgrown graveyard of Little St. Mary’s Church and made the turn onto Trumpington where the jingle of bicycle bells and the metallic clicking of their unoiled gears joined the rumble of evening traffic.

“Go on, Jack,” a young man shouted to a retreating bike rider from the doorway of a grocer’s shop as Lynley passed. “We’ll catch you up at the Anchor. All right?”

“Right.” A vague call in return, caught on the wind.

Three girls walked by, engaged in a heated discussion about “that sod, Robert.” They were followed by an older woman, high heels snapping against the pavement, pushing a crying baby in a pram. And then lurched by a black-garbed figure of uncertain sex from the folds of whose voluminous coat and trailing scarves came the plaintive notes of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” played on harmonica.

Through it all, Lynley heard Bernadette giving voice to Gareth’s angry words: We don’t want your hearing. But you can’t believe that, can you, because you think you’re special instead of just bloody different.

He wondered if this had marked the crucial difference between Gareth Randolph and Elena Weaver.
We don’t want your hearing
. For because of her parents’ well-intentioned if perhaps arguably misguided efforts on her behalf, Elena had been taught to know every moment of her life that something was missing. She had been given something to want. So how could Gareth ever have hoped to win her over to a life-style and a culture that she had been taught from birth to reject and overcome?

He wondered what it had been like for the two of them: Gareth dedicated to his people, seeking to make Elena one of them. And Elena merely following the dictates laid down by the Master of her College. Had she feigned interest in DeaStu? Had she feigned enthusiasm? And if she did neither, if she felt contempt, what kind of effect would this have had on the young man who had been given the unwanted assignment of steering her into a society so foreign to that which she had always known?

Lynley wondered what kind of blame—if any—ought to be assessed upon the Weavers for the efforts they had made with their daughter. For in spite of the manner in which they had apparently tried to create an inaccurate fantasy out of the reality of their daughter’s life, hadn’t they in fact given Elena what Gareth himself had never known? Hadn’t they given her her own form of hearing? And if that was the case, if Elena did move with a relative degree of comfort in a world in which Gareth felt himself an alien, how could he come to terms with the fact that he had fallen in love with someone who shared neither his culture nor his dreams?

Lynley paused in front of the multi-spired gatehouse of King’s College where lights shone brightly from the porter’s lodge. He stared, unseeing, at the collection of bicycles leaning this way and that. A young man was scrawling some sort of notice on a blackboard beneath the gate, while a chatting group of black-gowned academics hurried across the lawn towards the chapel with that self-important stride that appeared to be inherent to senior members of all the colleges who were blessed with the privilege of setting foot to grass. He listened to the continuing echo of the bells, with Great St. Mary’s just across King’s Parade calling out in a ceaseless, sonorous petition for prayer. Each note cast itself into the emptiness of Market Hill just beyond the church. Each building there caught the sound and flung it back into the night. He listened, he thought. He knew he was intellectually capable of getting to the root of Elena Weaver’s death. But as the evening continued to swell with sound, he wondered if he was unprejudicially capable of getting to the root of Elena’s life.

He was bringing to the job at hand the preconceptions of a member of the hearing world. He wasn’t sure how to shed them—or even if he needed to do so—in order to get at the truth behind her killing. But he did know that only through coming to an understanding of Elena’s own vision of herself could he also understand the relationships she shared with other people. And—all previous thoughts on Crusoe’s Island aside—for the moment, at least, it seemed that these relationships had to be the key to what had happened to her.

At the far end of the north range of Front Court, an amber rhombus of light melted out onto the lawn as the south door to King’s College Chapel slowly opened. The faint sound of organ music drifted on the wind. Lynley shivered, turned up the collar of his overcoat, and decided to join the college for Evensong.

Perhaps a hundred people had gathered in the chapel where the chóir was just filing down the aisle, passing beneath the magnificent Florentine screen atop of which angels held brass trumpets aloft. They were led by cross- and incense-bearers, the latter filling the icy chapel air with the heady sweet scent of smoky perfume. And they, along with the congregation, were dwarfed by the breathtaking interior of the chapel itself, whose fanvaulted ceiling soared above them in an intricate display of tracery periodically bossed by the Beaufort portcullis and the Tudor rose. It formed a beauty that was at once both austere and exalted, like the arcing flight of a jubilant bird, but one who does his sailing against a winter sky.

Lynley took a place at the rear of the chancel from which he could meditate at a distance upon
Adoration of the Magi
, the Rubens canvas that served as the chapel’s reredos, softly lit above the main altar. In it, one of the Magi leaned forward, hand outstretched to touch the child while the mother herself presented the baby, as if with the serene confidence that he wouldn’t be harmed. And yet even then she must have known what lay ahead. She must have had a premonition of the loss she would face.

A lone soprano—a small boy so tiny that his surplice hung just inches from the floor—sang out the first seven pure notes of a
Kyrie Eleison
, and Lynley lifted his eyes to the stained glass window above the painting. Through it moonlight shimmered in a muted corona, giving only one colour to the window itself, a deep blue faintly touched on its outer edge by white. And although he knew and could see that the crucifixion was what the window depicted, the only section which the moon brought to life was a single face—soldier, apostle, believer, or apostate—his mouth a black howl of some emotion eternally unnamed.

Life and death, the chapel said. Alpha and omega. With Lynley finding himself caught between the two and trying somehow to make sense of both.

As the choir filed out at the end of the service and the congregation rose to follow, Lynley saw that Terence Cuff had been among the worshippers. He had been sitting on the far side of the choir, and now he stood with his attention given to the Rubens, his hands resting in the pockets of an overcoat that was just a shade or two darker than the grey of his hair. Seeing his partial profile, Lynley was struck once again by the man’s self-possession. His features did not display the slightest trace of anxiety. Nor did they reveal any reaction to the pressures of his job.

When Cuff turned from the altar, he exhibited no surprise to find Lynley watching him. He merely nodded a greeting, left his pew, and joined the other man next to the chancel screen. He looked round the chapel before he spoke.

“I always come back to King’s,” he said. “At least twice a month like a prodigal son. I never really feel like a sinner in the hands of an angry God here. A minor transgressor, perhaps, but not a real miscreant. For what kind of God could honestly stay angry when one asks his forgiveness in such architectural splendour?”

“Have you a need to ask forgiveness?”

Cuff chuckled. “I’ve found it’s always unwise to admit one’s misdeeds in the presence of a policeman, Inspector.”