Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“Well…yes.”

“And you told her that? Jesus, what an idiot, Inspector.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I was wandering like a schoolboy in that blithering state of sexual euphoria when no one thinks. She said, ‘Tommy, how is it that Denton has never once stumbled in with your morning tea on the nights I’ve stayed?’ And I actually told her the truth.”

“That you’d been using the tie to tell Den-ton that Helen was in the bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“And that you’d done it with other women in the past?”

“God no. I’m not that much of an idiot. Although it wouldn’t have made any difference had I said it. She assumed I’d been using it that way for years.”

“And had you?”

“Yes. No. Well, not recently, for God’s sake. I mean, only with her. Which isn’t meant to imply that I didn’t put a tie on the knob for someone else. But there hasn’t been anyone else since she and I…Oh blast it.” He waved off the rest.

Barbara nodded solemnly. “I’m certainly getting the idea of how the old grave was dug.”

“She claims it’s an example of my inherent misogyny: my valet and I exchanging a lubricious chuckle over breakfast about who’s been moaning the loudest in my bed.”

“Which you’ve never done, of course.”

He swung his chair back to her. “What exactly do you take me for, Sergeant?”

“Nothing. Just yourself.” She poked at the hole on her knee with more interest. “Of course, you always could have given up early morning tea all together. I mean, once you started having women spend the night. That way you’d never have needed a signal. Or you could have started brewing morning tea yourself and nipping back up to your bedroom with the tray.” She pressed her lips together at the thought of Lynley stumbling round his kitchen — assuming he even knew where it was in the first place — trying to find the kettle and to work the cooker. “I mean, it would have been sort of liberating for you, sir. You might even have ultimately ventured into toast.”

And then she giggled, although it sounded more like a snort, slipping out from between her pressed lips. She covered her mouth and watched him over the top of her hand, half in shame at her making a joke of his situation and half in amusement at the thought of him — in the midst of frenzied, determined seduction — surreptitiously hanging a tie on his door knob in such a way that his lady love wouldn’t notice and question why he was doing it.

His face was wooden. He shook his head. He fingered the rest of Hillier’s report. “I don’t know,” he said gravely. “I don’t see how I could ever manage toast.”

She guffawed. He chuckled.

“At least we don’t have that sort of trouble in Acton.” Barbara laughed.

“Which is, no doubt, partially why you’re reluctant to leave.”

What a marksman, she thought. He wouldn’t miss an opening if he was wearing a blindfold. She got up from her chair and walked to the window, slipping her fingers into the rear

pockets of her jeans.

“Isn’t that why you’re here?” he asked her.

“I told you why. I was in the area.”

“You were looking for distraction, Havers. As was I.”

She gazed out the window. She could see the tops of the trees in St. James’s Park. Completely bare, rustling in the wind, they looked like sketchings against the sky.

“I don’t know, Inspector,” she said. “It seems like a case of be-careful-what-you-wishfor. I know what I want to do. I’m scared to do it.”

The telephone rang on Lynley’s desk. She started to answer it.

“Leave it,” he said. “We’re not here, remember?” They both watched it as it continued to ring, the way people do when they expect their collective will to have some small infl uence over another’s actions. It fi nally stopped.

“But I suppose you can relate to that,” Barbara went on as if the telephone had not interrupted them.

“It’s something about the gods,” Lynley said. “When they want to make you mad, they give you what you most desire.”

“Helen,” she said.

“Freedom,” he said.

“We’re one hell of a pair.”

“Detective Inspector Lynley?” Dorothea Harriman stood in the doorway, wearing a trim black suit relieved by grey piping on collar and lapels. A pillbox hat was perched on her head. She looked ready for an appearance on the balcony of Buck House on Remembrance Sunday should she be summoned to dwell among the royals. Only the poppy was missing.

“Yes, Dee?” Lynley asked.

“Telephone.”

“I’m not here.”

“But—”

“The sergeant and I are unavailable, Dee.”

“But it’s Mr. St. James. He’s phoning from Lancashire.”

“St. James?” Lynley looked at Barbara. “Haven’t he and Deborah gone on holiday?”

Barbara raised her shoulders. “Haven’t we all?”

LYNLEY WAS DRIVING UP THE acclivity of the Clitheroe Road towards the village of Winslough by late afternoon. Mellow sunlight, fading as day drew towards night, pierced the winter mist that lay over the land. In narrow bands, it glanced against the old stone structures— church, school, houses, and shops that rose in a serried display of Lancashire’s stalwart architecture — and it changed the colour of the buildings to ochre, from their normally sombre tan-soaked-with-soot. Beneath the tyres of the Bentley, the road was wet, as it always seemed to be in the North at this time of year, and pools of water from both ice and frost, which gathered and melted and gathered again on a nightly basis, glimmered in the light. Upon their surfaces the sky was refl ected, as were the vertebral forms of hedges and trees.

He slowed the car some fifty yards from the church. He parked on the verge and got out into the knife-sharp air. He could smell the smoke from a fresh, dry-wood fire nearby. This argued for dominance with the prevalent odours of manure, turned earth, wet and rotting vegetation which emanated from the expanse of open land lying just beyond the brambly hedge that bordered the road. He looked past this. To his left, the hedge curved northeast with the road, giving way to the church and then, perhaps a quarter of a mile farther on, to the village itself. To his far right, a stand of trees thickened into an old oak wood above which rose a hill that was sided by frost and topped by a wavering wreath of mist. And directly in front of him, the open fi eld dipped languidly down to a crooked stream from which the land lifted again on the other side in a patchwork of drystone walls. Among these stood farms, and from them even at this distance Lynley could hear the bleating of sheep.

He leaned against the side of the car and gazed at St. John the Baptist’s. Like the village itself, the church was a plain structure, roofed in slate and ornamented only by its clock-faced bell tower and Norman crenellation. Surrounded by a graveyard and chestnut trees, backdropped by a misty egg-shell sky, it didn’t much look like a player in a set piece with murder at its core.

Priests, after all, were supposed to be minor characters in the drama of life and death. Theirs was the role of conciliator, counsellor, and general intermediary between the penitent, the petitioner, and the Lord. They offered a service elevated both in effi cacy and importance as a result of its connection to the divine, but because of this fact there was a measured distance between them and the members of their congregation, one which seemed to preclude the sort of intimacy that led to murder.

Yet this chain of thought was sophistry, Lynley knew. Everything from the monitory aphorism about the wolf in sheep’s clothing to that time-worn hypocrite the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale bore evidence of that. Even if this were not the case, Lynley had been a policeman long enough to know that the most guileless exterior — not to mention the most exalted position — had the fullest potential to hide culpability, sin, and shame. Thus, if murder had shattered the peace of this somnolent countryside, the fault did not lie in the stars or in the ceaseless movement of the planets, but rather at the centre of a guarded heart.