Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

Lynley knew that he and St. James were engaged in piecing together a tapestry of guilt from the thinnest of threads. He didn’t like it. Nor did he like the indications of interest and curiosity that Polly Yarkin was attempting to hide, shuffling a carton here, moving a second one there, rubbing her sleeve across the base of the lamp to remove spots of dust that didn’t exist.

“Did you go to the inquest?” he asked her.

She withdrew her arm from the vicinity of the lamp, as if caught in an act of misbehaviour. “Me? Yes. Everyone went.”

“Why? Did you have evidence to give?”

“No.”

“Then…?”

“Just…I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to hear.”

“What?”

She lifted her shoulders slightly, allowed them to drop. “What she had to say. Once I knew the vicar had been with her that night. Everyone went,” she repeated.

“Because it was the vicar? And a woman? Or this particular woman, Juliet Spence?”

“Can’t say,” she said.

“About everyone else? Or about yourself?”

She dropped her eyes. The simple action was enough to tell him why she’d brought them the tea and why, after seeing to its pouring, she’d remained in the study shifting cartons and watching them sift through the vicar’s possessions long after it was necessary for her to do so.

WHEN POLLY HAD SHUT THE door behind them, St. James and Lynley got as far as the end of the drive before Lynley stopped and gave his concentration to the silhouette of St. John the Baptist Church. Complete darkness had fallen. Street lamps were lit along the incline that led through the village. They beamed ochreous rays through an evening mist and cast their shadows within the elongated pools of their own light on the damp street below.

Here by the church, however, outside the boundary of the village proper, a full moon— rising past the summit of Cotes Fell — and its companion stars provided the sole illumination.

“I could use a cigarette,” Lynley said absently. “When do you expect I’ll stop feeling the need to light up?”

“Probably never.”

“That’s certainly a comforting reassurance, St. James.”

“It’s merely statistical probability combined with scientifi c and medical likelihood. Tobacco’s a drug. One never completely recovers from addiction.”

“How did you escape it? There we all were, sneaking a smoke after games, lighting up the very instant we crossed the bridge into Windsor, impressing ourselves — and trying like the devil to impress everyone else — with our individual, nicotinic adulthood. What happened to you?”

“Exposure to an early allergic reaction, I suppose.” When Lynley glanced his way, St. James continued. “My mother caught David with a packet of Dunhills when he was twelve. She shut him up in the lavatory and made him smoke them all. She shut the rest of us in there

with him.”

“To smoke?”

“To watch. Mother’s always been a strong believer in the power of an object lesson.”

“It worked.”

“With me, yes. With Andrew as well. Sid and David, however, always found the thrill of displeasing Mother more than equal to whatever discomfort they themselves might incur as a result. Sid smoked like a chimney until she was twenty-three. David still does.”

“But your mother was right. About the tobacco.”

“Of course. But I’m not sure her methods of educating her offspring were particularly sound. She could be a real termagant when pushed to the edge. Sid always claimed it was her name: What else can you expect from someone called Hortense, Sidney’d demand after we’d suffered a whipping for one infraction or another. I, on the other hand, tended to believe she was saddled rather than blessed by motherhood. My father kept late hours, after all. She was on her own, despite the presence of whatever nanny David and Sid hadn’t managed to terrorise into leaving yet.”

“Did you feel yourself abused?”

St. James buttoned his topcoat against the chill. There was little breeze here — the church acted as a break against the wind that otherwise funnelled through the dale — but the falling mist was frost in the making, and it lay upon his skin in a clammy webbing that seemed to seep through muscle and blood to the bone. He stifled a shiver and thought about the question.

His mother’s anger had always been terrifying to behold. She was Medea incarnate when crossed. She was quick to strike, quicker to shout, and generally unapproachable for hours — sometimes days — after a transgression had been committed. She never acted without cause; she never punished without explanation. Yet in some eyes, he knew, and especially in modern eyes, she would have been seen as extremely wanting.

“No,” he said and felt it to be the truth. “We tended to be an unruly lot, given half a chance. I think she was doing the best she could.”

Lynley nodded and went back to his study of the church. As far as St. James could tell, there wasn’t much to see. Moonlight glinted off the crenellated roofline and sketched in silver the contour of a tree in the graveyard. The rest was one variation or another of darkness and shadow: the clock in the belltower, the peaked roof of the lych-gate, the small north porch. It would be growing close to the time for evensong, but no one was readying the church for prayers.

St. James waited, watching his friend. They’d brought away from the study the odd bits carton, which St. James was carrying under his arm. He set it on the ground and blew on his hands to warm them. The action roused Lynley, who looked his way and said, “Sorry. We should be off. Deborah will be wondering what’s happened to us.” Still he didn’t move. “I was thinking.”

“About abusive mothers?”

“In part. But more about how it all fits. If it all fits. If there’s the slightest possibility that anything fi ts.”

“The girl didn’t say anything to suggest abuse when she spoke to you today?”

“Maggie? No. But she wouldn’t, would she? If the truth is that she revealed something to Sage — something he felt he had to act upon and something that cost him his life at her mother’s hands — she wouldn’t be likely to reveal it a second time to anyone else. She’d be feeling responsible as hell for what happened.”

“You don’t sound as if you’re keen on that idea, despite the phone call to Social Services.”

Lynley nodded. The mist made a penumbra of the moonlight in which his expression was moody, with shadows drawn beneath his eyes. “‘When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.’ Did Sage intend the prayer to refer to Juliet Spence or to himself?”

“Perhaps neither. You may be making too much of nothing. It may have merely been a chance marking in the book. Or it may have referred to someone else entirely. It could be a piece of Scripture that Sage was using to comfort someone who had come to him to confess. For that matter, since we know he was trying to woo people back to the Church, he could have been using the prayer for that. Doeth that which is lawful and right: Worship God on Sundays.”

“Confession’s something I hadn’t thought of,” Lynley admitted. “I keep the worst of my sins to myself, and I can’t imagine anyone else doing otherwise. But what if someone did confess to Sage and then regretted having done so?”

St. James mulled the idea over. “The possibilities are so narrow that I think it unlikely, Tommy. According to what you’re attempting to set up, the regretful penitent would have to be someone who knew Sage was going to Juliet Spence’s that night for dinner. Who knew?” He began to list. “We have Mrs. Spence herself. We have Maggie—”