Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

He set down the magnifying glass and the photograph. There was only one fact he needed to confirm before he moved forward.

“Havers,” he said, “what about Susanna’s body? Who found it? Where?”

“According to Gladys, she was fi sh bait. No one ever found her. They had a funeral service, but there’s sod all in the grave. Not even a coffi n.”

He replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle and removed his spectacles. Carefully, he polished them on a handkerchief before returning them to his nose. He looked at his notes — Aspatria, Holystone, Tiree, Benbecula — and saw what she had attempted to do. The why of it all, he was certain, remained where it always had been, with Maggie.

“They’re the same person, aren’t they?” Helen left her chair and came to stand behind his where she could look over his shoulder at the material spread out before him. She put her hand on his shoulder.

He reached for it. “I think they are,” he said.

“What does it mean?”

He spoke contemplatively. “She would have needed a birth certificate for a different passport so that she could slip off the ferry when it docked in France. She could have got a copy of the Spence child’s certificate at St. Catherine’s House — no, it would have been Somerset House then — or she could have pinched the original from Gladys without her knowledge. She’d been visiting her sister in London before her ‘suicide.’ She would have had time to set everything up.”

“But why?” Helen asked. “Why did she do it?”

“Because she may have been the woman taken in adultery after all.”

A stealthy movement of the bed awakened Helen the next morning, and she cracked open one eye. A grey light was sifting through the curtains and falling upon her favourite armchair across whose back an overcoat was fl ung. The clock on the bedside table said just before eight. She murmured, “God,” and plumped her pillow. She closed her eyes with some deliberation. The bed moved again.

“Tommy,” she said, fumbling for the clock and turning it to face the wall, “I don’t think it’s even dawn yet. Truly, darling. You need to get more sleep. What time did we fi nally get to bed? Was it two?”

“Damn,” he said quietly. “I know it. I know it.”

“Good. Then lie down.”

“The rest of the answer’s right here, Helen. Somewhere.”

She frowned and rolled over to see that he was sitting against the headboard with his spectacles perched on the end of his nose, letting his eyes travel over piles of paper scraps, handouts, tickets, programmes, and other miscellanea that he’d spread across her bed. She yawned and simultaneously recognised the piles. They’d pawed through Robin Sage’s odd bits carton three times before giving it up and going to bed last night. But Tommy wasn’t done with it, it seemed. He leaned forward, riffl ed through one of the piles, and rested against the headboard once more, as if awaiting inspiration to strike.

“The answer’s here,” he said. “I know it.”

Helen stretched out an arm beneath the covers and rested her hand on his thigh. “Sherlock Holmes would have solved it by now,” she noted.

“Please don’t remind me.”

“Hmmm. You’re warm.”

“Helen, I’m making an attempt at deductive thought.”

“Am I getting in the way?”

“What do you think?”

She chuckled, reached for her dressing gown, draped it round her shoulders, and joined him against the headboard. She picked up one of the piles at random and leafed through it. “I thought you had the answer last night. If Susanna knew she was pregnant, and if the baby wasn’t his, and if there was no way she could pass it off as his because they’d stopped having sex, which according to her sister appears to have been the case…What more do you want?”

“I want a reason she’d kill him. What we have right now is a reason he’d kill her.”

“Perhaps he wanted her back and she didn’t want to go.”

“He could hardly force her.”

“But if he decided to claim the child was his? To force her hand through Maggie?”

“A genetic test would take the wind out of that plan.”

“Then perhaps Maggie was his after all. Perhaps he was responsible for Joseph’s death. Or perhaps Susanna thought he was, so when she discovered she was pregnant again, she wasn’t about to let him have a go with another child.”

Lynley made a noise of dismissal and reached for Robin Sage’s engagement diary. Helen noticed that, while she slept, he’d also rummaged round the flat for the telephone directory, which was lying open at the foot of the bed.

“Then…Let me see.” She fl ipped through her small stack of papers and wondered why on earth anyone would have kept these grimy handouts, the sort that were continually thrust at pedestrians on the street. She would have dropped them into the nearest dustbin. She hated to refuse to take them altogether when the people passing them out always looked so earnest. But to save them…

She yawned. “It’s rather like a reverse trail of bread crumbs, isn’t it?”

He was flipping to the back of the telephone directory and running his finger down the page. “Six,” he said. “Thank God it wasn’t Smith.” He glanced at his pocket watch, which lay open on the table next to his side of the bed, and threw back the covers. The odd bits went flying like debris in the wind.

“Was it Hansel and Gretel who left a trail of crumbs or Little Red Riding Hood?” Helen asked.

He was rooting through his suitcase, which gaped open on the fl oor and spilled out clothing in a fashion that Denton would have found teeth-jarring. “What are you talking about, Helen?”

“These papers. They’re like a trail of crumbs. Except he didn’t drop them. He picked them up.”

Tying the belt of his dressing gown, Lynley rejoined her at the bed, sitting on her side of it and reading the handouts once again. She read them along with him: the first for a concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields; the second for a car dealership in Lambeth; the third for a meeting at Camden Town Hall; the fourth for a hairdresser in Clapham High Street.

“He came by train,” Lynley said thoughtfully and began to rearrange the handouts. He said, “Give me that underground map, Helen.”

With the map in one hand, he continued to rearrange the handouts until he had the Cam-den Town Hall meeting first, the concert second, the car dealership third, and the hairdresser fourth. “He would have picked up the first at Euston Station,” he noted.

“And if he was going to Lambeth, he’d have got on the Northern Line and changed at Charing Cross,” Helen said.

“Which is where he’d have got the second, for the concert. But where does that leave Clapham High Street?”

“Perhaps he went there last, after Lambeth. Does it say in his diary?”

“On his last day in London, it says only Yanapapoulis.”

“Yanapapoulis,” she said with a sigh. “Greek.” She felt a tugging of sadness with the saying of the name. “I spoiled this week for us. We could have been there. On Corfu. Right this moment.”

He put his arm round her and kissed the side of her head. “It doesn’t matter. We’d be doing the same thing there as we are right now.”

“Talking about Clapham High Street? I doubt it.”

He smiled and lay his spectacles on the table. He brushed her hair back and kissed her neck. “Not exactly,” he murmured. “We’ll talk about Clapham High Street in a while…”

Which is what they did, a little more than an hour later.

Lynley agreed to Helen’s making the coffee, but after her presentation of lunch yesterday, he wasn’t willing to endure whatever she might bring forth from cupboards and refrigerator to serve as their breakfast. He scrambled the six eggs he found in the refrigerator and threw in cream cheese, stoned black olives, and mushrooms for good measure. He opened a tin of grapefruit wedges, dished them out, topped them with a maraschino cherry, and set about making toast.