Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

She jumped to her feet, planted them apart, punched her fists to her hips. “Just listen to yourself. You talk about me. She’s got you bewitched. She put you in place, got you eating from her hand, murdered the vicar, and got away with it clean. And you’re so blinded by your own stupid lust that you can’t even see how she’s used you.”

“It was an accident.”

“It was murder, murder, murder and she did it and everyone knows she did it. No one can think you could be such a fool as to believe a single word that she says. Except we all know why you believe her, don’t we, we all know what you’re getting, we even know when, so don’t you imagine she might have been giving our precious little vicar just a bit of the same?”

The vicar…the vicar…Colin felt it all at once: bones, blood, and heat. His muscles coiling and his mother’s voice shouting No, Ken, don’t! as his arm soared up right palm to left shoulder and he made the primary lunge to strike. Lungs full, heart raging, wanting contact and pain and retribution and—

Polly cried out, staggered back. Her boot hit the sherry glass. It flew towards the fi re and broke on the fender. The sherry dripped and sizzled. The dog began to bark.

And Colin stood there at the ready, aching to strike. With Polly not Polly and himself not himself and the past and the present howling round him like the wind. Arm raised, features twisted into an expression he’d seen a thousand times but never felt on his face, never thought to feel, never dreamed to feel. Because he couldn’t actually be the man he’d sworn to himself would never exist.

Leo’s barking turned to yelps. They sounded wild and fearful.

“Quiet!” Colin snapped.

Polly cringed. She took another step backwards. Her skirt skimmed the fl ames. Colin grabbed her arm to draw her from the fi re. She jerked away. Leo backed off. His nails scraped on the floor. Aside from the fi re and Colin’s torn breathing, they made the only sound in the room.

Colin held his hand up at the level of his chest. He stared at the shaking fi ngers and palm. He’d never struck a woman in his life. He wouldn’t have thought he was even capable of doing so. His arm dropped like a weight.

“Polly.”

“I cast the circle for you. For Annie as well.”

“Polly, I’m sorry. I’m not thinking right. I’m not thinking at all.”

She began to button her coat. He could see that her hands were trembling worse than his, and he made a move to help her but stopped when she cried No! as if with the expectation of being struck.

“Polly…” His voice sounded desperate, even to himself. But he didn’t know what he wanted to say.

“She’s got you not thinking,” Polly said. “That’s what it is. But you don’t see that, do you? You don’t even want to. ’Cause how can you face it if the very same thing that makes you hate me is what keeps you from seeing the truth about her.” She took out her scarf, made a shaky attempt to fold it into a triangle, and fl ipped it over her head to hold down her hair. She knotted its ends beneath her chin. She moved past him without a glance, squeaking across the room in her ancient boots. She paused at the door and spoke without looking back.

“While you were fucking that day in the barn,” she said quite clearly, “I was making love.”

“On the sitting room sofa?” Josie Wragg asked incredulously. “You mean right here? With your mum and dad in the house? You never!” She got as close as she could to the mirror above the basin and applied the eyeliner with an inexpert hand. A blob of it went into her lashes. She blinked, then squinted when it made contact with her eyeball. “Ooooh. It stings. Oh crikey Moses. Now look what I’ve done.” She’d given herself a makeup black eye. She rubbed it with a tissue and spread the mess across her cheek. “You didn’t really,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

Pam Rice balanced on the edge of the bathtub and blew cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. To do it, she let her head hang back on her neck in a lazy movement that Maggie was sure she’d seen in an old American film. Bette Davis. Joan Crawford. Maybe Lauren Bacall.

“Want to see the stain for yourself?” Pam asked.

Josie frowned. “What stain?”

Pam flicked ash into the bathtub and shook her head. “Lord. You don’t know anything, do you, Josephine Bean?”

“I most certainly do.”

“Really? Great. You tell me what stain.”

Josie worked this one over. Maggie could tell she was trying to think up a reasonable answer even though she pretended to be concentrating on the mess she’d made of her eyes. This was second to the mess she’d already made of her nails last night, having purchased a do-it-yourself acrylic nail kit through the post when her mother had refused to allow her to make a trip to Blackpool in order to have artificial nails put on by a stylist. The result of Josie’s attempt to extend her own stubs to what she called drive-men-wild length looked like elephant-man-of-the-fi ngers.

They were in the upstairs and only bathroom of Pam Rice’s terraced house, across the street from Crofters Inn. While directly below them in the kitchen Pam’s mummy fed the twins an afternoon tea of scrambled eggs and beans on toast — to the accompaniment of Edward’s happy shouting and Alan’s laugh-ter — they watched Josie experiment with her most recent cosmetic acquisition: a half-bottle of eyeliner purchased from a fifth former who’d pinched it from his sister’s chest of drawers.

“Gin,” Josie finally announced. “Everyone knows you drink it. We’ve seen the fl ask.”

Pam laughed and did her smoke-at-the-ceiling routine again. She flipped her cigarette into the toilet. It made a sound like psst as it sank. She held on to the edge of the bathtub and leaned back again, farther this time so that her breasts jutted towards the ceiling. She still wore her school uniform — all three of them did — but she’d removed the jersey, unbuttoned the blouse to expose her cleavage, and rolled up the sleeves. Pam had the ability to make an inanimate white cotton blouse just scream to be stripped from her body.

“God, I’m horny as a she-goat,” she said. “If Todd doesn’t want to do it tonight, I’m getting it off with some other bloke.” She swivelled her head in the direction of the door where Maggie sat on the fl oor, cross-legged. “How’s our Nickie?” she asked, casual and cool.

Maggie rolled her cigarette in her fi ngers. She’d taken six obligatory puffs — in by the mouth, out through the nose, nothing in the lungs — and was waiting for the rest to burn itself down so that she could let it join Pam’s in the toilet. “Fine,” she said.

“And big?” Pam asked, swinging her head so that her hair moved like a single curtain of blonde. “Just like a salami, that’s what I’ve heard. Is it true?”

Maggie looked at Josie’s reflection in the mirror. She made a wordless plea for rescue.

“Well, is it?” Josie said in Pam’s direction.

“What?”

“The stain. Gin. Like I said.”

“Semen,” Pam said, looking largely bored.

“See-what?”

“Come.”

“Where?”

“Christ alive, you’re a twit. That’s what it is.”

“What?”

“The stain! It’s from him, okay? It drips out, all right? When you’re done, understand?”

Josie studied her reflection, making another heroic attempt with the eyeliner. “Oh that ,” she said and dipped the brush into the bottle. “From the way you were talking, I thought it was s’posed to be something weird.”

Pam snagged up her shoulder bag that lay on the floor. She pulled out her cigarettes and lit up again. “Mum was frothing like a dog when she saw it. She even smelled it. Do you believe that? She started in with ‘You miserable little tart,’ went on to ‘You’re a real cheap piece for any one of these blokes,’ and fi nished with ‘I can’t hold my head up in the village any longer. Neither can your dad.’ I told her if I had my own bedroom, I wouldn’t have to use the sofa and she wouldn’t have to see the stains.” She smiled and stretched. “Todd goes on and on so long, he must come a bloody quart every time.” And with a sly look at Maggie, “What about Nick?”