Gareth’s eyes went to Lynley and then beyond him to the closed door of the offi ce. He chewed his gum with what looked like deliberate slowness. Its scent was liquid sugar in the air.
When he replied, his hands moved as slowly as his jaws. “I didn’t know that.”
“You weren’t her lover?”
He shook his head.
“According to her stepmother, she’d been seeing someone regularly since December of last year. Her calendar indicates that with a symbol. A fish. That wasn’t you? You would have first been introduced to her round then, wouldn’t you?”
“I saw her. I knew her. It was what Dr. Cuff wanted. But I wasn’t her lover.”
“A bloke at Fenners called her your woman.”
Gareth took a second stick of gum, unwrapped it, rolled it into a tube, popped it into his mouth.
“Did you love her?”
Again, his eyes dropped. Lynley thought of the wad of tissues in the conference room. He looked once again at the boy’s pallid face. He said, “You don’t mourn someone you don’t love, Gareth,” even though the boy’s attention was not on Bernadette’s hands.
Bernadette said, “He wanted to marry her, Inspector. I know that because he told me once. And he-”
Perhaps sensing the conversation, Gareth looked up. His hands fl ashed quickly.
“I was telling him the truth,” Bernadette said. “I said you wanted to marry her. He knows you loved her, Gareth. It’s completely obvious.”
“Past. Loved.” Gareth’s fists were on his chest more like a punch than a sign. “It was over.”
“When did it end?”
“She didn’t fancy me.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“She fancied someone else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I thought we were together. And we weren’t. That was it.”
“When did she make this clear to you? Recently, Gareth?”
He looked sullen. “Don’t remember.”
“Sunday night? Is that why you were arguing with her?”
“Oh, dear,” Bernadette murmured, although she cooperatively continued to sign.
“I didn’t know she was pregnant. She didn’t tell me that.”
“But as to the other. The man she loved. She told you about that. That was Sunday night, wasn’t it?”
Bernadette said, “Oh, Inspector, you can’t really think that Gareth had anything to do-”
Gareth lunged across the desk and grabbed Bernadette’s hands. Then he jerked out a few signs.
“What’s he saying?”
“He doesn’t want me to defend him. He says there’s nothing for me to defend.”
“You’re an engineering undergraduate, aren’t you?” Lynley asked. Gareth nodded. He said, “And the engineering lab’s by Fen Causeway, isn’t it? Did you know Elena Weaver ran that way in the morning? Did you ever see her run? Did you ever go with her?”
“You want to think I killed her because she wouldn’t have me” was his reply. “You think I was jealous. You’ve got it figured that I killed her because she was giving some other bloke what she wouldn’t give me.”
“It’s a fairly solid motive, isn’t it?”
Bernadette gave a tiny mewl of protest.
Gareth said, “Maybe the bloke who got her pregnant killed her. Maybe he didn’t fancy her as much as she fancied him.”
“But you don’t know who he was?”
Gareth shook his head. Lynley had the distinct impression he was lying. And yet he couldn’t at the moment come up with a reason why Gareth Randolph would lie about the identity of the man who made Elena pregnant, especially if he truly believed that man might be her killer. Unless he intended to take care of dealing with the man himself, in his own time, on his own terms. And with a blue in boxing, he’d have the odds on his side if it came to taking another by surprise.
Even as Lynley dwelt on this thought, he realised there was yet another possible reason why Gareth might choose not to cooperate with the police. If he was savouring Elena’s death at the same time as he mourned it, what better way to prolong his enjoyment than to lengthen the time it would take to bring the criminal to justice. How often had a jilted lover believed that a crime of violence perpetrated by someone else was exactly what the loved one deserved?
Lynley rose to his feet and nodded to the boy. He said, “Thank you for your time,” and turned to the door.
On the back of it he saw what he hadn’t had the opportunity to notice when he had entered the room. It was hung with a calendar on which the entire year was visible at one glance. So it was not avoidance that had made Gareth Randolph shift his eyes to the door when Lynley had told him of Elena Weaver’s pregnancy.
He’d forgotten about the bells. They’d rung at Oxford as well when he was an undergraduate, but somehow the years had taken that memory from him. Now as he stepped out of the Peterhouse Library and began the walk back to St. Stephen’s College, the resonant calling of the faithful to Evensong formed an auditory backdrop-like antiphonal chanting-from college chapels across the city. It was, he thought, one of life’s most joyous sounds, this ringing of bells. And he found himself regretting the fact that the span of time in which he had given himself over to learning how to understand the criminal mind had allowed him to forget the sheer pleasure of church bells ringing into an autumn wind.
He let sound itself become his most conscious perception as he strolled past the old, overgrown graveyard of Little St. Mary’s Church and made the turn onto Trumpington where the jingle of bicycle bells and the metallic clicking of their unoiled gears joined the rumble of evening traffi c.
“Go on, Jack,” a young man shouted to a retreating bike rider from the doorway of a grocer’s shop as Lynley passed. “We’ll catch you up at the Anchor. All right?”
“Right.” A vague call in return, caught on the wind.
Three girls walked by, engaged in a heated discussion about “that sod, Robert.” They were followed by an older woman, high heels snapping against the pavement, pushing a crying baby in a pram. And then lurched by a black-garbed figure of uncertain sex from the folds of whose voluminous coat and trailing scarves came the plaintive notes of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” played on harmonica.
Through it all, Lynley heard Bernadette giving voice to Gareth’s angry words: We don’t want your hearing. But you can’t believe that, can you, because you think you’re special instead of just bloody different.
He wondered if this had marked the crucial difference between Gareth Randolph and Elena Weaver. We don’t want your hearing. For because of her parents’ well-intentioned if perhaps arguably misguided efforts on her behalf, Elena had been taught to know every moment of her life that something was missing. She had been given something to want. So how could Gareth ever have hoped to win her over to a life-style and a culture that she had been taught from birth to reject and overcome?
He wondered what it had been like for the two of them: Gareth dedicated to his people, seeking to make Elena one of them. And Elena merely following the dictates laid down by the Master of her College. Had she feigned interest in DeaStu? Had she feigned enthusiasm? And if she did neither, if she felt contempt, what kind of effect would this have had on the young man who had been given the unwanted assignment of steering her into a society so foreign to that which she had always known?
Lynley wondered what kind of blame-if any-ought to be assessed upon the Weavers for the efforts they had made with their daughter. For in spite of the manner in which they had apparently tried to create an inaccurate fantasy out of the reality of their daughter’s life, hadn’t they in fact given Elena what Gareth himself had never known? Hadn’t they given her her own form of hearing? And if that was the case, if Elena did move with a relative degree of comfort in a world in which Gareth felt himself an alien, how could he come to terms with the fact that he had fallen in love with someone who shared neither his culture nor his dreams?