For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(139)

“And this,” Glyn said. “It was wrapped up in the canvas when I first unrolled it.”

She slapped into his hand a small brass plaque—perhaps two inches long and three quarters of an inch wide. He took it from his palm and held it to the light, knowing what it was that he would likely see. ELENA was engraved in fine script across it.

He looked up at Glyn Weaver and saw the exultant pleasure she was taking from the moment. He knew she was expecting him to comment upon the nature of the motive she’d just presented him. Instead, he asked, “Has Justine gone running while you’ve been in Cambridge?”

This didn’t seem to be the response she expected from him. But she answered well enough although her eyes narrowed with sharp suspicion as she did so. “Yes.”

“In a tracksuit?”

“Well, she wasn’t exactly dressed by Coco Chanel.”

“What colour, Mrs. Weaver?”

“Colour?” With a hint of outrage that he wasn’t keying into the ruined painting and what it implied.

“Yes. The colour.”

“It was black.”



“So just how much more proof do you want that Justine hated my daughter?” Glyn Weaver had followed him out of the breakfast room, leaving behind the smell of old eggs, tuna, butter, and crisps vying with one another in the air for domination. “What’s it going to take to convince you? How much more proof?”

She’d put a hand on his arm and pulled on him till he faced her, standing so close that he could feel her breath on his face and could smell the oily odour of fish each time she exhaled. “He sketched Elena, not his wife. He painted Elena, not his wife. Imagine watching that. Imagine hating each moment as it was going on before your eyes. Right here in this morning room. Because the light’s good here, and he would have wanted to paint her in light that was good.”

Lynley turned the Bentley into Bulstrode Gardens where the street-lamps did not so much cut through the mist as merely colour the top layer of it gold while the rest remained a mass of wet grey. He pulled directly into the semi-circular drive, through a mat of damp leaves fallen and blown from the stand of slim birches at the edge of the property. Without taking particular note of it, he gazed at the house before getting out of the car, considering the nature of the evidence he had with him, reflecting upon the sketches of Elena and what they suggested about the ruined canvas, thinking of the Ceephone, and, above all, playing with time. For it was time upon which the entire case hung.

She would have obliterated the image first and, taking no real or lasting satisfaction in that, she would have moved on to the girl herself second, Glyn Weaver had asserted. She would have pounded her face just as she’d hacked and stabbed at the painting, brutalising and destroying, living out her rage.

But most of that constituted hopeful conjecture, Lynley thought. Only part of it skirted close to the truth. He tucked the canvas under his arm and went to the door.

Harry Rodger answered, Christian and Perdita at his heels. He said only, “It’s Pen you want?” to Lynley’s request, and then to his son, “Go fetch Mummy, Chris.”

When the little boy scampered up the stairway to do so, shouting “Mummy!” and bashing the worn head of a hobbyhorse against the balusters with additional cries of “Ker-blowey, Ker-blew!” Rodger nodded Lynley into the sitting room. He swung his daughter onto his hip and glanced without speaking at the canvas beneath Lynley’s arm. Perdita curled herself against her father’s chest.

Above them Christian’s footsteps thumped along the upstairs corridor. His hobbyhorse banged against the wall. “Mummy!” Small fists pounded on a door.

“You’ve brought her some work, haven’t you?” Rodger’s words were polite, his face deliberately impassive.

“I’d like her to look at this, Harry. I need her expertise.”

The other man’s lips offered a brief smile, one which accepted information without indicating that it was at all welcome. He said, “Excuse me, please,” and he walked into the kitchen, shutting the door behind him.

A moment later, Christian preceded both his mother and his aunt into the sitting room. Somewhere in his sojourn through the house, he’d picked up a totsized vinyl holster, and he was wrestling it inexpertly round his waist, its companion toy gun dangling to his knees. “I shoot you, mister,” he said to Lynley, dragging on the gun’s handle and knocking himself into Lady Helen’s legs in his effort to get it out. “I shoot, Auntie Leen.”

“Those aren’t the wisest words to say to a policeman, Chris.” Lady Helen knelt in front of him, and saying, “Don’t be such a wiggle-worm,” she fastened the holster round his waist.

He giggled and shouted, “Ker-blang you, mister!” and ran to the sofa where he beat the pistol against the pillows.

“If nothing else, he has a fine future in crime,” Lynley noted.

Penelope raised both hands in futility. “It’s nearly his naptime. He gets a bit wild when he’s tired.”

“I’d hate to think what he’s like when he’s fully awake.”

“Ker-plough!” Christian yelled. He rolled onto the floor and began crawling in the direction of the hall, making shooting noises and taking aim at imaginary foes.

Penelope watched him and shook her head. “I’ve considered sedating him until his eighteenth birthday, but what would I do for laughs?” As Christian began an assault on the stairway, she said with a nod towards the canvas, “What have you brought?”