Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  “You didn’t think to phone him that night when you yourself were being sick?”

  “I didn’t attach my condition to the food. I said already, I thought I’d got flu. If he’d mentioned feeling unwell before he left, I might have phoned him. But he hadn’t mentioned it. So I didn’t make the connection.”

  “Yet he died on the footpath. How far is that from here? A mile? Less? He’d have been stricken rather quickly, wouldn’t you say?”

  “He must have been. Yes.”

  “I wonder how it was that he died and you didn’t.”

  She met his gaze squarely. “I couldn’t say.”

  He gave her a long ten seconds of silence in which to move her eyes off him. When she didn’t do so, he finally nodded and directed his own attention to the pond. The edges, he saw, wore a dingy skin of ice like a coating of wax that encircled the reeds. Each night and day of continued cold weather would extend the skin farther towards the centre of the water. When entirely covered, the pond would look like the frosty ground that surrounded it, appearing to be an uneven but nonetheless innocuous smear of land. The wary would avoid it, seeing it clearly for what it was. The innocent or oblivious would attempt to cross it, breaking through its false and fragile surface to encounter the foul stagnation beneath.

  “How are things between you and your daughter now, Mrs. Spence?” he asked. “Does she listen to you now that the vicar’s gone?”

  Mrs. Spence took the mittens from the sleeves of her pullover. She thrust her hands into them, her fingers bare. It was clear she intended to go back to work. “Maggie isn’t listening to anyone,” she said.

  Lynley slipped the cassette into the Bentley’s tape player and turned up the volume. Helen would have been pleased with the choice, Haydn’s Concerto in E-flat Major, with Wynton Marsalis on the trumpet. Uplifting and joyful, with violins supplying the counterpoint to the trumpet’s pure notes, it was utterly unlike his usual selection of “some grim Russian. Good Lord, Tommy, didn’t they compose anything just the merest bit listener-friendly? What made them so ghoulish? D’you think it was the weather?” He smiled at the thought of her. “Johann Strauss,” she would request. “Oh, all right. I know. Simply too pedestrian for your lofty taste. Then compromise. Mozart.” And in would pop Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the only piece by Mozart which Helen could invariably identify, announcing that her ability to do so kept her free of the epithet absolute philistine.

  He drove south, away from the village. He put the thought of Helen aside.

  He passed beneath the bare tree branches and headed for the moors, thinking about one of the basic tenets of criminology: There is always a relationship between the killer and the victim in a premeditated murder. This is not the case in a serial killing where the killer is driven by rages and urges incomprehensible to the society in which he lives. Nor is it always the case in a crime of passion when a murder grows out of an unexpected, transitory, but nonetheless virulent blaze of anger, jealousy, revenge, or hate. Nor is it like an accidental death in which the forces of coincidence bring the killer and the victim together for one moment of inalterable time. Premeditated murder grows out of a relationship. Sort through the relationships that the victim has had, and inevitably the killer turns up.

  This bit of knowlege was part of every policeman’s bible. It went hand in glove with the fact that most victims know their killers. It was second cousin to the additional fact that most killings are committed by one of the victim’s immediate relatives. Juliet Spence may well have poisoned Robin Sage in a horrible accident the consequences of which she would have to wrestle with for the rest of her life. It would not be the first time someone with a bent towards the natural and organic life picked up a wild-grown bit of root or fungi, flowers or fruit and ended up killing himself or someone else as a result of an error in identification. But if St. James was correct—if Juliet Spence couldn’t have realistically survived even the smallest ingestion of water hemlock, if the symptoms of fever and vomiting couldn’t be attached to hemlock poisoning in the first place—then there had to be a connection between Juliet Spence and the man who had died at her hands. If this was the case, then the superficial connection appeared to be Juliet’s daughter, Maggie.

  The grammar school, an uninteresting brick building that sat at the triangle created by the juncture of two converging streets, was not far from the centre of Clitheroe. It was eleven-forty when he pulled into the car park and slid carefully into the space left between an antique Austin-Healey and a conventional Golf of recent vintage with an infant’s safety seat riding as passenger. A small homemade sticker reading Mind The Baby was affixed to the Golf’s rear window.

  Lessons were in progress inside the school, judging from both the emptiness of the long linoleum-floored corridors and the closed doors that lined them. The administration offices were just inside, facing one another to the left and the right of the entrance. At one time suitable titles had been painted in black upon the opaque glass that comprised the upper half of their doors, but the passing years had reduced the letters to speckles the approximate colour of wet soot, from which one could barely make out the words headmistress, bursar, masters’ common room, and second master in self-important Graeco-Roman printing.

  He chose the headmistress. After a few minutes’ loud and repetitive conversation with an octogenarian secretary whom he found nodding over a strip of knitting that appeared to be the sleeve of a sweater appropriate in size for a male gorilla, he was shown into the headmistress’ study. Mrs. Crone was engraved across a placard that sat on her desk. An unfortunate name, Lynley thought. He spent the moments until her arrival considering all the possible sobriquets the pupils probably had invented for her. They seemed infinite in both variety and connotation.

  She turned out to be the antithesis of all of them, in a pencil-tight skirt hemmed a good five inches above the knee and an over-long cardigan with padded shoulders and enormous buttons. She wore discoidal gold earrings, a necklace to match, and shoes whose skyscraper heels directed the eye inexorably to an outstanding pair of ankles. She was the sort of woman who asked for the once-over twice or more, and as he forced his eyes to remain on her face, Lynley wondered how the school’s board of governors had ever settled upon such a creature for the job. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight years old.

  He managed to make his request with the minimum of time given to speculating what she looked like naked, forgiving himself for the instant of fantasy by telling himself it was the curse of being male. In the presence of a beautiful woman, he had always experienced that knee-jerk reaction of being reduced—if only momentarily—to skin, bone, and testosterone. He liked to believe that this response to an exposure to feminine stimuli had nothing to do with who he really was and where his loyalties lay. But he could imagine Helen’s reaction to this minor and assuredly inconsequential battle with lust-in-the-heart, so he engaged in a mental explanation of his behaviour, using terms like idle curiosity and scientific study and for God’s sake stop overreacting to things, Helen, as if she were present, standing in the corner, silently watching, and knowing his thoughts.

  Maggie Spence was in a Latin lesson, Mrs. Crone told him. Couldn’t this wait until lunch? A quarter of an hour?

  It couldn’t, actually. And even if it could, he’d prefer to make contact with the girl in complete privacy. At lunch, with other pupils milling about, there was the chance they’d be seen. He’d like to spare the girl whatever potential embarrassment he could. It couldn’t be easy for her, after all, with her mother having been under police scrutiny once already and now under it again. Did Mrs. Crone know her mother, by the way?

  She’d met her on Speech Day in Easter term last year. A very nice woman. A firm disciplinarian, but very loving towards Maggie, obviously devoted to the child’s every interest. Society could use a few more parents like Mrs. Spence behind our nation’s youth, couldn’t it, Inspector.

  Indeed. Mrs. Crone would get no disagreement from him. Now abo
ut seeing Maggie…?

  Did her mother know he’d come?

  If Mrs. Crone would like to phone her…

  The headmistress eyed him carefully and scrutinised his warrant card with such attention that he thought she was going to try it for gold between her teeth. At last she handed it back to him and said she would send for the girl if the Inspector would be so good as to wait here. They could use this study as well, she informed him, as she herself was on her way to the dining hall where she would remain on duty while the pupils had their lunch. But she expected the Inspector to allow Maggie time for hers, she warned in parting, and if the girl wasn’t in the dining hall by a quarter past twelve, Mrs. Crone would send someone to fetch her. Was that clear? Did they understand each other?

  They certainly did.

  In less than five minutes, the study door opened and Lynley stood as Maggie Spence came into the room. She shut the door behind her with unnecessary care, turning the knob to make certain the activity was done in perfect silence. She faced him across the room, hands clasped behind her back, head lowered.

  He knew that in comparison with today’s youth, his own introduction to sexual activity—enthusiastically orchestrated by the mother of one of his friends during the half-term at Lent in his final year at Eton—had been relatively late. He’d just turned eighteen. But despite the change in mores and the bent towards youthful profligacy, he found it difficult to believe that this girl was engaged in sexual experimentation of any kind.

  She looked too like a child. Part of this was her height. She couldn’t have been much more than an inch over five feet tall. Part was her posture and demeanour. She stood slightly pigeon-toed with her navy stockings bunched a bit at her ankles, and she shuffled on her feet, bent her ankles outwards, and looked as if she expected to be caned. The rest was personal appearance. The rules of the school may have forbidden the wearing of make-up, but surely nothing prevented her from taking a more adult approach with her hair. This was thick, the only attribute she shared with her mother. It fell to her waist in a wavy mass and was drawn back from her face and held in place with a large amber barrette shaped like a bow. She wore no bob, no shelf-cut, no sophisticated French braid. She made no attempt to emulate an actress or a rock-and-roll star.

  “Hello,” he said to her, finding that he spoke as gently as he would have done to a frightened kitten. “Has Mrs. Crone told you who I am, Maggie?”

  “Yes. But she needn’t have done. I knew already.” Her arms moved. She seemed to be twisting her hands behind her back. “Nick said last night you’d come to the village. He saw you in the pub. He said you’d be wanting to talk to all of Mr. Sage’s good mates.”

  “And you’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s rough to lose a friend.”

  She made no reply, merely shuffled again on her feet. This appeared to be another similarity to her mother. He was reminded of Mrs. Spence’s digging at the terrace weeds with the toe of her boot.

  “Join me,” he said. “I’d prefer to sit down, if you don’t mind.”

  He drew a second chair to the window, and when she sat, she finally looked up at him. Her sky-blue eyes regarded him frankly, with hesitant curiosity but no trace of guile. She was sucking on the inside of her lower lip. The action deepened a dimple in her cheek.

  Now that she was closer to him, he could more easily recognise the budding woman that was altering forever the shell of the child. She had a generous mouth. Her breasts were full. Her hips were just wide enough to be welcoming. Hers was the sort of body that was probably going to fight off weight in middle age. But now, under the staid school uniform of skirt, blouse, and jumper, it was ripe and ready. If it was at the insistence of Juliet Spence that Maggie used no make-up and wore a hairstyle more suited to a ten-year-old than to a teenager, Lynley found he couldn’t blame her.

  “You weren’t at the cottage the night that Mr. Sage died, were you?” he asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “But you were there during the day?”

  “Off and on. It was Christmas hols, see.”

  “You didn’t want to have dinner with Mr. Sage? He was your mate, after all. I wonder you didn’t welcome the chance.”

  Her left hand covered her right. She held them balled in her lap. “It was the night of the monthly doss-round,” she said. “Josie, Pam, and me. We spent the night with each other.”

  “Something you do every month?”

  “In alphabetical order. Josie, Maggie, Pam. It was Josie’s turn. That’s always the funnest because if they aren’t booked up, Josie’s mum lets us choose whatever room in the inn we fancy. We took the skylight room. It’s up under the eaves. It was snowing and we liked to watch it settle on the glass.” She was sitting up straight, her ankles properly crossed. Wisps of russet hair uncontrolled by the barrette curled against her cheeks and her forehead. “Dossing at Pam’s is the worse because we have to sleep in the sitting room. That’s on account of her brothers. They have the upstairs bedroom. They’re twins. Pam doesn’t like them much. She thinks it’s disgusting that her mummy and dad made more babies at their age. They’re forty-two, Pam’s mummy and dad. Pam says it gives her the creeps to think of her mum and dad like that. But I think they’re sweet. The twins, I mean.”

  “How do you organise the doss-round?” Lynley asked.

  “We don’t, ac’shully. We just do it.”

  “With no plan?”

  “Well, we know it’s the third Friday of the month, don’t we? And we just follow the alphabet like I said. Josie-Maggie-Pam. Pam’s next. We did my house this month already. I thought maybe Josie and Pam’s mummies wouldn’t let them doss with me this time round. But they did.”

  “You were worried because of the inquest?”

  “It was over, wasn’t it, but people in the village…” She looked out the window. Two grey-hooded jackdaws had landed on the sill and were pecking furiously at three crusts of bread, each bird trying to jockey the other from the perch and hence claim the remaining crust. “Mrs. Crone likes to feed the birds. She’s got a big cage-thing in her garden where she raises finches. And she always puts seed or something else to eat on the window-sill here. I think that’s nice. Except birds quarrel over food. Have you ever noticed? They always act like there won’t be enough. I can’t think why.”

  “And the people in the village?”

  She said, “I see them watching me sometimes. They stop talking when I pass. But Josie and Pam’s mummies don’t do that.” She dismissed the birds and offered him a smile. The dimple made her face both lopsided and endearing. “Last spring we had a doss-round in the Hall. Mummy said we could, so long as we didn’t mess anything about. We took sleeping bags. We dossed in the dining room. Pam wanted to go upstairs but Josie and I were afraid we’d see the ghost. So Pam went up the stairs with a torch ’n slept by herself in the west wing. Only we found out later she wasn’t by herself at all. Josie didn’t think much of that, did she? She said this was supposed to be just for us, Pamela. No men allowed. Pam said you’re just jealous because you’ve never had a man, have you? Josie said I’ve had plenty of men, Miss-Any-Bloke’s-Scrubber—which wasn’t exactly the truth—and they had such a quarrel that for the next two months Pam wouldn’t come to the doss-round at all. But then she did again.”

  “Do all of your mums know which night the doss-round is set for?”

  “The third Friday of the month. Everyone knows.”

  “Did you know you’d be missing a dinner with the vicar if you went to Josie’s for the December doss-round?”

  She nodded. “But I sort of thought he wanted to see Mummy alone.”

  “Why?”

  She played her thumb back and forth against the sleeve of her jumper, rolling and unrolling it against her white blouse. “Mr. Shepherd does, doesn’t he. I thought p’rhaps it would be like that.”

  “Thought or hoped?”

  She looked at him earnestly. “He’d
come before, Mr. Sage. Mummy sent me to visit with Josie, so I thought she was interested. They talked, him and Mummy. Then he came again. I thought if he fancied her, I could help out by being off. But then I found out he didn’t fancy her at all. Not Mummy. And she didn’t fancy him.”

  Lynley frowned. A small alarm was buzzing in his head. He didn’t like the sound of it.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, they didn’t do anything, did they. Not like her and Mr. Shepherd.”

  “They’d only seen each other a few times, though. Isn’t that the case?”

  Her head bobbed in agreement. “But he never talked about Mummy when I saw him. And he never asked after her like I thought he would if he fancied her.”

  “What did he talk about?”

  “He liked films and books. He talked about them. And the Bible. Sometimes he read me stories from the Bible. He liked the one about the old men who watched the lady taking a bath in the bushes. I mean the old men were in the bushes, not the lady. They wanted to have sex with her because she was so young and beautiful and even though they were old, it wasn’t like they’d stopped feeling desires themselves. Mr. Sage explained it. He was good at that.”

  “What other things did he explain?”

  “Mostly about me. Like why I was feeling how I felt about…” She gave the wrist of her jumper a little twist. “Oh, just stuff.”

  “Your boyfriend? Having intercourse with him?”

  She dropped her head and concentrated on the jumper. Her stomach growled. “Hungry,” she mumbled. Still, she didn’t look up.

  “You must have been close to the vicar,” Lynley said.

  “He said it wasn’t bad, what I felt for Nick. He said desire was natural. He said everyone felt it. He even felt it, he said.”