Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“Maggie?” Lynley asked.

“Her daughter. Juliet had been having some trouble with her and the vicar got involved. He wanted to help. Mediate between them.

Offer advice. That’s it. That’s their relationship in a nutshell. Should I have called in CID and had them read her the caution over that? Or would you have preferred a motive fi rst?”

“Means and opportunity are powerful indicators in themselves,” Lynley said.

“That’s a lot of balls and you know it,” the Chief Inspector put in.

“Pa…”

Shepherd’s father waved him off with his sherry glass. “I have the means for murder every time I get behind the wheel of my car. I have opportunity when I step on the pedal. Is it murder, Inspector, if I hit someone who dodges into the path of my car? Do we need to call in CID for that, or can we deem it an accident?”

“Pa…”

“If that’s your argument — and I can’t deny its ten-ability at the moment — why involve CID in the person of yourself?”

“Because he is involved with the woman, for God’s sake. He wanted me here to make sure he kept his mind clear. And he did. Every moment.”

“Every moment you were here. And by your own admission, you weren’t here for each interview.”

“I damn well didn’t need—”

“Pa.” Shepherd’s voice was sharp. It altered to quiet reason when he went on. “Obviously it looked bad when Sage died. Juliet knows her plants, and it was hard to believe she could have mistaken water hemlock for wild parsnip. But that’s what happened.”

“You’re certain of that?” St. James asked.

“Of course I am. She got ill herself the night Mr. Sage died. She was burning with fever. She was sick four or five times, until two the next morning. Now you can’t tell me that without having a blessed motive in the world she’d knowingly eat a few bites of the deadliest natural poison there is in order to paint a murder an accident. Hemlock’s not like arsenic, Inspector Lynley. One doesn’t build up an immunity to it. If Juliet wanted to kill Mr. Sage, she bloody well wouldn’t have been such a fool as to deliberately eat part of the hemlock herself. She could have died. She was lucky she didn’t.”

“You know for a fact she was ill?” Lynley asked.

“I was there.”

“At the dinner?”

“Later. I stopped by.”

“What time?”

“Towards eleven. After I made my last patrol.”

“Why?”

Shepherd tossed back the rest of his drink and placed the glass on the floor. He took off his spectacles and spent a moment polishing the outer right lens against the sleeve of his fl annel shirt.

“Constable?”

“Tell him, lad,” the Chief Inspector said. “It’s the only way he’s going to be satisfi ed.”

Shepherd gave a shrug, replacing the spectacles. “I wanted to see if she was alone. Maggie’d gone to spend the night with one of her mates…” He sighed, shifted his weight.

“And you thought Sage might be doing the same with Mrs. Spence?”

“He’d been there three times. Juliet gave me no reason to think she’d taken him as a lover. I wondered. That’s all. I wondered. It’s nothing I’m proud of.”

“Would it be likely that she’d take on a lover after so brief an acquaintance, Constable?”

Shepherd picked up his glass, saw it was empty, put it back down. A spring creaked on the sofa as the Chief Inspector stirred.

“Would she, Mr. Shepherd?”

The constable’s spectacles fl ashed briefl y in the light as he lifted his head to meet Lynley’s gaze. “That’s hard to know about any woman, isn’t it? Especially a woman you love.”

There was truth to that, Lynley admitted. More than he liked to think about. People expatiated on the virtues of trust all the time. He wondered how many of them actually lived by it, with no doubts ever camping like restless gypsies just at the edge of their consciousness.

He said: “I take it Sage was gone when you arrived?”

“Yes. She said he’d left at nine.”

“Where was she?”

“In bed.”

“Ill?”

“Yes.”

“But she let you in?”

“I knocked. She didn’t answer. I let myself in.”

“The door was unlocked?”

“I have a set of keys.” He saw St. James glance quickly in Lynley’s direction. He added, “She didn’t give them to me. Townley-Young did. Keys to the cottage, Cotes Hall, the whole estate. He owns it. She’s the care

taker.”

“She knows you have the keys?”

“Yes.”

“As a security precaution?”

“I suppose.”

“Do you use them often? As part of your evening patrol?”

“Not generally, no.”

Lynley saw that St. James was looking thoughtfully at the constable, his brows drawn together as he pulled at his chin. He said: “It was a bit risky, that, wouldn’t you say, letting yourself into her cottage at night? What if she had been in bed with Mr. Sage?”

Shepherd’s jaw tightened but he answered easily. “I suppose I would have killed him myself.”

DEBORAH SPENT THE FIRST quarter of an hour inside St. John the Baptist Church. Beneath the hammer-beam ceiling, she wandered down the central aisle towards the chancel, tracing a mittened finger along the scrollwork that edged each pew. On the far side of the pulpit, one of them was boxed, separated from the rest by a gate of barley-sugar columns on the top of which a small bronze plaque bore blackened letters reading Townley-Young . Deborah lifted its latch and stepped inside, wondering what sort of people would want to maintain the unpleasant, centuries-old custom of segregating themselves from those they considered their social inferiors.

She sat on the narrow bench and looked about. The air in the church was musty and frigid, and when she exhaled, her breath hung whitely before her face for a moment, then dissipated like a cirrus in the wind. On a pillar nearby, the hymnboard hung, listing a selection for some previous service. Number 388 was at the top, and idly she opened one of the hymnals to it, reading

Lord Christ, who on thy heart didst bear the burden of our shame and sin, and now on high dost stoop to share the fight without, the fear within,

after which she dropped her eyes to

that we may care, as thou hast cared, for sick and lame, for deaf and blind, and freely share, as thou hast shared, in all the sorrows of mankind

and then stared at the words with her throat aching-tight, as if they had been written precisely for her.Which they had not.Which they had not .

She slapped the book closed. To the left of the pulpit a banner hung limply from a metal rod, and she scrutinised this. Winslough was stitched across a faded blue background in letters of yellow. Below them St. John the Baptist Church was rendered in quilted patchwork from which several tufts of stuffing leaked like snow against the bell tower and on the face of the clock. She wondered what the banner was used for, when it had been hung, if it had ever seen the light of day, how old it was, who had made it and why. She pictured an elderly woman of the parish at work on the design, stitching her way into the good graces of the Lord by making an offering for His place of worship. How long had it taken her? What sort of thread had she used for the quilting? Did anyone help? Did anyone know? Was there anyone who kept that sort of history of a church?

Such games, Deborah thought. What an effort she made to keep her mind in check. How important it was to feel the tranquillity suggested by a visit to a church and communion with the Lord.

She hadn’t come here for that. She had come because a walk down the Clitheroe Road in the late afternoon with her husband and the man who was his closest friend, who was her own former lover, who was the father of the child she might have had — would never have — seemed the best way to escape the feeling of having been betrayed.