Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“They can come here any time as it is. They know that.”

“You could declare yourself too busy with your husband’s egocentric interests to be able to live a life of social and cultural responsibility as Cybele does.”

“I need to start being more involved in things, anyway. Daddy’s right about that, although I hate to admit it.”

“And once you had children, you could use their needs as a shield against whatever judgement your father might cast upon you for inactivity. Not that he’d cast any judgements at that point. He’d be too pleased.”

“About what?”

“About having you…settled, I suppose.”

“ Settled? ” Lady Helen speared a sweet pickle and chewed it thoughtfully, watching him.

“My God, don’t tell me you’re really that pro

vincial.”

“I didn’t intend—”

“You can’t honestly believe that a woman’s place is to be settled , Tommy. Or,” she asked shrewdly, “is it just my place?”

“No. Sorry. It was a poor choice of words.”

“Choose again, then.”

He placed his yogurt carton on the table. Its contents had tasted fairly good for the first few spoonfuls, but they didn’t wear well on the palate after that. “We’re dancing round the issue and we may as well stop. Your father knows that I want to marry you, Helen.”

“Yes. What of it?”

He crossed his legs, uncrossed them. He lifted his hand to loosen the knot of his tie, only to discover and recall that he wasn’t wearing one. He sighed. “Damn it all. Nothing of it. It merely seems to me that marriage between us wouldn’t be such a miserable thing.”

“And God knows that it would please Daddy well enough.”

He felt stung by her sarcasm and answered in kind. “I have no idea about pleasing your father, but there are—”

“You used the word pleased less than a minute ago. Or have you conveniently forgotten?”

“But there are moments — and frankly this isn’t turning out to be one of them — when I’m actually blind enough to think that it might please me.”

She looked stung in turn. She sat back in her chair. They stared at each other. The telephone, mercifully, began to ring.

“Let it go,” he said. “We need to thrash this out, and we need to do it now.”

“I don’t think so.” She got up. The phone was on the work top, next to the coffee maker. She poured them each a cup as she spoke to her caller, saying, “What a good guess. He’s sitting right here in my kitchen, eating salami and yogurt…” She laughed. “Truro? Well, I hope you’re running his credit cards to the limit…No, here he is…Really, Barbara, don’t give it a thought. We weren’t discussing anything more earthshaking than the merits of sweet pickles over dill.”

She had a way of knowing when he felt most betrayed by her levity, so Lynley wasn’t surprised when Helen didn’t meet his eyes as she handed him the phone and said, unnecessarily, “It’s Sergeant Havers. For you.”

He caught her fingers under his when he took the receiver. He didn’t release her until she looked at him. And even then, he said nothing, because, damn it all, she was at fault and he wasn’t going to apologise for lashing out when she drove him to it.

When he said hello to his sergeant, he realised that Havers must have heard more in his voice than he intended to convey, for she launched into her report without prefatory remarks of any kind, saying, “You’ll be chuffed to know that the C of E take police work dead to heart down here in Truro. The bishop’s secretary kindly gave me an appointment to see him a week from tomorrow, thank you very much. Busy as a bee in the roses, the bishop, if his secretary’s to be believed.” She blew out a long, loud breath. She’d be smoking, as usual. “And you should see the digs these two blokes live in. Sodding bloody hell. Remind me to hold on to my money the next time the collection plate is passed round in church. They should be supporting me, not vice versa.”

“So it’s been a waste.” Lynley watched Helen return to the table where she sat and began unfolding the corners of the magazine pages she’d previously folded down. She was pressing each one deliberately flat and smoothing it with her fingers. She wanted him to see the activity. He knew that as well as he knew her. Realising this, he felt the momentary grip of an anger so irrationally powerful that he wanted to kick the table through the wall.

Havers was saying, “So evidently the term ‘boating accident’ was a euphemism.”

Lynley tore his eyes from Helen. “What?”

“Haven’t you been listening?” Havers asked. “Never mind. Don’t answer. When did you tune in?”

“With the boating accident.”

“Right.” She began again.

Once she had realised that the bishop of Truro wasn’t going to be of help, she’d gone to the newspaper office, where she’d spent the morning reading back issues. There she discovered that the boating accident that had claimed the life of Robin Sage’s wife—

“Her name was Susanna, by the way.”

— hadn’t occurred on a boat in the first place and hadn’t been deemed an accident in the second.

“It was the ferry that runs from Plymouth to Roscoff,” Havers said. “And it was suicide, according to the newspaper.”

Havers sketched in the story with the details she’d gathered from her perusal of the newspaper accounts. The Sages had been making a crossing in bad weather, on their way to begin a two-week holiday in France. After a meal midway through the crossing—

“It’s a six-hour ride, you know.”

— Susanna had gone off to the Ladies’ while her husband returned to the lounge with his book. It was more than an hour before he realised that she ought to have turned up, but as she’d been feeling a bit low, he assumed she wanted some time alone.

“He said he had a tendency to hover when she was in a mood,” Havers explained. “And he wanted to give her some space. My words, not his.”

According to the information Havers had been able to gather, Robin Sage had left the lounge two or three times during the remainder of the crossing, to stretch his legs, to get a drink, to purchase a chocolate bar, but not to look for his wife about whose continued absence, it seemed, he did not appear to be worried. When they docked in France, he went below to the car, assuming that she would be there waiting. When she failed to show up as the passengers began to leave, he set about looking for her.

“He didn’t raise the alarm until he noticed that her handbag was on the front passenger seat of the car,” Havers said. “There was a note inside. Here, let me…” Lynley heard the noise of pages turning. “It said, ‘Robin, I’m sorry. I can’t find the light.’ There was no name but the writing was hers.”

“Not much of a suicide note,” Lynley remarked.

“You’re not the only one who thought that,” Havers said.

The crossing had been made in bad weather after all. It was dark for the latter half of it. It was cold, as well, so no one had been on deck to see a woman throw herself from the railing.

“Or be thrown?” Lynley asked.

Havers agreed obliquely. “The truth is that it could have been suicide, but it could have been something else as well. Which is, apparently, what the rozzers on both sides of the Channel thought. Sage was put through the wringer twice. He came up clean. Or as clean as he could because no one witnessed anything at all, including Sage’s trip to the bar or his saunters to stretch his legs.”

“And the wife couldn’t simply have slipped off the boat when it docked?” Lynley asked.

“An international crossing, Inspector. Her passport was in her handbag, along with her money, her driving licence, credit cards, and the whole bloody bit. She couldn’t have got off the boat at either end. And they searched every inch of it in France and in England.”