Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“It’s just that Maggie’s my best mate, see. And I’ve never had a best mate before. Her mum — Missus Spence — she keeps to herself lots. People call that queer, and they want to make something of it. But there’s nothing to make. You got to remember that, don’t you think?”

Lynley nodded. “That’s wise. I’d agree with that.”

“Well then…” She bobbed her ill-clipped head and looked for a moment as if she intended to dip into a curtsy. Instead, she backed away from the table in the direction of the kitchen door. “You’ll want to start eating, won’t you? The pâté’s mum’s own recipe, you know. The smoked salmon’s real fresh. And if you want anything…” Her voice faded when the door closed behind her.

“That’s Josie,” St. James said, “in case you haven’t been introduced. A strong advocate of the accident theory.”

“So I noticed.”

“What did Sergeant Hawkins have to say? I take it that’s the conversation Josie overheard you having.”

“It was.” Lynley speared a piece of salmon and was pleasantly surprised to find it — as Josie had declared — quite fresh. “He wanted to restate that he was following Hutton-Preston’s orders from the first. Hutton-Preston Constabulary got involved through Shepherd’s father, and as far as Hawkins was concerned, everything from that moment was on the up and up. Still is, in fact. So he’s backing his man in Shepherd, and he’s none too pleased that we’re poking about.”

“That’s reasonable enough. He’s responsible for Shepherd, after all. What falls on the village constable’s head isn’t going to look good on Hawkins’ record either.”

“He also wanted me to know that Mr. Sage’s bishop had been entirely satisfied with the investigation, the inquest, and the verdict.”

St. James looked up from his prawn cocktail. “He attended the inquest?”

“He sent someone, evidently. And Hawkins seems to feel that if the investigation and inquest had the blessing of the Church, they damn well ought to have the Yard’s blessing as

well.”

“He won’t cooperate, then?”

Lynley speared more salmon onto his fork. “It isn’t a question of cooperation, St. James. He knows the investigation was a bit irregular and the best way to defend it, himself, and his man is to allow us to prove their conclusions correct. But he doesn’t have to like any of it. None of them do.”

“They’re going to start liking it a great deal less when we take a closer look at Juliet Spence’s condition that night.”

“What condition?” Deborah asked.

Lynley explained what the constable had told them about the woman’s own illness on the night the vicar died. He explained the ostensible relationship between the constable and Juliet Spence. He concluded with, “And I have to admit, St. James, that you might have got me here on a fool’s errand after all. It looks bad that Colin Shepherd handled the case by himself with only his father’s intermittent assistance and a cursory glance at the scene by Clitheroe CID. But if she was ill too, then the accident theory bears far more weight than we originally thought.”

“Unless,” Deborah said, “the constable’s lying to protect her and she wasn’t ill at all.”

“There’s that, of course. We can’t discount it. Although it does suggest collusion between them. But if alone she had no motive to murder the man — a point, of course, which we know is moot — what on earth would theirs together have been?”

“There’s more to it than uncovering motives if we’re looking for culpability,” St. James said. He pushed his plate to one side. “There’s something peculiar about her illness that night. It doesn’t hold together.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shepherd told us that she was repeatedly sick. She was burning with fever as well.”

“And?”

“And those aren’t symptoms of hemlock poisoning.”

Lynley toyed a moment with the last piece of salmon, squeezed some lemon on top of it, but then decided against eating. After their conversation with Constable Shepherd, he’d been on the path to dismissing most of St. James’ earlier concerns regarding the vicar’s death. Indeed, he’d been well on his way to chalking the entire adventure up to one hell of a long drive away from London to cool himself off from his morning’s altercation with Helen. But now…“Tell me,” he said.

St. James listed the symptoms for him: excessive salivation, tremors, convulsions, abdominal pain, dilation of the pupils, delirium, respiratory failure, complete paralysis. “It acts on the central nervous system,” he concluded. “A single mouthful can kill a man.”

“So Shepherd’s lying?”

“Not necessarily. She’s a herbalist. Josie told us that last night.”

“And you told me this morning. It was largely the reason why you had me tearing up the motorway like Nemesis on wheels. But I don’t see what—”

“Herbs are just like drugs, Tommy, and they act like drugs. They’re circulatory stimulants, cardioactives, relaxants, expectorants…Their functions run the virtual gamut of what a chemist supplies under a doctor’s prescription.”

“You’re proposing she took something to make herself ill?”

“Something to induce fever. Something to induce vomiting.”

“But isn’t it possible that she ate some of the hemlock thinking it was wild parsnip, began to feel ill once the vicar left, and mixed herself a purgative to relieve her discomfort, without connecting her discomfort to what she thought was wild parsnip? That would account for the constant vomiting. And couldn’t the constant vomiting have raised her temperature?”

“It’s possible, yes. Marginally so. But if that’s the case — and frankly, I wouldn’t lay money on it, Tommy, considering how quickly water hemlock works on the system — wouldn’t she have told the constable that she’d drunk a purgative after eating something that didn’t agree with her? And wouldn’t the constable have passed that message on to us today?”

Lynley raised his head once again to the prints on the wall. There was Alice Nutter as before, maintaining her obdurate silence, her complexion becoming more perfect gallows with every moment she refused to speak. A woman of secrets, she carried all of them to her grave. If it was an outlawed Roman Catholicism which held her tongue, if it was pride, if it was the angry knowledge that she had been framed by a magistrate with whom she had quarrelled, no one knew. But in an isolated village, there was always an aura of mystery about a woman with secrets who was unwilling to share them. There was always a pernicious little need to smoke the creature out in an unrelated fashion and make her pay for what she kept to herself.

“One way or another, something’s not right here,” St. James was saying. “I tend to think Juliet Spence dug up the water hemlock, knew exactly what it was, and cooked it up for the vicar. For whatever reason.”

“And if she had no reason?” Lynley asked.

“Then someone else surely did.”

After Polly had gone, Colin Shepherd drank the first of the whiskies. Got to get the hands to stop shaking, he thought. He gulped the initial shot down. It raced fire through his gullet. But when he set the glass upon the side table, it chattered like a woodpecker knocking bark for its food. Another, he decided. The decanter shivered against the glass.

The next he drank to make himself think of it. The Great Stone of Fourstones, then Back End Barn. The Great Stone was a hulking oblong of granite, an unexplained country oddity sitting on the rough grassland of Loftshaw Moss a number of miles to the north of Winslough. There they had gone for their picnic on that fine spring day when the harsh moor’s wind blew only as a breeze and the sky was brilliant with its fleece of clouds and its blue forever. Back End Barn was the object of their walk when the meal was eaten and the wine was drunk. Hiking had been Polly’s suggestion. But he’d chosen the direction, and he knew what was there. He, who had walked on these moors since his childhood. He, who recognised every spring and rivulet, knew the name of every hill, and could fi nd the location of each pile of stones. He’d led them directly towards Back End Barn, and he’d been the one to suggest they have a look inside.