For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(86)

“I should think it was quite a scene between you,” Melinda was saying with a knowing smile. “Lots of weeping, lots of hair pulling, lots of gnashing of teeth, the requisite blame, not to mention the predictions of hell-fire and damnation. The typical middle-class thing. Poor darling, did they abuse you?”

Melinda, Rosalyn knew, had told her own family when she was seventeen in a matter-of-fact, take-it-or-leave-it announcement so typical of her, made during Christmas dinner, sometime between the crackers and the pudding. Rosalyn had heard the story often enough: “Oh, by the way, I’m gay if anyone’s particularly interested.” They hadn’t been. But that was the sort of family Melinda had. So she couldn’t imagine what it was like to be the only child of parents who dreamed among other things of a son-in-law and grandchildren and the fragile line of a family continuing into the future for just a bit longer.

“Did your mum push every guilt button there is? She probably did, and I hope you expected it. I did tell you how to answer when she trotted out the ‘what about us’ line, didn’t I? And if you used it properly, then she must have—”

“I really don’t want to talk about it, Mel,” Rosalyn said. She knelt on the floor, unzipped the haversack, and began unpacking it. Her mother’s “goodies from home” she set to one side.

“They really must have gone after you, then. I told you to let me go with you. Why didn’t you let me? I could have held my own with both of your parents.” She squatted next to Rosalyn. She smelled fresh and clean. “They didn’t…Ros, they didn’t get physical with you, did they? God, your dad didn’t hit you?”

“Of course not. Look, I just don’t want to talk about it. That’s it, all right? It’s nothing more than that.”

Melinda rested back on her heels. She shoved a thick mass of hair behind one ear. She said, “You’re sorry you did it, aren’t you? I can tell.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. It had to be done, but you were hoping you could avoid it forever. You were hoping they’d just eventually think you’d become an old maid, weren’t you? You didn’t want to take a stand. You didn’t want to come out.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Or maybe you’ve been hoping to take the cure. Wake up some morning and whoopee, you’re straight. Shove Melinda out of bed and make room for some bloke. Mum and Dad wouldn’t ever know anything then.”

Rosalyn looked up. She could see the bright shining in Melinda’s eyes and the high gloss of colour in her cheeks. It always amazed her that someone so clever and beautiful could also be someone so unsure and afraid.

She said, “I’m not planning on leaving you, Mel.”

“You’d like a man, wouldn’t you?” Melinda said. “If you could have one. If you could go straight. You’d like it. You’d prefer it. Wouldn’t you?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Rosalyn asked. She felt terribly weary.

Melinda laughed. The sound was high and giddy. “Men have only one use and we don’t even need them for that any longer. Just find a donor and inseminate yourself at home in the loo. They’re doing it, you know. I read about it somewhere. In a few more centuries, we’ll be generating sperm in laboratories and men as we know them will be completely extinct.”

Rosalyn knew it was wiser to say nothing when Melinda felt the spectre of abandonment hovering round her too closely. But she was tired. She was disheartened. She had just endured a marathon session of guilt with her parents largely to please her lover, and she was feeling as most people feel when they have been manipulated into acting in a fashion they might otherwise eschew: resentful. So she replied, against her better judgement:

“I don’t hate men, Melinda. I never have. If you do, that’s your problem. But it’s not one of mine.”

“Oh, they’re peachy, men are. They’re real bricks, the lot of them.” Melinda got to her feet and went to Rosalyn’s desk. From it she took a bright orange piece of paper, waved it, and said, “These are all over the University today. I saved one for you. This is what men are all about, Ros. Take a look if you like them so much.”

“What is it?”

“Just look.”

Rosalyn pushed herself to her feet, and, rubbing her shoulders where the haversack had dug into them, she took the piece of paper from Melinda. It was a hand-out, she saw. And then she saw the name in large black letters underneath a grainy photograph: Elena Weaver. And then another word: Murdered.

A cold chill zig-zagged the length of her spine. She said, “Melinda, what is this?”

“What’s been going on round here while you and Mum and Dad were nattering in Oxford.”

Numbly, Rosalyn carried the paper to her old rocking chair. She stared at the picture, at the face so familiar to her, at the grin, the chipped tooth, the long flow of hair. Elena Weaver. Her chief competitor. She ran like a god.

“She’s in Hare and Hounds,” Rosalyn said. “Melinda, I know her. I’ve been to her room. I’ve—”

“Knew her, you mean.” Melinda snatched the paper back, crumpled it, and tossed it into the rubbish basket.

“Don’t throw it away! Let me see it! What happened?”

“She was out running by the river early yesterday morning. Someone got her near the island.”