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 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 know that Elena was dead round half past six, Inspector. At least, she was dead round half past six if we can trust what Rosalyn Simpson said, and I don’t know about you, but I think we can. And even if Rosalyn wasn’t definite about the time she reached the island, she knows for certain that she got back to her room by half past seven. So if she did make an error, it’s probably in the other direction, putting the killing earlier, not later. And if Sarah Gordon-whose account is supported by two of her neighbours, mind you-didn’t leave her house until just before seven…” She squirmed in her seat to face Lynley. “Tell me. How was she in two places at once, at home having her Wheetabix in Grantchester at the same time as she was on Crusoe’s Island?”
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?”