“Did it work?”
She bent over the dog and rubbed her cheek against the top of his head. Somewhere in the house, the telephone began to ring. An answering machine switched on. A moment later the low tones of a man’s voice floated to them, leaving a message that was indistinguishable from where they sat. Sarah seemed indifferent both to the identity of her caller and to the fact of the call itself. She said, “I hadn’t the chance to find out. I made several preliminary sketches in one location on the island. When they didn’t work out-they were dreadful, to be honest-I went to another spot and stumbled on the body.”
“What do you remember of that?”
“Just that I stepped backwards onto something. I thought it was a branch. I kicked it aside and saw it was an arm.”
“You hadn’t noticed the body?” Havers clarifi ed.
“She was covered by leaves. My attention was on the bridge. I can’t say I even watched where I was walking.”
“In what direction did you kick her arm?” Lynley asked. “Towards her? Away from her?”
“Towards her.”
“You didn’t touch her other than that?”
“God, no. But I should have done, shouldn’t I? She may have been alive. I should have touched her. I should have checked. But I didn’t. Instead, I was sick. And then I ran.”
“In what direction? Back the way you came?”
“No. Across Coe Fen.”
“In the fog?” Lynley asked. “Not back the way you’d come?”
At the opening of her shirt, Sarah’s chest and neck began to redden. “I’d just stumbled upon a girl’s body, Inspector. I can’t say I was feeling very logical at the time. I ran across the bridge and through Coe Fen. There’s a path that comes out next to the Department of Engineering. That’s where I’d left my car.”
“You drove from there to the police station?”
“I just kept running. Down Lensfi eld Road. Across Parker’s Piece. It isn’t very far.”
“But you could have driven.”
“I could have done. Yes.” She offered no defence. She looked at her painting of the Pakistani children. Flame stirred beneath her hand and gave a gusty sigh. Roused, she said, “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’d been in a welter of nerves already because I’d gone to the island in order to draw. To draw, you see. To do something I’d been unable to do for months. That was everything to me. So when I found the body, I simply didn’t think. I should have seen if the girl was still alive. I should have tried to help her. I should have kept to the paved path. I should have driven my car to the police station. I know all that. I’m fi lled with should’s. I have no excuse for behaving as I did. Except that I panicked. And believe me, I feel wretched enough about that.”
“At the Department of Engineering, were there lights on?”
She looked back at him although her eyes didn’t focus. She seemed to be trying to conjure up a picture of the events in her mind. “Lights. I think so. But I can’t be certain.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“On the island, no. And not on the Fen, there was too much fog. I passed some bicyclists when I got to Lensfield Road, and there was traffi c, of course. But that’s all I remember.”
“How did you come to choose the island? Why didn’t you do your sketching here in Grantchester? Especially once you saw the fog in the morning.”
The red flush on her skin deepened in hue. As if aware of this, she raised her hand to the neck of her shirt and played with the material in her fingers until she had buttoned it. “I don’t know how to explain it to you except to say that I’d chosen the day, I’d planned in advance on the island, and to do anything less than what I planned seemed like admitting defeat and running away. I didn’t want to do that. I just couldn’t face it. It sounds pathetic. Rigid and obsessive. But that’s the way it was.” She got to her feet. “Come with me,” she said. “There’s really only one way that you might understand completely.”
Leaving her cocoa and her animals behind, she led them to the rear of the house where she pushed open a door that was only partially closed and admitted them into her studio. It was a large, bright room whose ceiling comprised four rectangular skylights. Lynley paused before entering, letting his eyes wander over everything, seeing how the room acted as mute corroboration to all that Sarah Gordon had told them.
The walls were hung with enormous charcoal sketches-a human torso, a disembodied arm, two interlocking nudes, a man’s face in three-quarter profile-all the sort of preliminary studies an artist does before setting out upon a new work. But instead of acting as rough ideas for a finished product that was also on display, beneath them leaned a score of incomplete canvases, project after project begun and discarded. A large worktable held a mass of artistic paraphernalia: coffee tins fi lled with clean, dry brushes like camel-hair fl owers; bottles of turps, linseed oil, and Damar varnish; a box of unused dry pastels; more than a dozen hand-labelled tubes of paint. It should have been a chaotic mess, with daubs of paint on the table and smudgy fi ngerprints on the bottles and tins, and squeeze-points on the tubes. Instead, everything was arranged as neatly and precisely as if it were on display in a Castle Museum exhibit devoted to a fanciful day-in-the-life-of presentation.
The air held no odour of paint or turpentine. No sketches piled here and there on the floor to make the suggestion of rapid artistic inspiration and equally rapid artistic rejection. No finished paintings stood waiting for the varnish that would complete them. It was apparent that someone cleaned the room regularly, for the bleached oak floor shone as if it were under glass and nowhere was there the slightest sign of dust or dirt. Just signs of disuse, and they were everywhere. Only a single easel holding a canvas stood covered with a paint-splodged cloth beneath one of the skylights, and even it looked as if it hadn’t been touched in ages.
“This was once the centre of my world,” Sarah Gordon said with simple resignation. “Can you understand, Inspector? I wanted it to be the centre again.”
Sergeant Havers, Lynley saw, had wandered to one side of the room where above a work top had been built a series of storage shelves.
These held cartons of carousels for photographic slides, dog-eared sketch pads, fresh containers of pastels, a large roll of canvas, and a variety of tools-from a set of palette knives to a pair of stretching pliers. The work top itself was covered by a large sheet of plate glass with a roughened surface to which Sergeant Havers touched her fi ngertips tentatively, a question on her face.
“Grinding colours,” Sarah Gordon told her. “That’s what it’s for. I used to grind my own colours.”
“You’re a purist then,” Lynley said.
She smiled with much the same resignation as he had heard in her voice. “When I fi rst began to paint-this was years ago-I wanted to own each part of the finished piece. I wanted to be each painting. I even milled the wood to make the stretcher bars for my canvases. That’s how pure I was going to be.”
“You lost that purity?”
“Success taints everything. In the long run.”
“And you had success.” Lynley went to the wall where her large charcoal sketches were hanging, one on top of the other. He began to browse through them. An arm, a hand, the line of jaw, a face. He was reminded of the Queen’s collection of Da Vinci’s studies. She was very talented.
“After a fashion. Yes. I had success. But that meant less to me than peace of mind. And ultimately peace of mind was what I was seeking yesterday morning.”
“Finding Elena Weaver put an end to that,” Sergeant Havers remarked.
As Lynley was looking through her sketches, Sarah had gone to stand near the covered easel. She had raised a hand to adjust its linen shroud-perhaps with the hope of keeping them from seeing how far the quality of her work had disintegrated-but she stopped and said without looking in their direction: “Elena Weaver?” Her voice sounded oddly uncertain.