For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(125)

“So you’d found that resilient flesh you’d been seeking,” Lady Helen said. Cool condemnation comprised the undercurrent of the statement.

Troughton didn’t avoid admitting the worst. “I found it. Yes. But not the way I thought. I didn’t count on falling in love. I thought it would just be sex between us. Good, vigorous sex anytime we felt the urge. We were, after all, serving each other’s needs.”

“In what way?”

“She was accommodating my need to savour her youth and perhaps recapture a bit of my own. I was accommodating her need to hurt her father.” He poured himself more brandy and added to the other glasses as well. He looked from Lynley to Lady Helen as if gauging on their faces a response to his final statement. He went on with, “As I said, Inspector, I’m not a complete fool.”

“Perhaps you’re judging yourself too harshly.”

Troughton placed the bottle on the table next to his chair and drank deeply of the brandy, saying, “Not at all. Look at the facts. I’m forty-seven years old and on the downhill plunge. She was twenty, surrounded by hundreds of young men with their entire lives ahead of them. Why on earth would she decide to set her sights on me unless she knew it was the perfect way to strike out at her father? And it was perfect, after all. To choose one of his colleagues—indeed, to choose one of his friends. To choose a man who was even older than her father. To choose a man who was married. To choose a man with children. I couldn’t actually delude myself with the idea that Elena wanted me because she found me more attractive than any other man she knew, and I never did so. I knew from the first what she had in mind.”

“The scandal we were speaking of earlier?”

“Anthony always had too much of himself tied into Elena’s performance here in Cambridge. He involved himself in every aspect of her life. How she acted and dressed, how she took notes in her lectures, how she comported herself in her supervisions. These were weighty matters to him. I think he believed that he would be judged—as a man, a parent, an academic even—dependent upon her success or failure here.”

“Was the Penford Chair tied into all this?”

“In his mind, I should think so. In reality, no.”

“But if he thought judgement of himself was going to be connected to Elena’s performance and behaviour—”

“Then he would want to see to it that she performed and behaved as the daughter of a respected professor should. Elena knew that. She could sense that attitude in everything her father did, and she resented him for it. So you can imagine the vast and—to Elena—amusing possibilities for his humiliation and her revenge when it became known that his daughter was having it off on a regular basis with one of his close colleagues.”

“Didn’t you mind being used in this way?”

“I was living every fantasy I’d ever entertained about making love to a woman and having a woman make love to me. We met at least three times a week from Christmas on and I loved every moment of it. I didn’t care about her motives in the least as long as she kept coming round to see me and taking off her clothes.”

“You met here, then?”

“Generally. I managed to get to London several times during the summer break to see her as well. And on a few weekend afternoons and evenings at her father’s house during term.”

“When he was home?”

“Only once, during a party. She found that particularly exciting.” He shrugged although his cheeks had begun to flush. “I found it rather exciting as well. I suppose it was the sheer terror of thinking we might be caught going at it.”

“But you weren’t?”

“Never. Justine knew—she’d found out somehow, she may well have guessed or Elena may have told her—but she never actually caught us in the act.”

“She never told her husband?”

“She wouldn’t have wanted to bear that sort of witness against Elena, Inspector. As far as Anthony was concerned, it would have been a case of kill the messenger, and Justine knew that better than anyone. So she held her tongue. I imagine she was waiting for Anthony to find things out on his own.”

“Which he never did.”

“Which he never did.” Troughton shifted his position in his chair, crossing one leg over the other and pulling out his cigarette case once again. He merely played it from hand to hand, however. He didn’t open it. “Of course, he would have been told eventually.”

“By you?”

“No. I imagine Elena would have wanted that pleasure.”

Lynley found it hard to believe that Troughton had no conscience in the matter of Elena. He had obviously felt no need to guide her. He had seen no necessity for urging her to deal with her resentment towards her father in another way. “But, Dr. Troughton, what I don’t understand is—”

“Why I went along with the game?” Troughton set the cigarette case next to the balloon glass. He studied the picture they made, side by side. “Because I loved her. At first it was her body—the incredible sensation of holding and touching that beautiful body. But then it was her. Elena. She was wild and ungovernable, laughing and alive. And I wanted that in my life. I didn’t care about the cost.”

“Even if it meant posing as the father of her child?”