For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(135)

“Never mind,” Glyn said. “I know why you hide them.” She went to stand behind him. She spoke near his ear. “How many years have you lived like this, Anthony? Ten? Twelve? How on earth have you managed?”

His head lowered. She studied the back of his neck, remembering unexpectedly how soft his hair was and how, when overlong, it curled like a child’s against his skin. It was greying now, with scattered strands like white threads woven against black.

“What did she hope to gain? Elena was your daughter. She was your only child. What on earth did she hope to gain?”

His reply was a whisper. He spoke as if answering someone not in the room. “She wanted to hurt me. There was nothing else she could do to make me understand.”

“Understand? What?”

“How it felt to be devastated. How I’d devastated her. Through cowardice. Selfishness. Egocentricity. But mostly through cowardice. You want the Penford Chair only for your ego, she said. You want a beautiful house and a beautiful wife and a daughter who’ll be your marionette. So that people will look at you with admiration and envy. So that people will say the lucky bloke’s got it all. But you don’t have it all. You have practically nothing. You have less than nothing. Because what you have is a lie. And you don’t even have the courage to admit it.”

A sudden fist of knowledge squeezed at Glyn’s heart as the full meaning of his words slowly dawned upon her, even though he spoke them in a fugue. “You could have prevented it. If only you’d given her what she wanted. Anthony, you could have stopped her.”

“I couldn’t. I had to think of Elena. She was here in Cambridge, in this home, with me. She was starting to come round, to be free with me at last, to let me be her father. I couldn’t run the risk of losing her again. I couldn’t take the chance. And I thought I would lose her if I—”

“You lost her anyway!” she cried, shaking his arm. “She’s not going to walk through that door. She’s not going to say Dad, I understand, I forgive you, I know you did your best. She’s gone. She’s dead. And you could have prevented it.”

“If she had a child, she might have understood what it felt like to have Elena here. She might have known why I couldn’t face the thought of doing anything that might have resulted in losing her again. I’d lost her once. How could I face that agony again? How could she expect me to face it?”

Glyn saw that he wasn’t really responding to her. He was ruminating. He was speaking in tongues. Behind a barrier that shielded him from the worst of the truth, he was talking in a canyon where an echo exists, but throws back different words. Suddenly, she felt the same degree of anger towards him that she’d felt during the worst years of their marriage when she’d greeted his blind pursuit of his career with pursuits of her own, waiting for him to notice the late nights she was keeping, wanting him to notice the nature of the bruises on her neck, her breasts, and her thighs, anticipating the moment when he would finally speak, when he’d give an indication that he really did care.

“This is all about you, isn’t it?” she asked him. “It always has been. Even having Elena here in Cambridge was for your benefit, not for herself. Not for her education, but to make you feel better, to give you what you want.”

“I wanted to give her a life. I wanted us to have a life together.”

“How would that have been possible? You didn’t love her, Anthony. You only loved yourself. You loved your image, your reputation, your wonderful accomplishments. You loved being loved. But you didn’t love her. And even now you can stand here and look at your daughter’s death and think about how you caused it and how you feel about it now and how devastated you are and what kind of statement it all makes about you. But you won’t do anything about any of it, will you, you won’t make any declaration, you won’t take any stand. Because how might that reflect upon you?”

Finally, he looked at her. The rims of his eyes appeared bloody and sore. “You don’t know what happened. You don’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly. You plan to bury your dead, lick your wounds, and go on. You’re as much a coward as you were fifteen years ago. You ran out on her then in the middle of the night. You’ll run out on her now. Because it’s the easiest thing to do.”

“I didn’t run out on her,” he said carefully. “I stood firm this time, Glyn. That’s why she died.”

“For you? Because of you?”

“Yes. Because of me.”

“The sun rises and sets on the same horizon in your world. It always has.”

He shook his head. “Perhaps once,” he said. “But it only sets now.”





21





Lynley pulled the Bentley into a vacant space at the southwest corner of the Cambridge police station. He stared at the vaguely discernible shape of the glass-encased notice board in front of the building, feeling drained. Next to him, Havers fidgeted in her seat. She began to flip through her notebook. He knew she was reading what she’d just recorded from Rosalyn Simpson.

“It was a woman,” the Queens’ undergraduate had said.

She had walked them along the same route she had taken early Monday morning, through the thick, dun, cotton wool of fog in Laundress Lane where the open door to the Asian Studies Faculty shot a meagre light out into the gloom. Once someone slammed it shut, however, the mist seemed impenetrable. The universe became confined to the twenty square feet which comprised the boundary of what they could see.