Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“I think I have. Yes.”

“I haven’t. The doctor says I’ll be over six feet. A throwback to the Vikings, he says and he laughs and pats me on the shoulder like I ought to get the joke. Well, what the H were the Vikings doing in Lancashire, that’s what I want to know.”

“And your mother, no doubt, wants to know what you were doing by the river,” St. James noted.

Josie looked fl ustered and waved her hands. “It’s not the river, exactly. And it’s nothing bad. Really. And it’s only a favour. Just a mention of my name. ‘Young girl met us in the car park, Mrs. Wragg. Tall. Bit gawky. Said her name was Josie. Quite pleasant she was.’ If you’d drop it like that, Mum might unknot her knickers for a bit.”

“Jo-se- phine! ” A woman’s voice shouted somewhere in the inn. “Jo-se-phine Eugenia Wragg!”

Josie winced. “I hate it when she does that. It reminds me of school. ‘Josephine Eugene. She looks like a bean.’”

She didn’t, actually. But she was tall, and she moved with the clumsiness of a young teenager who has suddenly become aware of her body before she’s got used to it. St. James thought of his own sister at this very same age, cursed by height, by the aquiline features into which she hadn’t yet grown, and by a wretchedly androgynous name. Sidney, she would introduce herself sardonically, the last of the St. James boys. She’d borne the brunt of her schoolmates’ teasing for years.

Gravely, he said, “Thank you for waiting in the car park, Josie. It’s always nice to be met when one gets where one’s going.”

The girl’s face lit. “Ta. Oh, ta ,” she said and headed for the door through which they’d come. “I’ll pay you back. You’ll see.”

“I’ve no doubt of that.”

“Just go on through the pub. Someone’ll meet you there.” She waved them in the general direction of another door across the room. “I’ve got to get out of these Wellies quick.” And with another querying look at them, “You won’t mention the Wellies, will you? They’re Mr. Wragg’s.”

Which went a long way to explain why she’d been flopping about like a swimmer wearing flippers. “My lips are sealed,” St. James said. “Deborah?”

“The very same.”

Josie grinned in response and slipped through the door.

Deborah picked up St. James’ crutches and looked about at the L-shaped room that served as the lounge. Its collection of overstuffed furniture was tatty, and several lampshades were askew. But a breakfront sideboard held an array of magazines for guests to peruse, and a bookcase was crammed with a good fi fty volumes. Above pine wainscotting the wallpaper appeared recently hung — poppies and roses twining together — and the air bore the decided fragrance of potpourri. She turned to St. James. He was smiling at her.

“What?” she said.

“Just like home,” he replied.

“Someone’s, at least.” She led the way into the pub.

They had arrived, apparently, during off-hours, for no one was present behind the mahogany bar or at any of the matching pub-issue tables which beer mats dotted in small round splodges of orange and beige. They dodged their way past these and their accompanying stools and chairs, under a ceiling that was low, its heavy timbers blackened by generations of smoke and decorated with a display of intricate horse brasses. In the fi replace, the remains of an afternoon’s blaze was still glowing, giving an occasional snap as fi nal pockets of resin burst.

“Where’d she get off to, that blasted girl?” a woman was demanding. She spoke from what was apparently an office. Its door stood open to the left of the bar. Immediately next to it, a stairway rose, with steps oddly slanted as if strained from bearing weight. The woman came out, yelled “Jo-se- phine !” up the stairs, and then caught sight of St. James and his wife. Like Josie, she started. Like Josie, she was tall and thin, and her elbows were pointed like arrow heads. She raised one self-conscious hand to her hair and removed a plastic barrette of pink rosebuds which held it haphazardly off her cheeks. She lowered the other to the front of her skirt and brushed aimlessly at a snowfall of lint. “Towels,” she said in apparent explanation of the latter activity. “She was supposed to fold them. She didn’t. I had to. That sums up life with a fourteen-year-old girl.”

“I think we just met her,” St. James said. “In the car park.”

“She was waiting for us,” Deborah added cooperatively. “She helped us in with our things.”

“Did she?” The woman’s eyes went from them to their suitcase. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. St. James. Welcome. We’ve given you Skylight.”

“Skylight?”

“The room. It’s our best. A bit cold, I’m afraid, at this time of year, but we’ve put in an extra heater for you.”

Cold didn’t really do justice to the condition of the room to which she led them, two fl ights up, at the very top of the hotel. Although the free-standing electric heater was ticking away, sending out palpable streams of warmth, the room’s three windows and two additional skylights acted like transmitters for the cold outside. Two feet in any direction from them, one walked into a shield of ice.

Mrs. Wragg drew the curtains. “Dinner’s from half past seven till nine. Will you be wanting anything prior to that? Have you had your tea? Josie can pop up with a pot, if you like.”

“Nothing for me,” St. James said. “Deborah?”

“No.”

Mrs. Wragg nodded. She rubbed her hands up the sides of her arms. “Well,” she said. She bent to pick a length of white thread from the carpet. She wound it round her fi nger. “Bath’s through that door. Mind your head, though. The lintel’s a bit low. But then all of them are. It’s the building. It’s old. You know the sort of thing.”

“Yes, of course.”

She went to the chest of drawers between the two front windows and made minute adjustments to a cheval mirror and more adjustments to the lace doily beneath it. She opened the clothes cupboard, saying, “Extra blankets here,” and she patted the chintz upholstery of the room’s only chair. When it became apparent that there was nothing more to be done, she said, “London, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” St. James said.

“We don’t get lots here from London.”

“It’s quite a distance, after all.”

“No. It’s not that. Londoners head south. Dorset or Cornwall. Everyone does.” She went to the wall behind the chair and fussed with one of two prints hanging there, a copy of Renoir’s Two Girls at the Piano , mounted on a white mat going yellow at the edges. “There’s not a lot likes the cold,” she added.

“There’s some truth in that.”

“Northerners move to London as well. Chasing dreams, I think. Like Josie does. Did she…I wonder did she ask about London?”

St. James glanced at his wife. Deborah had unlocked the suitcase and opened it on the bed. But at the question, she slowed what she was doing and stood, a single feathery grey scarf in her hands.

“No,” Deborah said. “She didn’t mention London.”

Mrs. Wragg nodded, then flashed a quick smile. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Because that girl’s got a mind for mischief when it comes to anything that’ll take her from Win-slough.” She brushed her hands together and balled them at her waist and said, “So then. You’ve come for country air and good walks. And we’ve plenty of both. On the moors. Through the fields. Up into the hills. We had snow last month — first time it’s snowed in these parts in ages — but we’ve only frost now. ‘Fool’s snow,’ my mum called it. Makes things muddy, but I expect you’ve brought your Wellies.”