Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

Lynley smiled. “Someone on holiday. Just like the rest of us.”

In Acton, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers turned on the radio that sat on the top of the refrigerator, and interrupted Sting in the midst of warbling about his father’s hands. She said, “Yeah, baby. Sing it, you hunk,” and chuckled at herself. She liked listening to Sting. Lynley claimed her interest was rooted solely in the fact that Sting appeared to shave only once a fortnight, in a display of putative virility that was geared to attract a largely feminine following. Barbara pooh-poohed this. She argued that, for his part, Lynley was a musical snob, saying that if a piece had been composed within the last eighty years, he wouldn’t offend his aristocratic ears by exposing them to it. She herself had no real predilection for rock and roll, but given her preference, she always chose it over classical, jazz, blues, or what Constable Nkata referred to as “honky Grandma tunes” which usually featured something from the forties inoffensively rendered by a full orchestra with a heavy emphasis on the strings. Nkata himself was devoted to blues, although Havers knew he’d sell his soul in an instant — not to mention his growing collection of CD’s — for just fi ve minutes alone with Tina Turner. “Never you mind she’s old enough to be my mum,” he’d say to his colleagues. “My mum look like that, I’d’a never left home.”

Barbara turned up the volume and opened the refrigerator. She was hoping that the sight of something inside would stimulate her appetite. Instead the odour of fi ve-day-old plaice made her retreat to the other side of the kitchen, saying, “Jesus bloody hell,” with some considerable reverence while she considered how best to be rid of the leaking package of fi sh without having to touch it. She wondered what other malodorous surprises were waiting for discovery, wrapped in foil, stored in plastic cases, or brought home in cartons for a hasty meal and long since forgotten. From her position of safety, she spied something green climbing the edges of one container. She wanted to believe it was leftover mushy peas. The colour seemed right, but the fi brous consistency suggested mould. Next to it, a new life-form seemed to be evolving from what once had been a plate of spaghetti. In fact, the entire refrigerator looked like an unsavoury experiment-in-progress, conducted by Alexander Fleming with another trip to Stockholm in mind.

With her eyes fastened suspiciously on this mess and the back of one index fi nger pressed beneath her nose to breathe against shallowly, Barbara edged over to the kitchen sink. She rustled through cleansers, scrubbing pads, brushes, and a few stiffened lumps that had once been dish-cloths. She unearthed a carton of rubbish bags. Armed with one of these and a spatula, she advanced to do battle. The plaice went into the sack fi rst, splatting against the floor and sending up a death howl in the form of an odour that made Barbara shudder. The mushy peas- cum -antibiotic went next, followed by the spaghetti, a wedge of double Gloucester that appeared to have grown some sort of interesting beard, a plate of petrifi ed bangers and mash, and a carton of pizza which she could not get up the nerve to open. Leftover chow mein joined the mess, as did the spongy remains of half a tomato, three grapefruit halves, and a carton of milk she distinctly remembered having purchased last June.

Once Barbara developed a rhythm to this catharsis of comestibles, she decided to carry it to its logical conclusion. Anything that wasn’t sealed in a jar, permanently and professionally pickled, or posing as a condiment unaffected by the passage of time — out with the mayonnaise, in with the ketchup — joined the plaice and its companions-in-decomposition. By the time she was done, the refrigerator shelves were bare of anything that made even the smallest promise of a meal, but she wasn’t a mourner for the edible loss. Whatever appetite she may have been trying to stimulate with her sentimental journey through the territory of ptomaine had long since disappeared.

She slammed the door home and tied up the rubbish bag with its length of wire. She opened the back door, shoved the bag outside and waited for a moment to see if it would develop legs and slither off to join the rest of the household rubbish on its own. When it didn’t, she made a mental note to handle it later.

She lit a cigarette. The scent of the match and of the burning tobacco did much to mask the residual foul odour of food gone bad. She lit a second match and then a third, while all the time she inhaled the smoke from the cigarette as deeply as she could.

Not a total loss, she thought, nothing for tea or supper, but look at it this way: another job’s done. All she had to do was scrub down the shelves and wash out the single drawer and the refrigerator would be ready to sell, a little old, a bit unreliable, but priced accordingly. She couldn’t take it with her when she moved to Chalk Farm — the studio was far too tiny to accommodate anything larger than munchkin size — so she was going to have to clean it out eventually, sooner or later…when she was ready to move…

She went to the table and sat, her chair noisily scraping one bare metal foot against the sticky linoleum floor. She twirled the end of her cigarette between thumb and index fi nger and idly watched the progress of the paper burning, as the tobacco it held continued to smoulder. The occasion of having to deal with this refrigerated putrefaction had, she realised, informed against her. One more job done meant one more item ticked off the list, which put her one step closer to shutting the house, selling it, and taking herself off to an unknown new life.

By alternate days she felt ready for the move and unaccountably terrified of the change it implied. She’d been to Chalk Farm half a dozen times already, she’d paid her deposit on the little studio, she’d talked to the landlord about different curtains and about the installation of the telephone. She’d even got a brief glimpse of one of her fellow tenants, sitting in a pleasant square of sun at the window of his lower ground-level flat. Yet even while that part of her life — marked FUTURE — drew her steadily onwards, the larger part — marked PAST — kept her standing in place. She knew that there was no turning back once this house in Acton was sold. One of the last ties to her mother would be severed.

Barbara had spent the morning with her. They’d walked to the hawthorn-lined common in Greenford and sat on one of the benches that surrounded the play area, watching a young mother twirling a laughing toddler on a round-about.

It had been one of her mother’s good days. She recognised Barbara, and although she slipped three times and called her Doris, she didn’t argue the point when Barbara gently reminded her that Auntie Doris had been dead and gone for nearly fifty years. She merely said with a wispy smile, “I forget, Barbie. But I’m good today. Shall I come home soon?”

“Don’t you like it here?” Barbara asked. “Mrs. Flo likes you. And you get on well with Mrs. Pendlebury and Mrs. Salkild, don’t you?”

Her mother scrabbled at the ground beneath her feet, then held her legs out straight, like a child. She said, “Like my new shoes, Barbie.”

“I thought you might.” They were high-top trainers, lavender with silver stripes on the side. Barbara had found them in a rainbow selection in Camden Lock Market. She’d bought a pair for herself in red and gold— snickering at the thought of Inspector Lynley’s horrified face when he saw them on her feet— and although they hadn’t had any in her mother’s size, she’d bought the lavender ones anyway because they were the most outrageous and consequently the most likely to please. She’d thrown in two pairs of purpleand-black argyle socks to fill up the space between her mother’s feet and the shoes, and she’d smiled at the pleasure Mrs. Havers had taken at unwrapping the package and fi shing through the tissue for her “supprise.”