Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“So there’s nothing,” Lynley mused.

“Not quite. Deborah and I have been working the phones for you most of the day.”

Before Aspatria, St. James said, she’d worked in Northumberland, outside the small village of Holystone. There, she’d been a combination of housekeeper and companion to an elderly invalid called Mrs. Soames-West, who lived alone in a small Georgian mansion to the north of the village.

“Mrs. Soames-West had no family in England,” St. James said. “And she didn’t sound as if she’d had a visitor in years. But she thought a great deal of Juliet Spence, hated to lose her, and wanted to be remembered to her.”

“Why did the Spence woman leave?”

“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 fi rst 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 fl u, 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 fi rst 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.”