Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

She pushed a tangle of coppery hair behind her ear, put the car back into gear, and said, “Let’s go on to the village, then, shall we?”

“Unless you’d like to have your palm read fi rst.”

“For my future, you mean? I think not, thank you.”

He’d intended it as nothing. From the false brightness of her reply, he knew she hadn’t taken it that way. He said, “Deborah…”

She reached for his hand. Driving, her eyes on the road, she pressed his palm to her cheek. Her skin was cool. It was soft, like the dawn. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is our time together. Don’t let me mess it about.”

But she didn’t look at him. More and more, at tense moments she wasn’t meeting his eyes. It was as if she believed that the act of doing so would give him an advantage she did not want him to have, while all the time he felt every single advantage between them was hers.

He let the moment pass. He touched her hair. He rested his hand on her thigh. She drove on.

From the palm reader’s sign, it was little over a mile into the small village of Win-slough, which was built along the acclivity of a hill. They passed the church fi rst — a Norman structure with crenellation on its tower and along its roofl ine and a blue-faced clock permanently displaying the time as three twenty-two — then the primary school, then a row of terraced houses facing an open fi eld. At the peak of the hill, in a Y where the Clitheroe Road met the west-east junctions leading to Lancaster or to Yorkshire, Crofters Inn sat.

Deborah idled the car at the junction. She wiped at some condensation on the windscreen, squinted at the building, and sighed. “Well. It’s not much to speak of, is it? I thought…I was hoping…It sounded so romantic in the brochure.”

“It’s fi ne.”

“It’s from the fourteenth century. It’s got a great hall where they used to hold a Magistrate’s Court. The dining room’s got a timbered ceiling, and the bar hasn’t been changed in two hundred years. The brochure

even said that—”

“It’s fi ne.”

“But I wanted it to be—”

“Deborah.” She finally looked at him. “The hotel’s not the point of our being here, is it?”

She looked back at the building. In spite of his words, she was seeing it through the lens of her camera, weighing each area of composition. How it was situated on its triangle of land, how it was placed in the village, how it was designed. She did it as a second-nature response, like breathing.

“No,” she said at last, although she sounded reluctant. “No. It’s not the point. I suppose.”

She drove through a gate at the inn’s west end and stopped in the car park behind it. Like all the other structures in the village, the building was a combination of the county’s tan limestone and millstone grit. Even from behind, aside from white woodwork and green window boxes that were filled with a motley array of winter pansies, the inn bore no truly distinguishing features and no adornments. Its most significant distinction seemed to be an ominous portion of concaved slate roof that St. James earnestly hoped wasn’t over their room.

“Well,” Deborah said again with some resignation.

St. James leaned towards her, turned her to face him, and kissed her. “Did I mention I’ve been wanting to see Lancashire for years?”

She smiled at that. “In your dreams,” she replied and got out of the car.

He opened the door, feeling the cold, damp air lap against him like water, smelling woodsmoke and the peaty odours of wet earth and decomposing leaves. He lifted out his braced bad leg and thumped it to the cobbles. There was no snow on the ground, but frost rimed the lawn of what would otherwise be a seasonal beer garden. It was abandoned now, but he could imagine it fi lled with summertime tourists who came to walk on the moors, to climb the hills, and to fish in the river that he could hear but not see, coursing noisily some thirty yards away. A path led towards it — he could see this as well since its frosty fl agstones reflected the lights at the rear of the inn — and although the inn’s property clearly did not include the river, a boundary wall had an access gate built into it. The gate was open and as he watched, a young girl hurried through it, stuffing a white plastic bag into the over-size anorak she was wearing. This was neon orange, and, despite the girl’s considerable height, it hung down to her knees and drew attention to her legs which were encased in enormous, muddy green Wellingtons.

She started when she saw Deborah and St. James. But rather than hurry by them, she marched right up and, without ceremony or introduction, grabbed the suitcase that St. James had lifted from the boot of the car. She peered inside and snatched up his crutches as well.

“ Here you are,” she said, as if she’d been searching them out by the river. “Bit late, aren’t you? Didn’t the register say you’d be here by four?”

“I don’t think I gave any time at all,” Deborah replied, in some confusion. “Our plane didn’t land until—”

“No matter,” the girl said. “You’re here now, aren’t you? And there’s plenty of time before dinner.” She glanced at the misty lower windows of the inn, behind which an amorphous shape was moving under the distinctive bright lights of a kitchen. “A word to the wise is in order. Skip the beef bourguignon. It’s the cook’s name for stew. Come on. This way.”

She began lugging the suitcase towards a rear door. With it in one hand and St. James’ crutches under her arm, she walked with a peculiar, hobbling gait, her Wellingtons alternately squishing and slapping against the cobbles. There seemed to be nothing to do but follow, and St. James and Deborah did so, trailing the girl across the car park, up a set of back stairs, and through the rear door of the inn. This gave way to a corridor off of which opened a room whose door was marked with a hand-lettered sign saying Residents’ Lounge .

The girl thumped the suitcase onto the carpet and leaned the crutches against it with their tips pressing onto a faded Axminster rose. “There,” she announced and brushed her hands together in an I’ve-done-my-part gesture. “Will you tell Mum that Josie was waiting for you outside? Josie. That’s me.” This last she said stabbing a thumb to her chest. “It’d be a favour, actually. I’ll pay you back.”

St. James wondered how. The girl watched them earnestly.

“Okay,” she said. “I can see what you’re thinking. To be honest, she’s ‘had it with me,’ if you know what I mean. It’s nothing that I did . I mean, it’s lots of stupid stuff. But mostly it’s my hair. I mean, it doesn’t generally look like this. Except it will for a while. I s’pose.”

St. James couldn’t decide if she was talking about the style or the colour, both of which were dreadful. The former was an ostensible attempt at a wedge which seemed to have been rendered by someone’s nail scissors and someone else’s electric razor. It made her look remarkably like Henry V as depicted in the National Portrait Gallery. The latter was an unfortunate shade of salmon that did battle with the neon jacket she wore. It suggested a dye job applied with more enthusiasm than expertise.

“Mousse,” she said apropos of nothing.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Mousse. You know. The stuff for your hair. It was s’posed to just give me red highlights, but it didn’t actually work.” She drove her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “I got just about everything going against me, see. Try finding a fourth form bloke my height sometime. So I thought if I made my hair look better, I’d get some notice from a fifth or lower sixth bloke. Stupid. I know. You don’t have to tell me. Mum’s been doing that for the last three days. ‘What am I go’n’ to do with you, Josie?’ Josie. That’s me. Mum and Mr. Wragg own the inn. Your hair’s awful pretty, by the way.” This last was addressed to Deborah whom Josie was inspecting with no little interest. “And you’re tall as well. But I expect you’ve stopped growing.”