He took a step towards her, placing his hand on her shuddering back. “Glyn, I’m-”
“Don’t you touch me!” She rolled away from him, lost her footing, and fell to one knee.
The fl imsy flannel covering on the coffi n tore. The wood was thin and vulnerable beneath it.
Heart pounding in both his chest and his ears, Lynley staggered to a halt within sight of Fen Causeway. He dug in his pocket for his watch. He flipped it open, panting, and checked the time. Seven minutes.
He shook his head, bent nearly double with his hands on his knees, wheezing like an undiagnosed case of emphysema. Less than a mile’s run and he felt completely done for. Sixteen years of cigarette smoking had taken its toll. Ten months of abstinence was not enough to redeem him.
He stumbled onto the worn wooden planks that bridged the stream between Robinson Crusoe’s Island and Sheep’s Green. He leaned against the metal rail, threw his head back, and gulped in air like a man saved from drowning. Sweat beaded his face and dampened his jersey. What a wonderful experience it was to run.
With a grunt, he turned to rest his elbows against the rail, letting his head hang while he caught his breath. Seven minutes, he thought, and not quite a mile. She would have run the same course in not much more than fi ve.
There could be no doubt about it. She ran daily with her stepmother. She was a long-distance runner. She ran with the Cambridge cross country team. If her calendar was any indication of reality, she’d been running with the University Hare and Hounds as far back as last January and probably before. Depending on the distance she had planned to go that morning, her pacing might have been different. But he couldn’t imagine her taking any longer than ten minutes to run to the island, no matter the course she had intended to follow. That being the case, unless she stopped off somewhere along the route, she would have reached the site of her murder no later than six-twenty-fi ve.
Respiration finally slowing, he raised his head. Even without the fog which had shrouded most of the region on the previous day, he had to admit that this was an exceptional spot for a murder. Crack willows, alders, and beeches- none of them yet leafless-created an impenetrable screen which shielded the island not only from the causeway bridge which arched above its south end on the way into the town but also from the public footpath that ran along the stream-Sheehan’s bit of a ditch-not ten feet away. Anyone wishing to carry off a crime reaped the benefi t of virtual privacy here. And although the occasional pedestrian crossed over the larger bridge from Coe Fen to the island and from there to the footpath, although bicycle riders pedalled across Sheep’s Green or along the river, in the nighttime darkness of half past six on a cold November morning the killer could have been fairly certain that no witness would come upon the beating and strangulation of Elena Weaver. At half past six in the morning no one would even be in the area, except her stepmother. And her presence had been eliminated with a simple call placed on the Ceephone, a call made by someone who presumed on a personal knowledge of Justine to assume that, given the opportunity, she wouldn’t run by herself the next morning.
Of course, she had run anyway. But it was the killer’s luck that she had chosen a different route. If, indeed, it had been luck at all.
Lynley pushed himself off the railing and walked across the footbridge onto the island. A tall wooden gate leading to the north end stood open, and Lynley entered to see a work-shed with punts piled to one side of it and three old bicycles leaning against its green doors. Inside, bundled in heavy pullovers against the cold, three men were examining a hole in a punt. Fluorescent lights along the ceiling yellowed their skin. The scent of marine varnish made a weight of the air. It wafted from a crowded workbench where two gallon cans stood open with paintbrushes resting across their tops. It spread from two other punts, freshly refurbished, that rested on sawhorses, waiting to dry.
“Bloomin idiots, they are,” one of the men was saying. “Lookit this bash, will you? It’s carelessness, that is. They none of them have a stitch of respect.”
One of the other men looked up. Lynley saw that he was young-no more than twenty. His face was spotty, his hair was long, and his earlobe sported a glittering zircon stud. He said, “Help you, mate?”
The other two ceased working. They were middle-aged and tired-looking. One gave Lynley a once-over look that took in his makeshift running clothes of brown tweed, blue wool, and white leather. The other went to the far end of the shed where he fi red up an electric sander and began to savage the side of a canoe.
Having seen the offi cial crime-scene notice still marking off the south end of the island, Lynley wondered why Sheehan had done nothing about this section. He discovered soon enough when the younger man said:
“No one shuts us out just ’cause some slag’s in the shit.”
“Leave off, Derek,” the older man said. “It’s a killing they’re dealing with, not some lady in distress.”
Derek tossed his head derisively. He pulled a cigarette from his blue jeans and lit one with a kitchen match which he threw to the fl oor, casually oblivious of the proximity of several cans of paint.
Identifying himself, Lynley asked if any of them had known the dead girl. Just that she was from the University, they told him. They had no more information than what the police had given them upon their arrival at the workshop yesterday morning. They knew only that a college girl’s body had been found on the south end of the island, with her face mashed up and some string round her neck.
Had the police conducted a search of this northern area? Lynley wanted to know.
“Poked their faces everywhere, they did,” Derek replied. “Cut right through the gate before we even got here. Ned was right cheesed off about that all day.” He shouted through the noise that screeched from the sander at the end of the building, “Weren’t you, mate?”
If he heard him, Ned gave no sign. He was fully intent upon the canoe.
“You noticed nothing out of the ordinary?” Lynley said.
Derek blew cigarette smoke from his mouth and sucked it up with his nostrils. He grinned, apparently pleased with the effect. “You mean aside from about two dozen coppers crawling round through the bushes trying to pin what they can on blokes like us?”
“How’s that?” Lynley asked.
“It’s the regular story. Some college tart got bagged. The coppers are looking to nab a local because if the University nits don’t like the nature of the collar, all hell’s go’n to break loose. Just ask Bill here how it works.”
Bill didn’t appear to be willing to hold forth on this particular topic. He busied himself at the workbench where he picked up a hacksaw and went after a narrow piece of wood being held steady by an old red vice.
Derek said, “His boy works on the local rag, he does. Was following a story ’bout some bloke who supposably offed himself last spring. Uni didn’t like the way the story was developing and bang on the button they tried to quash it straight away. That’s the way it runs round here, mister.” Derek stabbed a dirty thumb in the direction of the centre of town. “Uni like the locals to toe the Uni line.”
“Isn’t that sort of thing dead and gone?” Lynley asked. “I mean the town-and-gown strife.”