For the Sake of Elena

“I haven’t. Look at this.”

From the envelope, he took out a thin stack of photographs, telling them about the canvas and the set of sketches that Glyn Weaver had given him. “There was dual damage to the painting,” he said. “Someone had defaced it with great smears of colour and then fi nished the job with a kitchen knife. Weaver’s former wife assumed that the subject was Elena and that Justine had destroyed it.”

“She was wrong, I take it?” Barbara asked, picking up the photographs and flipping through them. Each of them showed a different section of the canvas. They were curious pieces, some of them looking like nothing so much as double exposures in which one fi gure was superimposed over another. They depicted various portraits of a female, from childhood up to young adulthood. “What are these?” Havers asked, passing each photograph on to St. James after she perused it.

“Infrared photographs and X-rays,” Lynley said. “Pen can explain. We did it at the museum.”

Penelope said, “They show what was originally on the canvas. Before it was smeared with paint.”

There were at least five head studies in the group, one of which was more than double the size of all the rest. Barbara puzzled her way through them, saying, “Odd sort of painting, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not when you assemble them,” Penelope said. “Here. I’ll show you.”

Lynley cleared away the tea debris, piling the stainless steel teapot, the cups, the plates, and the silverware onto a table nearby. “Because of its size, it could only be photographed in sections,” he explained to Barbara.

Pen went on. “When the sections are assembled, it looks like this.” She laid the photographs out to form an incomplete rectangle from whose right-hand corner a quadrilateral was missing. What Barbara saw on the table was a semi-circle of four head studies of a growing girl-depicted as a baby, a toddler, a child, an adolescent-and offset by the fi fth and larger head study of the young adult.

“If this isn’t Elena Weaver,” Barbara said, “then who-”

“It’s Elena all right,” Lynley said. “Her mother was dead on the money about that. Where she went wrong was in the rest of the scenario. She saw sketches and a painting hidden in Weaver’s study and reached a logical conclusion based upon her knowledge that he dabbled in art. But obviously this isn’t dabbling.”

Barbara looked up, saw that he was removing another photograph from the envelope. She held her hand out for it, put it into the empty spot at the bottom right-hand corner, and looked at the artist’s signature. Like the woman herself, it was not flamboyant. Just the simple word Gordon in thin strokes of black.

“Full circle,” he said.

“So much for coincidence,” she replied.

“If we can just connect her to some sort of weapon, we’re starting to fly home free.” Lynley looked at St. James as Lady Helen gathered the pictures into a neat stack and replaced them in the folder. “What did you come up with?” he asked.

“Glass,” St. James said.

“A wine bottle?”

“No. Not the right shape.”

Barbara went to the table where Lynley had stacked their tea things and rooted through them to find the drawing St. James had made. She pulled it from beneath the teapot and tossed it their way. It fell to the fl oor. Lady Helen picked it up, looked at it, shrugged, and handed it to Lynley.

“What is it?” he asked. “It looks like a decanter.”

“My thought as well,” Barbara said. “Simon says no.”

“Why?”

“It needs to be solid, heavy enough to shatter a bone with one blow.”

“Damn and blast,” Lynley said and fl ipped it to the table.

Penelope leaned forward, drew the paper towards her. “Tommy,” she said thoughtfully, “you know, I can’t be certain, but this looks awfully like a muller.”

“A muller?” Lynley asked.

Havers said, “What the dickens is that?”

“A tool,” Penelope said. “It’s what an artist first uses when he’s making his own paint.”

22

Sarah Gordon lay on her back and fi xed her eyes on the ceiling in her bedroom. She studied the patterns made in the plaster, urging out of the subtle swirls and indentations the silhouette of a cat, the gaunt face of an old woman, the wicked grin of a demon. It was the only room of the house on whose walls she had hung no decoration, establishing in it a monastic simplicity that she had believed would be conducive to the flights of imagination that had always in the past led her to creation.

They led her only to memory now. The thud, the crunch, the crushing of bone. The blood unexpectedly hot when it flew up from the girl’s face to speckle her own. And the girl herself. Elena.

Sarah turned on her side and drew the woollen blanket closer round her, curling herself into a foetal position. The cold was intolerable. She’d kept a fi re burning downstairs for most of the day, and she’d turned the heat up as far as it would go, but still she couldn’t escape the chill. It seemed to seep from the walls and the fl oor and the bed itself like an insidious contagion, determined to have her. And as the minutes passed, the cold became ever more the victor as her body convulsed with new spasms of shivering.

A small fever, she told herself. The weather’s been bad. One can’t expect to remain unaffected by the damp, the fog, or the ice-driven wind.

But even as she repeated key words-damp, fog, and wind-like a hypnotic chant designed to focus her thoughts on the narrowest, most bearable and acceptable pathway, the single part of her mind that she had been unable to discipline from the very beginning forced Elena Weaver forward again.

She’d come to Grantchester two afternoons a week for two months, rolling up the drive on her ancient bicycle with her long hair tied back to keep it out of her face and her pockets fi lled with contraband treats to slip to Flame when she thought Sarah was least likely to notice. Scruff-dog, she called him, and she tugged affectionately on his lopsided ears, bent her face to his, and let him lick her nose. “Wha’ d’ I have for li’l Scruffs?” she said, and she laughed when the dog snuffed at her pockets, his tail thumping happily, his front paws digging at the front of her jeans. It was a ritual with them, generally carried out on the drive where Flame dashed out to meet her, barking a frantic, delighted greeting that Elena claimed she could feel vibrating through the air.

Then she’d come inside, slinging off her coat, untying her hair, shaking it out, smiling her hello, a little embarrassed if Sarah happened to have caught her in the act of greeting the dog with such an open display of affection. She seemed to feel it wasn’t quite adult of her to love an animal, especially one that she didn’t even own.

“Ready?” she’d say in that half-swallowed manner that made the word sound much more like reh- y. She seemed shy at fi rst, when Tony brought her by those few nights to model for the life-drawing class. But it was only the initial reserve of a young woman conscious of her difference from others, and even more conscious of how that difference might somehow contribute to others’ discomfort. Once she sensed another’s ease in her presence-at least once she’d sensed Sarah’s ease-she herself grew more forthright, and she began to chat and to laugh, melding into the environment and the circumstances as if she’d always been a part of them.

She hopped onto the tall stool in Sarah’s studio at precisely half past two on those free afternoons. Her eyes danced round the room, scouting out whatever pieces had been worked on or were new since her last visit. And always she talked. She was, at heart, so like her father in that.

“You never married, Sarah?” Even her choice of topics was the same as her father’s, except unlike his, her question came out more like You ne’r mah-weed, Sehah? and it was a moment before Sarah mentally worked through the careful if distorted syllables to comprehend their meaning.

“No. I never did.”

“Why?”

Sarah examined the canvas on which she was working, comparing it to the lively creature perched atop the stool and wondering if she would ever be able to capture completely that quality of energy which the girl seemed to