Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“Do you have a licence for that?” he asked her.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It wasn’t necessary.”

“It’s the law.”

“Not for the way I bought it.”

She was standing with her back against the dresser. He stayed in the doorway. He thought about saying what he ought to say. He considered doing what the law required of him. The weapon was illegal, she was in possession of it, and he was supposed to remove it from the premises and charge her with the crime. Instead, he said:

“What do you use it for?”

“Target practice mostly. But otherwise protection.”

“From whom?”

“From anyone who isn’t warned off by a shouting voice or a shotgun blast. It’s a form of security.”

“You don’t seem insecure.”

“Anyone with a child in the house is insecure. Especially a woman on her own.”

“Do you always keep it loaded?”

“Yes.”

“That’s foolish. That’s asking for trouble.”

A smile fl ickered briefly round her mouth. “Perhaps. But I’ve never fired it in the company of anyone other than Maggie before today.”

“It was foolish of you to show it to me.”

“Yes. It was.”

“Why did you?”

“For the same reason I own it. Protection, Constable.”

He stared at her across the room, feeling his heart beating rapidly and wondering when it had begun to do so. From somewhere in the house he heard water dripping, from out-ofdoors the sharp trill of a bird. He saw the rise and fall of her chest, the V of her shirt where her skin seemed to glisten, the stretch of blue jeans across her hips. She was gangly and sweaty. She was more than unkempt. He couldn’t have left her.

Without a single coherent thought, he took two strides, and she met him in the centre of the room. He pulled her into his arms, his fi ngers diving through her hair, his mouth on hers. He hadn’t known that such hunger for a woman could even exist. Had she resisted in the least, he knew he would have forced her, but she didn’t resist and she clearly didn’t want to. Her hands were in his hair, at his throat, against his chest and then her arms encircled him as he pulled her closer, cradling her buttocks and grinding grinding grinding against her. He heard the snap of buttons falling away as he pulled off her shirt, seeking her breasts. And then his own shirt was off and her mouth was on him, kissing and biting a trail to his waist where she knelt, fumbled with his belt, and pushed down his trousers.

Jesus God, he thought. Jesus Jesus Jesus. He knew only two terrors: that he might actually explode into her mouth, that she might release him before he could do so.

SHE COULDN’T POSSIBLY have been less like Annie. Perhaps that had been the initial attraction. In place of Annie’s soft, willing compliance, he had put Juliet’s independence and strength. She was easily taken and eager to be taken, but not easily known. During the fi rst hour of their lovemaking on that March afternoon, she’d said only two words: God and harder , the second of which she repeated three times. And when they’d had enough of each other — long after they’d moved from the sitting room up the stairs to her bedroom where they’d tried out both the floor and the bed — she turned on her side with one arm cradling her head, and she said, “What’s your Christian name, Mr. Shepherd, or am I to go on calling you Mr. Shepherd?”

He traced the faint lightning bolt of skin that puckered her stomach and was the only indication — besides the child herself — that she’d given birth. He felt there wasn’t suffi cient time in his life to come to know every inch of her body well enough, and as he lay beside her, having had her four times already, he began to ache to have her again. He’d never made love to Annie more than once in any twenty-four-hour period. He’d never thought to try. And while the loving of his wife had been tender and sweet, leaving him feeling at once at peace and somehow in her debt, the loving of Juliet had ignited his senses, unearthing a desire that no amount of having her seemed to sate. After an evening, a night, an afternoon together, he could catch the scent of her — on his hands, on his clothes, when he combed his hair — and find himself wanting her, driven to telephone her, saying only her name to which her low voice would respond, “Yes. When.”

But to her first question, he merely said, “Colin.”

“What did your wife call you?”

“Col. And your husband?”

“I’m called Juliet.”

“And your husband?”

“His name?”

“What did he call you?”

She ran her fingers along his eyebrows, the curve of his ear, his lips. “You’re terribly young,” was her reply.

“I’m thirty-three. And you?”

She smiled, a small, sad movement of her mouth. “I’m older than thirty-three. Old enough to be…”

“What?”

“Wiser than I am. Far wiser than I’ve been this afternoon.”

His ego replied. “You wanted it, didn’t you?”

“Oh yes. As soon as I saw you sitting in the Rover. Yes. I wanted. It. You. Whatever.”

“Was that some sort of potion you had me drink?”

She raised his hand to her mouth, took his index finger between her lips, sucked on it gently. He caught his breath. She released him and chuckled. “You don’t need a potion, Mr. Shepherd.”

“How old are you?”

“Too old for this to be anything more than a single afternoon.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I have to.”

Over time, he’d chipped away at her reluctance. She revealed her age, forty-three, and she surrendered time and again to desire. But when he talked of the future, she turned to stone. Her answer was always the same.

“You need a family. Children to raise. You were meant to be a father. I can’t give that to you.”

“Rot. Women older than you have babies.”

“I’ve had my baby, Colin.”

Indeed. Maggie was the equation to be solved if he was to win her mother, and he knew it. But she was elusive, a sprite-child who had watched him solemnly from across the courtyard when he left the cottage on that first afternoon. She was clutching a mangy cat in her arms, and her eyes were solemn. She knows, he thought. He said hello and her name, but she disappeared round the side of the Hall. And ever since then, she’d been polite — a very model of good breeding — but he could see the judgement on her face and he could have predicted the manner in which she would exact retribution from her mother long before Juliet realised where Maggie’s infatuation with Nick Ware was heading.

He could have interceded in some way. He knew Nick Ware, after all. He was well-acquainted with the boy’s parents. He could have been useful, had Juliet let him.

Instead, she’d allowed the vicar to enter their lives. And it hadn’t taken Robin Sage long to forge what Colin himself had been unable to create: a fragile bond with Maggie. He saw them talking together outside the church, strolling into the village with the vicar’s heavy hand at rest on the girl’s shoulder. He watched them perched on the graveyard wall with their backs to the road, their faces towards Cotes Fell, and the vicar’s arm arcing out to illustrate the curve of the land or some point he was making. He noted the visits Maggie had paid to the vicarage. And he used these last to broach the subject with Juliet.

“It’s nothing,” Juliet said. “She’s looking for her father. She knows it can’t be you — she thinks you’re too young and besides you’ve never left Lancashire, have you — so she’s trying out Mr. Sage for the role. She thinks her father’s out searching for her somewhere. Why not as a vicar?”