Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  “But that’s fiction, Deborah. That’s not the binding. The stuff of life is the binding. This—between us now—this is the binding. And we’re the forever.” He held out his hand once again. This time she took it, although she remained where she was, those careful three feet away. “Come back to me,” he said. “Race up and down the stairs with your knapsack and your cameras. Clutter up the house with your photographs. Play music too loudly. Leave your clothes on the floor. Talk to me and argue and be curious about everything. Be alive to your fingertips. I want you back.”

  Her tears spilled over. “I’ve forgotten the way.”

  “I don’t believe that. It’s all there inside you. But somehow—for some reason—the idea of a baby has taken its place. Why, Deborah?”

  She lowered her head and shook it. Her fingers loosened in his. Their hands dropped to their sides. And he realised that, despite his intentions and all of his words, there was more to be said that his wife wasn’t saying.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IN BEST VICTORIAN FASHION, COTES Hall was a structure that seemed to consist solely of weathervanes, chimneys, and gables from which bay and oriel windows reflected the ashen morning sky. It was built of limestone, and the combination of neglect and exposure to weather had caused the exterior to grow unappealingly lichenous, with streaks of grey-green descending from the roof in a pattern that resembled a vertical alluvial fan. The land that immediately surrounded the Hall had been taken over by weeds, and while it commanded an impressive view of the forest and the hills to its west and its east, the bleak winter landscape in conjunction with the property’s general condition made the idea of living there more repellent than welcome.

  Lynley eased the Bentley over the last of the ruts and into the courtyard round which the Hall loomed like the house of Usher. He gave a moment’s thought to St. John Townley-Young’s appearance at Crofters Inn on the previous night. On the way out he’d encountered his son-in-law plainly having a drink with a woman who was not his wife, and from Townley-Young’s reaction it appeared that this was not the younger man’s first such transgression. At the time, Lynley had thought that they’d unwittingly stumbled upon the motive behind the pranks at the Hall as well as the identity of the prankster. A woman who was the third point of a love-triangle might go to extreme lengths to disrupt the tranquillity and the marriage of a man she wanted for herself. However, as he ran his eyes from the Hall’s rusting weathervanes to the great gaps in its rainpipes to the snarl of weeds and patches of damp where the base of the structure met the ground, Lynley was forced to admit that that had been a facile and largely chauvinistic conclusion. He, who didn’t even have to face it, shuddered at the thought of having to live here. No matter the renovation inside, the exterior of the Hall, as well as its gardens and park, would take years of devoted labour to turn round. He couldn’t blame anyone, wedded blissfully or otherwise, for trying to avoid it in whatever way he could.

  He parked the car between an open-back lorry stacked high with lumber and a minivan with Crackwell and Sons, Plumbing, Ltd. emblazoned in orange letters on its side. From inside the house came the mixed sounds of hammer, saw, cursing, and “March of the Toreadors” at medium volume. In unconscious time to the music, an elderly man in rust-stained coveralls teetered out a rear door, balancing a roll of carpet on his shoulder. It appeared to be sodden. He dumped it along the side of the lorry, nodding at Lynley. He said, “Help you with something, mate?” and lit a cigarette while waiting for the answer.

  “The caretaker’s cottage,” Lynley said. “I’m looking for Mrs. Spence.”

  The man lifted his bristly chin in the direction of a carriage house across the courtyard. Abutting it was a smaller building, an architectural miniature of the Hall itself. But unlike the Hall, its limestone exterior had been scrubbed clean and there were curtains in the windows. Round the front door someone had planted winter irises. Their blooms made a bright screen of yellow and purple against the grey walls.

  The door was closed. When Lynley knocked and no one answered, the man called out, “Try the garden. The greenhouse,” before he trudged back into the Hall.

  The garden proved to be a plot of land behind the cottage, separated from the courtyard by a wall into which a green gate was recessed. This opened easily despite the rust on its hinges, and it gave way to what was clearly Juliet Spence’s demesne. Here the earth was ploughed and free of weeds. The air smelled of compost. In a flower bed along the side of the cottage, twigs crisscrossed over a covering of straw that protected the crowns of perennials from the frost. It was clear that Mrs. Spence was preparing to do some sort of planting at the far side of the garden, for a large vegetable patch had been marked out with boards pounded into the earth, and pinewood stakes stood at the head and the foot of what would be rows of plants some six months from now.

  The greenhouse was just beyond this. Its door was closed. Its glass panes were opaque. Behind these, Lynley could see the form of a woman moving, her arms extended to tend to some sort of plant that was hanging on a level with her head. He crossed the garden. His Wellingtons sank into damp soil that formed a path from the cottage to the greenhouse and ultimately into the wood beyond.

  The door wasn’t latched. The pressure of a single, light tap swung it soundlessly open. Mrs. Spence apparently neither heard the tap nor immediately noticed the influx of cooler air, because she went on with her work, giving him the welcome opportunity to observe.

  The hanging plants were fuchsias. They grew from wire baskets lined with some sort of moss. They’d been trimmed for the winter but not stripped of all their leaves, and it was these that Mrs. Spence appeared to be attending to. She was pumping a malodorous spray upon them, pausing to turn each basket so that she doused the plant thoroughly before moving on to the next one. She was saying, “Take that, you little bastards,” and working the pump swiftly.

  She looked harmless enough, poking round the greenhouse among her plants. True, her choice of headgear was a little bit odd, but one couldn’t judge and condemn a woman for wearing a faded red bandana round her forehead. If anything, it made her look like an American Navajo. And it served its purpose, anchoring her hair away from her face. This bore smudges of dirt, which she further smeared by rubbing the back of her hand—protected by a frayed and fingerless mitten—across one cheek. She was middle-aged, but her activity had the concentration of youth, and watching her, Lynley found it difficult to call her murderess.

  This marked hesitation made him uneasy. It forced him to consider not only the facts he already had but also those in the process of unveiling themselves as he stood in the doorway. The greenhouse was a hotchpotch of plants. They stood in both clay and plastic pots along a central table. They lined the two work tops that ran the length of the greenhouse sides. They came in all shapes and sizes, in every imaginable type of container, and as he worked his eyes through them, he wondered how much of Colin Shepherd’s investigating had gone on in here.

  Juliet Spence turned from the last of the hanging baskets of fuchsias. She started when she saw him. Her right hand reached instinctively for the loose cowl-neck of her black pullover in an inherently female defensive manoeuvre. Her left hand still held the pump, however. Obviously, she had the presence of mind not to set it down when she could use it on him if necessary.

  “What do you want?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I knocked. You didn’t hear me. Detective Inspector Lynley. New Scotland Yard.”

  “I see.”

  He reached for his identification. She waved him off, revealing a large hole in her pullover’s armpit. It acted as companion, evidently, to the threadbare condition of her muddy jeans.

  “That’s unnecessary,” she said. “I believe you. Colin told me you’d probably come round this morning.” She placed the pump on the work top amid the plants and fingered the remaining leaves of the nearest fuchsia. He could see that they were abnormally ragged. “Capsids,” she said in explanation. “They’re insidious. Like t
hrips. You generally can’t tell they’re attacking the plant until the damage is evident.”

  “Isn’t that always the case?”

  She shook her head, giving another blast of insecticide to one of the plants. “Sometimes the pest leaves a calling card. Other times you don’t know he’s come for a visit until it’s too late to do anything but kill him and hope you don’t kill the plant in the process. Except that I don’t suppose I ought to be talking to you about killing as if I enjoy it, even when I do.”

  “Perhaps when a creature is the instrument of another’s destruction, it has to be killed.”

  “That’s certainly my feeling. I’ve never been one to welcome aphids into my garden, Inspector.”

  He started to enter the greenhouse. She said, “In there first, please,” and pointed to a shallow plastic tray of green powder just inside the door. “Disinfectant,” she explained. “It kills micro-organisms. There’s no sense in bringing other unwelcome visitors inside on the soles of one’s shoes.”

  He obliged her, closing the door and stepping into the tray in which her own footprints had already left their mark. He could see the residue of disinfectant speckling the sides and crusting the seams of her round-toed boots.

  “You spend a great deal of time in here,” he noted.

  “I like to grow things.”

  “A hobby?”

  “It’s very peaceful—raising plants. A few minutes with one’s hands in the soil and the rest of the world seems to fade away. It’s a form of escape.”

  “And you need to escape?”

  “Doesn’t everyone at one time or another? Don’t you?”

  “I can’t deny it.”

  The floor consisted of gravel and a slightly elevated path of brick. He walked along this between the central table and the peripheral work top and joined her. With the door closed, the air in the greenhouse was some degrees warmer than the air outside. It was heavily tinctured with the scent of potting soil, fish emulsion, and the odour of the insecticide she’d been pumping.

  “What sorts of plants do you grow in here?” he asked. “Aside from the fuchsias.”

  She leaned against the work top as she spoke, pointing out the examples with a hand whose nails were clipped like a man’s and crusted with dirt. She didn’t appear to mind or even to notice. “I’ve been babying along some cyclamen for ages. They’re the ones with the stems that look nearly transparent, lined up over there in the yellow pots. The others are philodendrons, grape ivy, amaryllis. I’ve got African violets, ferns, and palms, but something tells me you probably recognise them well enough. And these”—she moved to a shelf above which a grow-light glowed over four wide, black trays where tiny plants were sprouting—“are my seedlings.”

  “Seedlings?”

  “I start my garden in here in the winter. Green beans, cucumbers, peas, lettuce, tomatoes. These are carrots and onions. I’m trying Vidalias although every gardening book I’ve read predicts utter failure there.”

  “What do you do with it all?”

  “The plants I generally offer in Preston’s car-boot sale. The vegetables we eat. My daughter and I.”

  “And parsnips? Do you grow those as well?”

  “No,” she said and folded her arms. “But we’ve come to it, haven’t we?”

  “We have. Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need to apologise, Inspector. You’ve a job to do. But I hope you won’t mind if I work while we talk.” She gave him little choice in the minding. She picked up a small cultivator from among the clutter of gardening utensils which filled a tin pail underneath the central table. She began to move along the potted houseplants, gently loosening their soil.

  “Have you eaten wild parsnip from this area before?”

  “Several times.”

  “So you know it when you see it.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “But you didn’t last month.”

  “I thought I did.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “The plant, the dinner? What?”

  “Both. Where did the water hemlock come from?”

  She pinched a straggly stem from one of the larger philodendrons and threw it into a plastic sack of rubbish beneath the table. “I thought it was wild parsnip,” she clarified.

  “Accepted for the moment. Where did it come from?”

  “Not far from the Hall. There’s a pond on the grounds. It’s terribly overgrown—you probably noticed the state things are in—and I found a stand of wild parsnip there. What I thought was parsnip.”

  “Had you eaten parsnip from the pond before?”

  “From the grounds. But not from that location by the pond. I’d only seen the plants.”

  “What was the root stock like?”

  “Like parsnip, obviously.”

  “A single root? A bundle?”

  She bent over a particularly verdant fern, parted its fronds, examined its base, and then lifted the plant to the work top opposite. She went on with her cultivating. “It must have been a single, but I don’t actually recall the look of it.”

  “You know what it should have been.”

  “A single root. Yes. I know that, Inspector. And it would make it far easier on both of us if I just lied and declared it was definitely a single root I dug up. But the fact is I was in a rush that day. I’d gone to the cellar, discovered I had only two small parsnips, and hurried out to the pond where I thought I’d seen more. I dug one up and came back to the cottage. I assume the root I brought with me was a single, but I can’t recall for a fact that it was. I can’t picture it dangling from my hand.”

  “Odd, wouldn’t you say? It is, after all, one of the most important details.”

  “I can’t help that. But I would appreciate being given some credit for telling the truth. Believe me, a lie would be far more convenient.”

  “And your illness?”

  She set down her cultivator and pressed the back of her wrist to the faded red headband. She dislodged upon it a speckling of soil. “What illness?”

  “Constable Shepherd said you were ill yourself that night. He said you’d eaten some of the hemlock as well. He claimed to have dropped by that evening and found you—”

  “Colin’s trying to protect me. He’s afraid. He’s worried.”

  “Now?”

  “Then as well.” She replaced the cultivator among the other tools and went to adjust a dial on what appeared to be the irrigation system. The slow dripping of water began a moment later, somewhere to their right. She kept her eyes and her hand on the dial as she continued. “That was part of the convenience, Inspector, Colin’s saying he’d just dropped by.”

  Lynley followed the previously established euphemism. “I take it he didn’t drop by at all.”

  “Oh, he did. He was here. But it wasn’t a coincidence. He didn’t just happen to be on his rounds. That’s what he told the inquest. That’s what he told his father and Sergeant Hawkins. That’s what he told everyone. But that’s not what happened.”

  “You arranged for him to come?”

  “I telephoned him.”

  “I see. The alibi.”

  She looked up at that. Her expression seemed resigned rather than culpable or afraid. She took a moment to strip off her tattered mittens and tuck them into the sleeves of her sweater before saying, “That’s exactly what Colin said people would think: that I was phoning him to establish a form of innocence. ‘She ate the stuff as well,’ he’d have to say at the inquest. ‘I was at the cottage. I saw for myself.’”

  “Which is what he said, as I understand it.”

  “He’d have said the rest, if I’d had my way. But I couldn’t convince him of the necessity of saying I’d phoned him because I’d been sick three times, I wasn’t handling the pain of it very well, and I wanted him near. So he ended up putting himself at risk by colouring the truth. And I don’t much like living with that knowledge.”

  “He’s at risk in any number of ways at this poi
nt, Mrs. Spence. The investigation is filled with irregularities. He needed to hand the case over to a CID team from Clitheroe. Since he didn’t do that, he’d have been wise to conduct any interrogations with an official witness present. And considering his involvement with you, he should have stepped out of the process altogether.”

  “He wants to protect me.”

  “That may be the case but it looks a far sight nastier than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks as if Shepherd’s covering up his own crime. Whatever that may have been.”

  She pushed herself abruptly from the central table against which she had been leaning. She walked two paces away from him, then back again, pulling off her headband. “Look. Please. These are the facts.” Her words were terse. “I went out to the pond. I dug up water hemlock. I thought it was parsnip. I cooked it. I served it. Mr. Sage died. Colin Shepherd had no part of this.”

  “Did he know Mr. Sage was coming to dinner?”

  “I said he had no part of this.”

  “Did he ever ask you about your relationship with Sage?”

  “Colin’s done nothing!”

  “Is there a Mr. Spence?”

  She balled the bandana into her fist. “I…No.”

  “And your daughter’s father?”

  “That’s none of your business. This has absolutely nothing to do with Maggie. Not at all. She wasn’t even here.”

  “That day?”

  “For the dinner. She was in the village, spending the night with the Wraggs.”

  “But she was here that day, earlier, when you went out to look for the wild parsnip in the first place? Perhaps while you were cooking?”

  Her face seemed rigid. “Hear me, Inspector. Maggie isn’t involved.”

  “You’re avoiding the questions. That tends to suggest you’ve something to hide. Something about your daughter?”