Missing Joseph

by Elizabeth George

  She sipped her chicken bouillon. “He came to talk about Susanna.”

  “His wife.”

  “My sister.” She pulled a square of white linen from her pocket, dabbed it against the corners of her mouth, and replaced it neatly. “I hadn’t seen or heard a word from him since the day of her funeral. He wasn’t exactly welcome here. Not after everything that had happened.”

  “Between him and his wife.”

  “And the baby. That dreadful business about Joseph.”

  “He was an infant when he died, as I understand.”

  “Just three months. It was a cot death. Susanna went to get him up one morning, thinking that he’d actually slept through the night for the first time. He’d been dead for hours. He was stiff with rigor. She broke three of his ribs between the kiss of life and trying to give him CPR. There was an investigation, of course. And there were questions of abuse when the word got out about his ribs.”

  “Police questions?” Lynley asked in some surprise. “If the bones were broken after death—”

  “They would have known. I’m aware of that. It wasn’t the police. Naturally, they questioned her, but once they had the pathologist’s report, they were satisfied. Still, there were whispers in the community. And Susanna was in an exposed position.”

  Kate got up and walked to the window where she pushed back the curtains. The rain was pattering against the glass. She said contemplatively but without much ferocity, “I blamed him. I still do. But Susanna only blamed herself.”

  “I’d think that’s a fairly normal reaction.”

  “Normal?” Kate laughed softly. “There was nothing normal about her situation.”

  Lynley waited without reply or question. The rain snaked in rivulets against the window-panes. A telephone rang in the office below.

  “Joseph slept in their bedroom the first two months.”

  “Hardly abnormal.”

  She seemed not to hear. “Then Robin insisted he be given a room of his own. Susanna wanted him near her, but she cooperated with Robin. That was her way. And he was very convincing.”

  “About what?”

  “He kept insisting that a child could be irrevocably damaged by witnessing at any age, even in infancy, what Robin in his infinite wisdom called ‘the primal scene’ between his parents.” Kate turned from the window and sipped more broth. “Robin refused to have sex as long as the baby was in the room. When Susanna wanted to…resume relations, she had to go along with Robin’s wishes. But I suppose you can imagine what little Joseph’s death did to any future primal scenes between them.”

  The marriage quickly fell apart, she said. Robin flung himself into his work as a means of distraction. Susanna drifted into depression.

  “I was living and working in London at the time,” Kate said, “so I had her come to stay with me. I had her go to galleries. I gave her books to identify the birds in the parks. I mapped out city walks and had her take one each day. Someone had to do something, after all. I tried.”

  “To…?”

  “To get her back into life. What do you think? She was wallowing in grief. She was luxuriating in guilt and self-loathing. It wasn’t healthy. And Robin wasn’t helping matters at all.”

  “He’d have been feeling his own grief, I dare say.”

  “She wouldn’t put it behind her. Every day I’d come home and there she would be, sitting on the bed, holding the baby’s picture against her breast, wanting to talk and relive it all. Day after day. As if talking about it would have done any good.” Kate returned to the sofa and placed her mug on a round of mosaic that served as a mat on the side table. “She was torturing herself. She wouldn’t let it go. I told her she had to. She was young. She’d have another baby, after all. Joseph was dead. He was gone. He was buried. And if she didn’t snap out of it and take care of herself, she’d be buried with him.”

  “Which she eventually was.”

  “I blame him for that. With his primal scenes and his miserable belief in God’s judgement in our lives. That’s what he told her, you know. That Joseph’s death was the hand of God at work. What a beastly man. Susanna didn’t need to hear that sort of rubbish. She didn’t need to believe she was being punished. And for what? For what?”

  Kate pulled out her handkerchief a second time. She pressed it against her forehead although she didn’t appear to be perspiring.

  “Sorry,” she said. “There are some things in life that don’t bear remembering.”

  “Is that why Robin Sage came to see you? To share memories?”

  “He was suddenly interested in her,” she said. “He hadn’t been the least involved in her life in the six months that led up to her death. But suddenly he cared. What did she do while she was with you, he wanted to know. Where did she go? What did she talk about? How did she act? Whom did she meet?” She chuckled bitterly. “After all these years. I wanted to smack his mournful little face. He’d been eager enough to see her buried.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He kept identifying bodies washed up on the coast. There were two or three of them he said were Susanna. The wrong height, the wrong hair colour when there was hair left on them at all, the wrong weight. It didn’t matter. He was in such a nasty rush about it all.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I thought at first he had some woman lined up to marry and he needed to have Susanna declared officially dead in order to get on with it.”

  “But he didn’t marry.”

  “He didn’t. I assume the woman gave him the brush-off, whoever she was.”

  “Does the name Juliet Spence mean anything to you? Did he mention a woman called Juliet Spence when he was here? Did Susanna ever mention Juliet Spence?”

  She shook her head. “Why?”

  “She poisoned Robin Sage. Last month in Lancashire.”

  Kate raised a hand as if to touch it to her perfectly brushed hair. She dropped it, however, before it made contact. Her eyes grew momentarily distant. “How odd. I find I’m glad of the fact.”

  Lynley wasn’t surprised. “Did your sister ever mention any other men when she was staying with you? Did she see other men once things began to go wrong in her marriage? Could her husband have discovered that?”

  “She didn’t talk about men. She talked only about babies.”

  “There is, of course, an unavoidable connection between the two.”

  “I’ve always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards orgasm without pausing to realise that it’s merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense.”

  “People get involved with one another. They pursue intimacy along with love.”

  “More fools, they,” Kate said.

  Lynley got to his feet. Kate moved behind him and made an adjustment to the position of the pillow on his chair. She brushed her fingers across the chair’s back.

  He watched her, wondering what it had been like for her sister. Grief calls for acceptance and understanding. No doubt she’d felt herself cut off from mankind.

  He said, “Have you any idea why Robin Sage might have telephoned Social Services in London?”

  Kate picked a hair from the lapel of her dressing gown. “He’d have been looking for me, no doubt.”

  “You supply them with temps?”

  “No. I’ve had this business only eight years. Before that, I worked for Social Services. He’d have phoned there first.”

  “But your name was in his diary before his calls or visits to Social Services. Why would that be?”

  “I couldn’t say. Perhaps he wanted to go through Susanna’s paperwork in the trip down memory lane he’d been taking. Social Services in Truro would have been involved when the baby died. Perhaps he was tracking her paperwork to London.”

  “Why?”

  “To read it? To set the record straight?”

  “To discover if Social Services knew what someone else claimed to know?”

>   “About Joseph’s death?”

  “Is it a possibility?”

  She folded her arms beneath her breasts. “I can’t see how. If there had been something suspicious about his death, it would have been acted upon, Inspector.”

  “Perhaps it was something borderline, something that could have been interpreted either way.”

  “But why would he take a sudden interest in that now? From the moment Joseph died, Robin showed no interest in anything other than his ministry. ‘We’ll get through this by the grace of God,’ he told Susanna.” Kate’s lips pressed into a line of distaste. “Frankly, I wouldn’t have blamed her in the least if she’d had the luck to find someone else. Just to forget about Robin for a few hours would have been heaven.”

  “Could she have done? Did you get a sense of that?”

  “Not from her conversation. When she wasn’t talking about Joseph, she was trying to get me to talk about my cases. It was just another way to punish herself.”

  “You were a social worker, then. I’d thought—” He gestured in the general direction of the stairway.

  “That I was a secretary. No. I had much larger aspirations. I once believed I could actually help people. Change lives. Make things better. What an amusing laugh. Ten years in Social Services took care of that.”

  “What sort of work did you do?”

  “Mothers and infants,” she said. “Home visits. And the more I did it, the more I understood what a myth our culture has created about childbirth, depicting it as woman’s highest purpose fulfilled. What contemptible rot, all of it generated by men. Most of the women I saw were utterly miserable when they weren’t too uneducated or too impossibly ignorant to be able to recognise the extent of their plight.”

  “But your sister believed in the myth.”

  “She did. And it killed her, Inspector.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  IT’S THE NASTY LITTLE FACT THAT HE kept misidentifying bodies,” Lynley said. He nodded to the officer on duty at the kiosk, flashed his identification, and descended the ramp into the underground car park of New Scotland Yard. “Why keep saying definitively that each one was his wife? Why not say he wasn’t certain? It didn’t matter, after all. A postmortem would have been performed on the bodies in any case. And he must have known that.”

  “It sounds like shades of Max de Winter to me,” Helen replied.

  Lynley pulled into a space conveniently close to the lift now that the day was long over and the vast clerical staff was gone. He thought about the idea. “We’re meant to believe she deserved to die,” he mused.

  “Susanna Sage?”

  He got out of the car and opened her door. “Rebecca,” he said. “She was evil, lewd, lubricious, lascivious—”

  “Just the sort of person one longs to have at a dinner party to liven things up.”

  “—and she pushed him into killing her by telling him a lie.”

  “Did she? I can’t remember the whole story.”

  Lynley took her arm and led her towards the lift. He rang for it. They waited as the machinery creaked and groaned. “She had cancer. She wanted to commit suicide, but she lacked the courage to kill herself. So, because she hated him, she pushed him into doing it for her, destroying him and herself at the same time. And when the deed was done and he’d sunk her boat in the Manderley cove, he had to wait until a female body washed ashore somewhere along the coast so that he could identify it as Rebecca, gone missing in a storm.”

  “Poor thing.”

  “Which one?”

  Lady Helen tapped her cheek. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re meant to feel compassion for someone, but it does leave one a bit tarnished, doesn’t it, to be siding with the murderer?”

  “Rebecca was wanton, entirely without conscience. We’re meant to think it was justifiable homicide.”

  “And was it? Is it ever?”

  “That’s the question,” he said.

  They took the lift in silence. The rain had begun falling in earnest on his drive back into the city. A snarl of traffic in Blackheath had made him despair of ever getting back across the Thames. But he’d managed to reach Onslow Square by seven, they’d made it to Green’s for dinner by a quarter past eight, and now at twenty minutes before eleven, they were heading up to his office for a look at whatever Sergeant Havers had managed to fax from Truro.

  They were operating under an undeclared ceasefire. They’d discussed the weather, his sister’s decision to sell her land and her sheep in West Yorkshire and return to the south to be near his mother, a curious revival of Heartbreak House that Shavians were denouncing and critics were beatifying, and a Winslow Homer exhibition that was coming to London. He could sense her need to hold him at a distance, and he cooperated without much liking it. Helen’s timeline for opening her heart to him wasn’t what he would like it to be. But he knew that he stood a better chance of winning her confidence through patience rather than confrontation.

  The lift doors slid open. Even in CID, the night staff was significantly smaller than the day, so the floor seemed deserted. But two of Lynley’s fellow DI’s were standing in the doorway to one of their offices, drinking from plastic cups, smoking, and talking about the latest government minister to get caught with his trousers down behind King’s Cross Station.

  “There he was, poking some tart while the country goes to hell,” Phillip Hale was remarking blackly. “What is it with these blokes, I ask you?”

  John Stewart flicked cigarette ash onto the floor. “Stuffing some dolly in a leather skirt’s more immediately gratifying than solving a fiscal crisis, I’d guess.”

  “But this wasn’t a call girl. This was a ten-quid whore. Good Christ, you saw her.”

  “I’ve also seen his wife.”

  The two men laughed. Lynley glanced at Helen. Her face was unreadable. He guided her past his colleagues with a nod.

  “Aren’t you on holiday?” Hale called after them.

  “We’re in Greece,” Lynley said.

  In his office, he waited for her reaction as he took off his coat and hung it on the back of the door. But she said nothing about the brief exchange they’d heard. Instead, she went back to their previous topic, although, when he evaluated it, he realised that she wasn’t digressing too far thematically from her central concern.

  “Do you think Robin Sage killed her, Tommy?”

  “It was night, a rough crossing. There were no witnesses who saw his wife throw herself from the ferry, nor was there anyone who came forward to support his claim of going to the bar for a drink when he left the lounge.”

  “But a priest? Not only to do it in the first place but then to manage carrying on with his ministry afterwards?”

  “He didn’t carry on, exactly. He left his position in Truro directly she died. He took up a different sort of ministry as well. And he took it up in places where he wasn’t known to the congregation.”

  “So if he had something to hide from them, they wouldn’t necessarily recognise that fact from a changed behaviour since they didn’t know him in the first place?”

  “Possibly.”

  “But why kill her? What would have been his motive? Jealousy? Anger? Revenge? An inheritance?”

  Lynley reached for the telephone. “There seem to be three possibilities. They’d lost their only child six months before.”

  “But you said it was a cot death.”

  “He may have held her responsible. Or he may have been involved with another woman and knew as a priest he couldn’t divorce and expect his career to go anywhere.”

  “Or she may have been involved with another man and he found out about it and acted in rage?”

  “Or the final alternative: The truth is what it appears to be, a suicide combined with an honest mistake made by a grieving widower in misidentifying bodies. But no conjecture satisfactorily explains why he went to see Susanna’s sister in October. And where in the maze does Juliet Spence fit?” He picked up the phone. “You know where
the fax is, don’t you, Helen? Would you see if Havers sent the newspaper articles?”

  She left to do so, and he phoned Crofters Inn.

  “I left a message with Denton,” St. James told him when Dora Wragg rang through to their room. “He said he hadn’t seen a hair of you all day and hadn’t expected to. I imagine about now he’s phoning every hospital between London and Manchester, thinking you’ve had a crash somewhere.”

  “I’ll check in. How was Aspatria?”

  St. James gave him the facts they’d managed to gather during their day in Cumbria, where, he informed Lynley, the snow had begun falling at noon and followed them all the way back to Lancashire.

  Prior to moving to Winslough, Juliet Spence had been employed as a caretaker at Sewart House, a large estate some four miles outside of Aspatria. Like Cotes Hall, it was in an isolated location and, at the time, inhabited only during August when the son of the owner came up from London with his family for an extended holiday.

  “Was she sacked for some reason?” Lynley asked.

  Not at all, St. James told him. The house was deeded over to the National Trust when the owner died. The Trust asked Juliet Spence to stay on once they’d opened the grounds and the buildings for public viewing. She moved on to Winslough instead.

  “Any problems while she was in Aspatria?”

  “None. I spoke to the owner’s son, and he had nothing but unqualified praise for her and great affection for Maggie.”

  “So there’s nothing,” Lynley mused.

  “Not quite. Deborah and I have been working the phones for you most of the day.”

  Before Aspatria, St. James said, she’d worked in Northumberland, outside the small village of Holystone. There, she’d been a combination of housekeeper and companion to an elderly invalid called Mrs. Soames-West, who lived alone in a small Georgian mansion to the north of the village.

  “Mrs. Soames-West had no family in England,” St. James said. “And she didn’t sound as if she’d had a visitor in years. But she thought a great deal of Juliet Spence, hated to lose her, and wanted to be remembered to her.”

  “Why did the Spence woman leave?”