For the Sake of Elena

He read it. He ran his fingers over the black print and then across the picture of Elena.

“I’ve seen it,” he said. “That’s how I found out. No one phoned. I didn’t know. I saw it in the senior combination room when I went in for coffee about ten o’clock this morning. And then-” He looked across the river to Midsummer Common where the girl was leading her horse in the direction of Fort St. George. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“Were you home Sunday night, Victor?”

He didn’t look at her as he shook his head.

“Was she with you?”

“For a time.”

“And then?”

“She went back to St. Stephen’s. I stayed in my rooms.” He finally looked her way. “How did you know about us? Did she tell you?”

“Last September. The drinks party. You made love to Elena during the party, Victor.”

“Oh God.”

“In the bathroom upstairs.”

“She followed me up. She came in. She…” He rubbed his hand along his jawline. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved that day, for the stubble was thick, like a bruise on his skin.

“Did you take off all your clothes?”

“Christ, Justine.”

“Did you?”

“No. We stood against the wall. I lifted her up. She wanted it that way.”

“I see.”

“All right. I wanted it as well. Against the wall. Just like that.”

“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

“Yes. She told me.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did you plan to do about it?”

He’d been looking at the river, but now he turned back to her. “I planned to marry her,” he said.

It wasn’t the answer she had come prepared to hear, although the more she thought about it, the less it surprised her. It did leave, however, a slight problem unresolved.

“Victor,” she said, “where was your wife Sunday night? What was Rowena doing while you were having Elena?”

11

Lynley was relieved to fi nd Gareth Randolph in the offices of DeaStu, Cambridge University’s odd acronym for the Deaf Students’ Union. He had tried his room at Queens’ College first, only to be directed to Fenners, the central gymnasium for University sports where the boxing team worked out for two hours each day. There, however, in the smaller of the two gyms where he was assailed by the eye-prickling smells of sweat, damp leather, athletic tape, chalk, and unwashed workout clothes, Lynley had questioned a lorry-sized heavyweight who had pointed his side- of-beef fist in the direction of the exit and said that the Bant-apparently a reference to Gareth’s bantam-weight-was sitting by the phones at DeaStu, hoping for a call about the bird who got killed.

“She was his woman,” the heavyweight said. “He’s taking it hard.” And he drove his fi sts like battering rams into the punching bag which hung from the ceiling, putting his shoulders into each blow with such force that it seemed as if the floor shook beneath him.

Lynley wondered if Gareth Randolph was as powerful a fighter in his own weight class. He considered this question on the way to DeaStu. Anthony Weaver had made allegations about the boy that he could not avoid coupling with Havers’ report from the Cambridge police: Whatever Elena had been beaten with, it had left no trace.

DeaStu was housed in the basement of the Peterhouse Library not far from the University Graduate Centre, just at the bottom of Little St. Mary’s Lane, little more than two blocks from Queens’ College where Gareth Randolph lived. Its offices were tucked at the end of a low-ceilinged corridor illuminated by bright round globes of light. They had two means of access, one through the Lubbock Room on the ground floor of the library, and the other directly from the street at the rear of the building, not fifty yards away from the Mill Lane footbridge across which Elena Weaver had to have run on the morning of her death. The main office door of opaque glass bore the words Deaf Students of Cambridge University and beneath that the less formal DeaStu was superimposed over two hands crossed, fingers extended, palms outward.

Lynley had given lengthy thought to how he was going to communicate with Gareth Randolph. He had played round with the idea of calling Superintendent Sheehan to see if he had an interpreter associated with the Cambridge police. He’d never spoken with anyone deaf before, and from what he had gathered over the last twenty-four hours, Gareth Randolph did not have Elena Weaver’s facility for reading lips. Nor did he have her spoken language.

Once inside the office, however, he saw that things would take care of themselves. For talking to a woman who sat behind a desk piled with pamphlets, papers, and books was a knobby-ankled, bespectacled girl with her hair in plaits and a pencil stuck behind her ear. As she chatted and laughed, she was signing simultaneously. She also turned in his direction at the sound of the door opening. Here, Lynley thought, would be his interpreter.

“Gareth Randolph?” the woman behind the desk said in answer to Lynley’s question and after an inspection of his warrant card. “He’s just in the conference room. Bernadette, will you…?” And then to Lynley, “I assume you don’t sign, Inspector.”

“I don’t.”

Bernadette adjusted the pencil more fi rmly behind her ear, grinned sheepishly at this momentary display of self-importance, and said, “Right. Come along with me, Inspector. We’ll see what’s what.”

She led him back the way he had come and then down a short corridor whose ceiling was lined with pipes painted white. She said, “Gareth’s been here most of the day. He’s not doing very well.”

“Because of the murder?”

“He had a thing for Elena. Everyone knew it.”

“Did you know Elena yourself?”

“Just to see her. The others”-with a jutting out of her elbows to encompass the area and presumably the membership of DeaStu- “they sometimes like to have an interpreter go with them to their lectures just to make sure they don’t miss anything important. That’s my function, by the way. Interpreting. I make extra money to see me through the term that way. I get to hear some pretty decent lectures as well. I did a special Stephen Hawking lecture last week. What a job that was trying to sign. Astrophysical whatevers. It was like a foreign language.”

“I can well imagine.”

“The lecture hall was so quiet you’d have thought God was putting in an appearance. And after it was over, everyone stood and applauded and-” She rubbed the side of her nose with her index finger. “He’s rather special. I quite felt like crying.”

Lynley smiled, liking her. “But you never interpreted for Elena Weaver?”

“She didn’t use an interpreter. I don’t think she liked to.”

“She wanted people to think she could hear?”

“Not so much that,” Bernadette said. “I think she was proud that she could read lips. It’s difficult to do, especially if someone’s born deaf. My mum and dad-they’re both deaf, you see-they never learned to read much beyond ‘three quid please’ and ‘ta.’ But Elena was amazing.”

“How involved was she with the Deaf Students Union?”

Bernadette wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. “I couldn’t really say. Gareth’ll be able to tell you, though. He’s in here.”