Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“But if you had to decide.”

“Then I suppose it would all come down to crime and punishment.”

“Juliet Spence’s crime against Sheelah Cotton?”

“No. Sheelah’s crime against the baby: leaving her alone with the father so that he had the opportunity to injure her in the fi rst place, leaving her alone in the car at night only four months later so that someone could take her. I suppose I’d ask myself if the punishment of losing her for thirteen years — or forever — fi t or exceeded the crimes committed against her.”

“And then what?”

Lynley glanced his way. “Then I’d be in Gethsemane, praying for someone else to drink from the cup. Which is, I imagine, what Sage himself did.”

Colin Shepherd had seen her at noon, but she wouldn’t let him into the cottage. Maggie wasn’t well, she told him. A persistent fever, chills, a bad stomach. Running off with Nick Ware and dossing down in a farm building— even if only for part of the night — had taken its toll. She’d had a second bad night, but she was sleeping now. Juliet didn’t want anything to waken her.

She came outside to tell him, shutting the door behind her and shivering in the cold. The first seemed a deliberate effort to keep him out of the cottage. The second seemed designed to send him on his way. If he loved her, her quaking body declared, he wouldn’t want her standing out in the cold having a chat with him.

Her body language was clear enough: arms crossed tightly, fingers digging into the sleeves of her flannel shirt, posture rigid. But he told himself it was merely the cold, and he tried to read beneath her words for an underlying message. He gazed at her face and looked into her eyes. Courtesy and distance were what he read. Her daughter needed her and wasn’t he being rather selfish to expect her either to want or accept a distraction from that need?

He said, “Juliet, when will we have a chance to talk?” but she looked up at Maggie’s bedroom window and answered with “I need to sit with her. She’s been having bad dreams. I’ll phone you later, all right?” And she slipped back into the cottage and shut the door soundlessly. He heard the key turning in its lock.

He wanted to shout, “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? I’ve my own key. I can still get in. I can make you talk. I can make you listen.” But instead he stared long and hard at the door, counting its bolts, waiting for his heart to stop pounding so angrily.

He’d gone back to work, making his rounds, seeing to three cars that had misjudged the icy roads, herding fi ve sheep back over a disintegrating wall near Skelshaw Farm, replacing its stones, rounding up a rogue dog that had finally been cornered in a barn just outside the village. It was routine business, nothing to occupy his mind. And as the hours passed, he found himself more and more needing something to keep his thoughts in order.

Later had come, and she did not phone. He moved about his house restlessly as he waited. He looked out the window at the snow that lay unblemished in the graveyard of St. John the Baptist Church and, beyond it, upon the pasture land and the slopes of Cotes Fell. He built a fire and let Leo bask in front of it as day drew towards evening. He cleaned three of his shotguns. He made a cup of tea, added whisky to it, forgot about drinking it. He picked the phone up twice to make certain it was still in working order. The snow, after all, could have downed some lines. But he listened to the dialling tone’s heartless buzz telling him something was very wrong.

He tried not to believe it. She was concerned about Maggie, he told himself. She was rightfully concerned. It was no more than that.

At four o’clock he could stand the waiting no longer, so he did the phoning. Her line was engaged, and engaged at a quarter past, and engaged at half past, and every quarter hour after that until half past five when he understood that she had taken the phone off the hook so that its ringing would not disturb her daughter.

He willed her to phone from half past fi ve to six. After six, he began to pace. He went over every brief conversation they’d had in the two days since Maggie had returned from her short-lived experience of running away. He heard Juliet’s tone as she had sounded on the phone — resigned, somehow, to something he did not want to understand — and he felt a growing desperation.

When the phone rang at eight, he leapt to answer it, hearing a terse voice ask:

“Where the hell have you been all day, boy-o?”

Colin felt his teeth set and made an effort to relax. “I’ve been working, Pa. That’s what I usually do.”

“Don’t get a mouth with me. He’s asked for a wopsie, and she’s on her way. Do you know that, boy-o? Are you up on the news?”

The telephone was on a lengthy cord. Colin cradled the receiver against his ear and walked to the kitchen window. He could see the light from the vicarage porch, but everything else was shape and shadow, curtained off by the snow that was falling as if disgorged in an explosion from the clouds.

“Who’s asked for a wopsie? What’re you talking about?”

“That blighter from the Yard.”

Colin turned from the window. He looked at the clock. The cat’s eyes moved rhythmically, its tail ticked and tocked. He said, “How do you know?”

“Some of us maintain our ties, boy-o. Some of us have mates that’re loyal to the death. Some of us do favours so that when we need one, we can call it in. I’ve been telling you that from day one, haven’t I? But you don’t want to learn. You’ve been so bloody stupid, so fl aming sure…”

Colin heard a glass clink against the receiver at his father’s end. He heard the rattle of ice. “What is it?” he asked. “You having gin or whisky tonight?”

The glass crashed against something: the wall, a piece of furniture, the cooker, the sink. “God damn you ignorant piece of fi lth. I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Bugger that for a lark. You’re in so deep you can’t smell the shit. That ponce was locked up with Hawkins, boy-o, for nearly an hour. He called in forensic and the DC who came up there when you first found the body. I don’t know what he told them, but the end result was that they phoned for a wopsie and whatever that bloke from the Yard has up his sleeve to do next, it’s with Clitheroe’s blessing. You got that, boy-o? And Hawkins didn’t phone and put you in the picture, did he? Did he?”

Colin didn’t reply. He saw that he’d left a pot on the AGA at lunchtime. Luckily, it had held only salted water which had long since boiled away. The bottom of the pot, however, was crusted with sediment.

“What d’you think that means?” his father was demanding. “Can you put it together or do I have to spell it out?”

Colin forced himself to sound indifferent. “Bringing in a wopsie’s fine with me, Pa. You’re in a state over nothing.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I missed some things. The case needs to be re-opened.”

“You damn fool! Don’t you know what it means to botch a murder investigation?”

Colin could picture the veins in his father’s arms standing out. He said, “I’m not making history. This won’t be the first time a case has been re-opened.”

“Simpleton. Ass,” his father hissed. “You gave evidence for her. You took the oath. You’ve been playing in her knickers. No one’s likely to forget that when it comes time to—”

“I’ve some new information, and it’s nothing to do with Juliet. I’m ready to hand it over to that bloke from the Yard. It’s just as well he’s going to have a female PC with him because he’ll be wanting her.”

“What’re you saying?”