“She gave no reason. Just that she’d found another job and she thought it was time.”
“How long had she been there?”
“Two years there. Two years in Aspatria.”
“And before that?” Lynley glanced up as Helen returned with at least a metre’s worth of fax hanging over her arm. She handed it to him. He laid it on the desk.
“Two years on Tiree.”
“The Hebrides?”
“Yes. And before that Benbecula. You’re seeing the pattern, I take it?”
He was. Each location was more remote than the last. At this rate, he expected her first place of employment to be Iceland.
“That’s where the trail went cold,” St. James said. “She worked in a small guesthouse on Benbecula, but no one there could tell me where she’d been employed before that.”
“Curious.”
“Considering how long ago it was, I can’t say there’s great cause for suspicion in the fact. On the other hand, her life-style itself sounds rather suspect to me, but I suppose I’m more tied to home and hearth than most.”
Helen sat down in the chair facing Lynley’s desk. He’d turned on the desk lamp rather than the fluorescent lights overhead, so she was partially in shadow with a streak of brightness falling mostly across her hands. She was wearing, he noted, a pearl ring he’d given her for her twentieth birthday. Odd that he’d not noticed before now.
St. James was saying, “So despite their wanderlust, at least they won’t be going anywhere for the moment.”
“Who?”
“Juliet Spence and Maggie. She wasn’t at school today, according to Josie, which made us think at first that they’d heard you’d gone to London and done a bunk as a result.”
“You’re sure they’re still in Winslough?”
“They’re here. Josie told us at considerable length over dinner that she’d spoken with Maggie for nearly an hour on the phone round five o’clock. Maggie claims to have flu, which may or may not be the case since she also appears to have had a falling out with her boyfriend and according to Josie, she may have been skipping out on school for that reason. But even if she isn’t ill and they’re getting ready to run, the snow’s been coming down for more than six hours and the roads are hell. They’re not going anywhere unless they plan to do it on skis.” Deborah said something quietly in the background after which St. James added, “Right. Deborah says you might want to hire a Range Rover rather than drive the Bentley back up here. If the snow keeps up, you won’t be able to get in any more than anyone else will be able to get out.”
Lynley rang off with a promise to think about it.
“Anything?” Helen asked as he picked up the fax and spread it across the desk.
“It’s curiouser and curiouser,” he replied. He pulled out his spectacles and began to read. The amalgamation of facts were out of order—the first article was about the funeral—and he realised that, with an inattention to detail unusual in her, his sergeant had fed the copies of the newspaper articles into the facsimile machine haphazardly. Irritated, he took a pair of scissors, cut the articles, and was reassembling them by date, when the telephone rang.
“Denton thinks you’re dead,” Sergeant Havers said.
“Havers, why in God’s name did you fax me this mess out of order?”
“Did I? I must have got distracted by the bloke using the copy machine next to me. He looked just like Ken Branagh. Although what Ken Branagh would be doing making copies of a handout for an antiques fair is well beyond me. He says you drive too fast, by the way.”
“Kenneth Branagh?”
“Denton, Inspector. And since you haven’t phoned him, he assumes you’re squashed bug-like somewhere on the M1 or M6. If you’d move in with Helen or she’d move in with you, you’d be making things a hell of a lot easier on all of us.”
“I’m working on it, Sergeant.”
“Good. Give the poor bloke a call, will you? I told him you were alive at one o’clock, but he wasn’t buying that since I hadn’t actually seen your face. What’s a voice on the phone, after all? Someone could have been impersonating you.”
“I’ll check in,” Lynley said. “What do you have? I know Joseph’s was a cot death—”
“You’ve been a busy bloke, haven’t you? Make that a double and you’ll have put your finger on Juliet Spence as well.”
“What?”
“Cot death.”
“She had a child die of cot death?”
“No. She died of it herself.”
“Havers, for God’s sake. This is the woman in Winslough.”
“That may be the case, but the Juliet Spence connected to the Sages in Cornwall is buried in the same graveyard as they are, Inspector. She died forty-four years ago. Make that forty-four years, three months, and sixteen days.”
Lynley pulled the stack of clipped and sorted faxes towards him as Helen said, “What is it?” and Havers continued to speak.
“The connection you wanted wasn’t between Juliet Spence and Susanna. It was between Susanna and Juliet’s mother, Gladys. She’s still in Tresillian, as a matter of fact. I had late tea with her this afternoon.”
He scanned the information in the first article at the same time as he prolonged the moment when he would have to examine the dark, grainy photograph that accompanied it and make a decision.
“She knew the entire family—Robin grew up in Tresillian, by the by, and she used to keep house for his parents—and she still does the flowers for the church here. She looks about seventy and my guess is she could take us both on in tennis and rout us in a minute. Anyway, she got close to Susanna for a time when Joseph died. Since she’d been through the same thing herself, she wanted to help her, as much as Susanna would let her which, obviously, wasn’t a great deal.”
He reached in the drawer for a magnifying glass, played it over the faxed photograph, and wished uselessly that he had the original. The woman in the photograph was fuller of face than was Juliet Spence, with darker hair that curled loosely round her head to her shoulders and below. But more than a decade had passed since it had been taken. This woman’s youth might have given way to another’s middle-age, thinning the face and greying the hair. The shape of the mouth looked right. The eyes seemed similar.
Havers was continuing. “She said she and Susanna spent some time together after they buried him. She said it’s something a woman never gets over, losing a child and particularly losing an infant that way. She said she still thinks of her Juliet every day and never forgets her birthday. She always wonders what she might have turned out like. She said she still has dreams about the afternoon when the baby never woke up from her nap.”
It was a possibility, as indistinct as the photograph itself, but still undeniably real.
“She had two more children after Juliet, did Gladys. She tried to use that fact to help Susanna see that the worst of her grief would pass when other babies came. But Gladys’d had one other before Juliet as well and that one lived, so she could never break through to her completely because Susanna’d always remind her of that.”
He set down the magnifying glass and the photograph. There was only one fact he needed to confirm before he moved forward. “Havers,” he said, “what about Susanna’s body? Who found it? Where?”
“According to Gladys, she was fish bait. No one ever found her. They had a funeral service, but there’s sod all in the grave. Not even a coffin.”
He replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle and removed his spectacles. Carefully, he polished them on a handkerchief before returning them to his nose. He looked at his notes—Aspatria, Holystone, Tiree, Benbecula—and saw what she had attempted to do. The why of it all, he was certain, remained where it always had been, with Maggie.
“They’re the same person, aren’t they?” Helen left her chair and came to stand behind his where she could look over his shoulder at the material spread out before him. She put her hand on his shoulder.
He reached for
it. “I think they are,” he said.
“What does it mean?”
He spoke contemplatively. “She would have needed a birth certificate for a different passport so that she could slip off the ferry when it docked in France. She could have got a copy of the Spence child’s certificate at St. Catherine’s House—no, it would have been Somerset House then—or she could have pinched the original from Gladys without her knowledge. She’d been visiting her sister in London before her ‘suicide.’ She would have had time to set everything up.”
“But why?” Helen asked. “Why did she do it?”
“Because she may have been the woman taken in adultery after all.”
A stealthy movement of the bed awakened Helen the next morning, and she cracked open one eye. A grey light was sifting through the curtains and falling upon her favourite armchair across whose back an overcoat was flung. The clock on the bedside table said just before eight. She murmured, “God,” and plumped her pillow. She closed her eyes with some deliberation. The bed moved again.
“Tommy,” she said, fumbling for the clock and turning it to face the wall, “I don’t think it’s even dawn yet. Truly, darling. You need to get more sleep. What time did we finally get to bed? Was it two?”
“Damn,” he said quietly. “I know it. I know it.”
“Good. Then lie down.”
“The rest of the answer’s right here, Helen. Somewhere.”
She frowned and rolled over to see that he was sitting against the headboard with his spectacles perched on the end of his nose, letting his eyes travel over piles of paper scraps, handouts, tickets, programmes, and other miscellanea that he’d spread across her bed. She yawned and simultaneously recognised the piles. They’d pawed through Robin Sage’s odd bits carton three times before giving it up and going to bed last night. But Tommy wasn’t done with it, it seemed. He leaned forward, riffled through one of the piles, and rested against the headboard once more, as if awaiting inspiration to strike.
“The answer’s here,” he said. “I know it.”
Helen stretched out an arm beneath the covers and rested her hand on his thigh. “Sherlock Holmes would have solved it by now,” she noted.
“Please don’t remind me.”
“Hmmm. You’re warm.”
“Helen, I’m making an attempt at deductive thought.”
“Am I getting in the way?”
“What do you think?”
She chuckled, reached for her dressing gown, draped it round her shoulders, and joined him against the headboard. She picked up one of the piles at random and leafed through it. “I thought you had the answer last night. If Susanna knew she was pregnant, and if the baby wasn’t his, and if there was no way she could pass it off as his because they’d stopped having sex, which according to her sister appears to have been the case…What more do you want?”
“I want a reason she’d kill him. What we have right now is a reason he’d kill her.”
“Perhaps he wanted her back and she didn’t want to go.”
“He could hardly force her.”
“But if he decided to claim the child was his? To force her hand through Maggie?”
“A genetic test would take the wind out of that plan.”
“Then perhaps Maggie was his after all. Perhaps he was responsible for Joseph’s death. Or perhaps Susanna thought he was, so when she discovered she was pregnant again, she wasn’t about to let him have a go with another child.”
Lynley made a noise of dismissal and reached for Robin Sage’s engagement diary. Helen noticed that, while she slept, he’d also rummaged round the flat for the telephone directory, which was lying open at the foot of the bed.
“Then…Let me see.” She flipped through her small stack of papers and wondered why on earth anyone would have kept these grimy handouts, the sort that were continually thrust at pedestrians on the street. She would have dropped them into the nearest dustbin. She hated to refuse to take them altogether when the people passing them out always looked so earnest. But to save them…
She yawned. “It’s rather like a reverse trail of bread crumbs, isn’t it?”
He was flipping to the back of the telephone directory and running his finger down the page. “Six,” he said. “Thank God it wasn’t Smith.” He glanced at his pocket watch, which lay open on the table next to his side of the bed, and threw back the covers. The odd bits went flying like debris in the wind.
“Was it Hansel and Gretel who left a trail of crumbs or Little Red Riding Hood?” Helen asked.
He was rooting through his suitcase, which gaped open on the floor and spilled out clothing in a fashion that Denton would have found teeth-jarring. “What are you talking about, Helen?”
“These papers. They’re like a trail of crumbs. Except he didn’t drop them. He picked them up.”
Tying the belt of his dressing gown, Lynley rejoined her at the bed, sitting on her side of it and reading the handouts once again. She read them along with him: the first for a concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields; the second for a car dealership in Lambeth; the third for a meeting at Camden Town Hall; the fourth for a hairdresser in Clapham High Street.
“He came by train,” Lynley said thoughtfully and began to rearrange the handouts. He said, “Give me that underground map, Helen.”
With the map in one hand, he continued to rearrange the handouts until he had the Camden Town Hall meeting first, the concert second, the car dealership third, and the hairdresser fourth. “He would have picked up the first at Euston Station,” he noted.
“And if he was going to Lambeth, he’d have got on the Northern Line and changed at Charing Cross,” Helen said.
“Which is where he’d have got the second, for the concert. But where does that leave Clapham High Street?”
“Perhaps he went there last, after Lambeth. Does it say in his diary?”
“On his last day in London, it says only Yanapapoulis.”
“Yanapapoulis,” she said with a sigh. “Greek.” She felt a tugging of sadness with the saying of the name. “I spoiled this week for us. We could have been there. On Corfu. Right this moment.”
He put his arm round her and kissed the side of her head. “It doesn’t matter. We’d be doing the same thing there as we are right now.”
“Talking about Clapham High Street? I doubt it.”
He smiled and lay his spectacles on the table. He brushed her hair back and kissed her neck. “Not exactly,” he murmured. “We’ll talk about Clapham High Street in a while…”
Which is what they did, a little more than an hour later.
Lynley agreed to Helen’s making the coffee, but after her presentation of lunch yesterday, he wasn’t willing to endure whatever she might bring forth from cupboards and refrigerator to serve as their breakfast. He scrambled the six eggs he found in the refrigerator and threw in cream cheese, stoned black olives, and mushrooms for good measure. He opened a tin of grapefruit wedges, dished them out, topped them with a maraschino cherry, and set about making toast.
In the meantime, Helen manned the telephone. By the time he had the breakfast ready, she’d gone through five of the six entries for the name Yanapapoulis, made a list of four Greek restaurants she’d not yet tried, received one recipe for a poppy-seed cake soaked in ouzo—“Goodness, that sounds rather terrifyingly inflammable, my dear”—promised to pass along to her “superiors” a complaint about police mishandling of a burglary near Notting Hill Gate, and defended her honour against the accusations of a shrieking woman who assumed she was the mistress of her errant husband.
Lynley was setting their plates on the table and pouring coffee and orange juice when Helen struck gold with her final call. She had asked to speak to Mummy or Daddy. The reply went on at some length. Lynley was spooning orange marmalade onto his plate when Helen said,
“I am sorry to hear that, my dear. What about Mummy? Is she there?…But you aren’t home alone, are you? Shouldn’t you be in school?…Oh. Well, of course, someon
e must see to Linus’ headcold…. Do you have Meggezones? They work awfully well for a sore throat.”
“Helen, what in God’s name—”
She held up a hand to stop him. “She’s where?…I see. Can you give me the name, dear?” Lynley saw her eyes widen, saw the smile begin to curve her lips. “Lovely,” she said. “That’s wonderful, Philip. You’ve been such a help. Thank you so much…Yes, dear, you give him the chicken soup.” She hung up the phone and left the kitchen.
“Helen, I’ve got breakfast—”
“Just a moment, darling.”
He grumbled and forked up a portion of eggs. They weren’t half-bad. It wasn’t a combination of flavours that Denton would have either served or approved of, but then Denton had always possessed tunnel vision when it came to food.
“Here. Look.” With her dressing gown flying round in a whirl of burgundy silk, Helen clattered back into the kitchen—she was the only woman Lynley knew who actually wore high-heeled slippers with snowball tufts dyed to match the rest of her nightly ensembles—and presented him with one of the handouts they’d been looking at earlier.
“What?”
“The Hair Apparent,” she said. “Clapham High Street. Lord, what a ghastly name for a hairdresser. I always hate these puns: Shear Ecstasy, The Mane Attraction. Who comes up with them?”
He spread some marmalade on a wedge of toast as Helen slid into her seat and spooned up three pieces of grapefruit with “Tommy, darling, you can actually cook. I might think about keeping you.”
“That warms my heart.” He squinted at the paper in his hand. “‘Unisex styling,’” he read. “‘Discount prices. Ask for Sheelah.’”
“Yanapapoulis,” Helen said. “What’ve you put in these eggs? They’re wonderful.”
“Sheelah Yanapapoulis?”
“The very same. And she must be the Yanapapoulis we’re looking for, Tommy. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise that Robin Sage would have gone to see one Yanapapoulis and just happened to have in his possession a handout with the place of employment of an entirely different Yanapapoulis printed upon it. Don’t you agree?” She didn’t wait, merely went on, saying, “That was her son I was speaking to on the phone, by the way. He said to ring her at work. He said to ask for Sheelah.”
Missing Joseph Page 49
