A sudden fist of knowledge squeezed at Glyn’s heart as the full meaning of his words slowly dawned upon her, even though he spoke them in a fugue. “You could have prevented it. If only you’d given her what she wanted. Anthony, you could have stopped her.”
“I couldn’t. I had to think of Elena. She was here in Cambridge, in this home, with me. She was starting to come round, to be free with me at last, to let me be her father. I couldn’t run the risk of losing her again. I couldn’t take the chance. And I thought I would lose her if I-”
“You lost her anyway!” she cried, shaking his arm. “She’s not going to walk through that door. She’s not going to say Dad, I understand, I forgive you, I know you did your best. She’s gone. She’s dead. And you could have prevented it.”
“If she had a child, she might have understood what it felt like to have Elena here. She might have known why I couldn’t face the thought of doing anything that might have resulted in losing her again. I’d lost her once. How could I face that agony again? How could she expect me to face it?”
Glyn saw that he wasn’t really responding to her. He was ruminating. He was speaking in tongues. Behind a barrier that shielded him from the worst of the truth, he was talking in a canyon where an echo exists, but throws back different words. Suddenly, she felt the same degree of anger towards him that she’d felt during the worst years of their marriage when she’d greeted his blind pursuit of his career with pursuits of her own, waiting for him to notice the late nights she was keeping, wanting him to notice the nature of the bruises on her neck, her breasts, and her thighs, anticipating the moment when he would finally speak, when he’d give an indication that he really did care.
“This is all about you, isn’t it?” she asked him. “It always has been. Even having Elena here in Cambridge was for your benefi t, not for herself. Not for her education, but to make you feel better, to give you what you want.”
“I wanted to give her a life. I wanted us to have a life together.”
“How would that have been possible? You didn’t love her, Anthony. You only loved yourself. You loved your image, your reputation, your wonderful accomplishments. You loved being loved. But you didn’t love her. And even now you can stand here and look at your daughter’s death and think about how you caused it and how you feel about it now and how devastated you are and what kind of statement it all makes about you. But you won’t do anything about any of it, will you, you won’t make any declaration, you won’t take any stand. Because how might that refl ect upon you?”
Finally, he looked at her. The rims of his eyes appeared bloody and sore. “You don’t know what happened. You don’t understand.”
“I understand perfectly. You plan to bury your dead, lick your wounds, and go on. You’re as much a coward as you were fi fteen years ago. You ran out on her then in the middle of the night. You’ll run out on her now. Because it’s the easiest thing to do.”
“I didn’t run out on her,” he said carefully. “I stood firm this time, Glyn. That’s why she died.”
“For you? Because of you?”
“Yes. Because of me.”
“The sun rises and sets on the same horizon in your world. It always has.”
He shook his head. “Perhaps once,” he said. “But it only sets now.”
21
Lynley pulled the Bentley into a vacant space at the southwest corner of the Cambridge police station. He stared at the vaguely discernible shape of the glass-encased notice board in front of the building, feeling drained. Next to him, Havers fidgeted in her seat. She began to flip through her notebook. He knew she was reading what she’d just recorded from Rosalyn Simpson.
“It was a woman,” the Queens’ undergraduate had said.
She had walked them along the same route she had taken early Monday morning, through the thick, dun, cotton wool of fog in Laundress Lane where the open door to the Asian Studies Faculty shot a meagre light out into the gloom. Once someone slammed it shut, however, the mist seemed impenetrable. The universe became confined to the twenty square feet which comprised the boundary of what they could see.
“Do you run every morning?” Lynley asked the girl as they crossed Mill Lane and skirted the metal posts that kept vehicles off the pedestrian bridge which crossed the river at Granta Place. To their right, Laundress Green was obscured by the fog, an expanse of misty field intermittently disturbed by the hulking forms of crack willows. Beyond it, from across the pond, a single light winked from an upper floor in the Old Granary.
“Nearly,” she answered.
“Always the same time?”
“As close to a quarter past six as I can make it. Sometimes a bit later.”
“And on Monday?”
“Mondays are slower for me, getting out of bed. It was probably round six-twenty-five when I left Queens’ on Monday.”
“So you’d reach the island…”
“No later than half past.”
“You’re certain of that. It couldn’t have been later?”
“I was back in my room by half past seven, Inspector. I’m quick, it’s true, but I’m not that quick. And I did a good ten miles Monday morning, with the island at the start of it. It’s part of my training circuit.”
“For Hare and Hounds?”
“Yes. I fancy a blue this year.”
She hadn’t noticed anything unusual on the morning of her run, she told them. It was still quite dark when she left Queens’ College, and aside from overtaking a workman who was pushing a cart down Laundress Lane, she hadn’t seen another soul. Just the usual assortment of ducks and swans, some already fl oating on the river, others still placidly dozing on the bank. But the fog was heavy-“At least as heavy as it is today,” she said-so she had to admit that anyone might have been lurking in a doorway or waiting, hidden by the fog, on the green.
When they reached the island, they found a small fire burning, sending up weak puffs of acrid, soot-coloured smoke to melt into the fog. A man in a peaked cap, overcoat, and gloves was feeding autumn leaves, trash, and bits of wood into the blue-tipped fl ames. Lynley recognised him as Ned, the surlier of the two older boat repairmen.
Rosalyn indicated the footbridge that crossed not the Cam itself, but the secondary stream that the river became as it fl owed round the west side of the island. “She was crossing this,” she said. “I heard her because she stumbled against something-she might have lost her footing, everything was quite damp-and she was coughing as well. I assumed she was out running like me and was feeling worn out, and frankly I was a bit peeved to come upon her like that because she didn’t appear to be watching where she was going and I nearly bumped into her. And-” She seemed embarrassed. “Well, I suppose I have the University mind set about townees, don’t I? What was she doing, I thought, invading my patch?”
“What gave you the impression she was a local?”
Rosalyn looked thoughtfully at the footbridge through the mist. The damp air was catching on her eyelashes, spiking them darkly. Childlike curls of hair were forming against her brow. “It was something about her clothes, I should guess. And perhaps her age, although I suppose she could have been from Lucy Cavendish.”
“What about her clothes?”
Rosalyn gestured at her own mismatched sweat suit. “University runners generally wear their college colours somewhere, their college sweatshirts as well.”
“And she wasn’t wearing a sweat suit?” Havers asked sharply, glancing up from her notebook.
“She was-a tracksuit actually-but it wasn’t from a college. I mean, I don’t recall seeing a college name on it. Although, now I think of it, considering the colour, she might have been from Trinity Hall.”