For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(109)
At the top floor she paused outside her door, recognising the potential danger that lay within. Her bowels were loosening, and tears were eating at the back of her eyes. She listened at the smudged white panels of the door, but the recessed shape of them did nothing more than act as amplifiers for her own torn breathing.
She wanted to run, she needed to hide. But she had to have that cache of money to do either.
“Jesus,” she whispered. “Oh God, oh God.”
She would reach for the doorknob. She would fling the door open. If the killer was there she would scream like a banshee.
She filled her lungs with enough air to do the job right and thrust her shoulder against the door. It flew open. It crashed back against the wall. It left her with an unimpeded view of the room. Rosalyn’s body was lying on her bed.
Melinda began to scream.
Glyn Weaver positioned herself just to the left of the window in her daughter’s bedroom and flicked the sheer material away from the glass so that she could have an unimpaired glimpse of the front lawn. The Irish setter was gambolling there, yelping joyfully in expectation of a run. He was circling frantically round Justine who had changed into a tracksuit and running shoes and who was bending and stretching through a series of warm-ups. She’d taken the dog’s lead outside with her, and Townee scooped it up from the lawn on one of his passes by her. He carried it like a banner. He cavorted and pranced.
Elena had sent her a dozen pictures of the dog: as a furry baby curled into her lap asleep, a long-legged pup rooting for his gifts beneath the Christmas tree in her father’s house, a sleek adolescent leaping over a dry-stone wall. On the back of each she had written Townee’s age—six weeks, two days; four months, eight days; ten months today!—like an indulgent mother. Glyn wondered if she would have done the same for the baby she’d carried or if Elena would have opted for abortion. A baby, after all, was different from a dog. And no matter her reasons for getting herself pregnant—and Glyn knew her daughter well enough to realise that Elena’s pregnancy had probably been a calculated act—Elena was not so much the fool as to believe her life would be unchanged as a result of bringing a child into it. Children always altered one’s existence in unaccountable ways, and their unwavering devotion could hardly be relied upon as could a dog’s. They took and took and rarely gave. And only the most selfless sort of adult could continually enjoy the sensation of being drained of every resource and bled of every dream.
And for what reward? Just the nebulous hope that this lovely creature—this complete individual over whom one had absolutely no control—would somehow not make the same mistakes, repeat the same patterns, or know the same pain that the parents had lived through and inflicted on each other.
Outside, Justine was tying back her hair at the nape of her neck. Glyn took note of the fact that to do so she used a scarf that matched both the colour of her tracksuit and the colour of her shoes. Idly, she wondered if Justine ever left the house in anything less than a complete ensemble, and she chuckled at the sight of her. Even if one wished to criticise the fact that Justine chose to go exercising just two days after her stepdaughter’s murder, one certainly couldn’t condemn her for her choice of colour. It was thoughtfully appropriate.
Such a hypocrite, Glyn thought, her lower lip curling. She turned from the sight of her.
Justine had left the house without a word, sleek and cool and utterly patrician, but no longer as controlled as she liked to be. Their confrontation this morning in the breakfast room had taken care of that, with the real woman smoked out from beneath the guise of dutiful hostess and professor’s perfect wife. So now she would run, to tone up that lovely, seductive body, to work up a fragrant rose-scented sweat.
But it was more than that. She had to run now. And she had to hide. Because the fact beneath the fiction that was Justine Weaver had finally been revealed in the breakfast room in that fleeting moment when her normally guileless, butter-wouldn’t-melt features became rigid with the culpability that lay beneath them. The truth was out.
She had hated Elena. And now that she was off for her run, Glyn was ready to search out the evidence which would prove that Justine’s facade of well-bridled feelings skilfully hid the desperation of a killer.
Outside the house, she heard the dog barking, a happy sound of excitement that rapidly faded towards Adams Road. They were off, the two of them. Whatever time she had until Justine’s return, Glyn was determined to use every moment.
She bustled to the master bedroom with its sleek Danish furniture and shapely brass lamps. She went to the long, low chest and began opening drawers.
“Georgina Higgins-Hart.” The weasel-faced constable squinted at his notebook, the cover of which bore a stain that looked suspiciously like pizza sauce. “A member of Hare and Hounds. Working on an M.Phil. in Renaissance Literature. Newcastle girl.” He snapped the notebook closed. “President of the College and the senior tutor had no trouble identifying the body, Inspector. They’ve both known her since she came up to Cambridge three years back.”
The constable stood posted outside the closed door of the girl’s bed-sitting room. He was positioned like a guard, legs spread and arms folded across his chest, and his expression—flickering indecisively between smug judgement and outright derision—indicated the degree to which he considered the inadequacies of New Scotland Yard CID responsible for this latest Cambridge killing.