Across the hall, the music ended. A few last wavering, live notes sounded on the trumpet before, after a moment of muffl ed activity, the squeak of a door replaced the other sounds.
“Randie,” Lynley called.
Elena’s door swung inward. Miranda stood there, bundled up for the outdoors in her heavy pea jacket and navy sweat suit with a lime-green beret perched rakishly on her head. She was wearing high-topped black athletic shoes. Socks decorated to look like slices of watermelon peeked out from the top of them.
Glancing at her attire, Havers said meaningfully, “I rest my case, Inspector,” and then to the girl, “Good to see you, Randie.”
Miranda smiled. “You got here early.”
“Necessity. I couldn’t let his lordship muddle through on his own. Besides”-this with a sardonic look in Lynley’s direction-“he hasn’t quite got the flavour of modern university life.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Lynley said. “I’d be lost without you.” He indicated the calendar. “Will you look at this fi sh, Randie? Does it mean anything to you?”
Miranda joined him at the desk and inspected the sketches on the calendar. She shook her head.
“She hadn’t been doing any cooking in the gyp room?” Havers asked, obviously testing out her diet theory.
Miranda looked incredulous. “Cooking. Fish, you mean? Elena cooking fi sh?”
“You would have known it, right?”
“I would have got sick. I hate the smell of fi sh.”
“Then some society that she belonged to?” Havers was going for theory number two.
“Sorry. I know she was in DeaStu and Hare and Hounds and probably one or two other societies as well. But I’m not sure which.” Randie looked through the calendar as they themselves had done, chewing absently on the edge of her thumb. “It’s too often,” she said when she’d gone back to January. “No society has this many meetings.”
“A person, then?”
Lynley saw her cheeks flush. “I wouldn’t know. Really. She never said that there was anyone that special. I mean special enough for three or four nights a week. She never said.”
“You can’t know for certain, you mean,” Lynley said. “You don’t know for a fact. But you lived with her, Randie. You knew her far better than you think. Tell me the sorts of things Elena did. Those are merely facts, nothing more. I’ll build upon them.”
Miranda hesitated a long moment before saying, “She went out a lot at night by herself.”
“For entire nights?”
“No. She couldn’t do that because after last December they made her check in and out with the porter. But she got back to her room late whenever she went out…I mean when it was one of those secret going-outs. She was never here when I went to bed on those nights.”
“Secret going-outs?”
Miranda’s ginger hair bobbed as she nodded. “She went by herself. She always wore perfume. She didn’t take books. I thought there must have been someone she was seeing.”
“But she never told you who it was?”
“No. And I didn’t like to pry. I don’t think she wanted anyone to know.”
“That doesn’t suggest a fellow undergraduate, does it?”
“I suppose not.”
“What about Thorsson?” Her eyes dropped to the calendar. She touched the edge of it reflectively. “What do you know about his relationship with Elena? There’s something to it, Randie. I can see that on your face. And he was here Thursday night.”
“I only know…” Randie hesitated, sighed. “This is what she said. It’s only what she said, Inspector.”
“All right. That’s understood.” Lynley saw Havers flip over a page of her notebook.
Miranda watched the sergeant write. “She said he was trying to make it with her, Inspector. He’d been after her last term, she said. He was after her again. She hated him for it. She called him smarmy. She said she was going to turn him over to Dr. Cuff for sexual harassment.”
“And did she do so?”
“I don’t know.” Miranda twisted the button on her jacket. It was like a little talisman, infusing her with strength. “I don’t know that she ever got the chance, you see.”
Lennart Thorsson was in the process of completing a lecture in the English Faculty on Sidgwick Avenue when Lynley and Havers finally caught him up. The popularity of both his material and his manner of presenting it was attested by the size of the hall in which he spoke. It held at least one hundred chairs. All of them were filled, mostly by women. Ninety percent of them appeared to be hanging upon Thorsson’s every word.
There was much to hang on, all of it delivered in perfect, virtually unaccented English.
The Swede paced as he talked. He didn’t use notes. He seemed to take inspiration from intermittently running his right hand through the thick, strawberry-blond hair which tumbled onto his forehead and round his shoulders in an appealing mess, a complement to the drooping moustache that curved round his mouth in a style that befitted the early 1970’s.
“So in the royalty plays, we examine the issues that Shakespeare himself was intent upon examining,” Thorsson was saying. “Monarchy. Power. Hierarchy. Authority. Dominion. And in our examination of these issues we cannot avoid a scrutiny of that which comprised the question of status quo. How far is Shakespeare writing from a perspective to conserve the status quo? How does he do it if he does it? And if he’s cleverly spinning an illusion in which he merely wears the guise of adherence to these social constrictions of his day-while all the time espousing an insidious subversion of the social order-how is he doing that?”
Thorsson paused to let the furious note-takers catch up with the fl ow of his thoughts. He turned on his heel briskly and paced again. “And then we go further to begin our examination of the obverse position. We ask to what extent is Shakespeare openly contesting the existing social hierarchies? From what standpoint is he contesting them? Is he implying an alternative set of values-a subversive set of values-and if he is, what are they? Or”- Thorsson pointed a meaningful finger at his audience and leaned towards them, his voice more intense-“is Shakespeare doing something even more complex? Is he questioning and challenging the foundation of this country-his country-itself-authority, power, and hierarchy-in order to imply a refutation of the premise on which his entire society was founded? Is he projecting different ways of living, arguing that if possibility is circumscribed only by existing conditions, then man makes no progress and effects no change? Because is not Shakespeare’s real premise-present in every play-that all men share equality? And does not every king in every play reach that point at which his interests are in alignment with humanity at large and no longer with kingship? ‘I think the King is but a man, as I am.’ As…I…am. This, then, is the point we examine. Equality. The king and I are equals. We are but men. There is no defensible social hierarchy, here or anywhere. So we agree that it was possible for Shakespeare, as an imaginative artist, to store and dwell upon ideas which would not be talked about for centuries, projecting himself into a future he did not know, allowing us to see at last that the reason his works are valid today is simply because we have not yet even begun to catch up to his thinking.”
Thorsson strode to the podium and picked up a notebook which he closed decisively. “Next week then. Henry V. Good morning.”
For a moment, no one stirred. Paper crackled. A pencil dropped. Then, with what appeared to be reluctance, the audience roused itself with a collective sigh. Conversation rose as people headed for the exits while Thorsson stuffed his notebook and two texts into a haversack. As he removed his black academic gown and balled it up to join the textbooks, he spoke to a tousle-haired young woman still sitting in the front row. Then, after taking a moment to tap one finger against her cheek and laugh at something she’d said, he came up the aisle towards the door.