For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(24)

He was, Lynley thought, so different from his wife. Dark, his body thickening at the waist with advancing middle age, his hair beginning to show strands of scattered grey, his skin creasing on the forehead and webbing beneath the eyes. He wore a three-piece suit and a pair of gold cufflinks, but despite his rather formal attire, he managed to seem completely out of place in the cool, crafted elegance that surrounded him.

“What can we tell you, Inspector?” Weaver’s voice was as unsteady as his hands. “Tell me what we can do to help. I need to know that. I need to find this monster. He strangled her. He beat her. Have they told you that? Her face was…She was wearing her gold chain with the little unicorn I’d given her last Christmas, so I knew it was Elena the moment I saw her. And even if she hadn’t been wearing the unicorn, her mouth was partly open and I saw her front tooth. I saw that much. I saw that tooth. The little chip in it. That tooth.”

Justine Weaver lowered her eyes and clasped her hands in her lap.

Weaver pulled his spectacles from his face. “God help me. I can’t believe that she’s dead.”

Despite his presence in their home as a professional come to deal with the crime, Lynley was not untouched by the other man’s anguish. How many times had he witnessed this very scene played out in the last thirteen years? And still he felt no more able to assuage grief than he had as a detective constable, facing his first interview with the hysterical adult daughter of a woman who’d been bludgeoned to death by her own, drunk husband. In every case, he’d allowed grief free rein, hoping by this means to offer victims the meagre solace of knowing that someone shared their need to see justice done.

Weaver continued to speak. As he did so, his eyes filled with tears. “She was tender. Fragile.”

“Because she was deaf?”

“No. Because of me.” When Weaver’s voice cracked, his wife looked his way, pressed her lips together, and once more lowered her eyes. “I left her mother when Elena was five, Inspector. You’re going to learn that eventually, so you may as well know it right now. She was in bed, asleep. I packed my bags and I left and I never went back. And I had no way to explain to a five-year-old child—who couldn’t even hear me—that I wasn’t leaving her, that it wasn’t her fault, that the marriage itself was so filled with unhappiness that I couldn’t bear to live in it any longer. And Glyn and I were at fault for that. Not Elena, never once Elena. But I was her father. I left her, betrayed her. And she struggled with that—and with the idea that somehow she was at fault—for the next fifteen years. Anger, confusion, lack of confidence, fear. Those were her demons.”

Lynley didn’t even need to formulate a question to guide Weaver’s discourse. It was as if the man had only been waiting for an appropriate opportunity for self-flagellation.

“She could have chosen Oxford—Glyn was determined she’d go to Oxford, she didn’t want her here with me—but Elena chose Cambridge instead. Can you know what that meant to me? All those years she’d been in London with her mother. I’d tried to be there for her as best I could, but she held me at a distance. She’d only let me be a father in the most superficial ways. Here was my chance to be a real father to her again, to mend our relationship, to bring to some sort of”—he searched for a word—“some sort of fulfillment the love I felt for her. And my greatest happiness was feeling the bond begin to grow between us over this last year and sitting here and watching while Justine helped Elena with her essays. When these two women…” He faltered. “These two women in my life…these two women together, Justine and Elena, my wife and my daughter…” And finally he allowed himself to weep. It was a man’s horrible, humiliated sobbing, one hand covering his eyes, the other clutching his spectacles.

Justine Weaver didn’t stir in her chair. She looked incapable of movement, carved out of stone. Then a single breath eased from her and she raised her eyes and fastened them on the bright, artificial fire.

“I understand Elena had difficulties in the University at first,” Lynley said as much to Justine as to her husband.

“Yes,” Justine said. “The adjustment for her…from her mother and London…to here…” She glanced uneasily at her husband. “It took a bit of time for her to—”

“How could she have made the change easily?” Weaver demanded. “She was struggling with her life. She was doing her best. She was trying to be whole.” He wiped his face with a crumpled handkerchief which afterwards he continued to grasp—crushed—in his hand. He placed his spectacles back on his nose. “But that didn’t matter. Not a bit of it to me. Because she was a joy. An innocent. A gift.”

“Her troubles didn’t cause you embarrassment, then? Professional embarrassment?”

Weaver stared at him. His expression altered in a single instant from ravaged sorrow to disbelief. Lynley found the sudden change disquieting, and despite the occasion for both grief and outrage, he found himself wondering if he was being entertained by a performance of some sort.

“My God,” Weaver said. “What are you suggesting?”

“I understand you’ve been short-listed for a rather prestigious position here at the University,” Lynley said.

“And what does that have to do with—”

Lynley leaned forward to interrupt. “My job is to obtain and evaluate information, Dr. Weaver. In order to do that, I have to ask questions you might otherwise prefer not to hear.”