For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(67)

“Don’t say her name! Don’t you say it!”

Mr. Beck said, “Let me leave you,” and without acknowledging Glyn’s immediate “No!” he hurried from the room.

Glyn continued to write. She clutched the pen like a weapon in her hand. “He said two hundred pounds, didn’t he?”

“Don’t do this,” Anthony said. “Don’t make this another battle between us.”

“She’ll wear that blue dress Mum got her last birthday.”

“We can’t bury her like a pauper. I won’t let you do it. I can’t.”

Glyn ripped the cheque from the book. She said, “Where’d that man get off to? Here’s his money. Let’s go.” She headed for the door.

Anthony reached for her arm.

She jerked away. “You bastard,” she hissed. “Bastard! Who brought her up? Who spent years trying to give her some language? Who helped her with her schoolwork and dried her tears and washed her clothes and sat up with her at night when she was puling and sick? Not you, you bastard. And not your ice queen wife. This is my daughter, Anthony. My daughter. Mine. And I’ll bury her exactly as I see fit. Because unlike you, I’m not hot after some big poncey job, so I don’t have to give a damn what anyone thinks.”

He examined her with sudden, curious dispassion, realising that he saw no evidence of grief. He saw no mother’s devotion to her child and nothing that illustrated the magnitude of loss. “This has nothing to do with burying Elena,” he said in slow but complete understanding. “You’re still dealing with me. I’m not sure you even care much that she’s dead.”

“How dare you,” she whispered.

“Have you even cried, Glyn? Do you feel any grief? Do you feel anything at all beyond the need to use her murder for a bit more revenge? And how can anyone be surprised by that? After all, that’s how you used most of her life.”

He didn’t see the blow coming. She slammed her right hand across his face, knocking his spectacles to the floor.

“You filthy piece of—” She raised her arm to strike again.

He caught her wrist. “You’ve waited years to do that. I’m only sorry you didn’t have the audience you’d have liked.” He pushed her away. She fell against the grey coffin. But she was not spent.

She spit out the words: “Don’t talk to me of grief. Don’t you ever—ever—talk to me of grief.”

She turned away from him, flinging her arms over the coffin lid as if she would embrace it. She began to weep.

“I have nothing. She’s gone. I can’t have her back. I can’t find her anywhere. And I can’t…I can never..” The fingers of one hand curled, pulling at the flannel that covered the coffin. “But you can. You still can, Anthony. And I want you to die.”

Even through his outrage, he felt the sudden stirring of a horrified compassion. After the years of their enmity, after these moments in the funeral home, he wouldn’t have believed it possible that he should feel anything for her save outright loathing. But in those words you can, he saw the extent and the nature of his former wife’s grief. She was forty-six years old. She could never have another child.

No matter that the thought of bringing another child into the world to take Elena’s place was beyond unthinkable, that he’d lost his reason for living the moment he’d looked on his daughter’s corpse. He’d spend the rest of his life in a ceaseless involvement in academic affairs so that he would never again have a free moment in which he might have to remember the ruin of her face and the mark of the ligature round her neck, but that was no more than a point of indifference. He could still have another child, whatever the wilderness of his current grief. He still had that choice. But Glyn did not. Her sorrow was doubled by the incontrovertible fact of her age.

He took a step towards her, placing his hand on her shuddering back. “Glyn, I’m—”

“Don’t you touch me!” She rolled away from him, lost her footing, and fell to one knee.

The flimsy flannel covering on the coffin tore. The wood was thin and vulnerable beneath it.



Heart pounding in both his chest and his ears, Lynley staggered to a halt within sight of Fen Causeway. He dug in his pocket for his watch. He flipped it open, panting, and checked the time. Seven minutes.

He shook his head, bent nearly double with his hands on his knees, wheezing like an undiagnosed case of emphysema. Less than a mile’s run and he felt completely done for. Sixteen years of cigarette smoking had taken its toll. Ten months of abstinence was not enough to redeem him.

He stumbled onto the worn wooden planks that bridged the stream between Robinson Crusoe’s Island and Sheep’s Green. He leaned against the metal rail, threw his head back, and gulped in air like a man saved from drowning. Sweat beaded his face and dampened his jersey. What a wonderful experience it was to run.

With a grunt, he turned to rest his elbows against the rail, letting his head hang while he caught his breath. Seven minutes, he thought, and not quite a mile. She would have run the same course in not much more than five.

There could be no doubt about it. She ran daily with her stepmother. She was a long-distance runner. She ran with the Cambridge cross country team. If her calendar was any indication of reality, she’d been running with the University Hare and Hounds as far back as last January and probably before. Depending on the distance she had planned to go that morning, her pacing might have been different. But he couldn’t imagine her taking any longer than ten minutes to run to the island, no matter the course she had intended to follow. That being the case, unless she stopped off somewhere along the route, she would have reached the site of her murder no later than six-twenty-five.