Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  He tried to sound unaffected. “It’s a fair enough description. We both know that.”

  “It wasn’t. It was cruel. She hasn’t been home. I’ve been phoning everywhere. I feel caught on the edge and…” She balled her hands together and pressed them to her chin. In the meagre light that came from the kitchen, she looked like a child herself. “Colin, you can’t understand what she’s like—or what I’m like. The fact that you love me won’t change that.”

  “And you?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t love me in return?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “Love you? What a joke on the both of us. Of course, I love you. And look where it’s brought me to with Maggie.”

  “Maggie can’t run your life.”

  “Maggie is my life. Why can’t you see that? This isn’t about us—about you and me, Colin. This isn’t about our future because we don’t have a future. But Maggie does. I won’t let her destroy it.”

  He heard only part of her words and said in careful repetition to make certain he’d understood, “We don’t have a future.”

  “You’ve known that from the first. You just haven’t wanted to admit it to yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because love makes us blind to the real world. It makes us feel so complete—so much part of someone else—that we can’t see its equal power to destroy.”

  “I didn’t mean why haven’t I wanted to admit it. I meant why don’t we have a future,” he said.

  “Because even if I weren’t too old, even if I wanted to give you babies, even if Maggie could live with the idea of our getting married—”

  “You don’t know she can’t.”

  “Let me finish. Please. This once. And listen.” She waited for a moment, perhaps to bring herself under control. She held her hands out towards him, cupped together, as if she would give him the information. “I killed a man, Colin. I can’t stay here in Winslough any longer. And I won’t let you leave this place you love.”

  “The police have come,” he said in answer. “From London.”

  At once, she dropped her hands to her sides. Her face altered, as if she were drawing a mask into place. He could feel the distance it created between them. She was invulnerable and unreachable, her armour secure. When she spoke, her voice was utterly calm.

  “From London. What do they want?”

  “To find out who killed Robin Sage.”

  “But who…? How…?”

  “It doesn’t matter who phoned them. Or why. It only matters that they’re here. They want the truth.”

  She lifted her chin fractionally. “Then I’ll tell it. This time.”

  “Don’t make yourself look guilty. There isn’t any need.”

  “I said what you wanted me to say before. I won’t do that again.”

  “You’re not hearing me, Juliet. There isn’t any need for self-sacrifice in this. You’re no more guilty than I am.”

  “I…killed…this…man.”

  “You fed him wild parsnip.”

  “What I thought was wild parsnip. Which I myself dug up.”

  “You can’t know that for sure.”

  “Of course I know it for sure. I dug it up that very day.”

  “All of it?”

  “All…? What are you asking?”

  “Juliet, did you take some parsnip from the root cellar that evening? Was it part of what you cooked?”

  She took a step backwards, as if to distance herself from what his words implied. The action cast her into deeper shadow. “Yes.”

  “Don’t you see what that means?”

  “It means nothing. There were only two roots left when I checked the cellar that morning. That’s why I went out for more. I…”

  He could hear her swallow as she began to understand. He went to her. “So you see, don’t you?”

  “Colin…”

  “You’ve taken the blame without cause.”

  “No. I haven’t. I didn’t. You can’t believe that. You mustn’t.”

  He smoothed his thumb along her cheekbone, ran his fingers round the curve of her jaw. God, she was like an infusion of life. “You don’t see it, do you? That’s the goodness of you. You don’t even want to see it.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t Robin Sage at all. It was never Robin Sage. Juliet, how can you be responsible for the vicar’s death when you were the one who was meant to die?”

  Her eyes grew wide. She began to speak. He stopped her words—and the fear which he knew lay behind them—with his kiss.

  They were scarcely out of the dining room, making their way through the pub to the residents’ lounge, when the older man accosted them. He gave Deborah a cursory glance that took in everything from her hair—always somewhere in the evolutionary cycle between haphazardly disarrayed and absolutely dishevelled—to the splotchy stains of ageing on her grey suede shoes. Then he moved his attention to St. James and Lynley, both of whom he scrutinised with the sort of care one generally gives to assessing a stranger’s potential for committing a felony.

  “Scotland Yard?” he asked. His tone was peremptory. It managed to suggest that only a hand-wringing, obsequious response to the question would do. At the same time it implied, “I know your sort,” “Walk two steps to the rear,” and “Pull at your forelock.” It was a lord-of-the-manor voice, the sort that Lynley himself had spent years trying to shed, and thus it was guaranteed to raise his hackles the moment he heard it. Which it did.

  St. James said quietly, “I’m having a brandy. You, Deborah? Tommy?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” Lynley allowed his gaze to follow St. James and Deborah to the bar.

  The pub appeared to be serving its regulars, none of whom seemed to be paying much attention to the older man who stood before Lynley waiting for a response. Yet everyone seemed at the same time to be aware of him. Their effort to ignore his presence was too studied, their eyes darting towards him then just as quickly flitting away.

  Lynley looked him over. He was tall and spare, with thinning grey hair and a fair complexion made ruddy round the cheeks through an exposure to the out-of-doors. But this was a hunting-and-fishing exposure, for there was nothing about the man to suggest that the time he spent exposed to the elements was anything other than leisure’s employment. He wore good tweeds; his hands looked manicured; his air was sure. And from the expression of distaste he cast in the direction of Ben Wragg who was slapping the bar and laughing heartily at a joke he himself had just told St. James, it was clear that coming to Crofters Inn constituted something of a descent from on high.

  “Look here,” the man said. “I asked a question. I want an answer. Now. Is that clear? Which of you is from the Yard?”

  Lynley took the brandy that St. James brought him. “I am,” he said. “Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. And something tells me that you’re Townley-Young.”

  He loathed himself even as he did it. The man would have had no way of determining a thing about him or about his background from a simple examination of his clothes because he hadn’t bothered much about dressing for dinner. He wore a burgundy pullover over his pin-striped shirt, a pair of grey wool trousers, and shoes that still had a thin crease of mud along the seam. So until Lynley spoke—until he made the decision to employ the Voice whose every inflection shouted public school educated, blue blood born, and bred to possess a series of cumbersome, useless titles—Townley-Young would have had no way of knowing that he was addressing his questions to a belted earl. He still didn’t, exactly. No one was whispering Eighth Earl of Asherton into his ear. No one was listing the accoutrements of fortune, class, and birth: the town house in London, the estate in Cornwall, a seat in the House of Lords if he wished to take it, which he decidedly did not.

  Into Townley-Young’s startled silence, Lynley introduced the St. Jameses. Then he sipped his brandy and observed Townley-Young over the rim of his glass.

  The man was undergoing a major adjustment in attitude. The nostril
s were unpinching, and the spine was loosening. It was clear that he wanted to ask half a dozen questions absolutely verboten in the situation and that he was attempting to look as if he’d known from the first that Lynley was less them and more us than Townley-Young himself would ever be.

  “May I speak to you privately?” he said and then added hastily with a glance at the St. Jameses, “I mean out of the pub. I should hope your friends would join us.” He managed the request with considerable dignity. He may have been surprised to discover that more than one class of individual could rest at ease beneath the title of Detective Inspector, but he wasn’t about to go all Uriah Heepish in an effort to mitigate the scorn with which he’d first spoken.

  Lynley nodded towards the door to the residents’ lounge at the far side of the pub. Townley-Young led the way. The lounge was, if anything, colder than the dining room had been and without the extra electric fires placed strategically to cut the chill.

  Deborah switched on a lamp, straightened its shade, and did the same to another. St. James removed an unfolded newspaper from one of the armchairs, tossed it to the sideboard on which Crofters Inn kept its supply of other reading material—mostly ancient copies of Country Life that looked as if they’d crumble if opened precipitately—and sat in one of the armchairs. Deborah chose a nearby ottoman for her own seat.

  Lynley noted that Townley-Young glanced once at St. James’ disability, a swift look of curiosity that moved quickly on its way to find a place for himself in the room. He chose the sofa above which hung a dismal reproduction of The Potato Eaters.

  “I’ve come to you for help,” Townley-Young said. “I’d got the word at dinner that you’d appeared in the village—that sort of news passes like a blaze in Winslough—and I decided to come round and see you myself. You’re not here on holiday, I take it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “This Sage business, then?”

  Comrades in class did not constitute an invitation to professional disclosure as far as Lynley was concerned. He answered with a question of his own. “Do you have something to tell me about Mr. Sage’s death?”

  Townley-Young pinched the knot of his kelly-green tie. “Not directly.”

  “Then?”

  “He was a good enough chap in his way, I suppose. We just didn’t see eye-to-eye on matters of ritual.”

  “Low church versus high?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Surely not a motive for his murder, however.”

  “A motive…?” Townley-Young’s hand dropped from his tie. His tone remained icily polite. “I’ve not come here to confess, Inspector, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t much like Sage, and I didn’t much like the austerity of his services. No flowers, no candles, just the bare bones. Not what I was used to. But he wasn’t a bad sort for a vicar, and his heart was in the right place as far as church-going was concerned.”

  Lynley took up his brandy and let the balloon glass warm in the palm of his hand. “You weren’t part of the church council who interviewed him?”

  “I was. I dissented.” Townley-Young’s ruddy cheeks grew momentarily ruddier. That the apparent Lord of the Manor had held no sway with the council on which he was undoubtedly the most important member went leagues to reveal his position in the hearts of the villagers.

  “I dare say you don’t especially mourn his passing, then.”

  “He wasn’t a friend, if that’s what you’re getting at. Even if friendship had been possible between us, he’d only been in the village for two months when he died. I realise that two months count for two decades in some arenas of our society these days, but frankly, I’m not of the generation that takes to calling its fellows by their Christian names on a moment’s notice, Inspector.”

  Lynley smiled. Since his father had been dead for some fourteen years and since his mother was nothing if not decidedly given to breaking her way past traditional barriers, he sometimes had occasion to forget the older generation’s reliance upon the choice of name as an indicator of intimacy. It always caught him off-guard and amused him mildly to come up against it in his work. What’s in a name indeed, he thought.

  “You mentioned that you had something to tell me that was indirectly involved with Mr. Sage’s death,” Lynley reminded Townley-Young, who looked as if he was about to embellish upon his nominal theme.

  “In that he was a visitor on the grounds of Cotes Hall several times prior to his death.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “I’ve come about the Hall.”

  “The Hall?” Lynley glanced at St. James. The other man lifted one hand fractionally in a don’t-ask-me gesture.

  “I’d like you to look into what’s been happening out there. Malicious mischief being made. Pranks being pulled. I’ve been trying to renovate it for the past four months, and some group of little hooligans keep getting in the way. A quart of paint spilled here. A roll of wallpaper ruined there. Water left running. Graffiti on the doors.”

  “Are you assuming that Mr. Sage was involved? That hardly seems likely for a clergyman.”

  “I’m assuming someone with a bone to pick with me is involved. I’m assuming you—a policeman—will get to the bottom of it and see that it’s stopped.”

  “Ah.” As he felt himself bristle beneath the final, imperious statement—their relative positions in an ostensibly classless society brushed aside in the man’s exigent need to have his personal problems resolved post-haste—Lynley wondered how many people in the immediate vicinity felt they had serious bones to pick with Townley-Young. “You’ve a local constable to see to things of this sort.”

  Townley-Young snorted. “He’s been dealing”—the word heavy with the weight of Townley-Young’s sarcasm—“with this from the first. He’s done his investigating after every incident. And after every incident, he’s turned up nothing.”

  “Have you given no thought to hiring a guard until the work is finished?”

  “I pay my bloody taxes, Inspector. What else are they to be used for if I can’t call upon the assistance of the police when I have a need?”

  “What about your caretaker?”

  “The Spence woman? She frightened off a group of young thugs once—and quite competently, if you want my opinion, despite the ruckus it caused round here—but whoever’s at the bottom of this current rash of mischief has managed to do it with a great deal more finesse. No sign of forced entry, no trace left behind save for the damage.”

  “Someone with a key, I dare say. Who has them?”

  “Myself. Mrs. Spence. The constable. My daughter and her husband.”

  “Any of you wishing that the house go unfinished? Who’s supposed to live there?”

  “Becky…My daughter and her husband. Their baby in June.”

  “Does Mrs. Spence know them?” St. James asked. He’d been listening, his chin in his palm.

  “Know Becky and Brendan? Why?”

  “Might she prefer it if they didn’t move in? Might the constable prefer it? Might they be using the house themselves? We’ve been given to understand they’re involved with each other.”

  Lynley found that this line of questioning did indeed lead in an interesting direction, if not exactly the one intended by St. James. “Has someone dossed there in the past?” he asked.

  “The place was locked and boarded.”

  “A board is fairly easy to loosen if one needs entry.”

  St. James added, obviously continuing with his own line of thought, “And if a couple were using the place for an assignation, they might not take lightly to having it denied them.”

  “I don’t much care who’s using it and for what. I just want it stopped. And if Scotland Yard can’t do it—”

  “What sort of ruckus?” Lynley asked.

  Townley-Young gaped at him blankly. “What the devil…?”

  “You mentioned that Mrs. Spence caused a ruckus when she frightened someone off the property. What sort of ruckus?”

  “Dischargin
g a shotgun. Got the little beasts’ parents in a snit over that.” He gave another snort. “Let their lads run about like hooligans, they do, this lot of parents in the village. And when someone tries to show them a touch of discipline, you’d think Armageddon had begun.”

  “A shotgun’s rather heavy discipline,” St. James remarked.

  “Aimed at children,” Deborah added.

  “Thesearen’t exactly children and even if they were—”

  “Is it with your permission—or perhaps your advice—that Mrs. Spence uses a shotgun to carry out her duties as caretaker of Cotes Hall?” Lynley asked.

  Townley-Young’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t particularly appreciate your efforts to turn this round on me. I came here for your assistance, Inspector, and if you’re unwilling to give it, then I’ll be on my way.” He made a movement as if to rise.

  Lynley raised a hand briefly to stop him, saying, “How long has the Spence woman worked for you?”

  “More than two years now. Nearly three.”

  “And her background?”

  “What of it?”

  “What do you know about her? Why did you hire her?”

  “Because she wanted peace and quiet and I wanted someone out there who wanted peace and quiet. The location’s isolated. I didn’t want to employ as caretaker anyone who felt compelled to mingle with the rest of the village on a nightly basis. That would hardly have served my interests, would it?”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “Cumbria.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside of Wigton.”

  “Where?”

  Townley-Young sat forward with a snap. “Look here, Lynley, let’s get one thing straight. I came here to employ you, not the opposite. I won’t be spoken to as if I’m a suspect, no matter who you are or where you’re from. Is that clear?”

  Lynley placed his balloon glass on the birch side table next to his chair. He regarded Townley-Young evenly. The man’s lips had flattened to broom-straw width and his chin jutted out pugnaciously. If Sergeant Havers had been in the residents’ lounge with them, she would have yawned widely at this point, flipped her thumb towards Townley-Young, said, “Get this bloke, will you?” and followed that up with a less-than-friendly and more-than-bored “Answer the question before we have you in the nick for failure to cooperate in a police investigation.” It was always Havers’ way to stretch the truth to serve her purposes when hot on the scent of a piece of information. Lynley wondered whether that approach would have worked with someone like Townley-Young. If nothing else, it would have afforded him a moment of pleasure just to see Townley-Young’s reaction to being spoken to in such a way and with such an accent as Havers’. She didn’t have the Voice by any stretch of the imagination, and she generally made the most of that fact when confronted with someone who did.