For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(108)

“Another bird from Hare and Hounds, they said.”

Melinda felt dizzy. She heard him ask, “You all right?” but she didn’t respond. Instead, with every sense numbed, she pushed her bicycle towards the door of Rosalyn Simpson’s staircase.

“She promised,” Melinda whispered to herself. And just for a moment the overwhelming nature of Rosalyn’s betrayal was even more devastating than was her death.

She hadn’t extracted the promise from her in bed when resolutions weaken in the face of desire. Nor had she engaged in a tear-filled confrontation in which she used Rosalyn’s past vulnerabilities as tools of successful manipulation. Instead, she had opted for discussion—trying to remain calm and to avoid falling into the panic and hysteria which she knew would drive Rosalyn away eventually if she didn’t learn to get it under control—and she urged her lover to consider the dangers of continuing to run while a killer was at large. She expected a fight, especially since she knew how much Rosalyn regretted the earlier impulsive promise that had led her to Oxford on Monday morning. But instead of an argument or even a refusal to discuss the issue, Rosalyn agreed. She wouldn’t run again until the killer was found. Or if she ran, she would not run alone.

They had parted at midnight. Still a couple, Melinda thought, still in love…Although they hadn’t made love as she had hoped they might in what she’d imagined all Tuesday would be a celebration of Rosalyn’s coming forward and admitting her sexual preference to the world. It hadn’t worked out that way. Rosalyn had pleaded exhaustion, speaking of an essay she had to work on and expressing a need to be alone in order to come to terms with Elena Weaver’s death. All an excuse, Melinda realised now, all part of the beginning of the end between them.

And didn’t it always happen that way? The initial rapture of love. The encounters, the hopes. The growing intimacy. A prayer for shared dreams. Joyful communication. And, ultimately, disappointment. She had thought that Rosalyn was going to be different. But it was obvious now. She was a liar and a cheat like all the rest.

Bitch, she thought. Bitch. You promised and you lied what else did you lie about who else did you sleep with did you sleep with Elena?

She leaned her bicycle against the wall—indifferent to the fact that the college rules explicitly required that she take it elsewhere—and elbowed her way into the crowd. She saw that one of the porters stood just inside the entry, barring the doorway to the curious and looking one part grim and one part angry and several other parts disgusted. Over the murmur of voices, she heard him say, “Shotgun. Blasted her direct in the face.”

And her anger dissolved as fast as it had come upon her, melted by the power of those seven simple words.

Shotgun. Blasted her direct in the face.

Melinda found that she was biting down on her wool-covered fingers. Instead of the porter standing in the doorway in Old Court, what she saw was Rosalyn, her face and body shattered, disintegrating before her, blowing away in a roar of gunpowder, shot, and blood. And then directly afterwards, in Rosalyn’s place grew the dreadful knowledge of who had to have done this and why and how her own life hung in the balance.

She searched the faces of the students round her, looking for the face that would be looking for hers. It wasn’t there. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t nearby, looking from a window, waiting to see her reaction to the death. He’d be resting a bit from the labours of the morning, but his every intention would be to see the job through to the end.

She felt her muscles coiling as her body reacted to her mind’s demand for flight. At the same time, she was acutely aware of the need for an ostensible show of calm. For if she turned and ran in full view of everyone—especially in full view of the watcher who was simply waiting for her to make her move—she was lost for a certainty.

Where to go, she wondered. God, God, where to go.

The crowd of students in which she stood began to part as a man’s voice said, “Step to one side, please.” And then, “Havers, make that call to London, will you?” And the blond man she had seen in Queens’ Lane shouldered his way through the whispering group in front of the door as his companion headed in the general direction of the junior combination room.

“Porter says it was a shotgun,” someone called out as the blond mounted the single step that gave entry to the building. In reaction, the man favoured the porter with a critical glance but he said nothing as he passed him and began climbing the stairs.

“Blew her guts out, I heard,” a spotty-faced young man said.

“No, it was her face,” someone replied.

“Raped first…”

“Tied up…”

“Both her tits cut off and—”

Melinda’s body sprang into action. She spun from the sound of the speculative voices and shoved her way blindly out of the crowd. If she was fast enough, if she didn’t pause to consider where she was going and how she was going to get there, if she scrambled to her room and grabbed a rucksack and some clothes and the money her mother had sent her for her birthday…

She dashed across the front of the building to the stairway on the right side of the southern turret. She pushed open the door and flew up the stairs. Scarcely breathing, scarcely thinking, she sought only escape.

Someone called her name when she hit the second landing, but she ignored the voice and continued to dash upward. There was her grandmother’s house in West Sussex, she thought. A great-uncle lived in Colchester, her brother in Kent. But none of them seemed safe enough, far enough away. None of them seemed capable of offering her the sort of protection she would need from a killer who seemed to know movements in advance of their being made, who seemed to know thoughts and plans in advance of their being given voice. He was, in fact, a killer who even now might be waiting…