“How does it work?” Lynley asked.
Weaver blew his nose and shoved his handkerchief into his jacket pocket. He said, “I’ll phone my rooms in the college,” and walked to the desk, where he switched on the monitor, punched several numbers on the telephone, and pressed a data key on the modem.
After a few moments, the monitor screen divided into two sections, split horizontally by a thin, solid band. On the bottom half appeared the words: Jenn here.
“A colleague?” Lynley asked.
“Adam Jenn, my graduate student.” Weaver typed quickly. As he did so, his message to the student was printed on the top half of the screen. Dr. Weaver phoning, Adam. I’m demonstrating the Ceephone for the police. Elena used it last night.
Right appeared on the bottom half of the screen. Shall I stand by then? Do they want to see something special?
Weaver cast Lynley a querying look. “No, that’s fine,” Lynley said. “It’s clear how it works.”
Not necessary, Weaver typed.
OK, the response. And then after a moment, I’ll be here the rest of the evening, Dr. Weaver. Tomorrow as well. And as long as you need me. Please don’t worry about anything.
Weaver swallowed. “Nice lad,” he whispered. He switched off the monitor. All of them watched as the messages on the screen slowly faded away.
“What sort of message did Elena send you last night?” Lynley asked Justine.
She was still at the door, one shoulder against the jamb. She looked at the monitor as if to remember. “She said only that she wasn’t going to run this morning. She sometimes had trouble with one of her knees. I assumed she wanted to give it a rest for a day or two.”
“What time did she phone?”
Justine frowned pensively. “It must have been a bit after eight because she asked after her father and he wasn’t yet home from the college. I told her he’d gone back to work for a while and she said she’d phone him there.”
“Did she?”
Weaver shook his head. His lower lip quivered, and he pressed his left index finger to it as if by that action he could control further displays of emotion.
“You were alone when she phoned?”
Justine nodded.
“And you’re certain it was Elena?”
Justine’s fine skin seemed to tauten across her cheeks. “Of course. Who else-?”
“Who knew the two of you ran in the morning?”
Her eyes went to her husband, then back to Lynley. “Anthony knew. I suppose I must have told one or two of my colleagues.”
“At?”
“The University Press.”
“Others?”
Again, she looked at her husband. “Anthony? Do you know of anyone?”
Weaver was still staring at the monitor of the Ceephone, as if in the hope that a call would come through. “Adam Jenn, probably. I’m sure I told him. Her friends, I should think. People on her staircase.”
“With access to her room, to her phone?”
“Gareth,” Justine said. “Of course she would have told Gareth.”
“And he has a Ceephone as well.” Weaver looked sharply at Lynley. “Elena didn’t make that call, did she? Someone else did.”
Lynley could feel the other man’s growing need for action. Whether it was spurious or genuine he could not tell. “It’s a possibility,” he agreed. “But it’s also a possibility that Elena simply preferred to create an excuse to run alone this morning. Would that have been out of character?”
“She ran with her stepmother. Always.”
Justine said nothing. Lynley looked her way. She averted her eyes. It was admission enough.
Weaver said to his wife, “You didn’t see her at all when you were out this morning. Why, Justine? Weren’t you looking? Weren’t you watching?”
“I had the call from her, darling,” Justine said patiently. “I wasn’t expecting to see her. And even if I had been, I didn’t go along the river.”
“You ran this morning as well?” Lynley asked. “What time was this?”
“Our usual time. A quarter past six. But I took a different route.”
“You weren’t near Fen Causeway.”
A moment’s hesitation. “I was, yes. But at the end of the run, instead of the beginning. I’d made a circuit of the city and came across the causeway from east to west. Towards Newnham Road.” With a glance at her husband, she made a slight change of position as if she were girding herself with strength. “Frankly, I hate running along the river, Inspector. I always have. So when I had the opportunity to take another route, I did just that.”
It was, Lynley thought, the nearest thing to a revelation that Justine Weaver was likely to make in front of her husband about the nature of her relationship with his daughter Elena.
Justine let the dog into the house directly after the Inspector left. Anthony had gone upstairs. He wouldn’t know what she was doing. Since he wouldn’t come back down for the rest of the night, what could it hurt, Justine wondered, to let the dog sleep in his own wicker basket? She would get up early in the morning to let the animal out before Anthony even saw him.
It was disloyal to go against her husband this way. Justine knew her mother would never have done such a thing once her father had made his wishes known. But there was the dog to consider, a confused, lonely creature whose instincts told him something was wrong but who couldn’t know what or understand why.
When Justine opened the back door, the setter came at once, not bounding across the lawn as was usual, but hesitantly, as if he knew that his welcome was at risk. At the door with his auburn head lowered, the dog raised hopeful eyes to Justine. His tail wagged twice. His ears perked up, then drooped.
“It’s all right,” Justine whispered. “Come in.”
There was something comforting about the snick-snicking of the dog’s nails on the fl oor as he pursued the smells on the kitchen tiles. There was something comforting about all his sounds: the yelp and the growl when he played, the snarf when he dug and got soil in his nose, the long sigh when he settled into his bed at night, the low hum when he most wanted someone’s attention. He was in so many ways just like a person, a fact that Justine had found most surprising.
“I think a dog would be good for Elena,” Anthony had said prior to her arrival in Cambridge last year. “Victor Troughton’s bitch had a litter not long ago. I’ll take Elena by and let her have her pick of the lot.”
Justine hadn’t protested. Part of her had wanted to. Indeed, the protest was practically automatic since the dog-a potential source of mess and trouble-would be living in Adams Road, not in St. Stephen’s College with Elena. But another part of her had sparked alive to the idea. Other than a blue parakeet who had been mindlessly devoted to Justine’s mother, and a won-at-a-fête goldfish that on its first night in her possession had suicidally flung itself out of its overfilled bowl to become stuck on a wallpaper daffodil behind the sideboard when she was eight years old, Justine had never owned what she thought of as a real pet-a dog to tag along scruffily at her heels or a cat to curl at the foot of her bed or a horse to ride in the back lanes of Cambridgeshire. These weren’t deemed healthy by either of her parents. Animals carried germs. Germs were not appropriate. And propriety was everything once they’d come into her greatuncle’s fortune.
Anthony Weaver had been her break with all that, her permanent declaration of impropriety and adulthood. She could still see her mother’s mouth trembling round the words: “But what on earth can you possibly be thinking, Justine? He’s…well, he’s Jewish.” She could still manage to feel that searing, quite physical stab of satisfaction right between her breasts at the pale-cheeked consternation with which her mother greeted the news of her impending marriage. Her father’s reaction had been less of a pleasure.