For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(32)

“Hmmm. Well. D’you want a coffee or something? I expect you want to talk. The buttery’s still open. Or we could go to my room.” Despite the casual sound of the latter invitation, Miranda’s cheeks coloured. “I mean if you want to talk privately. You know.”

Lynley smiled. “Your room.”

She struggled into a huge pea jacket—tossing a “Ta, Inspector” over her shoulder when he helped her get it on—wrapped a scarf round her neck, and picked up her trumpet case. She said, “Right. Come on, then. I’m over in New Court,” and headed down the aisle.

Instead of crossing Chapel Court and using the formal passageway between the east and south buildings—“These’re called the Randolph digs,” Miranda informed him. “After the architect. Ugly, aren’t they?”—she led him along the arcade and into a doorway at its north end. They went up a short flight of stairs, down a corridor, through a fire door, down another corridor, through another fire door, down another flight of stairs. All the time Miranda talked.

“I don’t know yet how I feel about what’s happened to Elena,” she said. It sounded like a discourse she’d been having with herself most of the day. “I keep thinking I should feel outrage or anger or grief, but so far I’ve not felt anything at all. Except guilty for not feeling what I ought to feel and sort of disgustingly self-important now that Daddy’s involved—through you, of course—and that puts me ‘in the know.’ How despicable really. I’m a Christian, aren’t I? Shouldn’t I mourn her?” She didn’t wait for Lynley to reply. “You see, the essential problem is that I can’t quite grasp that Elena’s dead. I didn’t see her last night. I didn’t hear her leave this morning. That’s a fair description of how we lived on a regular basis anyway, so everything seems perfectly normal to me. Perhaps if I had been the one to find her, or if she’d been killed in her room and our bedder had found her and come screaming in to get me—kind of like a film, you know?—I would have seen and known and been moved somehow. It’s the absence of feeling that’s worrying me. Am I turning to stone? Don’t I even care?”

“Were you particularly close to her?”

“That’s just it. I should have been closer than I was. I should have made a bigger effort. I’ve known her since last year.”

“But she wasn’t a friend?”

Miranda paused at the doorway that led out of the north Randolph building and into New Court. She wrinkled her nose. “I wasn’t a runner,” she said obscurely, and shoved open the door.

A terrace overlooked the river to their left. A cobbled path to their right ran between the Randolph building and a lawn. An enormous sweet chestnut tree stood in the lawn’s centre, beyond which loomed the horseshoe-shaped building that comprised New Court, three storeys of blazing Gothic revival decorated with two-centred cusp windows, arched doorways whose doors wore heavy iron studs, battlements on the roofline, and a steepled tower. Although it was constructed from the same ashlar stone as the Randolph building which it faced, it could not have been stylistically more dissimilar.

“It’s this way,” Miranda said, and led him along the path to the southeast corner of the building. There, winter jasmine was growing enthusiastically up the walls. Lynley caught its sweet fragrance the instant before Miranda opened a door next to which the discreet letter L was carved into a small block of stone.

They went up two flights of stairs at Miranda’s quick pace. Her room was one of two bed-sitting rooms that faced each other on a short corridor, sharing a gyp room, a shower, and a toilet.

Miranda paused in the gyp room to fill a kettle and put it on to boil. “It’ll have to be instant,” she said with a little grimace. “But I’ve a bit of whisky and we can tart it up with that if you like. As long as you don’t tell Mummy.”

“That you’ve taken to drink?”

She rolled her eyes. “That I’ve taken to anything. Unless it’s a man. You can tell her what you’d like about that. Make up something good. Put me in a black lace negligee. It’ll give her hope.” She laughed and went to the door of her room. She’d wisely locked it, he noted with approval. She wasn’t the only daughter of a superintendent of police for nothing.

“I see you’ve managed to snare yourself deluxe accommodations,” he said as they entered, and indeed by Cambridge standards she had. For the bed-sit comprised two rooms, not one: a small inner chamber where she slept; a larger outer chamber for sitting. This latter was capacious enough to accommodate two undersized sofas and a small walnut dining table that acted as substitute for a desk. There was a bricked-in fireplace in one corner of the room and an oak window seat overlooking Trinity Passage Lane. On the seat itself a wire cage stood. Lynley went to inspect the tiny prisoner who was engaged in running furiously on a squeaking exercise wheel.

Miranda set her trumpet case next to the armchair and dumped her coat nearby. She said, “That’s Titbit,” and went to the fireplace to fiddle with an electric fire.

Lynley looked up from removing his own coat. “Elena’s mouse?”

“When I heard what happened, I fetched him from her room. It seemed the right thing to do.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. Perhaps…a bit after two.”