Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

And now, there was the potential humiliation of his son’s involvement in the cover-up of a crime. He’d rested easy when the coroner’s jury had reached their verdict. He’d be in a hornets’ nest of dread until Scotland Yard completed their investigation and verifi ed that there had been no crime.

“Colin,” his father said again. “You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you? Nothing held back?”

Colin met his gaze directly. He was proud he could do so. “Nothing held back,” he said.

It was only when he’d closed the door upon his father that Colin felt his legs weaken. He grasped onto the knob and leaned his forehead against the wood.

It was nothing to concern himself with. No one would ever need to know. He’d not even thought of it himself until the Scotland Yard DI had asked his question and triggered the memory of Juliet and the gun.

He’d gone to speak to her after receiving three angry phone calls from three frightened sets of parents whose sons had been out for a frolic on the grounds of Cotes Hall. She’d been living at the Hall in the caretaker’s cottage just a year then, a tall, angular woman who kept to herself, made her money from growing herbs and brewing up potions, hiked vigorously across the moors with her daughter, and seldom came into the village for anything. She bought groceries in Clitheroe.

She bought gardening supplies in Burnley. She examined crafts and sold plants and dried herbs in Laneshawbridge. She took her daughter on the occasional excursion, but her choices were always a margin off-beat, like the Lewis Textile Museum rather than Lancaster Castle, like Hoghton Tower’s collection of dolls’ houses rather than Blackpool’s diversions by the sea. But these were things he discovered later. At first, bucking down the rutted lane in his old Land Rover, he thought only of the idiocy of a woman who’d shoot into the darkness at three young boys making animal noises at the edge of the woods. And a shotgun at that. Anything could have happened.

The sun was filtering through the oak wood on that afternoon. Beads of green lined the branches of trees as a late winter day gave way to spring. He was rounding a bend in the blasted road that the Townley-Youngs had been refusing to repair for the better part of a decade when through the open window came the sharp scent of cut lavender and with it one of those stabbing memories of Annie. So blinding it was, so momentarily real that he trod on the brake, half expecting her to come at a run from the woods, there where the lavender had been planted thickly at the edge of the road more than one hundred years ago when Cotes Hall lay in readiness for its bridegroom who had never arrived.

They’d been out here a thousand times, he and Annie, and she usually plucked at the lavender bushes as she made her way along the lane, filling the air with the scent of both the flowers and the foliage, collecting the buds to use in sachets among the wools and the linens at home. He remembered those sachets as well, clumsy little gauze pouches tied with frayed purple ribbon. They always came apart within a week. He was always picking bits of lavender out of his socks and brushing them off the sheets. And despite his protest of “Come on, girl. What good do they do?” she kept industriously tucking the pouches into every corner of the house, even once into his shoes, saying, “Moths, Col. We can’t have moths, can we?”

After she died, he rid the house of them in an ineffective attempt to rid the house of her. Directly he swept her medicines from the bedside table, directly he pulled her clothes from their hangers and pushed her shoes into rubbish bags, directly he took her scent bottles into the rear garden and smashed them one by one with a hammer as if by that action he could smash away the rage, he went on a search for Annie’s sachets.

But the smell of lavender always thrust her before him. It was worse than at night when his dreams allowed him to see her, remember, and long for what she once had been. In the day, with only the scent to haunt him, she was just out of reach, like a whisper carried past him on the wind.

He thought Annie, Annie and stared at the lane with his hands gripping the steering wheel.

So he didn’t see Juliet Spence at once, and thus she had the initial advantage over him, which he sometimes thought she maintained to this day. She said, “Are you quite all right, Constable?” and he snapped his head to the open window to see that she had come out of the woods with a basket on her arm and the knees of her blue jeans crusted with mud.

It didn’t seem the least odd that Mrs. Spence should know who he was. The village was small. She would have seen him before now even though they had never been introduced. Beyond that, Townley-Young would have told her that he made periodic visits to the Hall as part of his evening rounds. She might even have noticed him on occasion from her cottage window when he rumbled through the courtyard and shone his torch here and there against the boarded windows of the mansion, checking to make sure that its crumble to ruin stayed in the hands of nature and was not usurped by man.

He ignored her question and got out of the Rover. He said, although he knew the answer already, “It’s Mrs. Spence, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Are you aware of the fact that last night you discharged your shotgun in the direction of three twelve-year-old boys? In the direction of children, Mrs. Spence?”

She had odd bits of greenery, roots, and twigs in her basket, along with a trowel and a pair of secateurs. She picked up the trowel, dislodged a heavy clod of mud from its tip, and rubbed her fingers along the side of her jeans. Her hands were large and dirty. Her fingernails were clipped. They looked like a man’s. She said, “Come to the cottage, Mr. Shepherd.”

She turned on her heel and walked back into the woods, leaving him to jostle and jolt the last half mile along the road. By the time he’d crunched into the courtyard across the gravel and pulled to a halt in the shadow of the Hall, she’d got rid of her basket, brushed the mud from her jeans, washed her hands so thoroughly that her skin looked abraded, and set a kettle to boil on the cooker.

The front door stood open and when he mounted the single step that did for a porch, she said, “I’m in the kitchen, Constable. Come in.”

Tea, he thought. Questions and answers all controlled through the ritual of pouring, passing sugar and milk, shaking Hob Nobs onto a chipped floral plate. Clever, he thought.

But instead of making tea, she poured the boiling water slowly into a large metal pan in which glass jars stood in water of their own. She set the pan onto the cooker as well.

“Things need to be sterile,” she said. “People die so easily when someone is foolish and thinks of making preserves without sterilising fi rst.”

He looked round the kitchen and tried to get a glimpse of the larder beyond it. The time of year seemed decidedly odd for what she was proposing. “What are you preserving?”

“I might ask the same of you.”

She went to a cupboard and took down two glasses and a decanter from which she poured a liquid that was in colour somewhere just between dirt-toned and amber. It was cloudy, and when she placed a glass in front of him on the table where he’d gone to sit unbidden in an attempt to establish some sort of authority over her, he picked it up suspiciously and sniffed. What did it smell like? Bark? Old cheese?

She chuckled and swallowed a healthy portion of her own. She put the decanter on the table, sat down across from him, and circled her hands round her glass. “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s made from dandelion and elder. I drink it every day.”

“What’s it for?”