exude. Even in repose-holding her head at an angle with her hair sweeping round and the light glancing off it like sun hitting summer wheat-she was electric and alive. Restless and questioning, she seemed eager for experience, anxious to understand.
“I suppose I thought a man might get in my way,” Sarah replied. “I wanted to be an artist. Everything else was secondary.”
“My da’ wan’s to be an ar’ist as well.”
“Indeed he does.”
“Is he good, d’you think?”
“Yes.”
“An’ d’you like him?”
This last with her eyes riveted on Sarah’s face. It was only so that she could easily read the answer, Sarah told herself. But still she said abruptly, “Of course. I like all my students. I always have done. You’re moving, Elena. Please put your head back as it was.”
She watched the girl reach her toe forward and rub it along the top of Flame’s head where he lay on the floor, anticipating the treat he hoped would fall from her pocket. She waited, breath held, for the moment’s question about Tony to pass. It always did. For Elena excelled at recognising boundaries, which went far to explain why she also excelled at obliterating most of them.
She grinned, said, “Sorry, Sarah,” and resumed her position while Sarah herself escaped from the girl’s scrutiny by going to the stereo and switching it on.
“Dad’ll be s’prised when he sees this,” Elena said. “When c’n I see it?”
“When it’s done. Position again, Elena. Damn, we’re losing light.”
And afterwards with the easel covered and the music playing, they’d sit in the studio and have their tea. Shortbread which Elena slipped into Flame’s eager mouth-his tongue lapping bits of sugar from her fingers-tarts and cakes that Sarah made from recipes she’d not thought about in years. As they munched and talked, the music continued, and Sarah’s fi ngers tapped its rhythm against her knee.
“Wha’s it like?” Elena asked her casually one afternoon.
“What?”
She nodded towards one of the speakers. “That,” she said. “You know. That.”
“The music?”
“Wha’s it like?”
Sarah dropped her gaze from the girl’s earnest eyes and looked at her hands as the haunting mystery of Vollenweider’s electric harp and Moog synthesiser challenged her to answer, the music rising and falling, each note like a crystal. She thought about how to reply for such a length of time that Elena fi nally said, “Sorry. I jus’ thought-”
Sarah raised her head quickly, saw the girl’s distress, and realised that Elena thought she herself was embarrassed by being accosted with an unthinking act of mentioning a disability, as if Elena had asked her to look upon a disfigurement she’d prefer to avoid seeing. She said, “Oh no. It’s not that, Elena. I was trying to decide… Here. Come with me.” And she took her first to stand by the speaker, turning the sound up full volume. She placed her hand against it. Elena smiled.
“Percussion,” Sarah said. “Those are the drums. And the bass. The low notes. You can feel them, can’t you?” When the girl nodded, pulling on her lower lip with her chipped front teeth, Sarah looked round the room for something else. She found it in the soft camel hairs of dry fine brushes, the cool sharp metal of a clean pallet knife, the smooth cold glass of turpentine in a jar.
“All right,” she said. “Here. This is what it sounds like.”
As the music changed, shifted, and swelled, she played it against the girl’s inner arm where the flesh was tender and most sensitive to touch. “Electric harp,” she said, and with the pallet knife she tapped the light pattern of notes against her skin. “And now. A fl ute.” This was the brush, in a wavering dance. “And this. The background, Elena. It’s synthetic, you see. He’s not using an instrument. It’s a machine that makes musical sounds. Like this. Just one note now while all the rest are playing,” and she rolled the jar smoothly in one long line.
“All at once it happens?” Elena asked.
“Yes. All at once.” She gave the girl the pallet knife. She herself used the brush and the jar. And as the record continued to play, they made the music together. While all the time above their heads on a shelf not five feet away sat the muller that Sarah would use to destroy her.
Now on her bed in the dim afternoon light, Sarah clutched the blanket and tried to stop quaking. There had been no other alternative, she thought. There was no other way that he might learn to face the truth.
But she herself had to live with the horror of it all for the rest of her life. She had liked the girl.
She’d moved beyond sorrow eight months ago, into a limbo in which nothing could touch her. So that when she heard the car on the drive, Flame’s answering bark, and the footsteps approaching, she felt nothing at all.
“Okay, I accept the fact that the muller looks like a go for the weapon,” Havers said as they watched the panda car pull away from the kerb, taking Lady Helen and her sister home. “But we
Lynley guided the Bentley out of the car park and slid it into the spotty traffi c heading southeast on Parkside. “You’re assuming that, when her neighbours saw her leaving at seven, it was the first time she left that morning,” he said. “Which is exactly what she wanted us to assume, exactly what she wanted her neighbours to assume. But by her own account, she was up that morning not long after fi ve-and she would have had to tell the truth about that because one of the very same neighbours who saw her leaving at seven might well have seen her lights on earlier and told us about that. So I think it’s safe to conclude that she had plenty of time to make another, earlier trip to Cambridge.”
“But why go a second time? If she wanted to play discoverer of the body once Rosalyn saw her, why not just head out to the police station right then?”
“She couldn’t,” Lynley said. “She had no real choice in the matter. She had to change her clothes.”
Havers stared at him blankly. “Right. Well. I’m a real looby, then. What have clothes got to do with it?”
“Blood,” St. James responded.
Lynley nodded at his friend in the rearview mirror before saying to Havers, “She could hardly go dashing into the police station to report having found a body if she was wearing a tracksuit whose jacket front was spotted with the victim’s blood.”
“Then why even go to the police station at all?”
“She had to place herself at the crime scene just in case-when the news broke about Elena Weaver’s death- Rosalyn Simpson remembered what she had seen and went to the police. As you said yourself, she had to play discoverer of the body. So that even if Rosalyn had been able to give the police an accurate description of the woman she’d seen that morning, even if the description led the local CID to Sarah Gordon-as it might have done once Anthony Weaver got wind of it-why on earth would anyone conclude that she had been to the island twice? Why on earth would anyone conclude that she’d kill a girl, go home, change her clothes, and return?”
“Right, sir. So why the hell did she?”
“To hedge her bets,” St. James said. “In case Rosalyn got to the police before she got to Rosalyn.”
“If she was wearing different clothes from those Rosalyn had seen the killer wear,” Lynley went on, “and if one or more of her neighbours could verify that she hadn’t left her house till seven, why would anyone think she was the killer of a girl who’d died round a half hour earlier?”
“But Rosalyn said that the woman she saw had light hair, sir. It was practically the only thing she remembered.”
“Quite. A scarf, a cap, a wig.”
“Why bother with that?”
“So that Elena would think she was seeing Justine.” Lynley circled through the roundabout at Lensfield Road
