For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(121)

“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.”