Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  Somewhere below them in the inn, Dora Wragg’s voice called, “Josephine Eugenia! Where’ve you got yourself to? How many times do I have to tell you—” A slamming door cut off the rest of the words.

  St. James said, “Not everyone is like you, my love. Not everyone sees a child that way.”

  “But if it’s her only child…”

  “Born under what circumstances? Having what kind of impact on her life? Trying her patience in what sort of ways? Who knows what’s gone on between them? You can’t look at Mrs. Spence and her daughter through the filter of your own desires. You can’t stand in her shoes.”

  Deborah gave a bitter laugh. “I do know that.”

  He saw how she had grasped his words and turned them round on herself to wound. “Don’t,” he said. “You can’t know what the future has in mind for you.”

  “When the past is its prologue?” She shook her head. He couldn’t see her face, just a sliver of her cheek like a small quarter moon nearly covered by her hair.

  “Sometimes the past is prologue to the future. Sometimes it isn’t.”

  “Holding on to that sort of belief is a damned easy way to avoid responsibility, Simon.”

  “It can be, indeed. But it can also be a way of getting on with things, can’t it? You always look backwards for your auguries, my love. But that doesn’t seem to give you anything but pain.”

  “While you don’t look for auguries at all.”

  “That’s the worst of it,” he admitted. “I don’t. Not for us, at least.”

  “And for others? For Tommy and Helen? For your brothers? For your sister?”

  “Not for them either. They’ll go their own way in the end, despite my brooding over what led up to their eventual decisions.”

  “Then who?”

  He made no reply. The truth of the matter was that her words had jogged a fragment of conversation loose in his memory, giving rise to thought. But he was wary of a change in topic that she might misinterpret as further indication of his detachment from her.

  “Tell me.” She was starting to bristle. He could see it in the way her fingers spread out then clutched the counterpane. “Something’s on your mind and I don’t much like to be cut out when we’re talking about—”

  He squeezed her hand. “It has nothing to do with us, Deborah. Or with this.”

  “Then…” She was quick to read him. “Juliet Spence.”

  “Your instincts are generally good about people and situations. Mine aren’t. I always look for bald facts. You’re more comfortable with conjectures.”

  “And?”

  “It was what you said about the past being prologue to the future.” He loosed his tie and pulled it over his head, throwing it in the direction of the chest of drawers. It fell short and draped against one of the pulls. “Polly Yarkin overheard Sage having a conversation on the telephone the day he died. He was talking about the past.”

  “To Mrs. Spence?”

  “We think so. He said something about judging…” St. James paused in the act of unbuttoning his shirt. He sought the words as Polly Yarkin had recited them. “‘You can’t judge what happened then.’”

  “The boating accident.”

  “I think that’s what’s been niggling at me since we left the vicarage. That declaration doesn’t fit in with his interest in Social Services, as far as I can see. But something tells me it needs to fit somewhere. He’d been praying all that day, Polly said. He wouldn’t take any food.”

  “Fasting.”

  “Yes. But why?”

  “Perhaps he wasn’t hungry.”

  St. James considered other options. “Self-denial, penance.”

  “For a sin? What was it?”

  He finished with his unbuttoning and sailed the shirt the way of the tie. It too missed its mark and fell to the floor. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m willing to lay whatever odds you’d like that Mrs. Spence does.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  AN EARLY START, INITIATED LONG before the sun rose above the slopes of Cotes Fell, got Lynley to the outskirts of London by noon. The city’s traffic, which daily seemed to become ever more like a Gordian knot on wheels, added another hour to his travel time. It was just after one when he pulled into Onslow Square and claimed a parking space that was being vacated by a Mercedes-Benz with its driver’s door crumpled like a defeated accordion and a scowling driver harnessed into a neck brace.

  He hadn’t phoned her, either from Winslough or from the Bentley. He’d told himself at first that it was far too early—when, after all, had Helen ever risen before nine in the morning if she wasn’t compelled to do so?—but as the hour grew later, he changed his reasoning to the fact that he didn’t want her to rearrange her schedule just to accommodate him. She wasn’t a woman who liked being at any man’s beck and call, and he wasn’t about to foist that role upon her. Her flat wasn’t that far from his own home, after all. If she’d gone out for the afternoon, he could simply toddle onwards to Eaton Terrace and have lunch there. He flattered himself with thinking how liberated all these considerations were. It was far easier than admitting the more obvious truth: He wanted to see her, but he didn’t want to be disappointed by Helen’s having an engagement that excluded him.

  He rang the bell and waited, observing a sky the approximate colour of a ten-pence coin and wondering how long the rain would hold off and if rain in London meant snow in Lancashire. He rang a second time and heard her voice crackle with static from the speaker.

  “You’re home,” he said.

  “Tommy,” she said and rang him in.

  She met him at the door to her flat. Without makeup, with her hair pulled back from her face and held in place with an ingenious combination of elastic and satin ribbon, she looked like a teenager. Her choice of conversation emphasised the similarity.

  “I’ve had the most tremendous row with Daddy this morning,” she said as he kissed her. “I was supposed to meet Sidney and Hortense for lunch—Sid’s discovered an Armenian restaurant in Chiswick that she swears is absolutely heaven on earth, if the combination of Armenian food, Chiswick, and heaven is even possible—but Daddy came to town yesterday on business, spent the night here, and we sank to new depths in our mutual loathing of each other this morning.”

  Lynley removed his overcoat. She’d been consoling herself with the rare luxury of a midday fire, he saw. On a coffee table in front of it were spread out the morning’s paper, two cups and saucers, and the remains of a breakfast that appeared to consist mostly of overboiled and half-eaten eggs and deeply charcoaled toast.

  “I didn’t know you and your father loathed each other,” he said. “Is this something new? I’d always got the impression you were rather his favourite.”

  “Oh, we don’t and I am, how true,” she said. “Which is why it’s so utterly disagreeable of him to have such expectations of me. ‘Now don’t misunderstand me, darling. Your mother and I don’t for a moment begrudge you the use of this flat,’ he says in that sonorous way he has of talking. You know what I mean.”

  “Baritone, yes. Does he want you out of the flat?”

  “‘Your grandmother intended it for the family, and as you’re part of the family, we can’t accuse you or ourselves of ignoring her wishes. Nonetheless, when your mother and I reflect upon the manner in which you spend your time,’ and all the etceteras at which he so excels. I hate it when he blackmails me about the flat.”

  “You mean ‘Tell me how uselessly you’ve been spending your days, Helen darling’?” Lynley asked.

  “That’s just exactly it.” She went to the coffee table and began folding the newspaper and stacking the dishes. “And it all came about because Caroline wasn’t here to cook his breakfast. She’s back in Cornwall—she’s definitely decided to return and isn’t that the decade’s best news, the blame for which, frankly, I lay directly on Denton’s doorstep, Tommy. And because Cybele is such a model of connubial bliss, and because Iris is as happy as a pig in the muck
with Montana, cattle, and her cowboy. But mostly it was because his egg wasn’t boiled the way he wanted it and I burnt his toast—well, heavens, how was I supposed to know one had to hang over the toaster like a woman in love?—and that set him off. He’s always been as prickly as a hedgehog in the morning anyway.”

  Lynley weeded through the information for the one point on which he had at least a degree of expertise. He couldn’t comment on the marital choices that two of Helen’s sisters had made—Cybele to an Italian industrialist and Iris to a rancher in the United States—but he felt conversant with at least one area of her life. For the past several years, Caroline had acted the role of maid, companion, housekeeper, cook, dresser, and general angel of mercy for Helen. But she was Cornwall born and Cornwall bred and he’d known London would wear uneasily upon her in the long run. “You couldn’t have hoped to hold on to Caroline forever,” he noted. “Her family’s at Howenstow, after all.”

  “I could have done if Denton hadn’t seen fit to break her heart every month or so. I don’t understand why you can’t do something about your own valet. He’s simply unconscionable when it comes to women.”

  Lynley followed her into the kitchen. They set the dishes on the work top, and Helen went to the refrigerator. She brought out a carton of lemon yogurt and prised it open with the end of a spoon.

  “I was going to ask you to lunch,” he said hastily as she dipped into it and leaned against the work top.

  “Were you? Thank you, darling. I couldn’t possibly. I’m afraid I’m too occupied with trying to decide how to make something of my life in a fashion both Daddy and I can live with.” She knelt and rooted through the refrigerator a second time, bringing forth three more cartons. “Strawberry, banana, another lemon,” she said. “Which would you like?”

  “None of them, actually. I had visions of smoked salmon followed by veal. Champagne cocktails fore, claret with, brandy aft.”

  “Banana, then,” Helen decided for him and handed him the carton and a spoon. “It’s just the very thing. Quite refreshing. You’ll see. I’ll make some fresh coffee.”

  Lynley examined the yogurt with a grimace. “Can I actually eat this without feeling like little Miss Muffet?” He wandered to a circular table of birch and glass that fitted neatly into an alcove in the kitchen. At least three days of post lay unopened upon it, along with two fashion magazines with corners turned down to mark pages of interest. He flipped through these as Helen poured coffee beans into a grinder and set it to roar. Her choice of reading material was intriguing. She’d been investigating bridal gowns and weddings. Satin versus silk versus linen versus cotton. Flowers in the hair versus hats versus veils. Receptions and breakfasts. The registry office versus the church.

  He glanced up to see that she was watching him. She spun away and dealt with the ground coffee intently. But he had seen the momentary confusion in her eyes—when on earth had Helen ever been nonplussed about anything?—and he wondered how much, if any, of her current interest in weddings had to do with him and how much of it had to do with her father’s criticism. She seemed to read his mind.

  “He always goes on about Cybele,” she said, “which puts him into a state about me. There she is: mother of four, wife of one, the grande dame of Milano, patroness of the arts, on the board of the opera, the head of the museum of modern art, chairwoman of every committee known to mankind. And she speaks Italian like a native. What a wretched sort of oldest sister she is. She could at least have had the decency to be miserable. Or to be married to a lout. But no, Carlo adores her, worships her, calls her his fragile little English rose.” Helen slammed the glass carafe under the spout of the coffee maker. “Cybele’s as fragile as a horse and he knows it.”

  She opened a cupboard and began pulling out an assortment of tins, jars, and cartons, which she carried to the table. Cheese biscuits took up position on a plate with a wedge of brie. Olives and sweet pickles went into a bowl. To these, she added a splash of cocktail onions. She finished off the array with a hunk of salami and a cutting board.

  “Lunch,” she said and sat down opposite him as the coffee brewed.

  “Eclectic gastronomy,” he noted. “What could I have been thinking of, suggesting smoked salmon and veal?”

  Lady Helen cut herself some brie and smoothed it onto a biscuit. “He sees no need for me to have a career—honestly, what a Victorian Daddy is—but he thinks I ought to be doing something useful.”

  “You are.” Lynley tucked into his banana yogurt and tried to think of it as something one could chew rather than simply gum and swallow. “What about everything you do for Simon when he gets swamped?”

  “That’s a particularly sore spot with Daddy. What on earth is one of his daughters doing dusting and photographing latent fingerprints, placing hairs on microscope slides, typing up reports about decomposing flesh? My God, is this the sort of life he expected the fruit of his loins to be living? Is this what he sent me to finishing school for? To spend the rest of my days—intermittently, of course, I don’t pretend to be doing anything far removed from frivolity on a regular basis—in a laboratory? If I were a man, at least I could fritter away my time at the club. He’d approve of that. It’s what he spent most of his youth doing, after all.”

  Lynley raised an eyebrow. “I seem to recall your father chairing three or four rather successful investment corporations. I seem to recall that he still chairs one.”

  “Oh, don’t remind me. He spent the morning doing so, when he wasn’t listing the charitable organisations to which I ought to be giving my time. Really, Tommy, sometimes I think he and his attitudes stepped right out of a Jane Austen novel.”

  Lynley fingered the magazine he’d been looking through. “There are, of course, other ways to appease him, aside from giving your time to charity. Not that he needs to be appeased, of course, but supposing you wish to. You might, for instance, give your time to something else he considered worthwhile.”

  “Naturally. There’s fund raising for medical research, home visits to the elderly, working on one hot line or another. I know I ought to do something with myself. And I keep intending to, but things just get in the way.”

  “I wasn’t talking about becoming a volunteer.”

  She paused in the act of slicing herself a piece of salami. She placed the knife down, wiped her fingers on a peach linen napkin, and didn’t respond.

  “Think how many birds the single stone of marriage would kill, Helen. This flat could go back to the use of your whole family.”

  “They can come here any time as it is. They know that.”

  “You could declare yourself too busy with your husband’s egocentric interests to be able to live a life of social and cultural responsibility as Cybele does.”

  “I need to start being more involved in things, anyway. Daddy’s right about that, although I hate to admit it.”

  “And once you had children, you could use their needs as a shield against whatever judgement your father might cast upon you for inactivity. Not that he’d cast any judgements at that point. He’d be too pleased.”

  “About what?”

  “About having you…settled, I suppose.”

  “Settled?” Lady Helen speared a sweet pickle and chewed it thoughtfully, watching him. “My God, don’t tell me you’re really that provincial.”

  “I didn’t intend—”

  “You can’t honestly believe that a woman’s place is to be settled, Tommy. Or,” she asked shrewdly, “is it just my place?”

  “No. Sorry. It was a poor choice of words.”

  “Choose again, then.”

  He placed his yogurt carton on the table. Its contents had tasted fairly good for the first few spoonfuls, but they didn’t wear well on the palate after that. “We’re dancing round the issue and we may as well stop. Your father knows that I want to marry you, Helen.”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  He crossed his legs, uncrossed them. He lifted his hand to loosen the knot of his tie, onl
y to discover and recall that he wasn’t wearing one. He sighed. “Damn it all. Nothing of it. It merely seems to me that marriage between us wouldn’t be such a miserable thing.”

  “And God knows that it would please Daddy well enough.”

  He felt stung by her sarcasm and answered in kind. “I have no idea about pleasing your father, but there are—”

  “You used the word pleased less than a minute ago. Or have you conveniently forgotten?”

  “But there are moments—and frankly this isn’t turning out to be one of them—when I’m actually blind enough to think that it might please me.”

  She looked stung in turn. She sat back in her chair. They stared at each other. The telephone, mercifully, began to ring.

  “Let it go,” he said. “We need to thrash this out, and we need to do it now.”

  “I don’t think so.” She got up. The phone was on the work top, next to the coffee maker. She poured them each a cup as she spoke to her caller, saying, “What a good guess. He’s sitting right here in my kitchen, eating salami and yogurt…” She laughed. “Truro? Well, I hope you’re running his credit cards to the limit…No, here he is…Really, Barbara, don’t give it a thought. We weren’t discussing anything more earthshaking than the merits of sweet pickles over dill.”

  She had a way of knowing when he felt most betrayed by her levity, so Lynley wasn’t surprised when Helen didn’t meet his eyes as she handed him the phone and said, unnecessarily, “It’s Sergeant Havers. For you.”

  He caught her fingers under his when he took the receiver. He didn’t release her until she looked at him. And even then, he said nothing, because, damn it all, she was at fault and he wasn’t going to apologise for lashing out when she drove him to it.