For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(23)
“You’ll be wanting to see where we’ve put you, no doubt,” Cuff said politely. “Let me ring the porter.”
It was shortly after seven when Lynley rang the bell at Anthony Weaver’s home off Adams Road. With an expensive-looking metallic blue Citro?n parked in its drive, the house was not a great distance from St. Stephen’s College, so he had walked, crossing the river on the modern concrete and iron crescent of Garret Hostel Bridge and passing beneath the horse chestnut trees that littered Burrell’s Walk with enormous yellow leaves sodden with the fog. The occasional bicycle rider passed him, muffled against the cold in knit hat, scarf, and gloves, but otherwise the path that connected Queen’s Road with Grange Road was largely deserted. Lampposts provided sporadic illumination. Holly, fir, and box hedgerows—broken up by intermittent fencing that ran the gamut from wood to brick to iron—served as boundaries for the walk. Beyond them stood the russet mass of the University Library, into which shadowy figures scurried for last minutes of work prior to its closing.
The houses in Adams Road were all set behind hedges. Trees surrounded them, leafless silver birches that stood like pencil sketches against the fog, poplars whose bark displayed every variation of the colour grey, alders not yet offering their leaves to the coming winter. It was quiet here. Only the gurgle of water pouring into an outdoor drain broke into the stillness. The night air was tinged with the friendly fragrance of wood-smoke, but at the Weaver house the only scent outdoors came from the dampening wool of Lynley’s own overcoat.
It was largely no different inside.
The door was opened by a tall, blonde woman with a face of chiselled, refined composure. She looked far too young to be Elena’s mother, and she didn’t appear particularly struck by grief. Lynley thought, as he looked at her, that he’d never seen anyone with such perfect posture. Every limb, bone, and muscle seemed locked into position, as if an unseen hand had arranged her stance at the door just moments before he knocked upon it.
“Yes.” She said it as a statement, not a question. No part of her face moved other than her lips.
He produced his warrant card, introduced himself, and asked to see the dead girl’s parents.
At this the woman stepped back from the door. She said only, “I’ll fetch Anthony,” and left him standing on the bronze and peach Oriental carpet of a parquet-floored entrance hall. To his left a door opened into a sitting room. To his right a glass-enclosed morning room held a wicker table that was set with linen and china for breakfast.
Lynley took off his overcoat, laid it over the polished handrail of the stairway, and went into the sitting room. He paused, feeling unaccountably put off by what he saw. Like the hall, the sitting room was floored in parquet, and like the hall the parquet was covered with an Oriental carpet. On it sat grey leather furniture—a sofa, two chairs, and a chaise longue—and tables with pedestals of peach-veined marble and tops of glass. The watercolours on the walls had obviously been chosen, mounted, and framed to match the room’s colour scheme, and they hung precisely centred over the sofa: the first, a bowl of apricots on a windowsill behind which shone a sky of robin’s egg blue and the second, a slim grey vase of salmon-coloured oriental poppies with three blooms fallen to the ivory surface upon which the vase stood. Both of them were signed with the single word Weaver. Either husband, wife, or daughter had an interest in art. A slender glass tea table against one wall held an arrangement of silk tulips. Next to this was a single copy of Elle and a photograph in a silver frame. Other than these last two objects and the watercolours, there was nothing in the room to indicate that anyone actually lived in it. Lynley wondered what the rest of the house was like, and walked to the tea table to look at the photograph. It was a wedding portrait, perhaps ten years old, judging from the length of Weaver’s hair. And the bride—looking solemn and celestial and surprisingly young—was the woman who had just answered the door.
“Inspector?” Lynley turned from his perusal of the picture as the dead girl’s father came into the room. He walked quite slowly. “Elena’s mother is asleep upstairs. Shall I wake her for you?”
“She’s taken a pill, darling.” Weaver’s wife had come to the doorway where she hesitated, one hand touching the silver lily pinned to the lapel of her jacket.
“I’ve no need to see her at the moment if she’s asleep,” Lynley said.
“The shock,” Weaver said and added unnecessarily, “She’s just come up from London this afternoon.”
“Shall I make coffee?” Weaver’s wife asked. She’d ventured no further into the room.
“Nothing for me,” Lynley said.
“Nor for me. Thank you, Justine. Darling.” Weaver smiled at her briefly—the effort it cost him rode directly on the surface of the behaviour itself—and he held out a hand to indicate that she was to join them. She entered the sitting room. Weaver went to the fireplace where he lit a gas fire beneath an artful arrangement of artificial coals. “Please sit down, Inspector.”
As Weaver himself chose one of the two leather chairs and his wife took the other, Lynley observed the man who had lost his daughter that day and saw in him the subtleties that illustrate the manner in which men are permitted to face before strangers the worst of their grief. Behind his thick wire-rimmed spectacles, his brown eyes were blood-shot, with crescents of red lining their lower lids. His hands—rather small for a man of his height—trembled when he gestured, and his lips, which were partially obscured by a dark, clipped moustache, quivered as he waited for Lynley to speak.