For the Sake of Elena

“Why not just write out whatever the fi sh stood for?”

“Perhaps it was too long. Perhaps it was easier to draw the fish. It can’t mean much. Why would she worry about someone else seeing something she was putting on her personal calendar? It was probably shorthand, a device she used to remind herself of something. A supervision, perhaps.”

“Or an assignation.”

“Considering how Elena was telegraphing her sexual activity, Inspector, I hardly think she’d be disguising an assignation when it came to her own calendar.”

“Perhaps she had to. Perhaps she only wanted her father to know what she was doing but not with whom. And he’d have seen her calendar. He’d have been in her room, so she might not have wanted him to see the name.”

Lynley waited for her to respond. When she did not do so, he said, “Elena had birth control pills in her desk. But she hadn’t taken them since February. Can you explain that?”

“Only in the most obvious way, I’m afraid. She wanted to get pregnant. But that doesn’t surprise me. It was, after all, the normal thing to do. Love a man. Have his baby.”

“You and your husband have no children, Mrs. Weaver?”

The quick change in subject, tagged logically onto her own statement, seemed to take her momentarily aback. Her lips parted briefl y. Her gaze went to the wedding photograph on the tea table. She appeared to straighten her spine even further, but it may have been the result of the breath she took before she replied quite evenly, “We have no children.”

He waited to see if she would say more, relying upon the fact that his own silence had so often in the past proved more effective than the most pointed question in pressuring someone into disclosure. Moments ticked by. Outside the sitting room window, a sudden gust of wind tossed a spray of field maple leaves against the glass. They looked like a billowing, saffron cloud.

Justine said, “Will there be anything else?” and smoothed her hand along the perfect, knife-edged crease in her trousers. It was a gesture which eloquently declared her the victor, if only for an instant, in the brief battle of their wills.

He admitted defeat, standing and saying, “Not at the moment.”

She walked with him to the front door and handed him his overcoat. Her expression, he saw, was no different from what it had been when she first admitted him into the house. He wanted to marvel at the degree to which she had herself under control, but instead he found himself wondering whether it was a matter of mastering any revealing emotions or a matter of having-or experiencing-those emotions in the first place. He told himself it was to assess this latter possibility rather than to meet the challenge of cracking the composure of someone who seemed so invulnerable that he asked his fi nal question.

“An artist from Grantchester found Elena’s body yesterday morning,” he said. “Sarah Gordon. Do you know her?”

Quickly, she bent to pick up the stem of a leaf which lay, barely discernible, on the parquet floor. She rubbed her finger along the spot where she had found it. Back and forth, three or four times as if the minuscule stem had somehow damaged the wood. When she had seen to it to her satisfaction, she stood again.

“No,” she said. She met his eyes directly. “I don’t know Sarah Gordon.” It was a bravura performance.

He nodded, opened the door, and walked out onto the drive. Round the corner of the house, an Irish setter bounded gracefully towards them, a dirty tennis ball in his mouth. He vaulted past the Bentley and hurtled onto the lawn, making a joyful racecourse of its perimeter before he leaped over a white wrought iron table and dashed across the drive to land in a happy heap at Lynley’s feet. He loosened his jaws and deposited the ball on the drive, tail wagging hopefully and silky coat rippling like soft reeds in the wind. Lynley picked up the ball and flung it beyond the cypress tree. With a yelp of delight, the dog hurtled after it. Once again, he raced round the edge of the lawn, once more he leaped over the wrought iron table, once more he landed in a heap at Lynley’s feet. Again, his eyes said, again, again.

“She always came to play with him in the late afternoon,” Justine said. “He’s waiting for her. He doesn’t know that she’s gone.”

“Adam said the dog ran with you and Elena in the morning,” Lynley said. “Did you take him yesterday when you went alone?”

“I didn’t want the trouble. He’d have wanted to head in the direction of the river. I wasn’t going that way, and I didn’t want him to fi ght me.”

Lynley rubbed his knuckles on the top of the setter’s head. When he stopped, the dog used his nose to flip the hand back into appropriate petting position once again. Lynley smiled.

“What’s his name?”

“She called him Townee.”

Justine didn’t allow herself to react until she reached the kitchen. And even then she wasn’t aware she was reacting until she saw that her hand-grasping the water glass-was clenched solidly round it as if she’d been suddenly afflicted by a stroke. She turned on the tap, let the water flow, held the glass beneath it.

She felt as if every argument and discussion, every moment of pleading, every second of emptiness over the last few years had somehow been both concentrated and compressed into a single statement: You and your husband have no children.

And she herself had given the detective the opening to make that observation: Love a man, have his baby.

But not here, not now, not in this house, not with this man.

With the water still running, she brought the glass to her lips and forced herself to drink. She filled the glass a second time, forced the water down again. She filled it a third time and drank again. Only then did she turn off the tap, raise her eyes from the sink, and look out the kitchen window into the rear garden where two grey wagtails bobbed up and down on the edge of the birdbath while a plump woodpigeon watched them from the sloping tile roof of the garden shed.

For a while she had harboured the secret hope that she might arouse him to such an extent that he simply lost himself-lost his control-in the desire to have her. She’d even taken to reading books in which she was alternately advised to be playful, to keep him off-guard, to become his fantasy whore, to sensitise her own body to stimulation so that she might more readily understand his, to become aware of erogenous zones, to demand expect require an orgasm, to vary positions locations times and circumstances, to be aloof, to be warm, to be honest, to be submissive. All of the reading and all of the advice left her nothing more than bewildered. It did not change her. Nor did it alter the fact that nothing-no amount of sighing, moaning, coaxing, or stimulating-kept Anthony from rising from her at the crucial moment, fumbling in the drawer, tearing open the package, and sheathing himself with a millimetre’s despicable latex protection, her punishment for having threatened, in the heat of a wretchedly futile argument, to stop taking the pills without his knowledge.

He had one child. He would not have another. He could not betray Elena again. He had walked out on her, and he would not make the implied rejection worse by having another child that Elena might see as a replacement for herself or a competitor for her father’s love. Nor would he run the risk of her thinking that he was seeking to satisfy his own needs of ego by producing a child who could hear.

They had talked about it all before they married. He had been forthright from the first, letting her know that children between them were out of the question, considering his age and his responsibilities to Elena. At the time, twenty-five years old and just three years into a career at which she was determined to be a success, the idea of having a child had been remote. Her attention had been fixed upon the world of publishing and upon her rise to significance within it. But if the passage of ten years had brought her a fi ne degree of professional success-thirty- five years old and publishing director of a highly respected press-it also brought her one step closer to the immutable fact of her own mortality and to the need to leave behind something that was her own creation and not the product of someone else.

Each month ticked its way through another cycle. Each egg washed away in a rush of blood. Each gasp of completion her husband experienced marked another wasting of the possibility of life.

But Elena had been pregnant.

Justine wanted to howl. She wanted to weep. She wanted to pull her lovely wedding china from the cupboard and hurl every piece of it against the wall. She wanted to overturn furniture and smash picture frames and drive her fist through the windows. But instead she lowered her eyes to the glass which she held, and she placed it with careful, decided precision into the unblemished porcelain sink.