Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“Here’s this creature that grew inside her for nine months, listening to her heartbeat, sharing the flow of her blood, kicking and moving in those final months to make her presence known. Maggie came from her body. She sucked milk from her breasts. Within weeks, she knew her face and her voice. I think—” Her fingers paused in their tracing. Her tone tried and ultimately failed to become practical. “A mother would do anything to safeguard her child. I mean…Wouldn’t she do anything to protect the life she created? And don’t you honestly think that’s what this killing’s all about?”

Somewhere below them in the inn, Dora Wragg’s voice called, “Josephine Eugenia! Where’ve you got yourself to? How many times do I have to tell you—” A slamming door cut off the rest of the words.

St. James said, “Not everyone is like you, my love. Not everyone sees a child that way.”

“But if it’s her only child…”

“Born under what circumstances? Having what kind of impact on her life? Trying her patience in what sort of ways? Who knows what’s gone on between them? You can’t look at Mrs. Spence and her daughter through the filter of your own desires. You can’t stand in her shoes.”

Deborah gave a bitter laugh. “I do know that.”

He saw how she had grasped his words and turned them round on herself to wound. “Don’t,” he said. “You can’t know what the future has in mind for you.”

“When the past is its prologue?” She shook her head. He couldn’t see her face, just a sliver of her cheek like a small quarter moon nearly covered by her hair.

“Sometimes the past is prologue to the future. Sometimes it isn’t.”

“Holding on to that sort of belief is a damned easy way to avoid responsibility, Simon.”

“It can be, indeed. But it can also be a way of getting on with things, can’t it? You always look backwards for your auguries, my love. But that doesn’t seem to give you anything but pain.”

“While you don’t look for auguries at all.”

“That’s the worst of it,” he admitted. “I don’t. Not for us, at least.”

“And for others? For Tommy and Helen? For your brothers? For your sister?”

“Not for them either. They’ll go their own way in the end, despite my brooding over what led up to their eventual decisions.”

“Then who?”

He made no reply. The truth of the matter was that her words had jogged a fragment of conversation loose in his memory, giving rise to thought. But he was wary of a change in topic that she might misinterpret as further indication of his detachment from her.

“Tell me.” She was starting to bristle. He could see it in the way her fi ngers spread out then clutched the counterpane. “Something’s on your mind and I don’t much like to be cut out when we’re talking about—”

He squeezed her hand. “It has nothing to do with us, Deborah. Or with this.”

“Then…” She was quick to read him. “Juliet Spence.”

“Your instincts are generally good about people and situations. Mine aren’t. I always look for bald facts. You’re more comfortable

with conjectures.”

“And?”

“It was what you said about the past being prologue to the future.” He loosed his tie and pulled it over his head, throwing it in the direction of the chest of drawers. It fell short and draped against one of the pulls. “Polly Yarkin overheard Sage having a conversation on the telephone the day he died. He was talking about the past.”

“To Mrs. Spence?”

“We think so. He said something about judging…” St. James paused in the act of unbuttoning his shirt. He sought the words as Polly Yarkin had recited them. “‘You can’t judge what happened then.’”

“The boating accident.”

“I think that’s what’s been niggling at me since we left the vicarage. That declaration doesn’t fit in with his interest in Social Services, as far as I can see. But something tells me it needs to fi t somewhere. He’d been praying all that day, Polly said. He wouldn’t take any food.”

“Fasting.”

“Yes. But why?”

“Perhaps he wasn’t hungry.”

St. James considered other options. “Selfdenial, penance.”

“For a sin? What was it?”

He finished with his unbuttoning and sailed the shirt the way of the tie. It too missed its mark and fell to the floor. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m willing to lay whatever odds you’d like that Mrs. Spence does.”

AN EARLY START, INITIATED long before the sun rose above the slopes of Cotes Fell, got Lynley to the outskirts of London by noon. The city’s traffic, which daily seemed to become ever more like a Gordian knot on wheels, added another hour to his travel time. It was just after one when he pulled into Onslow Square and claimed a parking space that was being vacated by a Mercedes-Benz with its driver’s door crumpled like a defeated accordion and a scowling driver harnessed into a neck brace.

He hadn’t phoned her, either from Win-slough or from the Bentley. He’d told himself at first that it was far too early — when, after all, had Helen ever risen before nine in the morning if she wasn’t compelled to do so? — but as the hour grew later, he changed his reasoning to the fact that he didn’t want her to rearrange her schedule just to accommodate him. She wasn’t a woman who liked being at any man’s beck and call, and he wasn’t about to foist that role upon her. Her flat wasn’t that far from his own home, after all. If she’d gone out for the afternoon, he could simply toddle onwards to Eaton Terrace and have lunch there. He flattered himself with thinking how liberated all these considerations were. It was far easier than admitting the more obvious truth: He wanted to see her, but he didn’t want to be disappointed by Helen’s having an engagement that excluded him.

He rang the bell and waited, observing a sky the approximate colour of a ten-pence coin and wondering how long the rain would hold off and if rain in London meant snow in Lancashire. He rang a second time and heard her voice crackle with static from the speaker.

“You’re home,” he said.

“Tommy,” she said and rang him in.

She met him at the door to her fl at. Without makeup, with her hair pulled back from her face and held in place with an ingenious combination of elastic and satin ribbon, she looked like a teenager. Her choice of conversation emphasised the similarity.

“I’ve had the most tremendous row with Daddy this morning,” she said as he kissed her. “I was supposed to meet Sidney and Hortense for lunch — Sid’s discovered an Armenian restaurant in Chiswick that she swears is absolutely heaven on earth, if the combination of Armenian food, Chiswick, and heaven is even possible — but Daddy came to town yesterday on business, spent the night here, and we sank to new depths in our mutual loathing of each other this morning.”

Lynley removed his overcoat. She’d been consoling herself with the rare luxury of a midday fire, he saw. On a coffee table in front of it were spread out the morning’s paper, two cups and saucers, and the remains of a breakfast that appeared to consist mostly of overboiled and half-eaten eggs and deeply charcoaled toast.

“I didn’t know you and your father loathed each other,” he said. “Is this something new? I’d always got the impression you were rather his favourite.”

“Oh, we don’t and I am, how true,” she said. “Which is why it’s so utterly disagreeable of him to have such expectations of me. ‘Now don’t misunderstand me, darling. Your mother and I don’t for a moment begrudge you the use of this flat,’ he says in that sonorous way he has of talking. You know what I mean.”