Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

Polly stood next to the desk. She’d lit the lamp on it, but positioned herself so that her hair cast an oblique shadow across her face.

The room was crowded with cartons, all of them labelled, one of them open. This contained clothes, obviously the source of Polly’s trousers.

Lynley said, “He had a lot of possessions.”

“Not a lot of important stuff. It’s just that he was a bit of a hoarder. When I wanted to throw something away, I had to put it in his work tray on the desk and let him decide. Mostly he kept things, especially London things. Tickets to museums, a day pass for the underground. Like they were souvenirs. He just collected odd bits, did the vicar. Some people are like that, aren’t they.”

Lynley wandered among the cartons, reading the labels. Just books, loo, parish business, sitting room, vestments, shoes, study, desk, bedroom, sermons, magazines, odd bits… “What’s in this?” he asked of the last.

“Things from his pockets, scraps. Theatre programmes. That sort of thing.”

“And the diary? Where would we fi nd it?”

She pointed to the cartons marked study, desk , and books . There were at least a dozen. Lynley began moving them for easier access. He said, “Who’s been through the vicar’s belongings, besides yourself?”

“No one,” she said. “The church council told me to pack everything up and seal it and mark it, but they haven’t looked things over yet. I expect they’ll want to keep the parish business carton, won’t they, and they might want to offer his sermons to the new vicar as well. The clothes can go to—”

“And prior to your packing things into cartons?” Lynley asked. “Who went through his things then?”

She hesitated. She was standing near him. He could smell the odour of her perspiration soaking into the wool of her pullover.

“After the vicar died,” Lynley clarified, “during the investigation, did anyone look through his belongings?”

“Constable,” she said.

“Did he go through the vicar’s things alone? Were you with him? Was his father?”

Her tongue darted out to dampen her upper lip. “I brought him tea. Every day. I was in and out.”

“So he worked alone?” When she nodded, he said, “I see,” and unsealed the fi rst carton as St. James did the same to another. He said, “Maggie Spence was a frequent visitor to the vicarage, as I understand. She was a great

favourite of the vicar.”

“I suppose.”

“Did they meet alone?”

“Alone?” Polly picked at a rough spot on the side of her thumb.

“The vicar and Maggie. Did they meet alone? In here? In the sitting room? Somewhere else? Upstairs?”

Polly surveyed the room as if looking for the memory. “In here mostly, I’d say.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Was the door open or shut?”

She began to unseal one of the cartons. “Shut. Mostly.” Before Lynley could ask another question, she went on. “They liked to talk. Bible stuff. They loved the Bible. I’d bring them their tea. He’d be sitting in that chair”—she pointed to an overstuffed chair on which three more cartons were piled—“and Maggie’d be on the stool. There. In front of the desk.”

A discreet four feet away, Lynley noted. He wondered who placed it there: Sage, Maggie, or Polly herself. He said, “Did the vicar meet with other young people from the

parish?”

“No. Just Maggie.”

“Did you think that unusual? After all, there was a social club for the teenagers, as I understand. He never met with any of them?”

“When he first got here there was a meeting in the church for the young people. To form the club. I made them scones. I remember that.”

“But only Maggie came here? What about her mother?”

“Missus Spence?” Polly shuffl ed through the material in the carton. She made a show of examining it. It seemed to consist mostly of loose papers filled with typescript. “She never was here, Missus Spence.”

“Did she phone?”

Polly considered the question. Across from her, St. James was going through a sheaf of papers and a stack of pamphlets. “Once. Near supper. Maggie was still here. She wanted her at home.”

“Was she angry?”

“We didn’t speak very long, so I couldn’t say. She just asked was Maggie here, sort of snippy, I guess. I said yes and fetched her. Maggie talked on the phone, mostly Yes, Mummy, No, Mummy, and Please listen,

Mummy. Then she went on home.”

“Upset?”

“A bit grey in the face and dragging her feet. Like she was caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to. She was fond of the vicar, Maggie was. He was fond of her. But her mum didn’t want that. So Maggie came to see him on the sly.”

“And her mother found out. How?”

“People see things. They talk. There’s no secrets in a village like Winslough.”

It seemed a wildly facile statement to Lynley. As far as he had been able to ascertain, there were secrets layered upon secrets in Winslough and nearly all of them had to do with the vicar, Maggie, the constable, and Juliet Spence.

St. James said, “Is this what we’re looking for?” and Lynley saw that he was holding a small engagement diary with a black plastic cover and a spiral spine. St. James handed it over and went on rooting through the carton that he had opened.

Polly said, “I’ll leave you to it, then” and left them. In a moment, they could hear water running in the kitchen.

Lynley put on his spectacles and flipped through the diary from December, backwards, noting first that although the twenty-third was marked with the Townley-Young wedding and the morning of the twenty-second had Power/ Townley-Young scrawled at half past ten, there was no reference on that same day to having dinner with Juliet Spence. The day before had a notation, however. The name Yanapapoulis made a diagonal across the lines for appointments.

“When did Deborah meet him?” Lynley asked.

“When you and I were in Cambridge. November. A Thursday. Was it round the twentieth?”

Lynley flipped the pages forward. They were filled with notations about the vicar’s life. Meetings of the altar society, visitations to the sick, the assembling of his fl edgling teen club, baptisms, three funerals, two weddings, sessions that looked like marital counseling, presentations before the church council, two clerical gatherings in Bradford.

He found what he was looking for on Thursday the sixteenth, SS next to one o’clock. But at that point, the trail went cold. There were names listed next to times further back, all the way to the vicar’s arrival in Winslough. Some were Christian names, some were surnames. But it was impossible to tell if they belonged to parishioners or if they indicated Sage’s business in London.

He looked up. “SS,” he said to St. James. “Does that suggest anything to you?”

“Someone’s initials.”

“Possibly. Except that he’s not used initials any place else. It’s always names except this once. What does that suggest?”

“An organisation?” St. James looked refl ective. “Nazis come to mind.”

“Robin Sage, neo-Nazi? A closet skinhead?”

“Secret Service, perhaps?”

“Robin Sage, Winslough’s budding James Bond?”

“No, it would have been MI5 or 6 then, wouldn’t it? Or SIS.” St. James began replacing items in the carton. “Nothing much in here aside from the diary. Stationery, business cards — his own, Tommy — part of a sermon on the lilies of the field, ink, pens, pencils, farming guides, two packets of seeds for tomatoes, a file of correspondence fi lled with letters of dismissal, letters of application, letters of acceptance. An application for—” St. James frowned.