Lynley looked back at the path, at the untroubled surface of the sluggish river. Timing, he thought. It all centred round timing. He returned to the car.
“Well?” Havers said.
“She wouldn’t have driven her car on the first trip,” Lynley said. “She couldn’t have taken the risk that one of her neighbours might see her leaving-as two did later in the morn-ing-or that anyone might see it parked near the island.”
Havers looked in the direction from which he’d just come. “So she walked in on a footpath. But she must have had to run like the devil all the way back.”
He reached for his pocket watch and unhooked it from his waistcoat. “Who was it-Mrs. Stamford?-who said she was in a tearing hurry when she left at seven? At least now we know why. She had to fi nd the body before anyone else did.” He fl ipped the watch open and handed it to Havers. “Time the drive to Grantchester, Sergeant,” he said.
He slid the Bentley into the traffi c which, although slow-moving, was sparse at this time of afternoon. They descended the gentle slope of the causeway and, after one quick pause when an oncoming car veered into their lane in order to avoid hitting a postal van that was parked half on the pavement with its hazard lights blinking, they made their way into the Newnham Road roundabout. From there traffic diminished noticeably, and although the fog was still thick-swirling round the Granta King pub and a small Thai restaurant as if it were being stage-managed to do so-Lynley was able to increase his speed marginally.
“Time?” he asked.
“Thirty-two seconds so far.” She pivoted in her seat so that she faced him again, the watch still in her hand. “But she’s not a runner, sir. Not like the rest of them.”
“Which is why it took her nearly thirty minutes to get home, change her clothes, load her car, and get back to Cambridge. It’s little more than a mile and a half over the field to Grantchester,” he said. “A distance runner could have done the same course in less than ten minutes. And had Sarah Gordon been a runner, Georgina Higgins-Hart wouldn’t have needed to die.”
“Because she would have got home, changed clothes, and returned in good enough time that even if Rosalyn described her accurately, she could have said that she was stumbling off the island after having discovered the body?”
“Right.” He drove on.
She examined the watch. “Fifty-two seconds.”
They drove along the west side of Lam-mas Land, a broad green of picnic tables and play areas that sprawled 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 Citroën 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.”