“What gave you that impression?”
“There were times when she’d come by quite late and we were still up and she’d hang on her father and hug him and press her cheek against his and rub up against him and all the time she was reeking like…” Justine’s fi ngers felt for her wedding band.
“Was she trying to arouse him?”
“I thought so at first. Who wouldn’t have thought so with her carrying on like that? But then I began to think that she merely was trying to rub his face in normal.”
It was a curious expression. “An act of defi ance?”
“No. Not at all. An act of compliance.” She must have seen the next query on his face, for she went on with, “I’m being normal, Daddy. See how normal I am? I’m partying and drinking and having regular sex. Isn’t this what you wanted? Didn’t you want a normal child?”
Lynley saw how her words reaffi rmed the picture which Terence Cuff had painted obliquely on the previous night about Anthony Weaver’s relationship with his daughter. “I know he didn’t want her to sign,” Lynley said. “But as for the rest-”
“Inspector, he didn’t want her to be deaf. Nor did Glyn, for that matter.”
“Elena knew this?”
“How could she help knowing? They’d spent her entire life trying to shape her into a normal woman, the very thing she could never hope to be.”
“Because she was deaf.”
“Yes.” For the first time, Justine’s posture altered. She leaned forward fractionally to make her point. “Deaf-isn’t-normal- Inspector.” She waited for a moment before going on, looking as if she were gauging his reaction. And he did feel the reaction course swiftly through him. It was an aversion of the sort he always felt when someone made a comment that was xenophobic, homophobic, or racist.
“You see,” she said, “you want to make her normal as well. You even want to call her normal and condemn me for daring to suggest that being deaf is different. I can see it on your face: Deaf is as normal as anything else. Which is exactly what Anthony wanted to think. So you can’t really judge him, can you, for wanting to describe his daughter in the very same way as you’ve just done?”
There was sheer, cool insight behind the words. Lynley wondered how much time and reflection had gone into Justine Weaver’s being able to make such a detached evaluation. “But Elena could judge him.”
“And she did just that.”
“Adam Jenn told me he saw her occasionally, at your husband’s request.”
Justine returned to her original, upright position. “Anthony had hopes that Elena might attach herself to Adam.”
“Could he be the one who made her pregnant, then?”
“I don’t think so. Adam only met her this past September, at the faculty party I mentioned earlier.”
“But if she became pregnant shortly thereafter…?”
Justine dismissed this by quickly raising her hand from her lap to stop his words. “She’d been having sex frequently since the previous December. Long before she knew Adam.” Once again, she seemed to anticipate his next question. “You’re wondering how I could know that so defi nitely.”
“It was nearly a year ago after all.”
“She’d come in to show us the gown she’d bought for the Christmas Ball. She undressed to try it on.”
“And she hadn’t washed.”
“She hadn’t washed.”
“Who took her to the ball?”
“Gareth Randolph.”
The deaf boy. Lynley reflected upon the fact that Gareth Randolph’s name was becoming like a constant undercurrent, omnipresent beneath the flow of information. He evaluated the manner in which Elena Weaver might have used him as an instrument of revenge. If she was acting out of a need to rub her father’s face in his own desire that she be a normal, functioning woman, what better way to throw that desire back at him than to become pregnant. She’d be giving him what he ostensibly wanted-a normal daughter with normal needs and normal emotions whose body functioned in a perfectly normal way. At the same time, she’d be getting what she wanted-retaliation by choosing as the father of her child a deaf man. It was, at heart, a perfect circle of vengeance. He only wondered if Elena had been that devious, or if her stepmother was using the fact of the pregnancy to paint a portrait of the girl that would serve her own ends.
He said, “Since January, Elena had marked her calendar periodically with the small drawing of a fish. Does that mean anything to you?”
“A fi sh?”
“A pencil drawing similar to the symbol used for Christianity. It appears several times each week. It’s on the calendar the night before she died.”
“A fi sh?”
“Yes. As I’ve said. A fi sh.”
“I can’t think of what it might mean.”
“A society she belonged to? A person she was meeting?”
“You make her life sound like a spy novel, Inspector.”
“It appears to be something clandestine, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Why?”
“Why not just write out whatever the fi sh stood for?”
“Perhaps it was too long. Perhaps it was easier to draw the fish. It can’t mean much. Why would she worry about someone else seeing something she was putting on her personal calendar? It was probably shorthand, a device she used to remind herself of something. A supervision, perhaps.”
“Or an assignation.”
“Considering how Elena was telegraphing her sexual activity, Inspector, I hardly think she’d be disguising an assignation when it came to her own calendar.”
“Perhaps she had to. Perhaps she only wanted her father to know what she was doing but not with whom. And he’d have seen her calendar. He’d have been in her room, so she might not have wanted him to see the name.”
Lynley waited for her to respond. When she did not do so, he said, “Elena had birth control pills in her desk. But she hadn’t taken them since February. Can you explain that?”
“Only in the most obvious way, I’m afraid. She wanted to get pregnant. But that doesn’t surprise me. It was, after all, the normal thing to do. Love a man. Have his baby.”
“You and your husband have no children, Mrs. Weaver?”
The quick change in subject, tagged logically onto her own statement, seemed to take her momentarily aback. Her lips parted briefl y. Her gaze went to the wedding photograph on the tea table. She appeared to straighten her spine even further, but it may have been the result of the breath she took before she replied quite evenly, “We have no children.”
He waited to see if she would say more, relying upon the fact that his own silence had so often in the past proved more effective than the most pointed question in pressuring someone into disclosure. Moments ticked by. Outside the sitting room window, a sudden gust of wind tossed a spray of field maple leaves against the glass. They looked like a billowing, saffron cloud.
Justine said, “Will there be anything else?” and smoothed her hand along the perfect, knife-edged crease in her trousers. It was a gesture which eloquently declared her the victor, if only for an instant, in the brief battle of their wills.
He admitted defeat, standing and saying, “Not at the moment.”
She walked with him to the front door and handed him his overcoat. Her expression, he saw, was no different from what it had been when she first admitted him into the house. He wanted to marvel at the degree to which she had herself under control, but instead he found himself wondering whether it was a matter of mastering any revealing emotions or a matter of having-or experiencing-those emotions in the first place. He told himself it was to assess this latter possibility rather than to meet the challenge of cracking the composure of someone who seemed so invulnerable that he asked his fi nal question.
“An artist from Grantchester found Elena’s body yesterday morning,” he said. “Sarah Gordon. Do you know her?”
Quickly, she bent to pick up the stem of a leaf which lay, barely discernible, on the parquet floor. She rubbed her finger along the spot where she had found it. Back and forth, three or four times as if the minuscule stem had somehow damaged the wood. When she had seen to it to her satisfaction, she stood again.