Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“Don’t we all need something.” She walked away.

Colin saw her pass. She was a whimsical vision of colour against a backdrop of white. Purple scarf, navy coat, red trousers, brown boots. She was carrying a basket and ploughing steadily along the far side of the road.

She didn’t look his way. She would have at one time. She would have ventured a surreptitious glance at his house, and if by chance he was working in the front garden or tinkering with the car, she would have crossed the road with an excuse to talk. Hear about the dog trials in Lancaster, Colin? How’s your dad feeling? What’d the vet have to say about Leo’s eyes?

Now she made a project out of looking straight ahead. The other side of the road, the houses that lined it, and particularly his simply didn’t exist. It was just as well. She was saving them both. Had she turned her head and caught him watching her from the kitchen window, he might have felt something. And so far, he’d managed to keep himself from feeling anything at all.

He’d gone through the motions of the morning: making coffee, shaving, feeding the dog, pouring himself a bowl of cornflakes, slicing a banana, raining sugar on top, and dousing the mixture thoroughly with milk. He’d even sat at the table with the bowl in front of him. He’d even gone so far as to dip the spoon into it. He’d even lifted the spoon to his lips. Twice. But he was unable to eat.

He’d held her hand but it was dead weight in his. He’d said her name. He was unsure what to call her — this JulietSusanna that the London detective claimed she was — but he needed all the same to call her something in an effort to bring her back to him again.

She wasn’t really there, he discovered. The shell of her was, the body he had worshipped with his own, but the interior substance of her rode up ahead in the other Range Rover, trying to calm her daughter’s fears and looking for the courage to say goodbye.

He strengthened his grip on her. She said in a voice without depth or timbre, “The elephant.”

He struggled to understand. The elephant. Why? Why here? Why now? What was she telling him? What was it that he should know about elephants? That they never forget? That she never would? That she still reached out to him for rescue from the quicksand of her despair? The elephant.

And then oddly, as if they communicated in an English that meant something only to them, Inspector Lynley answered her. “Is it in the Opel?”

She said, “I told her Punkin or the elephant. You must decide, darling.”

He said, “I’ll see that she gets it, Mrs. Spence.”

And that was all. Colin willed her to respond to the pressure of his fingers. Her hand never moved, she never grasped his. She simply took herself to a place of dying.

He understood that now. He was there himself. At first, it seemed he’d begun the process when Lynley had laid the facts before him. At first, it seemed he’d continued to decay throughout the interminable passing of the night. He stopped hearing their voices. He drifted out of his body altogether and observed from on high the ending of things. He watched it all curiously, filed it all away, and thought perhaps he might wonder at it later. How Lynley spoke, not as an official of the police, but as if to comfort or to reassure her, how he helped her to the car, how he steadied her with his arm round her shoulders and pressed her head against his chest the final time they heard Maggie cry. It was odd to think he never once seemed triumphant at having his speculations proven true. Instead he looked torn. The crippled man said something about the workings of justice, but Lynley laughed bitterly. I hate all of this, he said, the living, the dying, the whole bloody mess. And although Colin listened from the faraway place to which the self of him had retreated, he found that he hated nothing at all. One cannot hate while one is engaged in the process of dying.

Later, he saw that he’d really begun that process the moment he raised a hand against Polly. Now, standing at the window and watching her pass by, he wondered if he hadn’t been dying for years.

Behind him the clock ticked the day onwards, its cat’s eyes shifting along with the movement of its pendulum tail. How she’d laughed when she saw it. She’d said, Col, it’s precious, I must have it, I must. And he’d bought it for her birthday, wrapped it in newspaper because he’d forgotten the fancy paper and ribbon, left it on the front porch, and rung the bell. How she’d laughed, clapped her hands, said, Hang it up right now, right now, you must.

He took it from the wall above the AGA and carried it to the work top. He turned it face down. The tail still wagged. He could sense that the eyes were still moving as well. He could still hear the passing of its time.

He tried to prise open the compartment that held its workings, but couldn’t manage the job with his fingers. He tried three times, gave it up, and opened a drawer beneath the work top. He fumbled for a knife.

The clock ticked and tocked. The cat’s tail moved.

He slid the knife between the backing and the body and pulled back sharply. And then a second time. The plastic gave with a snap, part of the backing broke away. It fl ew up and out and landed on the floor. He fl ipped the clock over and slammed it hard a single time against the work top. A gear fell out. The tail and eyes stopped. The gentle ticking ceased.

He broke the tail off. He used the wooden handle of the knife to shatter the eyes. He flung the clock in the rubbish where a soup tin shifted with the weight of its fall and began to drip diluted tomato against its face.

What shall we name it, Col? she’d asked, slipping her arm through his. It needs a name. I fancy Tiger myself. Listen what it sounds like: Tiger tells the time. Am I a poet, Col?

“Perhaps you were,” he said.

He put on his jacket. Leo dashed from the sitting room, ready for a run. Colin heard his anxious whine and ran his knuckles across the top of the dog’s head. But when he left the house, he left it alone.

The steam from his breath said the air was frigid. But he couldn’t feel anything, either warmth or cold.

He crossed the road and went through the lych-gate. He saw that others had been in the graveyard before him because someone had laid a spray of juniper on one of the graves. The rest were bare, frozen under the snow with their markers rising like smokestacks through clouds.

He walked towards the wall and the chestnut tree where Annie lay, these six years dead. He made a deliberate, fresh trail through the snow, feeling the drifts give way against his shins, the way ocean water breaks when you walk against it.

The sky was as blue as the fl ax she’d planted one year by the door. Against it, the leafl ess branches of the chestnut tree wore a diamond cobweb of ice and snow. The branches cast a net of shadows on the ground beneath them. They dipped skinless fi ngers towards Annie’s grave.

He should have brought something with him, he thought. A spray of ivy and holly, a fresh pine wreath. He should have at least come prepared to clean the stone, to make sure lichen had no chance to grow. He needed to keep the words from fading. At the moment, he needed to read her name.

The gravestone was partially buried in the snow and he began to use his hands against it, first brushing off the top and then down the sides and then preparing to use his fi ngers on the carving.

But then he saw it. The colour caught his eye first, bright pink on pure white. The shapes caught his eye second, two interlocking ovals. It was a small flat stone — worn smooth by a thousand years of river — and it was lying at the head of the grave, tangent to the marker.

He put his hand out, then drew it back. He knelt in the snow.