Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“What would you have done had Polly named Shepherd?” St. James asked.

“Arrested the bastard. Turned him over to Clitheroe CID. Had his job.”

“And since she didn’t name him?”

“I’ll have to come at it from another direction.”

“To step on his face?”

“Metaphorically. I’m my father’s own son in wish, if not in deed. It’s nothing I’m proud of. But there it is.”

“So what did you give Shepherd just before he drove off?”

Lynley adjusted the carton beneath his arm. “I gave him something to think about.”

Colin remembered with perfect clarity the final time his father had struck him. He was sixteen years old. Foolish, too hot-headed to think of the consequences of defi ance, he had risen angrily and bodily to his mother’s defence. Shoving his chair back from the dinner table — he could still recall the sound it made as it scraped across the floor and slammed into the wall — he’d shouted, Just leave her alone, Pa! and grabbed his father’s arms to keep him from slapping her face another time.

Pa’s rage always took root in something inconsequential, and because they never knew when to expect his anger to fl are into violence, he was that much more terrifying. Anything could set him off: the condition of a beef joint at dinner, a button missing from his shirt, a request for money to pay the gas bill, a comment about the hour at which he had arrived home the previous night. This particular evening it was a telephone call from Colin’s biology master. Another exam failed, lessons incomplete, was there a problem at home, Mr. Tranville wondered.

His mother had revealed that much over the dinner table, tentatively, as if attempting to telegraph her husband a message she was unwilling to say in front of their child. “Colin’s teacher asked if there were problems, Ken. Here at home. He said counselling might—”

Which was as far as she’d got. Pa said, “Counselling? Did I hear you right? Counselling?” in a tone that should have told her that she’d have been wiser to eat quietly and keep the telephone call to herself.

But instead, she said, “He can’t study, Ken, if things are in chaos. You see that, don’t you?” in a voice that pleaded for reason but only succeeded in betraying her fear.

Pa thrived on fear. He loved to feed twigs of intimidation into its fire. He set down his knife first, then his fork. He pushed back his chair from the table. He said, “Tell me about all this chaos, Clare.” When she read his intentions and said she supposed it was nothing, really, his father said, “No. Tell me. I want to hear.” When she didn’t cooperate, he got up. He said, “Answer me, Clare,” and when she said, “Nothing. Do eat your meal, Ken,” he was on her.

He’d only managed to strike her three times — one hand twisted in her hair and the other smacking harder each time she cried out — when Colin grabbed him. His father’s response was the same as it had been from Colin’s childhood. Women’s faces were meant to be abused with the open hand. On boy children a real man used his fi sts.

The difference this time was that Colin was bigger. And while he was as afraid of his father as he’d always been, he was also angry. Anger and fear washed his body with adrenaline. When Pa struck him, for the first time in his life, Colin struck back. It had taken more than five minutes for his father to beat him into submission. He did it with his fists, his belt, and his feet. But when it was over, the delicate balance of power had shifted. And when Colin said, “I’ll kill you next time, you fi lthy bastard. Just see if I won’t,” he saw for an instant, reflected on his father’s face, that he too was capable of inspiring fear.

It had been a source of pride to Colin that his father had never struck his mother again, that his mother had filed for divorce a month later, and most of all that they were rid of the bastard because of him . He’d sworn he’d never be like his father. He’d never again struck a living soul. Until Polly.

On the side of the road leading out of Win-slough, Colin sat in the Land Rover and rolled between his palms the piece of material from Polly’s skirt which the inspector had pressed into his hand. All of it had been such a pleasure: feeling the sting of her flesh against his palm, tearing the material so easily from her body, tasting the salty sweat of her terror, hearing her cries, her pleas, and especially her choked sob of pain — no moan of sexual arousal now, Polly, is this what you wanted, is this how you hoped it would happen between us? — and finally accepting the triumph of her numb defeat. He slammed into her, he ploughed her, he mastered her, all the time saying cow bitch sow cunt in his father’s voice.

He’d done it all in a storm of blind rage and desperation, frantic to keep the memory and the truth of Annie at bay.

Colin pressed the piece of material to his closed eyes and tried not to think about either of them, Polly or his wife. With Annie’s dying, he’d crossed every line, violated every code, wandered in the dark, and lost himself entirely, somewhere between the valley of his worst depression and the desert of his blackest despair. He’d spent the years since her death caught between trying to rewrite the history of her torturous illness and trying to recall, reinvent, and resurrect the image of a marriage that was utterly perfect. The resulting lie had been so much easier to face than the reality that when Polly tried to obliterate it forever in the vicarage, Colin struck out in an effort to preserve it as much as in an attempt to hurt her.

He’d always felt he could continue to cope and move forward in life as long as he had the falsehood. It comprised what he called the sweetness of their relationship, the sure knowledge that with Annie he’d had warmth and tenderness, complete understanding, compassion, and love. It also comprised an account of her illness, one filled with the details of her noble suffering, replete with illustrations of his efforts to save her and his eventual calm acceptance of the fact he could not. The falsehood depicted him at her bedside, holding her hand and trying to memorise the colour of her eyes before she closed them forever. The falsehood declared that as life was taken from her in vicious bits and pieces, her optimism never faltered and her spirit stayed whole.

You’ll forget all this, people had said at the funeral. Given time, you’ll remember only the beauty of what you had. And you had two wonderful years with her, Colin. So let time work its magic, and watch what happens. You’ll heal and look back and still have those two years.

It hadn’t happened that way. He hadn’t healed. He’d simply rearranged his recollection of what the end had been like and how they’d got there. In his revised version of their history, Annie had accepted her fate with grace and dignity while he had been unfailing in his support of her. Gone from memory were her descents into bitterness. Excised from existence was his implacable rage. In the place of these was a new reality that masked everything he couldn’t face: how he hated her in moments as much as he loved her, how he despised his marriage vows, how he embraced her death as his only possible escape from a life that he could not bear, and how in the end all they had to share in a marriage that had once been joyful was the fact of her illness and the day-to-day horror of having to cope with it.

Make it different, he had thought, after she had died, make me better than I was. And he had used the past six years to do so, seeking oblivion instead of forgiveness.

He rubbed the gauzy material against his face, feeling it snag on the scratches that Polly’s nails had left. It was stiff in places with Polly’s blood and musty with the scent of her body’s secrets.