Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“In the vicarage. Polly’d make tea and bring it into the study. We’d eat Jaffa Cakes and talk.”

“Alone?”

She nodded. “Polly didn’t much like to talk about the Bible. She doesn’t go to church. Course, we don’t either.”

“But he talked about the Bible with you.”

“Mostly because we were friends. You can talk about stuff with your friends, he said. You can tell who your friends are because they listen.”

“You listened to him. He listened to you. You were special to each other.”

“We were mates.” She smiled. “Josie said the vicar liked me better’n anyone in the parish and I didn’t even go to church. She was miffed at that, was Josie. She said why does he want you for tea and for walks on the moors, Miss Maggie Spence? I said he was lonely and I was his friend.”

“Did he tell you he was lonely?”

“He didn’t have to. I knew. He was always glad to see me. He always gave me a hug when I left. He was good at hugs.”

“You liked them.”

“Yes.”

He let a moment pass as he considered how best to approach the subject without frightening her off. Mr. Sage had been her friend, her trusted companion. Whatever they had shared had been sacred to the girl.

“It’s nice to be hugged,” he said musingly. “Few things are nicer, if you ask me.” He could tell she was watching him, and he wondered if she sensed his hesitation. This type of interview wasn’t his forte. It required the surgical skill of a psychologist, touching as it did upon fear and taboo. He was feeling his way forward on precarious ground and not particularly happy about being there. “Friends have secrets sometimes, Maggie, things they know about each other, things they say, things they do together. Sometimes it’s the secrets and the promise of keeping them that make them friends in the first place. Was that how it was between you and Mr. Sage?”

She was silent. He saw that she had gone back to sucking on the inside of her lower lip. A wedge of mud had fallen to the fl oor from between the heel and the sole of one of her shoes. In her restless movement on the chair, she had crushed the mud to brown shards on the Axminster carpet. Mrs. Crone wouldn’t be pleased with that.

“Were they a worry to your mum, Maggie? The promises perhaps? The secrets?”

“He liked me better’n anyone,” she said.

“Did your mum know that?”

“He wanted me to be in the social club. He said he’d speak with her so she would let me join. They were going to take an excursion to London. He asked me special did I want to go. They were going to have a Christmas party as well. He said surely Mummy would let me come to that. They talked on the phone.”

“The day he died?”

It was too quick a question. She blinked rapidly and said, “Mummy didn’t do anything. Mummy wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Did she ask him for dinner that night, Maggie?”

The girl shook her head. “Mummy didn’t say.”

“She didn’t invite him?”

“She didn’t say she asked him.”

“But she told you he was coming.”

Maggie weighed an answer. He could see her doing so, the action evident from the manner in which her eyes lowered to the level of his chest. He needed no additional reply.

“How did you know he was coming if she didn’t tell you?”

“He phoned. I heard.”

“What?”

“It was about the social club, the party, like I said. Mummy sounded cross. ‘I have no intention of letting her go. There’s no point in discussing this any further.’ That’s what she said. Then he said something. He went on and on. And she said he could come for dinner and they’d talk about it then. But I didn’t think she was going to change her mind.”

“That very night?”

“Mr. Sage always said one had to strike while the poker could get to the wood.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Or something like that. He never took a first no to mean an always no. He knew I wanted to be in the club. He thought it was important.”

“Who directs the club?”

“No one. Not now that Mr. Sage’s dead.”

“Who was in it?”

“Pam and Josie. Girls from the village. Some from the farms.”

“No boys?”

“Just two.” She wrinkled her nose. “The boys were being stubborn about joining. ‘But we shall win them over in the end,’ Mr. Sage said. ‘We shall put our heads together and develop a plan.’ That’s part of the reason why he wanted me in the club, you see.”

“So that you could put your heads together?” Lynley asked blandly.

She didn’t react. “So that Nick would join. ’Cause if Nick joined, the rest would follow. Mr. Sage knew that. Mr. Sage knew everything.”

Rule One: Trust your intuition. Rule Two: Back it up with the facts. Rule Three: Make an arrest . Rule Four had something to do with where

an officer of the law should relieve himself after consuming four pints of Guinness at the conclusion of a case, and Rule Five referred to the single activity most highly recommended as a form of celebration once the guilty party was brought to justice. Detective Inspector Angus MacPherson had handed out the rules, printed on garish hot-pink cards with suitable illustrations, during a divisional meeting at New Scotland Yard one day, and while the fourth and fifth rules had been the cause of general guffawing and lewd remarks, the first three Lynley had clipped from the rest during an idle moment while waiting on hold on the telephone. He used them for a bookmark. He considered them an addendum to the Judges’ Rules.

The intuitive deduction that Maggie was central to Mr. Sage’s death had brought him to the Clitheroe grammar school in the fi rst place. Nothing she had said during their conversation disabused him of that belief.

A lonely, middle-aged man and a young girl poised on the brink of womanhood made for an uneasy combination, no matter the man’s ostensible rectitude and the girl’s overt naiveté. If sifting through the ashes of Robin Sage’s death disclosed a meticulous approach to the seduction of a child, Lynley would not be at all surprised. It wouldn’t be the first time molestation had worn the guise of friendship and sanctity. It wouldn’t be the last. The fact that the violation was perpetrated upon a child was part of its insidious allure. And in this case, because the child was already sexual, whatever guilt might otherwise stay the hand of captivation could be easily ignored.

She was eager for friendship and approval. She yearned for the warmth of contact. What better fodder could possibly exist to satiate a man’s mere physical desire? It wouldn’t necessarily have been an issue of power with Robin Sage. Nor would it have naturally been a demonstration of his inability to forge or maintain an adult relationship. It could have been human temptation, pure and simple. He was good at hugs, as Maggie had said. She was a child who welcomed them. That she was actually far more than a child might have been something the vicar discovered to his own surprise.

And what then, Lynley wondered. Arousal and Sage’s failure to master it? The itch in the palms to peel back clothing and expose bare flesh? Those two traitors to detachment — heat and blood — pulsing in the groin and demanding action? And that clever whisper in the back of the brain: What difference does it make, she’s already doing it, she’s nobody’s innocent, it’s not as if you’re seducing a virgin, if she doesn’t like it she can tell you to stop, just hug her close so she can feel you and know, graze her breasts quickly, glide a hand between her thighs, talk about how nice it is to be cuddled, just the two of us, Maggie, our special secret, my fi nest little mate…

It all could have happened over a few short weeks. She was at odds with her mother. She needed a friend.