Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

She said, What else could I do? He said he was going to return her to London.

“And that was the real hell behind the murder,” St. James said.

Deborah looked perplexed. “What real hell? What do you mean?”

St. James got to his feet and walked to the clothes cupboard. He began to undress. “Sage never intended to turn his wife over to the authorities for snatching the baby,” he said. “That last night of his life, he’d brought her enough money to get out of the country. He was perfectly willing to go to prison rather than tell anyone in London where he’d found the girl once he turned her over to Social Services. Of course, the police would have known eventually, but by that time his wife would have been long gone.”

“That can’t be right,” Deborah said. “She must be lying about what happened.”

He turned from the clothes cupboard. He said, “Why? The offer of money only makes the case against her blacker. Why would she lie?”

“Because…” Deborah plucked at the bed-covers as if she would find the answer there. She said deliberately, laying out her facts like cards, “He’d found her. He’d discovered who Maggie was. If he meant to return her to her real mother anyway, why wouldn’t she have taken the money and saved herself from gaol? Why did she kill him? Why didn’t she just run? She knew the game was up.”

St. James unbuttoned his shirt with great care. He examined each button as his fi ngers touched it. He said, “I expect it was because Juliet felt she was Maggie’s real mother all along, my love.”

He looked up then. She was rolling a bit of the sheet between her thumb and forefi nger and watching herself do so. He left her alone.

In the bathroom he took his time about washing his face, brushing his teeth, and running a brush through his hair. He removed his leg brace and let it thump to the fl oor. He kicked it to lie by the wall. It was metal and plastic, strips of Velcro and polyester. It was simple in design but essential in function. When legs didn’t work the way they were supposed to, one strapped on a brace, or took to a wheelchair, or eased along on crutches. But one kept going. That had always been his basic philosophy. He wanted that precept to be Deborah’s as well, but he knew she would have to be the one to choose it.

She’d switched off the lamp next to the bed, but when he came out of the bathroom, the light behind him fell across the room. In the shadows he could see that she was still sitting up in bed, but this time with her head on her knees and her arms round her legs. Her face was hidden.

He flicked off the bathroom light and made his way to the bed, tapping carefully in a darkness that was more complete this night because the skylights were covered with snow. He lowered himself into the covers and lay his crutches soundlessly on the fl oor. He reached out and ran his hand along her back.

“You’re going to get cold,” he said. “Lie down.”

“In a moment.”

He waited. He thought about how much of life comprised that very act, and how waiting always involved either another individual or a force outside oneself. He had mastered the art of waiting long ago. It had been a gift imposed upon him with too much alcohol, oncoming headlamps, and the cormorant scream of skidding tyres. Through sheer necessity, wait-and-see along with give-it-time had become his armorial motto. Sometimes the maxims led him into inaction. Sometimes they allowed him peace of mind.

Deborah stirred beneath his touch. She said, “Of course, you were right the other night. I wanted it for myself. But I also wanted it for you. Perhaps even more. I don’t know.” She turned her head to face him. He couldn’t see her features in the darkness, just the shape of her.

“As retribution?” he asked. He felt her shake her head.

“We were estranged in those days, weren’t we? I loved you but you wouldn’t let yourself love me in return. So I tried to love someone else. And I did, you know. Love him.”

“Yes.”

“Does it hurt you to think about it?”

“I don’t think about it. Do you?”

“Sometimes it creeps up on me. I’m never prepared. All of a sudden, there it is.”

“Then?”

“I feel torn inside. I think how much I’ve hurt you. And I want things to be different.”

“The past?”

“No. The past can’t be changed, can it? It can just be forgiven. It’s the present that concerns me.”

He could tell that she was leading him towards something she had thought carefully through, perhaps that night, perhaps in the days that had preceded it. He wanted to help her say whatever it was she felt needed to be said, but he couldn’t see the direction clearly. He could only sense that she believed the unspoken would hurt him in some undefi n-able way. And while he wasn’t afraid of discussion — indeed, he’d been determined to provoke it ever since they’d left London— he found at the moment that he wanted discussion only if he was able to control its content. That she intended to do so, to an end he couldn’t clearly anticipate, caused him to feel the cold-hot mantle of wariness cloak him. He tried to shed it, couldn’t do so completely.

“You’re everything to me,” she said softly. “That’s what I wanted to be to you. Everything.”

“You are.”

“No.”

“This baby thing, Deborah. Adoption, the whole business of children—” He didn’t complete the sentence because he didn’t know where to go with it any longer.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s it. This baby thing. The whole business of children. Being whole in and of itself. That’s what I wanted for you. That would be my gift.”

He saw the truth then. It was between them the single dried bone of reality that they picked at and worried like two mongrel dogs. He’d grabbed it and chewed it for the years they’d been apart. Deborah had been worrying it ever since. Even now, he saw, when there was no need, she was grappling with it.

He said nothing further. She’d gone this far and he was confident she would say the rest. She was too close now to back away from saying it, and backing away was not, in fact, her style. She’d been doing so for months to protect him, he realised, when he needed no protection, either from her or from this.

“I wanted to make it up to you,” she said.

Say the rest, he thought, it doesn’t hurt me, it won’t hurt you, you can say the rest.

“I wanted to give you something special.”

It’s all right, he thought. It doesn’t change anything.

“Because you’re crippled.”

He pulled her down to him. She resisted at first, but came to him when he said her name. Then the rest of it was spilling out, whispered into his ear. Much of it didn’t make sense, an oddly combined jumble of memories and the experience and understanding of the last few days. He merely held her and listened.

She remembered when they brought him home from his convalescence in Switzerland, she told him. He’d been gone four months, she was thirteen years old, and she remembered that rainy afternoon. How she’d observed it all from the top floor of the house, how her father and his mother had followed him slowly up the stairs, watching as he gripped the banister, their hands flying out to keep him from losing his balance but not touching him, never touching him because they knew without seeing the expression on his face — which she herself could see from the top of the house — that he wasn’t to be touched, not that way, not any longer. And a week later when the two of them were alone — she in the study and this angry stranger called Mr. St. James a floor above in his bedroom from which he had not emerged in days — she heard the crash, the heavy thud of weight and she knew he’d fallen. She’d run up the stairs and stood by his door in her thirteenyear-old’s agony of indecision. Then she’d heard him weeping. She’d heard the sound of him pulling himself along the floor. She’d crept away. She’d left him to face his devils alone because she didn’t know what to do to help.