Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

She didn’t move away from the doorway to let them in. But she shivered from the cold, and Lynley looked down to see that her feet were bare. He also saw that she was wearing trousers, fine grey herring bone.

“May we come in?”

“It was an accident,” she said. “Everyone knows that.”

“We won’t stay long. And you ought to get out of the cold.”

She gripped her pullover’s neck more tightly. She looked from him to St. James and back to him before she stepped away from the door and admitted them into the house.

“You’re the housekeeper?” Lynley asked.

“Polly Yarkin,” she said.

Lynley introduced St. James and went on to say, “May we talk to you?” He felt the curious need to be gentle with her, and he couldn’t determine exactly why. There was something both frightened and defeated in her air, like a horse that’s been broken by an ill-tempered hand. She seemed ready to bolt in an instant.

She led them into the sitting room where she turned the switch on a floor lamp to no effect. She said, “Bulb’s gone, isn’t it,” and left them alone.

In the diminishing light of dusk, they could see that whatever personal possessions the vicar had owned, they were gone. What was left was a sofa, an ottoman, and two chairs arranged round a coffee table. Across from them a bookshelf reached from floor to ceiling, empty of books. Something glittered on the floor next to this, and Lynley went to investigate. St. James strolled to the window and pushed the curtains to one side, saying, “Nothing much out there. The shrubs look bad. There’re plants on the step,” mostly to himself.

Lynley picked up a small globe of silver that lay, unhinged and open, on the carpet. Scattered round it were the desiccated remains of triangular fleshy bits that appeared to be fruit. He picked up one of these as well. It had no scent. Its texture was like a dried sponge. The globe was connected to a matching silver chain. Its clasp was broken.

“That’s mine.” Polly Yarkin had returned, lightbulb in hand. “I wondered where it got itself off to.”

“What is it?”

“Amulet. For health. Mum likes me to wear it. Silly. Like garlic. But you can’t tell Mum that. She’s ever one to believe in charms.”

Lynley handed it to her. She returned his warrant card. Her fingers felt feverish. She went to the floor lamp, changed the bulb, switched it on, and retreated to one of the chairs which she stood behind, her hands curved round its back.

Lynley went to the sofa. St. James joined him. She nodded at them to sit, although it seemed clear that she had no intention of sitting herself. Lynley gestured to the chair, said, “This won’t take long,” and waited for her to move.

She did so reluctantly, one hand holding on to the back of the chair as if she would pull herself behind it again. Sitting, she was more fully in the light, and it appeared that light and not their company was what she wished to avoid.

He saw for the first time that the trousers she wore belonged to a man’s suit. They were far too long. She’d rolled the bottoms into bulky cuffs.

“Vicar’s,” she said in hesitant explanation. “I don’t think anyone will mind, do you? I tripped on the back step just a bit ago. Ripped my skirt up proper. Clumsy as an old cow, I am.”

He raised his eyes to her face. An angry red welt curved from under the protective curtain of her hair, marking a path that ended at the corner of her mouth.

“Clumsy,” she said again, and she gave a little laugh. “I’m always running into things.

Mum should’ve gave me an amulet to keep me steady on my feet.”

She pushed her hair forward a bit more. Lynley wondered what else she was trying to hide on her face. Her skin was shiny across what he could see of her forehead, perspiration either from nerves or from illness. It wasn’t warm enough in the house for the sheen of sweat to be realistically from anything else. He said, “Are you quite all right? May we phone a doctor for you?”

She rolled the trouser cuffs down to cover her feet and tucked the extra material round them. “I never seen a doctor these past ten years. I just fell. I’m all right.”

“But if you’ve hit your head—”

“Just banged up my face on that silly door, didn’t I?” She backed herself cautiously into the chair and put one hand on each arm. Her movement was slow and it looked deliberate, as if she were digging out of her memory the appropriate way to sit and behave when someone came to call. But something about her manner — perhaps it was the way her arms moved, like mechanical extensions of her body, or the way her fingers uncurled with an effort and lay flat against the chair’s upholstery — suggested that she really wanted nothing so much as to cradle herself, doubled over, until some interior pain went away. When neither Lynley nor St. James spoke at once, she said, “Church wardens asked me to keep the place up and get it ready for another vicar. I’ve been cleaning. Sometimes I work too hard and get a bit sore. You know.”

“You’ve been working on the house since the vicar died?” It seemed unlikely. The place wasn’t that large.

“It takes time, doesn’t it, to get things sorted out proper and to make them tidy when someone passes on.”

“You’ve done a good job.”

“It’s just that they always look the vicarage over, don’t they, the new ones? It helps them make a decision if they get offered the job.”

“Is that how it worked with Mr. Sage? Did he come to look the vicarage over before he took the position?”

“He didn’t mind what it was like. I s’pose it was because he didn’t have a family so it didn’t much matter about the house. There was only him in it.”

“Did he ever speak of a wife?” St. James asked.

Polly reached for the amulet which lay in her lap. “Wife? Was he thinking of getting married?”

“He’d been married. He was a widower.”

“He never said. I thought…Well, he didn’t seem much interested in women, did he?”

Lynley and St. James exchanged a glance. Lynley said, “How do you mean?”

Polly picked up the amulet and closed her fingers round it, returning her hand to the arm of the chair. “He never acted any different with the church-cleaning ladies than he did with the blokes that ring the bells. I always thought…I thought, well, maybe the vicar’s too holy. Maybe he doesn’t think about ladies and such. He read the Bible lots, after all. He prayed. He wanted me to pray with him. He’d always say, Let’s start the day with a prayer, dear Polly.”

“What sort of prayer?”

“‘God, help us to know Your will and to find the way.’”

“That was the prayer?”

“Mostly. But it was longer’n that. I always wondered what way I was s’posed to find.” Her lips curved briefly. “Find the way to cook the meat proper, I guess. Except he never complained about my cooking, the vicar. He said, You cook like Saint Somebody-or-other, dear Polly. I forget who. St. Michael? Did he cook?”

“I think he fought the devil.”

“Oh. Well. I’m not religious. I mean the kind of religion with churches and such. Vicar didn’t know that, which is just as well.”

“If he admired your cooking, he must have told you he’d not be home for dinner the night he died.”

“He only said that he wouldn’t be wanting any dinner. I didn’t know he was going out. I just thought maybe he wasn’t feeling right.”

“Why?”

“He’d been holed up in his bedroom all day, hadn’t he, and he didn’t eat his lunch. He came out once round tea time to use the phone in the study, but he went right back to his room when he was done.”

“What time was this?”

“Round three, I guess.”