Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  “Constable?”

  “Tell him, lad,” the Chief Inspector said. “It’s the only way he’s going to be satisfied.”

  Shepherd gave a shrug, replacing the spectacles. “I wanted to see if she was alone. Maggie’d gone to spend the night with one of her mates…” He sighed, shifted his weight.

  “And you thought Sage might be doing the same with Mrs. Spence?”

  “He’d been there three times. Juliet gave me no reason to think she’d taken him as a lover. I wondered. That’s all. I wondered. It’s nothing I’m proud of.”

  “Would it be likely that she’d take on a lover after so brief an acquaintance, Constable?”

  Shepherd picked up his glass, saw it was empty, put it back down. A spring creaked on the sofa as the Chief Inspector stirred.

  “Would she, Mr. Shepherd?”

  The constable’s spectacles flashed briefly in the light as he lifted his head to meet Lynley’s gaze. “That’s hard to know about any woman, isn’t it? Especially a woman you love.”

  There was truth to that, Lynley admitted. More than he liked to think about. People expatiated on the virtues of trust all the time. He wondered how many of them actually lived by it, with no doubts ever camping like restless gypsies just at the edge of their consciousness.

  He said: “I take it Sage was gone when you arrived?”

  “Yes. She said he’d left at nine.”

  “Where was she?”

  “In bed.”

  “Ill?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she let you in?”

  “I knocked. She didn’t answer. I let myself in.”

  “The door was unlocked?”

  “I have a set of keys.” He saw St. James glance quickly in Lynley’s direction. He added, “She didn’t give them to me. Townley-Young did. Keys to the cottage, Cotes Hall, the whole estate. He owns it. She’s the caretaker.”

  “She knows you have the keys?”

  “Yes.”

  “As a security precaution?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Do you use them often? As part of your evening patrol?”

  “Not generally, no.”

  Lynley saw that St. James was looking thoughtfully at the constable, his brows drawn together as he pulled at his chin. He said: “It was a bit risky, that, wouldn’t you say, letting yourself into her cottage at night? What if she had been in bed with Mr. Sage?”

  Shepherd’s jaw tightened but he answered easily. “I suppose I would have killed him myself.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DEBORAH SPENT THE FIRST QUARTER OF an hour inside St. John the Baptist Church. Beneath the hammer-beam ceiling, she wandered down the central aisle towards the chancel, tracing a mittened finger along the scrollwork that edged each pew. On the far side of the pulpit, one of them was boxed, separated from the rest by a gate of barley-sugar columns on the top of which a small bronze plaque bore blackened letters reading Townley-Young. Deborah lifted its latch and stepped inside, wondering what sort of people would want to maintain the unpleasant, centuries-old custom of segregating themselves from those they considered their social inferiors.

  She sat on the narrow bench and looked about. The air in the church was musty and frigid, and when she exhaled, her breath hung whitely before her face for a moment, then dissipated like a cirrus in the wind. On a pillar nearby, the hymnboard hung, listing a selection for some previous service. Number 388 was at the top, and idly she opened one of the hymnals to it, reading

  Lord Christ, who on thy heart didst bear

  the burden of our shame and sin,

  and now on high dost stoop to share

  the fight without, the fear within,

  after which she dropped her eyes to

  that we may care, as thou hast cared,

  for sick and lame, for deaf and blind,

  and freely share, as thou hast shared,

  in all the sorrows of mankind

  and then stared at the words with her throat aching-tight, as if they had been written precisely for her. Which they had not. Which they had not.

  She slapped the book closed. To the left of the pulpit a banner hung limply from a metal rod, and she scrutinised this. Winslough was stitched across a faded blue background in letters of yellow. Below them St. John the Baptist Church was rendered in quilted patchwork from which several tufts of stuffing leaked like snow against the bell tower and on the face of the clock. She wondered what the banner was used for, when it had been hung, if it had ever seen the light of day, how old it was, who had made it and why. She pictured an elderly woman of the parish at work on the design, stitching her way into the good graces of the Lord by making an offering for His place of worship. How long had it taken her? What sort of thread had she used for the quilting? Did anyone help? Did anyone know? Was there anyone who kept that sort of history of a church?

  Such games, Deborah thought. What an effort she made to keep her mind in check. How important it was to feel the tranquillity suggested by a visit to a church and communion with the Lord.

  She hadn’t come here for that. She had come because a walk down the Clitheroe Road in the late afternoon with her husband and the man who was his closest friend, who was her own former lover, who was the father of the child she might have had—would never have—seemed the best way to escape the feeling of having been betrayed.

  Dragged up to Lancashire on false pretences, she thought and gave a weak chuckle at the idea, she who had been the ultimate betrayer.

  She had found the sheaf of adoption papers tucked between his pyjamas and his socks, and she’d felt indignation pinch at her spine at the thought of his deception and at this intrusion into their time away from their real life in London. He wanted to talk about it, he explained when she flung the papers on the chest of drawers. He felt it was time that they sorted things out.

  There was nothing to sort. To talk about it was to engage in the kind of conversation that spun like a cyclone, gathering speed and energy from misunderstanding, wreaking destruction from words hurled in anger and self-defence. A family isn’t blood, he would say so reasonably because God knew that Simon Allcourt-St. James was scientist, scholar, and reason incarnate. A family is people. People bond to one another out of time, exposure, and experience, Deborah. We form our connections from the give and take of emotion, from the growing sensitivity to another’s needs, from mutual support. A child’s attachment to his parents has nothing to do with who gave him birth. It comes from living day to day, from being nurtured, from being guided, from having someone there—someone consistent—that he can trust. You know this. You do.

  It isn’t that, it isn’t that, she would want to say, even as she felt the tears which she so much despised cutting off her ability to speak.

  Then what is it? Tell me. Help me understand.

  Mine…it wouldn’t be…yours. It wouldn’t be us. Can’t you see that? Why won’t you see?

  He would look at her without speaking for a moment, not to punish her with withdrawal as she’d once thought his silences meant, but to think and to problem-solve. He would be considering a recommendation on a course of action for them to take when all she wanted was that he too would weep and display through his tears that he understood her grief.

  Because he’d never do that, she couldn’t say the final unsayable to him. She hadn’t even yet said it to herself. She didn’t want to feel the sorrow that would accompany the words. So she fought against their encroachment on her consciousness and she fended them off by railing against what she knew very well was his greatest strength: that he never allowed a single circumstance to defeat him, that he took life as he found it and bent it to his will.

  You don’t even care, would be the words she chose. This means nothing to you. You don’t want to understand me.

  What a convenience a cyclone-argument was.

  She’d gone walking that morning to avoid confrontation. Out on the moors with the wind in her face, hiking across the uneven ground,
dodging the occasional spines of furze and tramping through heather gone brown with winter, she’d kept everything at bay but the exercise itself.

  Now, however, the quiet church admitted no such means of avoidance. She could examine the memorials, watch the dying light darken the colours in the windows, read the bronze Ten Commandments that formed the reredos and decide how many she’d broken so far. She could scrape her feet across the age-warped floor of the Townley-Young pew and count the moth holes dotting the red mantle on the pulpit. She could admire the woodwork of the rood screen and the tester. She could wonder about the tonal quality of the bells. But she could not avoid the voice of her conscience that spoke the truth and forced her to hear it:

  Filling out those papers means I’m giving up. It’s admitting defeat. It tells me I’m a failure, not a woman at all. It says the ache will fade but it’ll never end. And it isn’t fair. This is the one thing that I want…this single, simple, unattainable thing.

  Deborah stood and pushed open the box-pew’s gate. With the sound of its creaking came Simon’s words:

  Are you punishing yourself, Deborah? Does your conscience say you’ve sinned and the only expiation is to replace one life with another which you yourself create? Is that what you’re doing? And are you doing it for me? Do you think you owe me that?

  Perhaps, in part. For he was, if anything, forgiveness itself. If he had been some other kind of man—railing occasionally or throwing into her face the fact that she was at fault in this failure—she might have been able to bear it more easily. It was because he did nothing save look for solutions and express his growing alarm about her health that she found it so difficult to forgive herself.

  On the worn red carpet, she retraced her steps down the aisle to the north door of the church. She stepped outside. She shivered in the growing cold and tucked her scarf inside the collar of her coat. Across the street, two cars were still parked in the constable’s drive. A light was on in the porch. But no one was stirring behind the front window.

  Deborah turned away and entered the graveyard. It was lumpy like the moorland, tangled at the edges with blackberry and bramble, the stark red of dogwood growing in a thicket round one tomb. On top of this an angel stood with head bowed and arms extended, as if in final readiness to throw himself into the fire-coloured stems.

  Nothing much had been done to see to the upkeep of the graves. Mr. Sage had been dead for a month, but the lack of concern for the church’s immediate surroundings seemed to have its genesis further back in time than that. The path was overgrown with weeds. The graves were mottled with black, dead leaves. The stones were splattered with mud and green with lichen.

  Among them, one grave lay like a soundless reproach to the state to which time and lack of interest had reduced the others. It was swept clean. Its blanket of tough, moorland grass was clipped. Its stone was unblemished. Deborah went to inspect it.

  Anne Alice Shepherd, the carving read. She’d been twenty-seven years old at her death. She’d also been someone’s dearest wife in life, and if the condition of her grave was any indication, she was someone’s dearest wife in death as well.

  A glint of colour caught Deborah’s eye. It seemed as misplaced as did the red dogwood in the otherwise chromatic congruence of the graveyard, and she bent to examine the base of the gravestone where two bright pink interlocking ovals shone against a nest of something grey. Upon her first inspection, the grey seemed to flow out of the marble marker as if the stone were disintegrating to dust. But on a closer look, she saw that it was a small mound of ashes into whose centre an even smaller, smooth stone had been carefully laid. On this were painted the interlocking ovals which had first caught her eye, two rings of neon pink, perfectly executed, each the same size.

  It seemed an odd offering to make to the dead. Winter called for holly wreaths and made do with juniper. At the worst, it accepted those ghastly plastic flowers encased in plastic cases that grew mildew inside. But ashes and stone and, she now saw, four slivers of wood holding the stone in place?

  She touched her finger to it. It was smooth as glass. It was almost perfectly flat as well. It had been placed on the ground directly at the centre of the gravestone, but it lay among the ashes like a message for the living and not a fond remembrance of the dead.

  Two rings, interlocked. Gently, without disturbing the ashes in which the stone lay, Deborah picked it up, its size and weight no more than that of a pound coin in her hand. She removed one mitten and she felt the stone lie cold, like a pool of standing water in her palm.

  Despite their odd colour, the rings reminded her of wedding bands, the sort one saw engraved in gold or embossed on invitations. Like their counterparts on paper, they were the same sort of perfect circles that priests always seemed to speak of, perfect circles of both the union and the unity that a strong marriage was supposed to embody. “A union of bodies, of souls, and of minds,” the minister had said at her own wedding more than two years ago. “These two before us shall now become one.”

  Except that it never quite happened that way in anyone’s life, as far as Deborah could tell. There was love, and with it came growing trust. There was intimacy, and with it came the warmth of assurance. There was passion, and with it came moments of joy. But if two hearts were to beat as one and if two minds were to think in like manner, such integration had not occurred between herself and Simon. Or if it had, the triumph of its accomplishment had been evanescent.

  Yet there was love between them. It was vast, subsuming most of her life. She could not imagine a world without it. What she wondered was if the love between them was enough to forge through fear in order to reach understanding.

  Her fingers closed round the stone with its two pink rings painted brightly upon it. She would keep it as a talisman. It would serve as a fetish for what the unity of marriage was supposed to produce.

  “You’ve made a real cock-up of things this time. You know that, don’t you? They’ve settled themselves in to reinvestigate the death and you’ve not got yourself a sinner’s chance in hell of stopping them. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Colin carried his whisky glass into the kitchen. He placed it directly beneath the tap. Although there were no other dishes in the sink and none at the moment that wanted washing on either the work top or the table, he squirted a lemon-scented detergent into the glass and ran water into it until soap bubbles frothed. They slid over the rim and down one side while the water churned up more like foam in a Guinness.

  “Your career’s on the line now. Everyone from Constable Nit chasing boys from Borstal to Hutton-Preston’s CC is going to hear about this. You realise that, don’t you? You’ve a blot on you, Col, and when next there’s an opening in CID, no one’s likely to forget it. You see that, don’t you?”

  Colin unwound the striped dish cloth from the base of the tap and lowered it into the glass with the sort of precision he might have used when cleaning one of his shotguns. He knuckled it into a wad, shimmied it round and round, and ran it carefully along the rim. Funny, how he could still miss Annie at an unexpected moment like this. It always came without warning—a quick surge of grief and longing that rose from his loins and ended near his heart—and it always came from something so ordinary that he never considered how insidious was the action that precipitated it. He was always unarmed and never unaffected.

  He blinked. A tremor shook him. He rubbed the glass harder.

  “You think I can help you at this point, don’t you, boy?” his father was continuing. “I stepped in once—”

  “Because you wanted to step in. I didn’t need you here, Pa.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Have you bloody gone daft? Has she got you in blinkers or just smiling like a prat with your trousers unzipped?”

  Colin rinsed the glass, dried it with the same care he’d used in washing it, and placed it next to the toaster which, he noted, was dusty and littered on its top with crumbs. Only then did he look at his father.

  The Chie
f Inspector was standing in the doorway as was his habit, blocking escape. The only way to avoid conversation was to push past him, to find employment in the pantry off the kitchen, or to mess about in the garage. In any case, his father would follow. Colin recognised when the Chief Inspector was building up a good head of steam.

  “What in hell were you thinking of?” his father asked. “What in God’s-name-bloody-stinking hell were you thinking of?”

  “We’ve been through this before. It was an accident. I told Hawkins. I followed procedure.”

  “Bleeding hell you did! You had a corpse on your hands with the stench of murder oozing from every pore. Tongue chewed to shreds. Body bloated like a pig. The whole area beat down like he’d been wrestling with the devil. And you call it an accident? You report that to your superior officer? Christ, I can’t think why they haven’t sacked you by now.”

  Colin folded his arms across his chest, leaned against the work top, and made his breathing slow. They both knew why. He put the answer into words. “You didn’t give them the chance, Pa. But for that matter, you didn’t give me a chance, either.”

  His father’s face flamed. “Jesus God! A chance? This isn’t a game. This is life and death. It’s still life and death. Only this time, boy-o, you’re on your own.” He’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt upon entering the house when they’d returned from their hike. Now he began unrolling them, shoving the material down his arms and battering it into place. On the wall to his right, Annie’s cat clock wagged its black pendulum tail as its eyes shifted with every tick and tock. It was just about time for him to leave. He had his sweet piece of girl-flesh to see to. All Colin had to do was wait him out.

  “Suspicious circumstances call for CID. You know that, boy, don’t you?”

  “I had CID.”

  “You had their bleeding photographer!”

  “The crime team came. They saw what I saw. There was no indication that anyone other than Mr. Sage had been there. No footprints in the snow but his. No witness who saw anyone else on the footpath that night. The ground was thrashed up because he’d had convulsions. It was obvious from the look of him that he’d had some sort of seizure. I didn’t need any DI to tell me that.”