Despite his presence in their home as a professional come to deal with the crime, Lynley was not untouched by the other man’s anguish. How many times had he witnessed this very scene played out in the last thirteen years? And still he felt no more able to assuage grief than he had as a detective constable, facing his first interview with the hysterical adult daughter of a woman who’d been bludgeoned to death by her own, drunk husband. In every case, he’d allowed grief free rein, hoping by this means to offer victims the meagre solace of knowing that someone shared their need to see justice done.
Weaver continued to speak. As he did so, his eyes filled with tears. “She was tender. Fragile.”
“Because she was deaf?”
“No. Because of me.” When Weaver’s voice cracked, his wife looked his way, pressed her lips together, and once more lowered her eyes. “I left her mother when Elena was fi ve, Inspector. You’re going to learn that eventually, so you may as well know it right now. She was in bed, asleep. I packed my bags and I left and I never went back. And I had no way to explain to a five-year-old child-who couldn’t even hear me-that I wasn’t leaving her, that it wasn’t her fault, that the marriage itself was so filled with unhappiness that I couldn’t bear to live in it any longer. And Glyn and I were at fault for that. Not Elena, never once Elena. But I was her father. I left her, betrayed her. And she struggled with that-and with the idea that somehow she was at fault-for the next fifteen years. Anger, confusion, lack of confidence, fear. Those were her demons.”
Lynley didn’t even need to formulate a question to guide Weaver’s discourse. It was as if the man had only been waiting for an appropriate opportunity for self-fl agellation.
“She could have chosen Oxford-Glyn was determined she’d go to Oxford, she didn’t want her here with me-but Elena chose Cambridge instead. Can you know what that meant to me? All those years she’d been in London with her mother. I’d tried to be there for her as best I could, but she held me at a distance. She’d only let me be a father in the most superfi cial ways. Here was my chance to be a real father to her again, to mend our relationship, to bring to some sort of”-he searched for a word-“some sort of fulfi llment the love I felt for her. And my greatest happiness was feeling the bond begin to grow between us over this last year and sitting here and watching while Justine helped Elena with her essays. When these two women…” He faltered. “These two women in my life…these two women together, Justine and Elena, my wife and my daughter…” And finally he allowed himself to weep. It was a man’s horrible, humiliated sobbing, one hand covering his eyes, the other clutching his spectacles.
Justine Weaver didn’t stir in her chair. She looked incapable of movement, carved out of stone. Then a single breath eased from her and she raised her eyes and fastened them on the bright, artifi cial fi re.
“I understand Elena had difficulties in the University at first,” Lynley said as much to Justine as to her husband.
“Yes,” Justine said. “The adjustment for her…from her mother and London…to here…” She glanced uneasily at her husband. “It took a bit of time for her to-”
“How could she have made the change easily?” Weaver demanded. “She was struggling with her life. She was doing her best. She was trying to be whole.” He wiped his face with a crumpled handkerchief which afterwards he continued to grasp-crushed-in his hand. He placed his spectacles back on his nose. “But that didn’t matter. Not a bit of it to me. Because she was a joy. An innocent. A gift.”
“Her troubles didn’t cause you embarrassment, then? Professional embarrassment?” Weaver stared at him. His expression altered in a single instant from ravaged sorrow to disbelief. Lynley found the sudden change disquieting, and despite the occasion for both grief and outrage, he found himself wondering if he was being entertained by a performance of some sort.
“My God,” Weaver said. “What are you suggesting?”
“I understand you’ve been short-listed for a rather prestigious position here at the University,” Lynley said.
“And what does that have to do with-”
Lynley leaned forward to interrupt. “My job is to obtain and evaluate information, Dr. Weaver. In order to do that, I have to ask questions you might otherwise prefer not to hear.”
Weaver worked this over, his fi ngers digging into the handkerchief balled into his fist. “Nothing about my daughter was an embarrassment, Inspector. Nothing. Not a single part of her. And nothing she did.”
Lynley tallied the denials. He refl ected upon the rigid muscles in Weaver’s face. He said, “Had she enemies?”
“No. And no one who knew her could have hurt Elena.”
“Anthony,” Justine murmured hesitantly, “you don’t think she and Gareth…Might they have had a falling out?”
“Gareth Randolph?” Lynley said. “The president of DeaStu?” When Justine nodded, he went on with, “Dr. Cuff told me he’d been asked to act as a guardian to Elena last year. What can you tell me about him?”
“If he was the one, I’ll kill him,” Weaver said.
Justine took up the question. “He’s an engineering student, a member of Queens’ College.”
Weaver said, more to himself than to Lynley, “And the engineering lab is next to Fen Causeway. He has his practicals there. His supervisions as well. What is it, a two-minute walk from Crusoe’s Island? Across Coe Fen, a one-minute run?”
“Was he fond of Elena?”
“They saw a great deal of each other,” Justine said. “But that was one of the stipulations set up by Dr. Cuff and her supervisors last year: attendance at DeaStu. Gareth saw to it that she went to the meetings. He took her to a number of their social functions as well.” She shot her husband a wary look before she finished carefully with, “Elena liked Gareth well enough, I dare say. But not, I imagine, the way he liked her. And he’s a lovely boy, really. I can’t think that he-”
“He’s in the boxing society,” Weaver continued. “He’s got a blue in boxing. Elena told me that.”
“Could he have known that she would be running this morning?”
“That’s just it,” Weaver said. “She wasn’t supposed to run.” He turned to his wife. “You told me she wasn’t going to run. You said that she’d phoned you.”
His words had the ring of an accusation. Justine’s body retreated fractionally, a reaction that was almost imperceptible considering her upright posture in the chair. “Anthony.” She said his name like a discreet entreaty.
“She phoned you?” Lynley repeated, perplexed. “How?”
“On a Ceephone,” Justine said.
“Some sort of visual phone?”
Anthony Weaver stirred, moved his eyes off his wife, and pushed himself out of his chair. “I’ve one in the study. I’ll show you.”
He led the way through the dining room, through a spotless kitchen fitted with an array of gleaming appliances, and down a short corridor that led to the rear of the house. His study was a small room that faced the back garden, and when he switched on the light, a dog began to whine beneath the window outside.
“Have you fed him?” Weaver asked.
“He wants to be let in.”
“I can’t face it. No. Don’t do that, Justine.”
“He’s just a dog. He doesn’t understand. He’s never had to-”
“Don’t do it.”
Justine fell silent. As before, she remained by the door while Lynley and her husband went into the room.
The study was quite different from the rest of the house. A worn fl oral carpet covered the floor. Books crowded onto sagging shelves of cheap pine. A collection of photographs leaned against a filing cabinet, and a set of framed sketches hung on the wall. Beneath the room’s single window stood Weaver’s desk, large, grey metal, and utterly hideous. Aside from a pile of correspondence and a set of reference books, on it rested a computer, its monitor, a telephone, and a modem. This, then, constituted the Ceephone.