Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

Colin followed slowly, keeping to the footpath. He paused by Great North and put his hand against it, feeling the quick shock of cold that the ancients would have called the rock’s magical power.

“Did she?” he asked and closed his eyes for the answer. He could feel it in his fingers. Yes…yes…

The descent wasn’t consistently sharp. The walk was a cold one, but it wasn’t impossible. So many feet had carved out the track over time that the grass, which was slippery with frost in other areas, was worn through to the earth and stones on the path. The resulting friction against the soles of one’s shoes eliminated much risk. Anyone could make the walk up Cotes Fell. One could walk it in the mist. One could walk it at night.

It switched back on itself three times so that the vista it provided was continually changing. A view of the Hall became one of the dale with Skelshaw Farm in the distance. A moment later, the sight of Skelshaw Farm gave way to the church and cottages of Winslough. And finally, as the slope became pasture at the bottom of the fell, the footpath edged the grounds of Cotes Hall.

Colin paused here. There was no stile in the drystone wall to allow a hiker easy access to the Hall. But like many areas of the countryside that have gone untended, the wall was in marginal disrepair. Brambles overgrew it in some sections. Others gaped open with small pyramids of rubble lying beneath them. It would take little effort to climb through the gap. He did it himself, whistling for the dog who followed.

The land here dipped a second time, in a gradual slope that ended at the pond, some twenty yards away. Reaching this, Colin looked back the way he had come. He could make out Great North, but beyond it nothing. The mist and the sky were monochromatic, and the frost on the land provided no contrast. They hid without even appearing to hide. An observer couldn’t have asked for more.

He skirted the pond with the dog at his heels, stopping to crouch and examine the root that Juliet had unearthed for Lynley. He rubbed its surface, disclosing the dirty-ivory flesh, and he pressed his thumbnail against the stem. A thin bleeding of oil the width of a needle oozed out. Yes…yes .

He fl ung it into the middle of the pond and watched it sink. The water undulated in growing circles that lapped at the edges of the grimy ice. He said, “Leo. No,” when the dog’s instincts to fetch took him too close to the water’s edge. He took the tennis ball from him, threw it the distance to the terrace, and followed him after it.

She would be back in the greenhouse. He’d seen her return there when Lynley left, and he knew she’d be seeking the release that came from potting, trimming, and otherwise working with her plants. He thought about stopping. He felt the urge to share with her what he knew so far. But she wouldn’t want to hear it. She would protest and fi nd the idea repellent. So instead of crossing the courtyard and entering the garden, he headed down the lane. When he came to the first gap in the bordering lavender, he slipped through it with the dog and went into the wood.

A quarter of an hour’s walk brought him to the rear of the lodge. There was no garden, just an open plot of land comprising leaves, mud, and one anemic Italian cypress that appeared to be longing for transplantation. This leaned at a windblown angle against the lodge’s only outbuilding, a ramshackle shed with gaps in the roof.

The door bore no lock. It also possessed neither knob nor handle, just a rusty ring, survivor of neglect and the vicissitudes of weather. When he pushed upon it, one hinge came apart from the frame, screws tumbled out of the rotten wood, and the door sagged into a narrow depression in the soggy ground where it fit quite naturally as if used to the place. The resulting aperture was large enough for him to slip through.

He waited for his eyes to adjust to the change in light. There was no window, just the gray illumination of the day, filtering through the poorly sealed walls and streaking in a thin seam from the door. Outside, he heard the dog sniffing round the base of the cypress. Inside, he heard nothing save the sound of his own breathing, amplified as it struck the wall in front of him and returned.

Forms began to emerge. What was fi rst a slab of wood at waist height, jammed with an odd assortment of shapes, became a workbench holding sealed gallon tins of paint. Among these lay stiffened brushes, petrifi ed rollers, and a stack of aluminum trays. Two cartons of nails lay behind the paint, along with a quart jar on its side, spilling out an assortment of screws, nuts, and bolts. Everything was covered with what appeared to be at least a decade of grime.

Between two of the paint tins, a spider’s web hung. It trembled with his movement but held no spider lying in wait at its centre. Colin passed his hand through it, feeling the ghost-touch of the strands against his skin. They bore no trace of the mucilage produced to trap flying insects. The web’s solitary architect was long since gone.

None of that mattered. One could enter the shed without disturbing its appearance of disuse and its air of decay. He had done so himself.

He ran his eyes over the walls where nails held tools and gardening implements: a rusty saw, a hoe, a rake, two shovels, and one balding broom. Beneath them a green hose pipe coiled. At its centre stood a dented pail. He looked inside. The pail held only a pair of gardening gloves with thumb and index fi nger worn through on the right hand. He examined these. They were large, a man’s. They fi tted his own hands. And in the spot where they had laid at the bottom of the pail, the metal shone bright and winked clean in the light. He returned them and went back to the search.

A sack of lawnseed, another of fertiliser, and a third of peat leaned against a black wheelbarrow which was upended into the farthest corner. He moved these to one side and pulled the barrow away from the wall to look behind it. A small wooden crate fi lled with rags gave off a faint odour of rodents. He upended the crate, saw two small creatures scurry for cover under the workbench, and rustled through the rags with the toe of his boot. He found nothing. But the barrow and the bags had looked as undisturbed as the rest of the objects in the shed, so he wasn’t surprised, just thoughtful.

There were two possibilities, and he mulled them over as he returned everything to its appropriate place. One was implied by the unmistakable absence of small handtools. He had seen no hammer for the nails, no driver for the screws, no spanner for the nuts and the bolts. More importantly, he had seen neither trowel nor cultivator despite the presence of rake, hoe, and shovels. Disposing of either the trowel or the cultivator would have been too obvious, of course. Disposing of them all was decidedly clever.

The second possibility was that there had been no handtools in the first place, that the long-departed Mr. Yarkin had removed them along with himself upon his hasty fl ight from Winslough more than twenty-five years ago. They would have made an odd addition to his baggage, to be sure, but perhaps he’d wanted them for his work. What had it been? Colin tried to recall. Was it carpentry? Then why leave the saw, if that was the case?

He carried his developing scenario further. If there were no handtools here at the lodge, she would have known where to borrow what she needed. She would have known when to do the borrowing since she could have waited for the moment from her perch on Cotes Fell. For that matter, she could even have watched for her moment from the lodge. It sat on the edge of the estate grounds, after all. She would have heard any car pass, and a quick trip to the window would have told her who was driving.

That made the most sense. Even if she had her own tools, why would she run the risk of using them when she could use Juliet’s and replace them in the greenhouse with no one’s being the wiser? She’d have to go into the garden anyway, in order to get to the cellar. Yes. That was it. She had motive, means, and opportunity, and although Colin felt certainty quicken his pulse, he knew he couldn’t afford to proceed along this line of suspicion without making solid a few more facts.