For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(88)

Lynley started the Bentley, wound slowly through the streets of the housing estate, and began to evaluate the almost instant antipathy that had developed between Sergeant Havers and Lennart Thorsson. Havers’ instincts were generally sound when it came to hypocrisy in her fellow men, and she was anything but xenophobic. She hadn’t needed to see Thorsson’s home in suburbia to recognise the extent of his affectation. Her play upon Shakespeare earlier in the day indicated that. And Lynley knew her well enough to realise that, having ascertained that Thorsson had been missing from his home in the early hours of the previous day, she would be hot to give him the caution and pin him to the wall of one of Sheehan’s interrogation rooms upon her return to Cambridge in the morning. And that’s what would happen—that’s what solid policework dictated at this point—unless he came up with something else.

In spite of the manner in which their store of facts pointed ineluctably towards Thorsson, Lynley felt discomfited by the very neatness with which everything was falling into place. He knew from experience that murder was often an obviously cut-and-dried affair in which the likeliest suspect was indeed the perpetrator of the crime. But he also knew that some deaths grew from darker places in the soul and from motives far more convoluted than were suggested by the initial evidence. And as the facts and the faces from this particular case drifted in and out of his field of consciousness, he began to weigh the other possibilities, all of them darker than that which was defined by the mere need to dispose of a girl because she was pregnant:

Gareth Randolph, knowing that Elena had a lover, yet loving her all the time himself. Gareth Randolph, with a Ceephone in his office at DeaStu. Justine Weaver, recounting Elena’s sexual behaviour. Justine Weaver, with a Ceephone but without her own children. Adam Jenn, seeing Elena regularly at her father’s request, his own future tied in to Weaver’s promotion. Adam Jenn, with a Ceephone in Anthony Weaver’s study in Ivy Court. And everything peculiar about that study, most particularly Sarah Gordon’s brief visit to it Monday night.

He made the turn west and began the drive back into Cambridge, recognising the fact that, no matter the day’s revelations to the contrary, his mind kept returning to Sarah Gordon. She didn’t sit well with him.

You know why, Havers would have argued. You know why she keeps forcing her way into your thoughts. You know who she reminds you of.

He couldn’t deny it. Nor could he avoid admitting that at the end of the day when he was most exhausted, he was also most likely to lose the discipline that kept his mind focussed while he was at work. At the end of the day, he was most susceptible to anything and anyone that reminded him of Helen. This had been the case for nearly a year now. And Sarah Gordon was slender, she was dark, she was sensitive, she was intelligent, she was passionate. Still, he told himself, those qualities which she shared with Helen were not the only reasons why he returned to her at a moment when both motive and opportunity were affixing themselves squarely to Lennart Thorsson.

There were other reasons not to eliminate Sarah Gordon. Perhaps they were not as pressing as those which cast blame in Thorsson’s direction, but they still existed, nagging at the mind.

You’re talking yourself into it, Havers would have said. You’re building a case out of dust motes and lint.

But he wasn’t so sure.

He didn’t like coincidences in the midst of a murder investigation, and—Havers’ protests to the contrary—he couldn’t avoid seeing Sarah Gordon’s presence at the murder scene followed by her presence at Ivy Court that night as coincidental. More than that, he couldn’t get away from the fact that she knew Weaver. He had been her student—her private student. She had called him Tony.

Okay, so they were boffing each other, Havers would have continued. So they were doing it five nights a week. So they were doing it in every position known to mankind and in some they invented. So what, Inspector.

He wants the Penford Chair, Havers.

Ah, she would have crowed. Let me get this straight. Anthony Weaver stopped boffing Sarah Gordon—whom, of course, we don’t know whether he was boffing in the first place—because he was afraid that if anyone found out, he wouldn’t get the Chair. So Sarah Gordon killed his daughter. Not Weaver himself, who probably deserves to be put out of his misery if he’s such a gormless twit, but his daughter. Great. When did she do it? How did she carry it off? She wasn’t even on the island until seven in the morning and the girl was dead by then. Dead, Inspector, cold, out, kaput, dead. So why are you thinking about Sarah Gordon? Tell me, please, because this is making me nervous. We’ve walked the path before, you and I.

He couldn’t come up with an answer that Havers would find acceptable. She would argue that any exploration of Sarah Gordon at this point was, in fact or fantasy, a pursuit of Helen. She would not accept his essential curiosity about the woman. Nor would she allow for his uneasiness with coincidence.

But Havers wasn’t with him at the moment to argue against a course of action. He wanted to know more about Sarah Gordon, and he knew where to find someone with access to the facts. In Bulstrode Gardens.

How convenient, Inspector, Havers would have hooted.

But he made the right turn into Hills Road and dismissed his sergeant’s spectral presence.

He arrived at the house at half past eight. Lights were on in the sitting room, filtering through the curtains in lacy strands which fell upon the semi-circle of the drive and glanced off the silver metal of a child’s pantechnicon which lay on its side with one wheel missing. Lynley picked it up and rang the front bell.