Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

St. James heard the words as if he still stood in that room in Glasgow, all of twenty-one years old and thinking not of organic toxins but of the young woman he’d fi nally taken to bed on his last visit home. His reverie disturbed, he made a valiant attempt at bluffi ng his way through a response to the professor’s request. Cicuta virosa , he said and he cleared his throat in an effort to buy time, toxic principle cicutoxin, acting directly on the central nervous system, a violent convulsant, and …The rest was a mystery.

And, Mr. St. James? And? And?

Alas. His thoughts were too fi rmly attached to the bedroom. He remembered nothing more.

But here in Lancashire, more than fi fteen years later, Josephine Eugenia Wragg gave the answer. “She always kept roots in the cellar. Potatoes and carrots and parsnips and everything, each in their separate bin. So a whisper went round that if she didn’t feed it to the vicar on purpose, someone might’ve snuck in and mixed the hemlock with the other parsnips and just waited till it was cooked and eaten. But she said at the inquest that couldn’t have happened ’cause the cellar was always locked up tight. So then everyone said all right we’ll accept that that’s the case but then she should have known it wasn’t wild parsnip in the first place ’cause…”

Of course she should have known. Because of the root. And that had been Ian Rutherford’s main point. That was what he’d been waiting impatiently for his daydreaming, negligent student to say.

Ye don’t have a prayer in science, my lad .

Yes. Well. They would see about that.

THERE IT WAS, THAT NOISE again. it sounded like hesitant foot steps treading on gravel. At fi rst she had thought it was coming from the courtyard, and although she knew it wasn’t proper to be relieved at the idea, her fears were at least moderately soothed by the fact that whoever it was creeping round in the dark, he seemed to be heading in the direction not of the caretaker’s cottage but of Cotes Hall. And it had to be a he , Maggie Spence decided. Prowling about old buildings at night wasn’t the sort of behaviour a she would engage in.

Maggie knew she ought to be on the alert, considering everything that had gone on at the Hall over the past few months, considering especially the ruination of that fancy-pants carpet only last weekend. Being on the alert was, after all, the only thing aside from her school prep that Mummy had asked her to do prior to leaving with Mr. Shepherd this evening.

“I’ll only be gone a few hours, darling,” Mummy had said. “If you hear anything, don’t go outside. Just phone. All right?”

Which is, by rights, what Maggie knew she ought to do now. After all, she had the numbers. They were downstairs next to the telephone in the kitchen. Mr. Shepherd’s home, Crofters Inn, and the Townley-Youngs just in case. She had looked them over as Mummy left, wanting to say in mock innocence, “But you’re just going to the inn, aren’t you, Mummy? So why’ve you given me Mr. Shepherd’s number as well?” But she knew the answer to that question already, and if she asked, it would only have been to embarrass the both of them.

Sometimes, though, she wanted to embarrass them. She wanted to shout, March twenty-third! I know what happened, I know that’s when you did it, I even know where, I even know how. But she never did. Even if she hadn’t seen them in the sitting room together— having arrived home too early after a tiff in the village with Josie and Pam — and even if she hadn’t slipped away from the window with her legs gone all peculiar at the sight of Mummy and what she’d been doing, and even if she hadn’t gone to sit and think about it all on the weed-choked terrace of Cotes Hall with Punkin curled in a mangy ball of tabby-orange at her feet, she still would have known. It was pretty obvious, with Mr. Shepherd looking at Mummy ever since with his eyes all bleary and his mouth gone soft and Mummy being careful as careful not to look at him.

“They’re doing it?” Josie Wragg had whispered breathlessly. “And you actually in reality without a doubt in the world saw them doing it? Naked and stuff? In the sitting room? Maggie!” She lit a Gauloise and lay back on her bed. All the windows were open to remove the smoke so that her mummy wouldn’t know what she was getting up to. But Maggie couldn’t see how all the breeze in the world could come close to eliminating the foul odour produced by the French cigarettes that Josie favoured. She placed her own between her lips and filled her mouth with smoke. She blew it out. She hadn’t mastered the inhaling part yet and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“They didn’t have all their clothes off,” she said. “Mummy didn’t, at least. I mean, she wasn’t actually undressed at all. She didn’t really need to be.”

“Didn’t need …? Then what were they doing?” Josie demanded.

“Oh God, Josephine.” Pam Rice yawned. She tossed her head of perfectly bobbed blond hair and it fell, as it always did, perfectly in place. “Develop a clue in life, won’t you? What d’you think they were doing? I thought you were supposed to be the expert round here.”

Josie frowned. “But I don’t see how…I mean if she had all her clothes on.”

Pam raised her eyes to the ceiling in a display of martyred patience. She drew in deeply on her cigarette and exhaled and inhaled in something she called Frenching. “It was in her mouth,” she said. “M-o-u-t-h. Do I have to draw you a picture, or do you get it now?”

“In her…” Josie looked flustered. She touched her fingertips to her tongue as if doing so would allow her to understand more completely. “You mean his thing was actually—”

“His thing ? God. It’s called a penis, Josie. P-e-n-i-s. All right?” Pam rolled onto her stomach and gazed with narrowed eyes at the glowing tip of her cigarette. “All I can say is I hope she got something, which she probably didn’t if she was wearing all her clothes.” Again, a toss of that perfect head of hair. “Todd knows better than to finish it off before I’ve come and that’s a fact.”

Josie’s forehead creased. She was obviously still trying to come to terms with the information. Always presenting herself as the living authority on female sexuality — courtesy of a dog-eared copy of The Female Sexual Animal Unleashed At Home (Vol. I), which she’d pinched from the rubbish bin where her mother had deposited it after, at the insistence of her husband, she had spent two months attempting to “become lidibinous or something like that”— she was out of her depth with this one.

“Were they—” She seemed to struggle for a word. “Were they moving or anything, Maggie?”

“Christ in dirty knickers,” Pam said. “Don’t you know anything? No one needs to move. She just needs to suck.”

“To…” Josie mashed out her cigarette on the windowsill. “Maggie’s mum? With a bloke? That’s disgusting!”

Pam chuckled languidly. “No. It’s Unleashed . Right and proper, if you ask me. Didn’t your book get round to mentioning that, Jo? Or was it all about dipping your tits in clotted cream and serving them up with the strawberries at tea? You know the sort of thing. ‘Make life for your man a constant surprise.’”

“There’s nothing wrong with a woman becoming attuned to her sensual nature,” Josie replied with some dignity. She lowered her head and picked at a scab on her knee. “Or to a man’s, for that matter.”

“Yes. Too right. A real woman ought to know what gives who a tickle and where. Don’t you think so, Maggie?” Pam used her unnerving ability to make her eyes look at once both purely innocent and bluer than blue. “Don’t you think it’s important?”