Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  He walked round the grave slowly, wanting to believe Polly, willing to give her every chance. He thought the dog might have knocked it to one side, so he searched with the light and turned over every stone that appeared the right size, looking upon each for the interlocking pink rings. He finally gave up.

  He chuckled with derision at his own gullibility. How guilt makes us want to believe in redemption. Obviously, she had offered the first thought that had come into her head, putting herself forward, trying as always to make him take the blame. And—as everyone appeared to be doing—at the same time she was giving it her all to wrest him away from Juliet. It wasn’t going to work.

  He lowered the torch to shine in a white, bright circle on the ground. He gazed first to the north in the direction of the village where lights climbed the hillside in a pattern so familiar that he could have named each family behind every point of illumination. He gazed then to the south where the oak wood grew and where, beyond it, Cotes Fell rose like a black-cloaked figure against the night sky. And at the base of the fell, across the meadow, tucked into a clearing that had long ago been made among the trees, Cotes Hall stood, and with it the cottage and Juliet Spence.

  What a damn fool’s errand he had come on to the churchyard. He stepped over Annie’s grave, reached the wall in two strides. With a third he was over it, calling for the dog and swiftly moving in the direction of the public footpath that led from the village to the top of Cotes Fell. He could have gone back for the Rover. It would have been faster. But he told himself that he wanted the walk, needing to feel completely grounded in the choice he was making. And what better way to do that than to have the solid earth beneath his feet, to have his muscles working and his blood at the flow?

  He brushed aside the thought that fluttered against his mind like a wet-winged moth as he strode along the path: In his position, going the back way to the cottage implied not only a clandestine visit to Juliet but also collusion between them as well. Why was he using the back way to the cottage when he had nothing whatsoever to hide? When he had a car? When it was faster in a car? When the night was cold?

  As it had been in December when Robin Sage made the identical walk, with the identical destination in mind. Robin Sage, who had a car, who could have driven, who chose to walk, despite the snow that already lay upon the ground and in ignorance of or indifference to the fact that more had been promised before morning. Why had Robin Sage walked that night?

  He liked exercise, fresh air, a ramble on the moors, Colin told himself. In the two months Sage had lived in the village prior to his death, he’d seen the vicar often enough in his crusty Wellingtons with a walking stick stabbing into the ground. He called upon all the villagers by foot. He went to the common by foot when he fed the ducks. What reason was there to conclude he would have done anything but walk when it came to the cottage?

  The distance, the weather, the time of year, the growing cold, the night. The answers presented themselves to Colin, as rose the one fact he kept trying to discount. He’d never seen Sage do his walking at night. If the vicar made a call outside the village after dark, he took his car. He’d done as much the single time he’d gone out to Skelshaw Farm to meet Nick Ware’s family. He’d done the same when he’d made the rounds of the other farms.

  He’d even driven to dine at the Townley-Young estate shortly after his arrival in Winslough, before St. John Andrew Townley-Young had fully comprehended the extent of the vicar’s low church leanings and cut him off his list of acceptable acquaintances. So why had Sage walked to see Juliet?

  The same moth fluttered its wet-winged answer. Sage hadn’t wanted to be seen, just as Colin himself didn’t want to be seen paying a call at the cottage on the very night of the day that New Scotland Yard had come to the village. Admit it, admit it…

  No, Colin thought. That was the venomous, green-eyed monster making its attack on trust and belief. Surrendering to it in any way meant a sure death to love and a certain extinction of his hopes for the future.

  He determined to think no more about it, and made good that promise by turning off the torch. Although he had walked the footpath for nearly thirty years, he had to concentrate on something beyond Robin Sage in order to anticipate a sudden dip in the land and to find his way over the occasional stile. The stars assisted. They were brilliant in the sky, a dome of crystals that flickered like beacons on a distant landmass, across an ocean of night.

  Leo led the way. Colin couldn’t see him, but he could hear the dog’s feet breaking through the skin of frost on the ground, and the sound of him scrambling over a wall with a happy yelp made Colin smile. A moment later the dog began to bark in earnest. And then a man’s voice called, “No! Hey, there! Steady on!”

  Colin switched on the torch and picked up the pace. Against the next wall, Leo was bounding back and forth, leaping up towards a man who sat atop the stile. Colin shone the light on his face. The man squinted and shrank back in response. It was Brendan Power. The solicitor had a torch with him, but he wasn’t using it. Instead, it lay next to him, its light extinguished.

  Colin ordered the dog down. Leo obeyed, although he lifted one front leg and pawed rapidly at the wall’s rough stones as if greeting the other man. “Sorry,” Colin said. “He must have given you a start.”

  He saw that the dog had interrupted Power in the midst of a sit and a smoke, which explained why he hadn’t been using his torch. His pipe still glowed weakly, and what was left of the burning tobacco gave off the odour of cherries.

  Bum-boy’s tobacco, Colin’s father would have called it with a scoff. If you’re going to smoke, boy-o, at least have the sense to choose something that makes you smell like a man.

  “Quite all right,” Power said, extending his hand to let the dog sniff his fingers. “I was out for a walk. I like to get out in the evening if I can. Get in a bit of exercise after sitting behind a desk all day. Keep myself in shape. That sort of thing.” He sucked on the pipe and seemed to be waiting for Colin to make some sort of similar reply.

  “Out to the Hall?”

  “The Hall?” Power reached in his jacket and brought forth a pouch which he opened and sank the pipe into, packing it with fresh tobacco without having cleared the bowl of the old. Colin watched him curiously. “Yes. The Hall. Right. Checking things. The work and all. Becky’s getting anxious. Things haven’t gone well. But you know that already.”

  “There’s been no more trouble since the weekend?”

  “No. Nothing. But one can’t be too careful. She likes me to check. And I don’t mind the walk. Fresh air. Breeze. Good for the lungs.” He took a deep breath as if to prove his point. Then he tried to light the pipe with only a moment’s success. The tobacco caught, but the clogged bowl prevented the stem from drawing. He gave up the effort after two tries and replaced pipe, pouch, and matches in his jacket. He hopped off the wall. “Becky’ll be wondering where I’ve got off to. I suppose. Good evening, Constable.” He began to walk off.

  “Mr. Power.”

  The man turned abruptly. He kept himself clear of the light which Colin was directing his way. “Yes?”

  Colin picked up the torch which still lay on the wall. “You’ve forgotten this.”

  Power bared his teeth in what passed for a smile. He gave a short laugh. “Fresh air must have gone right to my head. Thanks.”

  When he reached for the torch, Colin held on a moment longer than was absolutely necessary. Testing the waters because they needed to be tested, because New Scotland Yard would be doing its own testing soon enough, he said, “Do you know this is the spot where Mr. Sage died? Just on the other side of the stile?”

  Power’s Adam’s apple seemed to travel the length of his neck. He said, “I say…”

  “He did his best to make it over but he was having convulsions. Did you know? He hit his head on the lower step.”

  Power’s glance shifted quickly from Colin to the wall. “I didn’t know. Only that he was found…that you found him somewhere on the
footpath.”

  “You saw him the morning before he died, didn’t you? You and Miss Townley-Young.”

  “Yes. But you know that already. So—”

  “That was you with Polly in the lane last night, wasn’t it? Outside the lodge?”

  Power didn’t answer at once. He looked at Colin with some curiosity and when he replied, the answer came slowly, as if with some thought as to why the question had been asked in the first place. He was, after all, a solicitor. “I was on my way out to the Hall. Polly was on her way home. We walked together. Is there a problem with that?”

  “And the pub?”

  “The pub?”

  “Crofters. You’ve been there with her. Drinking in the evenings.”

  “Once or twice, while I was out for a walk. When I stopped by the pub on my way home, Polly was there. I joined her.” He played the torch from one hand to the other. “What of it, anyway?”

  “You met Polly before your marriage. You met her at the vicarage. Did she treat you well?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Did she seek you out? Ask you any favours?”

  “No. Of course not. What are you getting at?”

  “You’ve access to keys to the Hall, haven’t you? To the caretaker’s cottage as well? She never asked to borrow them? She never made any offer in return for the loan of them?”

  “That’s some bloody cheek. What in hell are you trying to suggest? That Polly…?” As his words died, Power looked towards Cotes Fell. “What’s all this about? I thought it was over.”

  “No,” Colin said. “Scotland Yard’s come to call.”

  Power’s head turned. His gaze was even. “And you’re looking to misdirect them.”

  “I’m looking for the truth.”

  “I thought you did that already. I thought we heard it at the inquest.” Power removed his pipe from his jacket. He tapped the bowl against the heel of his shoe, dislodged the tobacco, and all the time kept his eyes on Colin. “You’re in hot water, aren’t you, Constable Shepherd? Well, let me make a suggestion. Don’t look to pour any of it on Polly Yarkin.” He strode off without another word, pausing some twenty yards away to repack and relight his pipe. The match flared, and from the glow that followed, it was clear that the tobacco had caught.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  COLIN KEPT THE TORCH LIT FOR THE rest of the walk to the cottage. Using darkness as a means of distraction was futile at this point. Brendan Power’s final words had made further avoidance impossible.

  He was hedging his bets and he knew it, setting up a secondary set of possibilities, and arranging an unexamined point of departure. He was looking for a viable direction in which he could lead the London police.

  Just in case, he told himself. Because the what if’s were increasing their restless murmur inside his skull, and he had to do something to quell them. He had to take an action that was well within his purview, called for under the circumstances, and guaranteed to set his mind at rest.

  He hadn’t considered what that direction would be until he saw Brendan Power and realised—with a rush of intuition so powerful that he could feel its certainty in the hollow of his gut—what could have happened, what must have happened, and how Juliet was blaming herself for a death she had only indirectly caused.

  Right from the start, he’d believed that the death was accidental because he couldn’t consider any other explanation and continue to look at himself in the mirror every morning. But now he saw how wrong he might have been and what an injustice he had done to Juliet in those dark and isolated moments when he—like everyone else in the village—wondered how she of all people could possibly have made such a fatal mistake. Now he saw how she might have been manipulated into believing that she had made a mistake in the first place. Now he saw how it all had been done.

  That thought and the rising desire to avenge the wrong committed against her drove him forward at new speed along the footpath, with Leo happily loping ahead. They veered off into the oak wood a short distance beyond the lodge in which Polly Yarkin and her mother lived. How easy it was to slip from the lodge to Cotes Hall, Colin realised. One didn’t even need to walk along the gouged disaster of a lane to get there.

  The path led him beneath the trees, across two footbridges whose wood was mossy and slowly rotting with each winter’s damp, and over a spongy drugget of leaves that lay in sodden decomposition under a delicate coating of frost. It ended where the trees made way for the rear garden of the cottage, and when Colin reached this point, he watched Leo bound through the piles of compost and the fallow earth to scratch at the base of the cottage door. He himself directed the torchlight here and there, assessing the details: the greenhouse to his immediate left, detached from the cottage, no lock on its door; the shed beyond it, four wooden walls and a tarpaper roof where she kept the tools which she used for her gardening and for the forays she made into the woods for her plants and roots; the cottage itself with the green cellar door—its thick paint flaking away in large chips—that led to the dark, loam-scented cavity beneath the cottage where she stored her roots. He fixed the torchlight on this and kept it fixed steadily as he crossed the garden. He gazed down at the padlock that held the door closed. Leo joined him, bumping his head against Colin’s thigh. The dog walked across the sloping surface of the door. His nails scraped the wood, and a hinge creaked in answer.

  Colin flashed the light to this. It was old and rusty, quite loose against the wooden jamb that was itself bolted to the angled stone plinth that served as its base. He played the hinge in his fingers, back and forth, up and down. He dropped his hand to the lower hinge. It held firmly to the wood. He shone the light against it, examined it closely, wondering if the marks he saw could be construed as scratches against the screws or merely an indication of some sort of abrasive used against the metal to remove the stains left by a slipshod worker when he painted the wood.

  He should have seen all this before, he realised. He shouldn’t have been so desperate to hear “death by accidental poisoning” that he overlooked the signs which might have told him that Robin Sage’s death had been something else. Had he argued with Juliet’s own frantic conclusions, had his mind been clear, had he trusted her loyalty, he could have spared her the stain of suspicion, the subsequent gossip, and her own distorted belief that she had killed a man.

  He turned off the torch and walked to the back door. He knocked. No one answered. He knocked a second time, and then tried the knob. The door swung open.

  He said, “Stay,” to Leo who obediently sank onto his haunches. He entered the cottage.

  The kitchen smelled of dinner—the fragrance of roasted chicken and newly baked bread, of garlic sautéed in olive oil. The odour of the food reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since the previous night. He’d lost appetite along with self-assurance the moment Sergeant Hawkins phoned him this morning and told him to expect a visit from New Scotland Yard.

  “Juliet?” He flipped on the kitchen light. A pot was on the cooker, a salad on the work top, two places laid on the old Formica table with its burn mark shaped like a crescent moon. Two glasses held liquid—one milk, one water—but no one had eaten, and when he touched his fingers to the glass filled with milk, he could feel from its temperature that it had stood there, undrunk, for quite some time. He called her name again and went through the passage to the sitting room.

  She was by the window in the dark, just a shadow herself, standing with her arms crossed beneath her breasts, looking out at the night. He said her name. She replied without turning from the glass.

  “She hasn’t come home. I’ve phoned around. She was with Pam Rice earlier. Then with Josie. And now—” She let out her breath in a brief, bitter laugh. “I can guess where she’s gone. And what she’s up to. He was here last night, Colin. Nick Ware. Again.”

  “Shall I go out and have a look for her?”

  “What would be the point? She’s made up her mind. We can drag her back now and lock her in
her room, but that would only be postponing the inevitable.”

  “What?”

  “She means to get herself pregnant.” Juliet pressed the tips of her fingers against her forehead, rubbed them up to her hairline, grasped the front of her hair and pulled hard as if to give herself pain. “She doesn’t know anything about anything. God in heaven, neither do I. Why did I ever think I’d be good for a child?”

  He crossed the room, stood behind her, and reached round her to loose her fingers from her hair. “You are good for her. This is just a stage she’s in.”

  “One I’ve set in motion.”

  “How?”

  “With you.”

  He felt an odd settling within him, one churn of the stomach and nothing more, presage of a future he wouldn’t consider. “Juliet,” he said. But he had no idea of what would reassure her.

  Along with her blue jeans, she was wearing an old work shirt. It smelled faintly like a herb. Rosemary, he thought. He didn’t want to think of anything else. He pressed his cheek against her shoulder and felt the material, soft, against his skin.

  “If her mummy can take a lover, why can’t she?” Juliet said. “I let you into my life and now I’m to pay.”

  “She’ll grow past this. Give it time.”

  “While she’s having regular sex with a fifteen-year-old boy?” She pulled away from him. He felt the cold sweep in to take the place of the pressure of her body against his. “There isn’t time. And even if there were, what she’s doing—what she’s after—is complicated by the fact that she wants her father, and if I can’t produce him in double quick time, she’ll make a father out of Nick.”

  “Let me be her father.”

  “That isn’t the point. She wants him, the real thing. Not a stars-in-his-eyes substitute ten years too young who’s blithering with some sort of idiotic love, who thinks marriage and babies are the answer to everything, who—” She stopped herself. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”