For the Sake of Elena Read Online Free

of grapefruit wedges, one boiled egg, and one thin slice of unbuttered toast provoked him into snarling at his teenaged son and daughter about their clothing and their hair, as if they were not both wearing school uniforms, as if their heads were not well-groomed and tidy. Stephen glanced at his mother, Linda did the same. And the three of them tucked into their own breakfasts with the martyred air of a family too long exposed to the unexpected mood-swings of the chronic dieter.
    Traffic had been locked at the Newnham Road round-about, and only by driving half on the pavement was Sheehan able to reach the bridge of Fen Causeway at something other than the hedgehog speed at which the rest of the cars were moving. He could envision the clogged mess which every southern artery into the city had probably become by now, and when he braked his car behind the constabulary’s scenes-of-crime van and heaved himself into the damp, cold air, he told the constable stationed on the bridge to radio the dispatcher for more men to help move traffic along. He hated rubberneckers and thrill seekers equally. Accidents and murders brought out the worst in people.
    Tucking his navy scarf more securely into his overcoat, Sheehan ducked under the yellow ribbon of the established police line. On the bridge, a half a dozen undergraduates leaned over the parapet, trying to get a look at the activity below. Sheehan growled and waved the constable over to deal with them. If the victim was a member of one of the colleges, he wasn’t about to let the word out any sooner than he had to. An uneasy peace had reigned between the local constabulary and the University since a cocked-up investigation at Emmanuel last term. He didn’t particularly want anything to disturb it.
    He crossed the footbridge to the island, where a female constable was hovering over a woman whose face and lips were the colour of unbleached linen. She was sitting on one of the bottom iron steps of Crusoe’s Bridge, one arm curved round her stomach and one fist bearing the weight of her head. She wore an old blue overcoat that looked as if it would dangle to her ankles, the front of it crusted with brown and yellow specks. Apparently, she’d been sick on herself.
    “She found the body?” Sheehan asked the constable, who nodded in reply. “Who’s made it so far?”
    “Everyone but Pleasance. Drake kept him at the lab.”
    Sheehan snorted. Just another little tiff in forensic, no doubt. He raised his chin sharply at the woman in the overcoat. “Get her a blanket. Keep her here.” He went back to the gate and entered the southern section of the island.
    Depending upon how one looked at it, the place was either a dream-come-true or a crime-scene nightmare. Evidence abounded, everything from disintegrating newspapers to partially filled and discarded plastic sacks. The whole area looked like a common dumping ground with at least a dozen good—and obviously different—footprints pressed into the soggy earth.
    “Hell,” Sheehan muttered.
    Wooden planks had been laid down by the scenes-of-crime team. They started at the gate and travelled south, disappearing into the fog. He picked his way along these, avoiding the regular splattering of water from the trees overhead. Fogdrops, his daughter Linda would have called them with that passion for linguistic accuracy which always surprised him into thinking that his real daughter had somehow been left behind at the hospital sixteen years ago and a pixy-faced poet left in her place.
    He paused by a clearing where two canvases and an easel leaned against a poplar and a wooden case gaped open, collecting a skin of condensation on a neat row of pastels and eight hand-lettered tubes of paint. He frowned at this, looking from the river to the bridge to the great puffs of fog rising like a gas from the fen. As the subject for a painting, it reminded him of that French stuff he’d seen at the Courtauld Institute years ago, dots and swirls and