Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“I did wrong by Colin. I cast the circle—”

Rita turned her and grabbed her arms firmly. “And you’ll cast it again, right now, with me. To Mars. Like I said you should’ve been doing all along.”

“I cast to Mars like you said the other night. I gave the ashes to Annie. I put the ring stone with them. But I wasn’t pure.”

“Polly!” Rita shook her. “You didn’t do wrong.”

“I wanted her to die. I can’t take back that wanting.”

“An’ you think she didn’t want to die as well? Her insides were eaten with cancer, luv. It went from her ovaries to her stomach and her liver. You couldn’t have saved her. No one could have saved her.”

“The Goddess could. If I’d asked right. But I didn’t. So She punished.”

“Don’t be simple-minded. This isn’t punishment, what happened to you. This is evil, his evil. And we got to see that he pays for doing it.”

Polly loosened her mother’s hands from her arms. “You can’t use magic against Colin. I won’t let you.”

“Believe me, girl, I don’t mean to use magic,” Rita said. “I mean to use the police.” She lurched round and headed for the door.

“No.” Polly shuddered against the pain as she bent and retrieved the robe from the fl oor. “You’ll be bringing them out on a fool’s errand. I won’t talk to them. I won’t say a word.”

Rita swung back. “You listen to me…”

“No. You listen, Mum. It doesn’t matter, what he did.”

“Doesn’t…That’s like saying you don’t matter.”

Polly tied the robe firmly until it, and her answer, were both in place. “Yes. I know that,” she said.

“So the Social Services connection made Tommy feel even more certain that, whatever her reasons might have been for being rid of the vicar, they’re probably connected to Maggie.”

“And what do you think?”

St. James opened the door of their room and locked it behind them. “I don’t know. Something still niggles.”

Deborah kicked off her shoes and sank onto the bed, drawing her legs up Indian fashion and rubbing her feet. She sighed. “My feet feel twenty years older than I do. I think women’s shoes are designed by sadists. They ought to be shot.”

“The shoes?”

“Those too.” She pulled a tortoiseshell comb from her hair and pitched it onto the chest of drawers. She was wearing a green wool dress the same colour as her eyes, and it billowed round her like a mantle.

“Your feet may feel forty-five,” St. James noted, “but you look fi fteen.”

“It’s the lighting, Simon. Nicely subdued. Get used to it, won’t you? You’ll be seeing it more and more at home in the coming years.”

He chuckled, shedding his jacket. He removed his watch and placed it on the bedside table beneath a lamp whose tasselled shade was going decidedly frizzy on the ends. He joined her on the bed, shifting his bad leg to accommodate his position of half-sit and half-slouch, resting on his elbows. “I’m glad of it,” he said.

“Why? You’ve developed a fancy for subdued lighting?”

“No. But I’ve a definite fancy for the coming years. That we’ll be having them, I mean.”

“You thought we might not?”

“I never know quite what to think with you, frankly.”

She raised her knees and rested her chin on them, pulling her dress close round her legs. Her gaze was on the bathroom door. She said, “Please don’t ever think that, my love. Don’t let who I am — or what I do — make you think we’ll drift apart. I’m diffi cult, I know—”

“You were ever that.”

“—but the together of us is the most important thing in my life.” When he didn’t respond at once, she turned her head to him, still resting it against her knees. “Do you believe that?”

“I want to.”

“But?”

He coiled a lock of her hair round his fi nger and examined how it caught the light. It was, in colour, somewhere on the scale between red, chestnut, and blonde. He couldn’t have named it. “Sometimes the business of life and its general messiness get in the way of together ,” he settled on saying. “When that happens, it’s easy to lose sight of where you began, where you were heading, and why you took up with each other in the fi rst place.”

“I’ve never had a single problem with any of that,” she said. “You were always in my life and I always loved you.”

“But?”

She smiled and side-stepped with greater skill than he would have thought she possessed. “The night you first kissed me, you ceased being my childhood hero Mr. St. James and became the man I meant to marry. It was simple for me.”

“It’s never simple, Deborah.”

“I think it can be. If two minds are one.” She kissed him on the forehead, the bridge of his nose, his mouth. He shifted his hand from her hair to the back of her neck, but she hopped off the bed and unzipped her dress, yawning.

“Did we waste our time going to Bradford, then?” She wandered to the clothes cupboard and fished for a hanger.

He watched her, nonplussed, trying to make the connection. “Bradford?”

“Robin Sage. Did you find nothing in the vicarage about his marriage? The woman taken in adultery? And what about St. Joseph?”

He accepted her change in conversation, for the moment. It kept things easier, after all.

“Nothing. But his things were packed away in cartons and there were dozens of those, so there may be something still to be uncovered. Tommy seems to think it unlikely, however. He thinks the truth’s in London. And he thinks it has to do with the relationship between Maggie and her mother.”

Deborah pulled her dress over her head, saying in a voice muffled from within its folds, “Still, I don’t see why you’ve rejected the past. It seemed so compelling — a mysterious wife’s even more mysterious boating accident and all of that. He may have been phoning Social Services for reasons having nothing to do with the girl in the fi rst place.”

“True. But phoning Social Services in London? Why wouldn’t he have phoned a local branch if it was in reference to a local problem?”

“For that matter, even if his phoning had to do with Maggie, why would he phone London about her?”

“He wouldn’t want her mother to know, I expect.”

“He could have phoned Manchester or Liverpool, then. Couldn’t he? And if he didn’t, why didn’t he?”

“That’s the question. One way or the other, we need to find the answer. Suppose he was telephoning with regard to something that Maggie had confi ded in him. If he was invading what Juliet Spence saw as her own patch — the upbringing of her daughter — and if he was invading it in a way that threatened her and if he revealed this invasion to her, perhaps to force her hand in some way, don’t you suppose she may have reacted to that?”

“Yes,” Deborah said. “I tend to think she would have done.” She hung up her dress and straightened it on the hanger. She sounded thoughtful.

“But you’re not convinced?”

“It’s not that.” She reached for her dressing gown, donned it, and rejoined him on the bed. She sat on the edge, studying her feet. “It’s just that…” She frowned. “I mean…I think it more likely that, if Juliet Spence murdered him and if Maggie’s at the bottom of why she murdered him, she did it not because she herself was threatened, but because Maggie was. This is her child, after all. You can’t forget that. You can’t forget what it means.”

St. James felt trepidation send its current of warning through the shorter hairs on the back of his neck. Her final statement, he knew, could lead to treacherous ground between them. He said nothing and waited for her to continue. She did so, dropping her hand to trace a pattern between them on the counterpane.