“Like a brother to Elena.”
Adam ran his thumb rapidly back and forth along the edge of the table. He reached up and rubbed his fingers along his jaw.
Lynley said, “Or perhaps not really like a brother. She was an attractive girl, after all. You would have seen a great deal of each other. Here in the study. At the Weavers’ house as well. And no doubt in the combination room from time to time. Or at formal dinner. And in her own room.”
Adam said, “I never went inside. Just to get her. That’s all.”
“I understand you took her out.”
“To foreign films at the Arts. We went to dinner occasionally. We spent a day in the country.”
“I see.”
“It’s not what you’re thinking. I didn’t do it because I wanted…I mean I couldn’t have… Oh hell.”
“Did Dr. Weaver ask you to take Elena out?”
“If you have to know. Yes. He thought we were suited.”
“And were you?”
“No!” The vehemence driving the word seemed to cause it to reverberate in the room for an instant. As if with the need to disguise the strength of his reply in some way, Adam said, “Look, I was like a hired escort to her. There was nothing more to it than that.”
“Did Elena want a hired escort?”
Adam gathered up the essays that lay on the table. “I’ve too much work here. The supervisions, my own studies. I’ve no time in my life for women at the moment. They add complications when one least expects it, and I can’t afford the distraction. I’ve hours of research every day. I’ve essays to read. I’ve meetings to attend.”
“All of which must have been diffi cult to explain to Dr. Weaver.”
Adam sighed. He crossed his ankle on his knee and picked at the lace of his gym shoe. “He invited me to his house the second weekend of term. He wanted me to meet her. What could I say? He’d taken me on as a graduate. He’d been so willing to help me. How could I not give him help in return?”
“In what way were you helping him?”
“There was this bloke he preferred she didn’t see. I was supposed to run interference between them. A bloke from Queens’.”
“Gareth Randolph.”
“That’s him. She’d met him through the deaf students’ union last year. Dr. Weaver wasn’t comfortable with them going about together. I imagine he hoped she might…you know.”
“Learn to prefer you?”
He dropped his leg to the fl oor. “She didn’t really fancy this bloke Gareth anyway. She told me as much. I mean, they were mates and she liked him, but it was no big deal. All the same, she knew what her father was worrying about.”
“What was that?”
“That she’d end up with…I mean marry…”
“Someone deaf,” Lynley fi nished. “Which, after all, wouldn’t be that unusual a circumstance since she was deaf herself.”
Adam pushed himself off his chair. He walked to the window and stared into the courtyard. “It’s complicated,” he said quietly to the glass. “I don’t know how to explain him to you. And even if I could, it wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever I’d say would just make him look bad. And it wouldn’t have anything to do with what happened to her.”
“Even if it did, Dr. Weaver can’t afford to look bad, can he? Not with the Penford Chair hanging in the balance.”
“That’s not it!”
“Then it really can’t hurt anyone if you talk to me.”
Adam gave a rough laugh. “That’s easy to say. You just want to find a killer and get back to London. It doesn’t make any difference to you whose lives get destroyed in the process.”
The police as Eumenides. It was an accusation he’d heard before. And while he acknowledged its partial accuracy-for there had to be a disinterested hand of justice or society crumbled-the convenience of the allegation afforded him a moment’s sour amusement. Pushed right to the edge of truth’s abyss, people always clung tenaciously to the same form of deniaclass="underline" I’m protecting someone else by withholding the truth, protecting someone from harm, from pain, from reality, from suspicion. It was all a variation of an identical theme in which denial wore the guise of self-righteous nobility.
He said, “This isn’t a singular death taking place in a void, Adam. It touches everyone she knew. No one stays protected. Lives have already been destroyed. That’s what murder does. And if you don’t know that, it’s time you learned.”
The young man swallowed. Even across the room, Lynley could hear him do so.
“She took it all as a joke,” he said fi nally. “She took everything as a joke.”
“In this case, what?”
“That her father was worried she’d marry Gareth Randolph. That he didn’t want her to hang round the other deaf students so much. But most of all, that he…I think it was that he loved her so much and that he wanted her to love him as much in return. She took it as a joke. That’s the way she was.”
“What was their relationship like?” Lynley asked, even though he knew how unlikely it was that Adam Jenn would say anything to betray his mentor.
Adam looked down at his fingernails and began to worry the cuticles by pushing his thumb against them. “He couldn’t do enough for her. He wanted to be involved in her life. But it always seemed-” He shoved his hands back into his pockets. “I don’t know how to explain.”
Lynley recalled Weaver’s description of his daughter. He recalled Justine Weaver’s reaction to the description. “Not genuine?”
“It was like he felt he had to keep pouring on the love and devotion. Like he had to keep showing her how much she meant to him so that maybe she’d come to believe it someday.”
“He would have wanted to take special pains with her because she couldn’t hear, I should think. She was in a new environment. He’d have wanted her to succeed. For herself. For him.”
“I know what you’re getting at. You’re heading back towards the Chair. But it’s more than that. It went beyond her studies. It went beyond her being deaf. I think he believed he had to prove himself to her for some reason. But he was so intent on doing that that he never even saw her. Not really. Not entirely.”
The description moulded perfectly to Weaver’s agonising on the previous night. It was so often the circumstance that grew from divorce. A parent partnered in an unremittingly bleak marriage feels caught between the needs of a child and the needs of self. If he stays in the marriage solely to meet the needs of the child, he reaps the benefi ts of society’s approval, but his self erodes. Yet if he leaves the marriage solely to meet the needs of self, the child is damaged. What is required is a masterful balancing act between these disparate needs, a balancing act in which a marriage can end, former partners can establish more productive lives, and the children can escape without irreparable harm in the process.
It was, Lynley thought, the Utopian ideal, utterly improbable because feelings were involved whenever a marriage came to an end. Even when people were acting in the only manner possible to preserve their peace of mind, it was in the very need for peace of mind that guilt lay its most virulent seeds. Most people-and he admitted he was one of them-invariably gave power to social condemnation, allowing their behaviour to be guided by guilt, living their lives dominated by a Judaeo-Christian tradition which taught them that they had no right to happiness or to anything else save a life in which considerations of self were secondary to complete devotion to others. The fact that men and women did indeed lead lives of quiet desperation as a result generally went ignored. For as long as they led their lives for others, they achieved the approval of everyone else who-in equally quiet desperation-was engaged in doing the very same thing.
The situation was worse for Anthony Weaver. To achieve peace of mind-which society told him was not his due in the fi rst place-he had ended a marriage only to fi nd that the guilt attendant to divorce was exacerbated by the fact that, in escaping unhappiness, he had not merely left behind a small child who loved and depended upon him. He had left behind a handicapped child as well. And what kind of society would ever forgive him that? He stood to lose no matter what he’d done. Had he stayed in his marriage and devoted his life to his daughter, he could have felt self-righteous and nobly miserable. In opting at a try for peace of mind, he had reaped the harvest of guilt whose seeds were planted within what he-and society-considered a base and selfi sh need.