Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“What about the body? Where was she found? Who identifi ed her?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’m working that angle. D’you want to place any bets?”

“Sage liked to talk about the woman taken in adultery,” Lynley said, more to himself than to her.

“And since there were no stones handy on the boat, he gave her the old heave-ho as her just deserts?”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, whatever happened, they’re sleeping in the bosom of Jesus right now. In the graveyard in Tresillian. They all are, in fact. I went to check.”

“They all are?”

“Susanna, Sage, and the kid. All of them. Lying in a tidy little row.”

“The kid?”

“Yeah. The kid. Joseph. Their son.”

Lynley frowned, listening to his sergeant and watching Helen. The former was supplying the rest of the details. The latter was playing a knife across the wedge of brie in an aimless pattern, her magazines closed and set to one side.

“He was three months old when he died,” Havers said. “And then her death…let me see…here it is. She died six months later. That supports the suicide theory, doesn’t it? She’d have been depressed as hell, I’d guess, to have her baby die. And how did she put it? She couldn’t find the light.”

“What was his cause of death?”

“Don’t know.”

“Find out.”

“Right.” She rustled some papers, jotting down instructions in her notebook, probably. She said suddenly, “Hell, Inspector, he was three months old. D’you think this bloke Sage might’ve…or even the wife…”

“I don’t know, Sergeant.” On the other end of the line, he heard the brief, distinct snap of a match being struck. She was lighting up again. He longed to do so himself. He said, “Dig a little deeper on Susanna as well. See if you can find anything at all about her relationship to Juliet Spence.”

“Spence…Got it.” More paper crinkled. “I’ve made copies of the newspaper articles for you. They’re not much, but shall I fax them to the Yard?”

“For what they’re worth, I suppose so.” It seemed little enough.

“Right. Well.” He could hear her drawing on the cigarette. “Inspector…” The word was not so much spoken as drawled.

“What?”

“Soldier on up there. You know. Helen.”

Easy to say, he thought as he replaced the phone. He returned to the table, saw that Helen had cross-hatched the entire top of the brie. She’d given up eating her yogurt, and the salami was still only partially cut. At the moment, she was using a fork to roll a black olive round her plate. Her expression was disconsolate. He felt oddly moved to compassion.

“I expect your father wouldn’t approve of your playing with your food, either,” he said quietly.

“No. Cybele never plays with her food. And Iris never eats, as far as I know.”

He sat and looked without hunger at the brie he’d spread on a biscuit. He picked it up, put it down, reached for the pickle bowl, pushed it away.

He finally said, “Right. I’ll be off. I must go out to—” just as she said quickly, “I’m so sorry, Tommy. I don’t mean to keep hurting you. I don’t know what comes over me or why I do it.”

He said, “I push you. We push each other.”

She took the ribboned elastic from her hair and played the elastic round her hand. She said, “I think I’m looking for evidence, and when it isn’t there, I create it from nothing.”

“This is a relationship, Helen, not a court of law. What are you trying to prove?”

“Unworthiness.”

“I see. Mine.” He tried to sound objective but knew he didn’t manage it.

She looked up. Her eyes were dry, but her skin was blotched. “Yours. Yes. Because God knows I already feel my own.”

He reached for the ribbon she’d twisted in her hands. She’d bound them loosely together, and he unwove the binding. “If you’re waiting for me to end things between us, it’s not going to happen. So you’ll have to do the ending yourself.”

“I can, if you ask me.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“It would be so much easier.”

“Yes. It would. But only at first.” He stood. “I must go out to Kent for the afternoon. Will you have dinner with me?” He smiled. “Will you have breakfast as well?”

“Love-making isn’t what I’m avoiding, Tommy.”

“No,” he agreed. “Making love is easy enough. It’s living with it that’s the devil.”

Lynley pulled into the car park of the train station in Sevenoaks just as the fi rst raindrops hit the windscreen of the Bentley. He fumbled in his overcoat pocket for the directions they’d found among the vicar’s belongings in Lancashire.

They were simple enough, taking him to the high street for a brief jaunt before heading out of the town altogether. A few turns past the point where the prehurricane, eponymous oaks of the town had once stood, and he was in the country. Down two more lanes and up a slight rise, and he found himself following a short drive labelled Wealdon Oast. This led to a house, with white tile cladding above and brick below, decorated by the distinctive, bent-chimneyed oast roundel attached to the building at its north end. The house had a view of Sevenoaks to the west and a mixture of farmland and woodland to the south. The land and the trees were winter-drab now, but the rest of the year, they would provide an ever-changing palette of colour.

As he parked between a Sierra and a Metro, Lynley wondered if Robin Sage had walked this distance out from the town. He wouldn’t have driven all the way from Lancashire, and the set of directions seemed to indicate two facts: He had arrived by train with no intention of taking a taxi from the station, and no one had met him or intended to meet him, either at the station or somewhere in the town.

A wooden sign, neatly lettered in yellow and affixed to the left of the front door, identifi ed the oast house not as a home but as a place of business. Gitterman Temps , it read. And beneath that in smaller letters of yellow, Katherine Gitterman, Prop .

Kate, Lynley thought. Another answer was emerging to the questions that had arisen from Sage’s engagement diary and the odd bits carton.

A young woman looked up from a reception desk as Lynley entered the house. What had once been the sitting room was now an offi ce with ivory walls, green carpeting, and modern oak furniture that smelled faintly of lemon oil. The girl nodded at him, as she said into the thin wire headpiece of a telephone receiver,

“I can let you have Sandy again, Mr. Coatsworth. She got on well with your staff and her skills…Well, yes, she’s the one with the braces on her teeth.” She rolled her eyes at Lynley. They were, he noted, skilfully shaded with an aquamarine shadow that exactly matched the jumper she wore. “Yes, of course, Mr. Coatsworth. Let me see…” On her desk, which was otherwise free of clutter, lay six manila folders. She opened the first. “It’s no trouble, Mr. Coatsworth. Really. Please, don’t give it a thought.” She riffled through the second. “You’ve not tried Joy, have you?…No, she doesn’t wear braces. And she types…let me see…”

Lynley glanced to his left through the door that opened into the roundel. Into its circular wall a half-dozen neat cubicles had been built. At two of them, girls were pecking at electric typewriters while a timer ticked to one side. In a third, a young man worked upon a word processor, shaking his head at the screen and saying, “Jesus, this is screwed for sure. I’ll bet a hundred quid it was another power surge.” He leaned towards the floor and rattled through a repair case filled with circuit boards and arcane equipment. “Disk crash city,” he murmured. “I sure as hell hope she was backing up.”