For the Sake of Elena (37 page)

The determination behind her words plunged his spirits. He said, “You’re planning to stay on here, aren’t you?”

“I’ll phone Daphne tomorrow. She can put off her visit for another week. God knows she’d be happy enough to do so. She has a family of her own.”

Without a thought, he said, “Helen, damn it all, I wish you would—” and then he stopped himself.

He felt her turn in her seat, knew she was watching him. He said nothing more.

“You’ve been good for Pen,” she said. “I think you’ve made her face something she didn’t want to see.”

He took no pleasure from the information. “I’m glad I’m good for someone.”

He parked the Bentley in a narrow space on Garret Hostel Lane, a few yards away from the gentle rise of the footbridge that crossed the River Cam. They walked back towards the porter’s lodge of the college, just down the street from the entrance to St. Stephen’s.

The air was cold, it seemed hung with moisture. A heavy cover of clouds obscured the night sky. Their footsteps echoed against the pavement, a brisk sound like the sharp tattoo of drums.

Lynley glanced at Lady Helen. She was walking near enough at his side that her shoulder brushed his, and the warmth of her arm, the fresh, crisp scent of her body, acted in concert as a call to action which he tried to ignore. He told himself that there was more to life than the immediate gratification of his own desires. And he tried to believe this even as he felt himself grow lost in the simple contemplation of contrast offered by the dark fall of her hair as it swung forward to touch the pearl of her skin.

He said, as if there had been no break in their conversation, “But am I good for you, Helen? That’s the real question, isn’t it?” And although he managed to keep his voice light, his heart still beat rapidly at the back of his throat. “I wonder that. I put the sum of what I am into a balance and weigh it against what I ought to be, and I ask myself if I’m really enough.”

When she turned her head, the amber light shafting down from a window above them surrounded her like an aureole. “Why would you ever think you’re not enough?”

He pondered the question, tracing his thoughts and his feelings right back to their source. He found that both of them grew from her decision to remain with her sister’s family in Cambridge. He wanted her back in London, available to him. If he was good enough for her, she’d return at his request. If she valued his love, she’d bow to his wishes. He wanted her to do so. He wanted an overt manifestation of the love she claimed to feel for him. And he wanted to be the one to decide exactly what that manifestation would be.

But he couldn’t tell her this. So he settled on saying, “I think I’m struggling with a definition of love.”

She smiled and slipped her hand through his arm. “You and everyone else, Tommy darling.”

They rounded the corner into Trinity Lane and entered the college grounds where a blackboard sign had been decorated with the words
Jazz Up Your Life Tooo-nite
in coloured chalk, and construction paper arrows affixed to the pavement led the way through the main college court to the junior combination room in the northeast corner of the grounds.

Similar to St. Stephen’s College, the building that housed Trinity Hall’s JCR was modern, little more than alternating panels of wood and glass. In addition to the combination room, it contained the college bar, where a considerable crowd was gathered at small round tables, engaged in boisterous conversation that seemed to be revolving round the good-humoured harassment of two men who were playing darts with rather more intensity than usually accompanied the game. The apparent reason for their avid concentration seemed to be age. One player was a youth of no more than twenty, the other an older man with a close-cropped grey beard.

“Go for it, Petersen,” someone shouted when the younger man took position for his turn. “Junior fellows kick arse. Show him.”

The young man made an elaborate display of loosening up his muscles and assuming the correct stance before he flung the dart and missed the shot entirely. Jeers roared through the room. In response, he turned around, pointed to his backside meaningfully, and hefted a pint of beer to his mouth. The crowd hooted and laughed.

Lynley guided Lady Helen through the jostling group to the bar and from there they made their way towards the JCR, beers in hand. The JCR was built on several different levels accommodating a line of immovable sofas and a number of uninteresting chairs with lazy, slung backs. At one end of the room, the floor rose to what was being used as a small staging area where the jazz group was getting ready to perform.

There were only six of them, so they didn’t need room for anything more than the space required to set up a keyboard and drums, three straight-back chairs for the saxophone, the trumpet, and the clarinet players, and a roughly defined triangular area for the double bass. Electrical extension cords from the keyboard seemed to snake everywhere, and when she turned and saw Lynley and Lady Helen, Miranda Webberly tripped over one in her haste to say hello.

Regaining her footing with a grin, she dashed over to greet them. “You came!” she said. “This is absolutely grand. Inspector, will you promise to tell Dad I’m a musical genius? I’m after another trip to New Orleans, but he’s only likely to cooperate if he thinks I’ve a future playing the changes on Bourbon Street.”

“I’ll tell him you play like an angel.”

“No! Like Chet Baker, please!” She greeted Lady Helen and went on confidentially. “Jimmy—he’s our drummer—wanted to cancel tonight’s gig. He’s at Queens’, you know, and he thought with that second girl getting shot this morning…” She looked over her shoulder to where the drummer was moodily tapping his sticks in a light spitting rhythm against the cymbals. “‘We shouldn’t be out entertaining,’ he says. ‘It’s not right, is it? It doesn’t feel right.’ But he can’t come up with an alternative for us. Paul—he plays double bass—wanted to bash local heads in some Arbury pub. But all in all, it seemed best that we just go ahead and play. I don’t know what it’ll sound like, though. No one seems very much in the mood.” She glanced anxiously round the room as if in the need for some sort of contradiction to reassure her.

A respectable crowd had begun to gather, apparently drawn by the rapid scales and chords which the keyboard player was using to warm up. Lynley took the opportunity before the concert began to say:

“Randie, did you know Elena Weaver was pregnant?”

Miranda shifted on her feet, rubbing the right sole of her high-topped black gym shoe against her left ankle. “Rather,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“I mean, I suspected. She never told me.”

They’d trodden this ground together before. “You mean you didn’t know it for a fact.”

“I didn’t know it for a fact.”

“But you suspected? Why?”

Miranda sucked at the inside of her lower lip. “It was the Cocoa Puffs in the gyp room, Inspector. They were hers, the same carton. It’d been there for weeks.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Her breakfast,” Lady Helen said.

Miranda nodded. “She’d left off eating in the morning. And three times—perhaps four—I’d gone to the loo and she’d been in there being sick. Once I found her at it and the other times—” Miranda twisted a button on her navy cardigan. She wore a navy T-shirt beneath it. “It’s just that I could smell it.”

She belonged on the force, Lynley thought. She was a natural observer. She didn’t miss a trick.

She said in a rush, “I would have said something to you Monday night only I didn’t know for sure. And other than being sick those mornings, she didn’t act any different.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she wasn’t acting like she had anything in particular to worry about, so I thought perhaps I might have been wrong.”

“Perhaps she wasn’t worried. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy isn’t the sort of disaster it might have been thirty years ago.”

“Maybe not in your family.” Miranda smiled. “But I can’t exactly see my dad greeting that kind of news like it was an announcement of the Second Coming. And I never got the impression her dad was any different.”

“Randie, come on. Let’s do it,” the saxophone player called from across the room.

“Right,” she said. She gave Lynley and Lady Helen a light-hearted salute. “I’m taking a ride during the second number. Listen for it.”

“Taking a ride?” Lady Helen said as Randie scampered back to join the rest of the jazz combo. “What on earth does she mean, Tommy?”

“It must be jazzspeak,” Lynley said. “I’m afraid we’d need Louis Armstrong here to translate.”

The concert began with a roll of drums and the keyboard player call-ing out, “Pound the valves down, Randie. One and two and three and—”

Randie, the saxophonist, and the clarinet player lifted their instruments. Lynley glanced down at the sheet of paper that served as programme for the concert and read the name of the number. “Circadian Dysrhythmia.” It featured the keyboard player who, huddled over his instrument with effort and concentration, carried the lively melody for the first few minutes before tossing it over to the clarinet player who surged to his feet and took it from there. The drummer provided a steady tip-tapping on the cymbals in the background. As he did so, his narrowed eyes flitted round the room to take in the crowd.

By the middle of the number, more listeners had joined the group in the JCR, wandering in from the bar with drinks in hand, and coming in directly from the college grounds where the music no doubt drifted into the surrounding buildings. Heads bobbed in the sort of second-nature response that is generally the listener’s reaction to good jazz while handsrapped against the arms of chairs, the tops of thighs, and the sides of beer glasses. By the end of the number, the audience was won, and when the song ended—with no prior warning or winding down of the musicians’ enthusiasm but just upon a single note that was cut off into silence—the moment of stunned surprise that followed was broken by long and enthusiastic applause.

The band didn’t acknowledge this approbation with anything more than a nod from the keyboard player. Before the applause died down, the saxophone was twirling through the familiar, sultry melody of “Take Five.” After one complete turn through the number, he began to improvise. The double bass player kept up with him through the repetition of three notes and the drummer maintained the beat, but otherwise the saxophone was on his own. And he gave it his heart—eyes closed, his body swayed back, his instrument lifted. It was the sort of music one felt in the solar plexus, hollow and haunting.

As he completed his improvisation, the saxophone player nodded at Randie, who stood and began hers on the last note of his. Again, the double bass played the same three notes, again the drums maintained the same steady beat. But the sound of the trumpet changed the mood of the piece. It became pure and uplifting, a joyous celebration of brassy sound.

Like the saxophone player, Miranda performed with her eyes closed, and she tapped her right foot in time with the drummer. But unlike the saxophonist, when her solo was completed and the improvisation thrown to the clarinet, she grinned with unrestrained pleasure at the applause that greeted the ride she had taken.

Their third number, “Just a Child,” changed the mood once again. It featured the clarinet player—an overweight redhead whose face shone with perspiration—and it provided a dusky sound that spoke of rainy evenings and fusty nightclubs, a fog of cigarette smoke and glasses of gin. It invited slow dancing, lazy kissing, and sleep.

The crowd loved it, as they did the fourth, a piece called “Black Nightgown” which featured the clarinet and saxophone. It also ended the first set.

There was a general cry of protest when the keyboard player announced “We’re breaking for fifteen,” but since it was an opportunity to replenish drinks, most of the audience began to shuffle towards the bar. Lynley joined them.

The two darts players were still at it, he saw, their concentration and dedication having gone unimpaired by the performance in the next room. The younger man had apparently hit his stride, for the score on the blackboard showed that he had drawn nearly even with his bearded competitor.

“Last toss, this,” the younger player announced, displaying the dart with the flare of a magician about to make an elephant disappear. “Over the shoulder and I’ll have a bull’s-eye and a win. Who wants money on it?”

“Oh, too right!” Somebody laughed.

“Just throw the dart, Petersen,” someone else called. “Put an end to your misery.”

Petersen clucked in mock dismay. “Oh, you of intolerably little faith,” he said. He turned his back to the dart board, threw over his shoulder, and looked as surprised as everyone else when the dart flew like a magnet drawn to metal and lodged in the bull’s-eye.

The crowd sent up a satisfied roar. Petersen jumped on top of one of the tables.

“I’m taking all comers!” he shouted. “Step up. Try your luck. Senior members only. Collins here just got bashed and I’m looking for fresh blood.” He squinted through the cigarette smoke and the bodies. “You! Dr. Troughton! I see you hulking in the corner. Step up and defend the SCR.”

Lynley followed the direction of the boy’s gaze to a table at the far end of the room where another senior member of the college sat in conversation with two younger men.

“Drop the history drivel,” Petersen went on. “Save it for supervisions. Come on. Have a go. Troughton!”

The man looked up. He waved off the call. The crowd urged him on. He ignored them.

“Blast it, Troughtsie, come on. Be a man.” Petersen laughed.

Someone else called, “Let’s do it, Trout.”

And suddenly Lynley heard nothing more, just the name itself and all its variations, Troughton, Troughtsie, Trout. It was the eternal predeliction of students for giving their instructors some sort of affectionate appellation. He’d done it himself, first at Eton then at Oxford.

And now for the first time, he wondered if Elena Weaver had done the same.

19

“What is it, Tommy?” Lady Helen asked when she came at his beckoning from the doorway to the JCR.

“A premature ending to the concert. For us, at least. Come with me.”

She followed him back to the bar where the crush of people was beginning to thin as the jazz audience wandered once again in the direction of the music. The man called Troughton was still sitting at the corner table, but one of his companions had left and the other was getting ready to do the same, donning a green anorak and a black and white scarf. Troughton himself stood and cupped his hand round his ear to hear something that the younger man was saying, and after a moment of further conversation, he too put on a jacket and started across the room to the door.

As he approached, Lynley eyed the older man, taking his measure as the potential lover of a twenty-year-old girl. Although Troughton had a youthful, pixie-like face, he was otherwise perfectly nondescript, an ordinary man no more than five feet eight inches tall whose toast-coloured hair looked soft and was curly but was also decidedly thinning on the top. He appeared to be somewhere in his late forties, and aside from the width of his shoulders and the depth of his chest—both of which suggested that he was a rower—Lynley had to admit that he didn’t look at all the type of man to have attracted and seduced someone like Elena Weaver.

As the other man began to pass by them on his way to the door, Lynley said, “Dr. Troughton?”

Troughton paused, looked surprised to have a stranger addressing him by name. “Yes?”

“Thomas Lynley,” he said and introduced Lady Helen. He reached into his pocket and produced his police identification. “May we go somewhere to talk?”

Troughton didn’t appear the least bewildered by the request. Instead, he looked both resigned and relieved. “Yes. This way,” he said and led them out into the night.

He took them to his rooms in the building that comprised the north range of the college garden, two courtyards away from the JCR. On the second floor, situated in the southwest corner, they overlooked the River Cam on one side and the garden on the other. They consisted of a small bedroom and a study, the former furnished only with an unmade single bed and the latter crowded with ancient, overstuffed furniture and a vast and undisciplined number of books. These lent to the room the sort of mouldy mustiness associated with paper too long exposed to air that is heavy with damp.

Troughton picked up a sheaf of essays from one of the chairs and put it on his desk. He said, “May I offer you a brandy?” and when Lynley and Lady Helen accepted, he went to a glass-fronted cabinet to one side of the fireplace where he took out three plain balloon glasses and carefully held each one up to the light before pouring. He didn’t say anything until he had taken a seat in one of the heavy, overstuffed chairs.

“You’ve come about Elena Weaver, haven’t you?” He spoke quietly, calmly. “I suppose I’ve been expecting you since yesterday afternoon. Did Justine give you my name?”

“No. Elena herself did, after a fashion. She’d been making a curious mark on her calendar ever since last January,” Lynley said. “A small line drawing of a fish.”

“Yes. I see.” Troughton gave his attention to his balloon glass. His eyes filled, and he pressed his fingers to them before he raised his head. “Of course, she didn’t call me that,” he said unnecessarily. “She called me Victor.”

“But it was her shorthand method of noting when you’d meet, I should guess. And, no doubt, a way to keep the knowledge from her father should he ever happen to glance at her calendar on a visit to her room. Because, I imagine, you know her father quite well.”

Troughton nodded. He took a swallow of his brandy, setting the balloon glass on the low table that separated his chair from Lady Helen’s. He patted the breast pocket of his grey tweed jacket and brought out a cigarette case. It was made of pewter, dented in one corner. It bore some sort of crest upon its cover. He offered it round and then lit up, the match flickering in his fingers like an uneasy beacon. He had large hands, Lynley noted, strong-looking with smooth, oval nails. They were his best feature.

Troughton kept his eyes on his cigarette as he said, “The hardest part these last three days has been the pretence of it all. Coming to the college, seeing to my supervisions, taking my meals with the others. Having a glass of sherry before dinner last night with the Master and making small talk while all the time I wanted to throw my head back and howl.” When his voice wavered slightly on the last word, Lady Helen leaned forward in her chair as if she would offer him sympathy, but she stopped herself when Lynley lifted his hand in quick admonition. Troughton steadied himself by drawing in on his cigarette and placing it into a pottery ashtray on the table next to him where its smoke rose in a snaking plume. Then he went on.

“But what right have I to any one of the externals of grief? I have duties, after all. I have responsibilities. A wife. Three children. I’m supposed to think of them. I ought to be engaged in picking up the pieces and going on and being thankful that my marriage and my career didn’t come crashing down round me because I’ve spent the last eleven months screwing a deaf girl twenty-seven years my junior. In fact, inside my ugly little soul where no one would ever know the feeling is even there, I ought to be secretly thankful Elena’s out of the way. Because there’ll be no mess now, no scandal, no titters and whispers behind my back. It’s completely over and I’m to go on. That’s what men my age do, isn’t it, when they’ve puffed themselves up with a successful seduction that, over time, grows just a little bit tedious. And it was supposed to grow tedious, wasn’t it, Inspector? I was supposed to start finding her a sexual millstone, living evidence of an ego-boosting peccadillo that promised to come back to haunt me if I didn’t take care of her in one way or another.”

“It wasn’t like that for you?”

“I love her. I can’t even say
loved
because if I put it in the past tense, I’m going to have to face the fact that she’s gone and I can’t stand the thought of it.”

“She was pregnant. Did you know that?”

Troughton closed his eyes. The weak overhead light, which shone down from a cone-shaped shade, cast shadows from his eyelashes onto his skin. It glittered beneath the lashes on the crescent of tears which he appeared to be willing himself not to shed. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. When he could, he said, “I knew.”

“I should think that offered the possibility of serious difficulties for you, Dr. Troughton. No matter how you felt about the girl.”

“The scandal, you mean? The loss of life-long friendships? The damage to my career? None of that mattered. Oh, I knew I was likely to be ostracised by virtually everyone if I walked out on my family for a twenty-year-old girl. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to realise that I simply didn’t care. The sorts of things that matter to my colleagues, Inspector—prestigious appointments, the building of a political base, a stellar academic reputation, invitations to speak at conferences and to chair committees, requests to serve the college, the University, even the nation—those things ceased mattering to me a long time ago when I reached the conclusion that connection to another person is the only item of real value in life. And I felt I’d found that connection with Elena. I wasn’t about to give her up. I would have done anything to keep her. Elena.”

The saying of her name seemed a necessity to Troughton, a subtle form of release that he had not allowed himself—that the circumstances of their relationship had not allowed him—since her death. But still he didn’t cry, as if he believed that to give in to sorrow was to lose control over the few aspects of his life that remained unshattered by the girl’s murder.

As if she knew this, Lady Helen went to the cabinet by the fireplace and found the bottle of brandy. She poured a bit more into Troughton’s glass. Her own face, Lynley saw, was grave and composed.

“When did you see Elena last?” Lynley asked the other man.

“Sunday night. Here.”

“But she didn’t spend the night, did she? The porter saw her leaving St. Stephen’s to go running in the morning.”

“She left me…it must have been just before one. Before the gates close here.”

“And you? Did you go home as well?”

“I stayed. I do that most weeknights, and have done for some two years now.”

“I see. Your home isn’t in the city, then?”

“It’s in Trumpington.” Troughton appeared to read the expression on Lynley’s face, adding, “Yes, I know, Inspector. Trumpington’s hardly such a distance from the college to warrant having to spend the night here. Especially having to spend most weeknights over a two-year period. Obviously, my reasons for dossing here had to do with a distance of a very different sort. Initially, that is. Before Elena.”

Troughton’s cigarette had burnt itself to nothing in the ashtray by his chair. He lit another and took more of the brandy. He appeared to have himself once more under control.

“When did she tell you she was pregnant?”

“Wednesday night, not long after she’d got the results of the test.”

“But prior to that, she’d told you there was a possibility? She’d told you she suspected?”

“She hadn’t said anything to me about pregnancy before Wednesday. I had no suspicion.”

“Did you know she wasn’t taking precautions?”

“It wasn’t something I felt we had to discuss.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Lynley saw Lady Helen stir, turning to face Troughton, saying, “But surely, Dr. Troughton, a man of your education wouldn’t have left the sole responsibility of contraception to the woman with whom you intended to sleep. You would have discussed it with her before you took her to bed.”

“I didn’t see the need.”

“The need.” Lady Helen said the two words slowly.

Lynley thought of the unused birth control pills which Sergeant Havers had found in Elena Weaver’s desk drawer. He recalled February’s date upon them and the conjectures he and Havers had developed regarding that date. He asked, “Dr. Troughton, did you assume she was using a contraceptive of some sort? Did she tell you she was?”

“As entrapment, you mean? No. She never said a word about contraception one way or another. And she didn’t need to, Inspector. It wouldn’t have made any difference to me if she had.” He picked up his brandy glass and turned it on his palm. It seemed a largely meditative gesture.

Lynley watched the play of uncertainty on his face. He felt irritated at the delicacy with which the circumstances suggested he probe for the truth. He said, “I have the distinct impression that we’re caught between talking at cross purposes and engaging in outright prevarication. Perhaps you’d care to tell me what you’re holding back.”

In the silence, the distant sound of the jazz concert beat rhythmically against the windows in the room, the high wild notes of the trumpet improvising as Randie took another ride with the band. And then the drummer soloed. And then the melody resumed. When it did so, Victor Troughton raised his head, as if the music beckoned him to do so.

He said, “I was going to marry Elena. Frankly, I welcomed the opportunity to do so. But her baby wasn’t mine.”

“Wasn’t—”

“She didn’t know that. She thought I was the father. And I let her believe it. But I wasn’t, I’m afraid.”

“You sound certain of that.”

“I am, Inspector.” Troughton offered a smile of infinite sadness. “I had a vasectomy nearly three years ago. Elena didn’t know. And I didn’t tell her. I’ve never told anyone.”

Just outside the building in which Victor Troughton had his study and bedroom, a terrace overlooked the River Cam. It rose from the garden, partially hidden by a brick wall, and it held several planters of verduous shrubs and a few benches on which—during fine weather—members of the college could take the sun and listen to the laughter of those who tried their luck punting down the river towards the Bridge of Sighs. It was to this terrace that Lynley directed Lady Helen. Although he recognised his need to lay before her each singular realisation that the circumstances of the evening had forced upon him, he said nothing at the moment. Instead, he tried to give definition to what those realisations were causing him to feel.