Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“Hello,” he said to her, fi nding that he spoke as gently as he would have done to a frightened kitten. “Has Mrs. Crone told you who I am, Maggie?”

“Yes. But she needn’t have done. I knew already.” Her arms moved. She seemed to be twisting her hands behind her back. “Nick said last night you’d come to the village. He saw you in the pub. He said you’d be wanting to talk to all of Mr. Sage’s good mates.”

“And you’re one of them, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“It’s rough to lose a friend.”

She made no reply, merely shuffl ed again on her feet. This appeared to be another similarity to her mother. He was reminded of Mrs. Spence’s digging at the terrace weeds with the toe of her boot.

“Join me,” he said. “I’d prefer to sit down, if you don’t mind.”

He drew a second chair to the window, and when she sat, she finally looked up at him. Her sky-blue eyes regarded him frankly, with hesitant curiosity but no trace of guile. She was sucking on the inside of her lower lip. The action deepened a dimple in her cheek.

Now that she was closer to him, he could more easily recognise the budding woman that was altering forever the shell of the child. She had a generous mouth. Her breasts were full. Her hips were just wide enough to be welcoming. Hers was the sort of body that was probably going to fight off weight in middle age. But now, under the staid school uniform of skirt, blouse, and jumper, it was ripe and ready. If it was at the insistence of Juliet Spence that Maggie used no make-up and wore a hairstyle more suited to a ten-year-old than to a teenager, Lynley found he couldn’t blame her.

“You weren’t at the cottage the night that Mr. Sage died, were you?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“But you were there during the day?”

“Off and on. It was Christmas hols, see.”

“You didn’t want to have dinner with Mr. Sage? He was your mate, after all. I wonder you didn’t welcome the chance.”

Her left hand covered her right. She held them balled in her lap. “It was the night of the monthly doss-round,” she said. “Josie, Pam, and me. We spent the night with each other.”

“Something you do every month?”

“In alphabetical order. Josie, Maggie, Pam. It was Josie’s turn. That’s always the funnest because if they aren’t booked up, Josie’s mum lets us choose whatever room in the inn we fancy. We took the skylight room. It’s up under the eaves. It was snowing and we liked to watch it settle on the glass.” She was sitting up straight, her ankles properly crossed. Wisps of russet hair uncontrolled by the barrette curled against her cheeks and her forehead. “Dossing at Pam’s is the worse because we have to sleep in the sitting room. That’s on account of her brothers. They have the upstairs bedroom. They’re twins. Pam doesn’t like them much. She thinks it’s disgusting that her mummy and dad made more babies at their age.

They’re forty-two, Pam’s mummy and dad. Pam says it gives her the creeps to think of her mum and dad like that. But I think they’re sweet. The twins, I mean.”

“How do you organise the doss-round?” Lynley asked.

“We don’t, ac’shully. We just do it.”

“With no plan?”

“Well, we know it’s the third Friday of the month, don’t we? And we just follow the alphabet like I said. Josie-Maggie-Pam. Pam’s next. We did my house this month already. I thought maybe Josie and Pam’s mummies wouldn’t let them doss with me this time round. But they did.”

“You were worried because of the inquest?”

“It was over, wasn’t it, but people in the village…” She looked out the window. Two grey-hooded jackdaws had landed on the sill and were pecking furiously at three crusts of bread, each bird trying to jockey the other from the perch and hence claim the remaining crust. “Mrs. Crone likes to feed the birds. She’s got a big cage-thing in her garden where she raises finches. And she always puts seed or something else to eat on the window-sill here.

I think that’s nice. Except birds quarrel over food. Have you ever noticed? They always act like there won’t be enough. I can’t think why.”

“And the people in the village?”

She said, “I see them watching me sometimes. They stop talking when I pass. But Josie and Pam’s mummies don’t do that.” She dismissed the birds and offered him a smile. The dimple made her face both lopsided and endearing. “Last spring we had a doss-round in the Hall. Mummy said we could, so long as we didn’t mess anything about. We took sleeping bags. We dossed in the dining room. Pam wanted to go upstairs but Josie and I were afraid we’d see the ghost. So Pam went up the stairs with a torch ’n slept by herself in the west wing. Only we found out later she wasn’t by herself at all. Josie didn’t think much of that, did she? She said this was supposed to be just for us , Pamela. No men allowed. Pam said you’re just jealous because you’ve never had a man, have you? Josie said I’ve had plenty of men, Miss-Any-Bloke’s-Scrubber — which wasn’t exactly the truth — and they had such a quarrel that for the next two months Pam wouldn’t come to the doss-round at all. But then she did again.”

“Do all of your mums know which night the doss-round is set for?”

“The third Friday of the month. Everyone knows.”

“Did you know you’d be missing a dinner with the vicar if you went to Josie’s for the December doss-round?”

She nodded. “But I sort of thought he wanted to see Mummy alone.”

“Why?”

She played her thumb back and forth against the sleeve of her jumper, rolling and unrolling it against her white blouse. “Mr. Shepherd does, doesn’t he. I thought p’rhaps it would be like that.”

“Thought or hoped?”

She looked at him earnestly. “He’d come before, Mr. Sage. Mummy sent me to visit with Josie, so I thought she was interested. They talked, him and Mummy. Then he came again. I thought if he fancied her, I could help out by being off. But then I found out he didn’t fancy her at all. Not Mummy. And she didn’t fancy him.”

Lynley frowned. A small alarm was buzzing in his head. He didn’t like the sound of it.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they didn’t do anything, did they. Not like her and Mr. Shepherd.”

“They’d only seen each other a few times, though. Isn’t that the case?”

Her head bobbed in agreement. “But he never talked about Mummy when I saw him. And he never asked after her like I thought he would if he fancied her.”

“What did he talk about?”

“He liked films and books. He talked about them. And the Bible. Sometimes he read me stories from the Bible. He liked the one about the old men who watched the lady taking a bath in the bushes. I mean the old men were in the bushes, not the lady. They wanted to have sex with her because she was so young and beautiful and even though they were old, it wasn’t like they’d stopped feeling desires themselves. Mr. Sage explained it. He was good at that.”

“What other things did he explain?”

“Mostly about me. Like why I was feeling how I felt about…” She gave the wrist of her jumper a little twist. “Oh, just stuff.”

“Your boyfriend? Having intercourse with him?”

She dropped her head and concentrated on the jumper. Her stomach growled. “Hungry,” she mumbled. Still, she didn’t look up.

“You must have been close to the vicar,” Lynley said.

“He said it wasn’t bad, what I felt for Nick. He said desire was natural. He said everyone felt it. He even felt it, he said.”

Again the buzzing, that insidious alarm. Lynley observed the girl carefully, trying to read behind every word she was uttering, wondering how much she was leaving unsaid. “Where did you have these conversations, Maggie?”