Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

Another adventure, she’d called each move, let’s see what’s what in Northumberland. She’d tried to make a game out of running. It was only when she’d stopped running that she’d lost.

She mounted the stairs. A perfect sphere of dread seemed to be growing beneath her heart.

Why did she run, Juliet wondered, what did they tell her, what does she know?

The door to Maggie’s room was partially closed, and she swung it open. Moonlight shone through the branches of the lime tree outside the window and fell in a wavy pattern across the bed. On this Maggie’s cat was curled, head buried deeply between his paws, feigning sleep so that Juliet would take pity and not displace him. Punkin had been the first compromise Juliet had made with Maggie. Please, please c’n I have a kitten, Mummy had been such a simple request to grant. What she had not understood at the time was that seeing the joy of one small wish granted led inexorably to the longing to grant others. They’d been little nothings at fi rst — a dossround with her girlfriends, a trip to Lancaster with Josie and her mum — but they’d led to a budding sense of belonging that Maggie had never experienced before. In the end, they had led to the request to stay. Which, along with everything else, led to Nick, to the vicar, and to this night…

Juliet sat on the edge of the bed and switched on the light. Punkin buried his head deeper in his paws although the tip of his tail twitched once to betray him. Juliet ran her hand over his head and along the mobile curve of his spine. He wasn’t as clean as he ought to be. He spent too much time prowling about the wood. Another six months and he’d no doubt be more feral than tame. Instinct, after all, was instinct.

On the floor next to Maggie’s bed lay her thick scrapbook, its cover worn and cracked and its pages so dog-eared that their edges were crumbling to flakes in places. Juliet picked it up and rested it on her lap. A gift for her sixth birthday, it had Maggie’s Important Events printed in large block letters in her own hand on the first page. Juliet could tell by the feel of the book that most of the pages were full. She’d never looked through it before — it had seemed too like an invasion of Maggie’s small, private world — but she looked through it now, driven not so much by curiosity as by a need to feel her daughter’s presence and to understand.

The first part comprised childhood mementos: a tracing of a large hand with a smaller one traced inside it and the words Mumy and me scrawled below; a fanciful composition about “My Doggie Fred” upon which a teacher had written “And what a lovely pet he must be, Margaret” across the top; a programme for a Christmas music recital at which she had been part of a chorus of children who sang — very badly but ambitiously — the Alleluia Chorus from Handel’s Messiah ; a second-place ribbon from a science project on plants; and scores of pictures and postcards of their camping holidays together on the Hebrides, on Holy Island, far from the crowds in the Lake District. Juliet flipped through the pages. She touched her fingertips to the drawing, traced the edge of the ribbon, and studied each picture of her daughter’s face. This was a real history of their lives, a collection that spoke of what she and her daughter had managed to build upon a foundation of sand.

The second part of the scrapbook, however, spoke of the cost of having lived that same history. It comprised a collection of newspaper clippings and magazine articles about automobile racing. Interspersed among these were photographs of men. For the first time, Juliet saw that he died in a car crash, darling had assumed heroic proportions in Maggie’s imagination, and from Juliet’s reticence on the subject had sprung a father whom Maggie could love. Her fathers were the winners at Indianapolis, at Monte Carlo, at Le Mans. They spun out in flames on a track in Italy, but they walked away with their heads held high. They lost wheels, they crashed, they broke open champagne and waved trophies in the air. They all shared the single quality of being alive.

Juliet closed the book and rested her hands on its cover. It was all about protection, she said inside her head to a Maggie who wasn’t there. When you’re a mother, Maggie, the last thing you can bear of all the things that you have to bear anyway is losing your child. You can bear just about anything else and you usually have to at one time or another — losing your possessions, your home, your job, your lover, your husband, even your way of life. But losing a child is what will break you. So you don’t take risks that might lead to the loss because you’re always aware that the one risk you take might be the one that will cause all the horrors in the world to sweep into your life.

You don’t know this yet, darling, because you haven’t experienced that moment when the twisting squeezing crush of your muscles and the urge to expel and to scream at once results in this small mass of humanity that squalls and breathes and comes to rest against your stomach, naked to your nakedness, dependent upon you, blind at that moment, hands instinctively trying to clutch. And once you close those fingers round one of your own…no, not even then…once you look at this life that you’ve created, you know you’ll do anything, suffer anything, to protect it. Mostly for its own sake you protect, of course, because all it is really is living, breathing need. But partly you protect it for your own.

And that is the greatest of my sins, darling Maggie. I reversed the process and I lied in doing it because I couldn’t face the immensity of loss. But I’ll tell the truth now, here, and to you. What I did I did partly for you, my daughter. But what I did all those years ago, I did mostly for myself.

I DON’T THINK WE SHOULD stop yet, Nick,” Maggie said as stoutly as she could manage. Her jaw hurt awfully from locking her teeth together to keep them from chattering, and the tips of her fingers were numb despite the fact that she’d kept her hands balled into her pockets for most of the journey. She was tired of walking and muscle-weary from leaping behind hedges, over walls, or into ditches whenever they heard the sound of a car. But it was still relatively early, although it was dark, and she knew that in darkness lay their best hope of escape.

They’d kept off the road whenever possible, heading southwest towards Blackpool. The going was rough on both farmland and moors, but Nick wouldn’t hear of setting foot to pavement until they’d put Clitheroe a good fi ve miles behind them. Even then, he wouldn’t hear of taking the main road to Longridge where, the plan was, they would get a ride in a lorry to Blackpool. Instead, he said, they would stick to the twisty turny back lanes, skirting by farms, through hamlets, and over fields when necessary. The route he was taking made Longridge miles and miles farther away, but it was safer this way and she’d be glad they’d taken it. In Longridge, he said, no one would look at them twice. But until then, they had to keep off the road.

She didn’t have a watch, but she knew it couldn’t be much more than eight or half past. It seemed later, but that was because they were tired, it was cold, and the food Nick had managed to bring back to the car park from the town had long since been consumed. There had been little enough of it in the fi rst place — what could one reasonably be expected to purchase with less than three pounds? — and while they’d divided it evenly between them and talked about making it last until morning, they’d eaten the crisps fi rst, moved on to the apples to quench their thirst, and devoured the small package of biscuits to answer their craving for a sweet. Nick had been smoking steadily since that time to take the edge off his hunger. Maggie had tried to ignore her own, which had been easy enough to do since it was more than convenient to concentrate on the bitter cold instead. Her ears ached with it.