“Why?”
“Because I
“Rights to speak ill of this particular dead?”
“If you will.”
“You didn’t like Elena. That’s obvious enough. But all things considered, you’re hardly in a unique situation. No doubt you’re one of millions of women who don’t much care for the children they’ve been saddled with through a second marriage.”
“Children who generally aren’t murdered, Inspector.”
“The stepmother’s secret hope transformed into reality?” He saw the answer in her instinctive shrinking away from him as he asked the question. Quietly, he said, “It’s no crime, Mrs. Weaver. And you’re not the first person to have your blackest wish granted beyond your wildest dreams.”
She left the tea table abruptly and walked to the sofa, where she sat. Not leaning back against it, not sinking into it, but perched on the edge with her hands in her lap and her back like a rod. She said, “Please sit down, Inspector Lynley.” When he did so, taking a place in the leather armchair that faced the sofa, she continued. “All right. I knew that Elena was”-she seemed to be searching for an appropriate euphemism-“sexual.”
“Sexually active?” And when she nodded, pressing her lips together as if with the intention of smoothing out the salmon lipstick she wore, Lynley said, “Did she tell you?”
“It was obvious. I could smell it on her. When she had sex she didn’t always bother with washing herself afterwards, and it’s a rather distinctive odour, isn’t it?”
“You didn’t counsel her? Your husband didn’t speak to her?”
“About her hygiene?” Justine’s expression was mildly, if only distantly, amused. “I think Anthony preferred to remain oblivious of what his nose was telling him.”
“And you?”
“I tried to talk to her several times. At fi rst I thought that she might not be aware of how she ought to be taking care of herself. I also thought it might be wise to find out if she was taking precautions against pregnancy. Frankly, I’d never got the impression that she and Glyn engaged in many mother-daughter conversations.”
“She didn’t want to talk to you, I take it?”
“On the contrary, she did talk. In fact, she was rather entertained by what I had to say. She informed me that she’d been on the pill since she was fourteen years old when she began fucking-her word, Inspector, not mine-the father of one of her school friends. Whether that’s true or not, I have no idea. As to her personal hygiene, Elena knew all about how to take care of herself. She went unwashed deliberately. She wanted people to know she was having sex. Particularly, I think, she wanted her father to know.”
“What gave you that impression?”
“There were times when she’d come by quite late and we were still up and she’d hang on her father and hug him and press her cheek against his and rub up against him and all the time she was reeking like…” Justine’s fi ngers felt for her wedding band.
“Was she trying to arouse him?”
“I thought so at first. Who wouldn’t have thought so with her carrying on like that? But then I began to think that she merely was trying to rub his face in normal.”
It was a curious expression. “An act of defi ance?”
“No. Not at all. An act of compliance.” She must have seen the next query on his face, for she went on with, “I’m being normal, Daddy. See how normal I am? I’m partying and drinking and having regular sex. Isn’t this what you wanted? Didn’t you want a normal child?”
Lynley saw how her words reaffi rmed the picture which Terence Cuff had painted obliquely on the previous night about Anthony Weaver’s relationship with his daughter. “I know he didn’t want her to sign,” Lynley said. “But as for the rest-”
“Inspector, he didn’t want her to be deaf. Nor did Glyn, for that matter.”
“Elena knew this?”
“How could she help knowing? They’d spent her entire life trying to shape her into a normal woman, the very thing she could never hope to be.”
“Because she was deaf.”
“Yes.” For the first time, Justine’s posture altered. She leaned forward fractionally to make her point. “Deaf- isn’t-normal- Inspector.” She waited for a moment before going on, looking as if she were gauging his reaction. And he did feel the reaction course swiftly through him. It was an aversion of the sort he always felt when someone made a comment that was xenophobic, homophobic, or racist.
“You see,” she said, “you want to make her normal as well. You even want to call her normal and condemn me for daring to suggest that being deaf is different. I can see it on your face: Deaf is as normal as anything else. Which is exactly what Anthony wanted to think. So you can’t really judge him, can you, for wanting to describe his daughter in the very same way as you’ve just done?”
There was sheer, cool insight behind the words. Lynley wondered how much time and reflection had gone into Justine Weaver’s being able to make such a detached evaluation. “But Elena could judge him.”
“And she did just that.”
“Adam Jenn told me he saw her occasionally, at your husband’s request.”
Justine returned to her original, upright position. “Anthony had hopes that Elena might attach herself to Adam.”
“Could he be the one who made her pregnant, then?”
“I don’t think so. Adam only met her this past September, at the faculty party I mentioned earlier.”
“But if she became pregnant shortly thereafter…?”
Justine dismissed this by quickly raising her hand from her lap to stop his words. “She’d been having sex frequently since the previous December. Long before she knew Adam.” Once again, she seemed to anticipate his next question. “You’re wondering how I could know that so defi nitely.”
“It was nearly a year ago after all.”
“She’d come in to show us the gown she’d bought for the Christmas Ball. She undressed to try it on.”
“And she hadn’t washed.”
“She hadn’t washed.”
“Who took her to the ball?”
“Gareth Randolph.”
The deaf boy. Lynley reflected upon the fact that Gareth Randolph’s name was becoming like a constant undercurrent, omnipresent beneath the flow of information. He evaluated the manner in which Elena Weaver might have used him as an instrument of revenge. If she was acting out of a need to rub her father’s face in his own desire that she be a normal, functioning woman, what better way to throw that desire back at him than to become pregnant. She’d be giving him what he ostensibly wanted-a normal daughter with normal needs and normal emotions whose body functioned in a perfectly normal way. At the same time, she’d be getting what she wanted- retaliation by choosing as the father of her child a deaf man. It was, at heart, a perfect circle of vengeance. He only wondered if Elena had been that devious, or if her stepmother was using the fact of the pregnancy to paint a portrait of the girl that would serve her own ends.
He said, “Since January, Elena had marked her calendar periodically with the small drawing of a fish. Does that mean anything to you?”
“A fi sh?”
“A pencil drawing similar to the symbol used for Christianity. It appears several times each week. It’s on the calendar the night before she died.”
“A fi sh?”
“Yes. As I’ve said. A fi sh.”
“I can’t think of what it might mean.”
“A society she belonged to? A person she was meeting?”
“You make her life sound like a spy novel, Inspector.”
“It appears to be something clandestine, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Why?”
