Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

HER EYES COULDN’T SEEM to move from the hemlock she had dropped. “Surely I would have seen the multiple tubers,” she said. “I would have known. Even now, I’d remember .”

“Were you distracted? Did someone see you? Did someone call out to you while you were digging?”

Still she didn’t look at him. “I was in a rush. I came down the slope, made for this spot, cleared away the snow, and found the parsnip.”

“The hemlock, Mrs. Spence. Just as you did now.”

“It had to have been a single root. I would have seen otherwise. I would have known.”

“Tell me about Mr. Sage,” he repeated.

She raised her head. Her expression seemed bleak. “He came to the cottage several times. He wanted to talk about the Church. And Maggie.”

“Why Maggie?”

“She’d grown fond of him. He’d taken an interest in her.”

“What sort of interest?”

“He knew she and I were having our troubles. What mother and daughter don’t? He wanted to intercede.”

“Did you object to this?”

“I didn’t particularly enjoy feeling inadequate as a mother, if that’s what you mean. But I let him come. And I let him talk. Maggie wanted me to see him. I wanted to make Maggie happy.”

“And the night he died? What happened then?”

“Nothing more than had happened before. He wanted to counsel me.”

“About religion? About Maggie?”

“About both, actually. He wanted me to join the Church, and he wanted me to let Maggie do the same.”

“That was the extent of it?”

“Not exactly.” She wiped her hands on the faded bandana which she took from the pocket of her jeans. She balled it up, tucked it into the sleeve of her sweater to join her mittens, and shivered. Her pullover was heavy, but it would not be enough protection against the cold. Seeing this, Lynley decided to continue the interview right where they were. Her uprooting of the water hemlock had given him the whip hand, if only momentarily. He was determined to use it and to strengthen it by whatever means were available. Cold was one of them.

“Then what?” he asked.

“He wanted to talk to me about parenthood, Inspector. He felt I was keeping too tight a rein on my daughter. It was his belief that the more I insisted upon chastity from Maggie, the more I’d drive her away. He felt if she was having sex, she should be taking precautions against pregnancy. I felt she shouldn’t be having sex at all, precautions or not. She’s thirteen years old. She’s little more than a child.”

“Did you argue about her?”

“Did I poison him because he disagreed with how I was bringing her up?” She was trembling, but not from distress, he thought. Aside from the earlier tears which she had managed to control within moments of being tested by them, she didn’t really appear to be the sort of woman who would allow herself an overt display of anxiety in the presence of the police. “He didn’t have children. He wasn’t even married. It’s one thing to express an opinion growing out of a mutual experience. It’s quite another to offer advice having no basis in anything but reading psychology texts and possessing a glorified ideal of family life. How could I possibly take his concerns to heart?”

“Despite this, you didn’t argue with him.”

“No. As I said, I was willing to hear him out. I did that much for Maggie because she was fond of him. And that’s the extent of it. I had my beliefs. He had his. He wanted Maggie to use contraceptives. I wanted her to stop complicating her life by having sex in the fi rst place. I didn’t think she was ready for it. He thought it was too late to turn her behaviour around. We chose to disagree.”

“And Maggie?”

“What?”

“Where did she stand in this disagreement?”

“We didn’t discuss it.”

“Did she discuss it with Sage?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“But they were close.”

“She was fond of him.”

“Did she see him often?”

“Now and again.”

“With your knowledge and approval?”

She lowered her head. Her right foot dug at the weeds in a spasmodic, kicking motion. “We’ve always been close, Maggie and I, until this business with Nick. So I knew about it when she saw the vicar.”

The nature of the answer said everything. Dread, love, and anxiety. He wondered if they went hand in hand with motherhood.

“What did you serve him for dinner that night?”

“Lamb. Mint jelly. Peas. Parsnips.”

“What happened?”

“We talked. He left shortly after nine.”

“Was he feeling ill?”

“He didn’t say. Only that he had a walk ahead of him and since it had been snowing, he ought to be off.”

“You didn’t offer to drive him.”

“I wasn’t feeling well. I thought it was fl u. I was just as happy to have him leave, frankly.”

“Could he have stopped somewhere along the way home?”

Her eyes moved to the Hall on its crest of land, from there to the oak wood beyond it. She appeared to be evaluating this as a possibility, but then she said fi rmly, “No. There’s the lodge — his housekeeper lives there, Polly Yarkin — but that would have taken him out of his way, and I can’t see what reason he’d have to stop by and visit with Polly when he saw her every day at the vicarage. Beyond that, it’s easier to get back to the village on the footpath. And Colin found him on the footpath the next morning.”

“You didn’t think to phone him that night when you yourself were being sick?”

“I didn’t attach my condition to the food. I said already, I thought I’d got flu. If he’d mentioned feeling unwell before he left, I might have phoned him. But he hadn’t mentioned it. So I didn’t make the connection.”

“Yet he died on the footpath. How far is that from here? A mile? Less? He’d have been stricken rather quickly, wouldn’t you say?”

“He must have been. Yes.”

“I wonder how it was that he died and you didn’t.”

She met his gaze squarely. “I couldn’t say.”

He gave her a long ten seconds of silence in which to move her eyes off him. When she didn’t do so, he finally nodded and directed his own attention to the pond. The edges, he saw, wore a dingy skin of ice like a coating of wax that encircled the reeds. Each night and day of continued cold weather would extend the skin farther towards the centre of the water. When entirely covered, the pond would look like the frosty ground that surrounded it, appearing to be an uneven but nonetheless innocuous smear of land. The wary would avoid it, seeing it clearly for what it was. The innocent or oblivious would attempt to cross it, breaking through its false and fragile surface to encounter the foul stagnation beneath.

“How are things between you and your daughter now, Mrs. Spence?” he asked. “Does she listen to you now that the vicar’s gone?”

Mrs. Spence took the mittens from the sleeves of her pullover. She thrust her hands into them, her fingers bare. It was clear she intended to go back to work. “Maggie isn’t listening to anyone,” she said.

Lynley slipped the cassette into the Bentley’s tape player and turned up the volume. Helen would have been pleased with the choice, Haydn’s Concerto in E-flat Major, with Wynton Marsalis on the trumpet. Uplifting and joyful, with violins supplying the counterpoint to the trumpet’s pure notes, it was utterly unlike his usual selection of “some grim Russian. Good Lord, Tommy, didn’t they compose anything just the merest bit listener-friendly? What made them so ghoulish? D’you think it was the weather?” He smiled at the thought of her. “Johann Strauss,” she would request. “Oh, all right. I know. Simply too pedestrian for your lofty taste. Then compromise. Mozart.” And in would pop Eine Kleine Nachtmusik , the only piece by Mozart which Helen could invariably identify, announcing that her ability to do so kept her free of the epithet absolute philistine .