For the Sake of Elena

for three-quarters of the length of Newnham Road. They swung through the dogleg where Newnham became Barton and spun past a line of dismal pensioners’ flats, past a church, past a steamy-windowed laundrette, past the newer, brick buildings of a city in the midst of economic growth.

“One minute fifteen,” Havers said as they made the turn south towards Grantchester.

Lynley looked in the rearview mirror at St. James. The other man had picked up the material which Pen had assembled at the Fitzwilliam Museum-welcomed by her former colleagues with the sort of delight one expects to greet only visiting royalty-and he was fl ipping through the X-rays and the infrared photographs in his usual deliberate and thoughtful fashion. “St. James,” Lynley asked, “what’s the best part of loving Deborah?”

St. James raised his head slowly. He looked surprised. Lynley understood. Considering their history, these were straits which they did not generally navigate. “That’s an unusual question to ask a man about his wife.”

“Have you ever considered it?”

St. James glanced out the window where two elderly women-one supporting herself by means of an aluminum walker-were making their way towards a cramped-looking green grocer’s where an outdoor display of fruit and vegetables wore a sequin covering of mist. Orange string sacks dangled limply from their arms.

“I don’t think I have,” St. James said. “But I suppose it’s that feeling of being thoroughly struck by life. Feeling alive, not just being alive.

I can’t merely go through the motions with Deborah. I can’t make do. She doesn’t allow it. She demands my best. She engages my soul.” He looked into the mirror once again. Lynley caught his gaze. Sombre, thoughtful, it seemed at odds with his words.

“That’s what I would imagine,” Lynley said.

“Why?”

“Because she’s an artist.”

The last buildings-a row of old terrace houses-on the outskirts of Cambridge melted away, enclosed by the fog. Country hedges replaced them, dusty grey hawthorn preparing for winter. Havers looked at the watch. “Two minutes, thirty seconds,” she said.

The road was narrow, undivided, and unmarked. It swept past fields where a nimbus seem-ed to rise from the land, creating a solid, two-dimensional, mouse-coloured canvas on which nothing was drawn. If farm buildings existed somewhere in the distance round which a farmer worked and animals grazed, the heavy fog hid them.

They drove into Grantchester, passing a man in tweeds and black Wellingtons who was watching his collie explore the verge as he himself leaned heavily on a cane. “Mr. Davies and Mr. Jeffries,” Havers said. “Doing their usual number, I expect.” As Lynley slowed through the turn into the high street, she examined the face of the watch again. Using her fingers to help her with her calculations, she said, “Five minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” and jerked forward in her seat with a “Whoa, what’re you doing, sir?” when Lynley abruptly applied the brakes.

A metallic blue Citroen was parked squarely in the drive of Sarah Gordon’s house. Seeing it with the mist lapping at its tyres, Lynley said, “Wait here,” and got out of the Bentley. He pressed the door closed to shut it without sound and walked the remaining distance to the remodelled school.

The curtains on the front panel of windows were closed. The house itself seemed calm and uninhabited.

One minute he was here in the house talking to me. The next moment he was gone. I expect he’s out there somewhere in the fog, trying to think what he’s going to do next.

What had she called it? Moral obligation versus cock-throbbing lust. It was, on fi rst and superficial glance, as much an inadvertent reference to the demise of her own marriage as it was an assessment of her former husband’s dilemma. But it was more than that. For while Glyn Weaver saw her words as relating to Weaver’s duty towards a daughter’s death versus his continuing desire for a beautiful wife, Lynley was certain now that they had another application, one of which Glyn could not possibly be aware, one which was presented pellucidly in the simple form of a car in a driveway.

I knew him. For a time we were close.

He’s always had trouble when it comes to confl ict.

Lynley approached the car and found it locked. It was also empty save for a small, tan and white carton that lay partially open on the passenger seat. Lynley froze momentarily when he saw it. His eyes snapped to the house, then back to the carton and the three red cartridges that were sliding out of it. He jogged back to the Bentley.

“What’s-?”

Before Havers could fi nish the question, he switched off the ignition and turned to St. James.

“There’s a pub just a bit beyond the house on the left,” he said. “Go there. Phone the Cambridge police. Tell Sheehan to get out here. No sirens. No lights. But tell him to come armed.”

“Inspector-”

“Anthony Weaver’s in her house,” Lynley said to Havers. “He’s got a shotgun with him.”

They waited until St. James had disappeared into the fog before they turned back to the house some ten yards beyond them in the high street.

“What do you think?” Havers said.

“That we can’t afford to wait for Sheehan.” He peered back the way they had come into the village. The old man and the dog were just ambling round the bend in the road. “There’s a footpath somewhere that she had to have used on Monday morning,” he said. “And it seems to me that if she got out of her house without being seen, she can’t have left the front way. So…” He looked back at the house, and then again down the road. “This way.”

They set off on foot in the direction from which they had just driven. But they hadn’t gone more than five yards when the old man and the dog accosted them, the man raising his cane and poking it at Lynley’s chest.

“Tuesday,” he said. “You lot were here Tuesday. I remember that sort of thing, you know. Norman Davies. Good with my eyes, I am.”

“Christ,” Havers muttered.

The dog sat at attention at Mr. Davies’ side, ears pricked forward and an expression of friendly anticipation on his face.

“Mr. Jeffries and I”-this with a nod at the dog who seemed to dip his head politely at the sound of his name-“have been out for an hour now-Mr. Jeffries having a bit of a time answering the calls of nature at his advanced age-and we saw you pass, didn’t we, Mister? And I said those folks have been here before. And I’m right, aren’t I? I don’t forget things.”

“Where’s the footpath to Cambridge?” Lynley asked without ceremony.

The man scratched his head. The collie scratched his ear. “Footpath, you ask? You can’t be meaning to take a walk in this fog. I know what you’re thinking: If Mr. Jeffries and I are out in it, why not you two? But we’re out taking a ramble in order to see to the necessary. Otherwise, we’d be snug inside.” He gestured with his cane to a small thatched cottage just across the street. “When we aren’t out seeing to the necessary, we mostly sit in our own front window. Not that we spy on the village, mind you, but we like to have a look at the high street now and again. Don’t we, Mr. Jeffries?” The dog panted agreeably.

Lynley felt his hands itch with the need to grab the old man by the lapels of his coat. “The footpath to Cambridge,” he said.

Mr. Davies rocked back and forth in his Wellingtons. “Just like Sarah, aren’t you? She used to walk to Cambridge most days, didn’t she? ‘I had my constitutional this morning already,’ she’d say when Mr. Jeffries and I would stop by of an afternoon and ask her out on a ramble with us. And I’d say to her, ‘Sarah, anyone as attached to Cambridge as you are ought to live there just to save yourself the walk.’ And she’d say, ‘I’m planning on it, Mr. Davies. Just give me a bit of time.’” He chuckled and settled into his story by digging his cane into the ground. “Two or three times a week she was heading over the fields and she never took that dog of hers with her which, frankly, is something I have never been able to understand. Now, Flame-that’s her dog- doesn’t get near enough exercise to my way of thinking. So Mr. Jeffries and I would-”

“Where’s the bloody path!” Havers snarled.

The man started. He pointed down the road. “Just there on Broadway.”

They set off immediately, only to hear him call, “You might express some appreciation, you know. Folks never do think…”

The fog shrouded his body and muffl ed his voice as they rounded the bend where the high street became Broadway, as misnamed as a country lane could possibly be, narrow and thickly hedged on either side. Just beyond the last cottage, not two-tenths of a mile past the old school, a wooden kissing gate-green with its growth of winter