Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

Colin knew that I’m sorry did nothing to mitigate his sins committed against Polly Yarkin on that spring afternoon in Back End Barn and every day since then. She had reached out to him with the hand of friendship — no matter how complicated it might have been by the fact of her love — and time and again, he had turned away, caught up in the need to punish her, because he lacked the courage to admit the worst that he was to himself.

And now she’d given up the ring stone, laying it and all her simple hopes for the future on Annie’s grave. He knew she’d done it as yet another act of contrition, attempting to pay for a sin in which she’d played only a minor role. It wasn’t right.

“Leo,” Colin said. By the fire, the dog perked up his head, expectant. “Come.”

He grabbed a torch and his heavy jacket from the entry. He went out into the night. Leo walked at his side, unleashed, his nose quivering with the scents of the icy winter air: woodsmoke, damp earth, the lingering exhaust fumes of a car that passed, a faint smell of frying fish. For him, a walk at night lacked the excitement of a walk in the day when there were birds to chase and the occasional ewe to startle with his bark. But still, it was a walk.

They crossed the road and entered the graveyard. They wound their way towards the chestnut tree, Colin directing them with the torch’s cone of light, Leo snuffling along just ahead of him, to the right, out of its beam. The dog knew where they were going. They’d been there often enough before. So he reached Annie’s grave before his master and he was sniffing round the marker — and sneezing— when Colin said, “Leo. No.”

He shone the light on the grave. And then all round it. He squatted to get a better look.

What had she said? I burnt cedar for you, Colin. I put the ashes on her grave. I put the ring stone with them. I gave Annie the ring stone . But it wasn’t here. And the only thing that could possibly be interpreted as ashes from cedar was a faint coating of grey flecks on the frost. While he admitted that these could have come from the ashes if they’d been blown by the wind and disturbed by the dog’s snuffling through them, the rune stone itself couldn’t have been blown away. And if that was the case…

He walked round the grave slowly, wanting to believe Polly, willing to give her every chance. He thought the dog might have knocked it to one side, so he searched with the light and turned over every stone that appeared the right size, looking upon each for the interlocking pink rings. He fi nally gave up.

He chuckled with derision at his own gullibility. How guilt makes us want to believe in redemption. Obviously, she had offered the first thought that had come into her head, putting herself forward, trying as always to make him take the blame. And — as everyone appeared to be doing — at the same time she was giving it her all to wrest him away from Juliet. It wasn’t going to work.

He lowered the torch to shine in a white, bright circle on the ground. He gazed fi rst to the north in the direction of the village where lights climbed the hillside in a pattern so familiar that he could have named each family behind every point of illumination. He gazed then to the south where the oak wood grew and where, beyond it, Cotes Fell rose like a black-cloaked figure against the night sky. And at the base of the fell, across the meadow, tucked into a clearing that had long ago been made among the trees, Cotes Hall stood, and with it the cottage and Juliet Spence.

What a damn fool’s errand he had come on to the churchyard. He stepped over Annie’s grave, reached the wall in two strides. With a third he was over it, calling for the dog and swiftly moving in the direction of the public footpath that led from the village to the top of Cotes Fell. He could have gone back for the Rover. It would have been faster. But he told himself that he wanted the walk, needing to feel completely grounded in the choice he was making. And what better way to do that than to have the solid earth beneath his feet, to have his muscles working and his blood at the fl ow?

He brushed aside the thought that fl uttered against his mind like a wet-winged moth as he strode along the path: In his position, going the back way to the cottage implied not only a clandestine visit to Juliet but also collusion between them as well. Why was he using the back way to the cottage when he had nothing whatsoever to hide? When he had a car? When it was faster in a car? When the night was cold?

As it had been in December when Robin Sage made the identical walk, with the identical destination in mind. Robin Sage, who had a car, who could have driven, who chose to walk, despite the snow that already lay upon the ground and in ignorance of or indifference to the fact that more had been promised before morning. Why had Robin Sage walked that night?

He liked exercise, fresh air, a ramble on the moors, Colin told himself. In the two months Sage had lived in the village prior to his death, he’d seen the vicar often enough in his crusty Wellingtons with a walking stick stabbing into the ground. He called upon all the villagers by foot. He went to the common by foot when he fed the ducks. What reason was there to conclude he would have done anything but walk when it came to the cottage?

The distance, the weather, the time of year, the growing cold, the night. The answers presented themselves to Colin, as rose the one fact he kept trying to discount. He’d never seen Sage do his walking at night. If the vicar made a call outside the village after dark, he took his car. He’d done as much the single time he’d gone out to Skelshaw Farm to meet Nick Ware’s family. He’d done the same when he’d made the rounds of the other farms.

He’d even driven to dine at the Townley-Young estate shortly after his arrival in Winslough, before St. John Andrew Townley-Young had fully comprehended the extent of the vicar’s low church leanings and cut him off his list of acceptable acquaintances. So why had Sage walked to see Juliet?

The same moth fluttered its wet-winged answer. Sage hadn’t wanted to be seen, just as Colin himself didn’t want to be seen paying a call at the cottage on the very night of the day that New Scotland Yard had come to the village. Admit it, admit it…

No, Colin thought. That was the venomous, green-eyed monster making its attack on trust and belief. Surrendering to it in any way meant a sure death to love and a certain extinction of his hopes for the future.

He determined to think no more about it, and made good that promise by turning off the torch. Although he had walked the footpath for nearly thirty years, he had to concentrate on something beyond Robin Sage in order to anticipate a sudden dip in the land and to find his way over the occasional stile. The stars assisted. They were brilliant in the sky, a dome of crystals that fl ickered like beacons on a distant landmass, across an ocean of night.

Leo led the way. Colin couldn’t see him, but he could hear the dog’s feet breaking through the skin of frost on the ground, and the sound of him scrambling over a wall with a happy yelp made Colin smile. A moment later the dog began to bark in earnest. And then a man’s voice called, “No! Hey, there! Steady on!”

Colin switched on the torch and picked up the pace. Against the next wall, Leo was bounding back and forth, leaping up towards a man who sat atop the stile. Colin shone the light on his face. The man squinted and shrank back in response. It was Brendan Power. The solicitor had a torch with him, but he wasn’t using it. Instead, it lay next to him, its light extinguished.

Colin ordered the dog down. Leo obeyed, although he lifted one front leg and pawed rapidly at the wall’s rough stones as if greeting the other man. “Sorry,” Colin said. “He must have given you a start.”