Missing Joseph (17 page)

“This is what it's like,” she said quietly. Dark eyes she had, with pupils so large that the eyes themselves looked black. “At first it's the fear of something larger than yourself—something over which you have no control and only limited understanding—that's inside her body with a power of its own. Then it's the anger that some rotten disease cut into her life and yours and made a mess out of both. And then it's the panic because no one has any answers that you can believe in and everyone's answer is different from everyone else's anyway. Then it's the misery of being saddled with her and her illness when what you wanted—signed up for, made your vows to cherish—was a wife and a family and normality. Then it's the horror of being trapped in your house with the sights and the smells and the sounds of her dying. But oddly enough, in the end it all becomes the fabric of your life, simply the way you live as man and wife. You become accustomed to the crises and to the moments of relief. You become accustomed to the grim realities of bed pans, commodes, vomit, and urine. You realise how important you are to her. You're her anchor and her saviour, her sanity. And whatever needs you have of your own, they become secondary—unimportant, selfish, nasty even—in light of the role you play for her. So when it's over and she's gone, you don't feel released the way everyone thinks you probably feel. Instead, you feel like a form of madness. They tell you it's a blessing that God finally took her. But you know there isn't a God at all. There's just this gaping wound in your life, the hole that was the space she took up, the way she needed you, and how she filled your days.”

She poured more of the liquid into his glass. He wanted to make some sort of response, but he wanted even more to run so that he wouldn't have to. He removed his spectacles—turning his head away from them rather than simply drawing them off the bridge of his nose—and in doing so he managed to remove his eyes from hers.

She said, “Death isn't a release for anyone but the dying. For the living it's a hell whose face just keeps on changing all the time. You think you'll feel better. You think you'll let the grief go someday. But you never do. Not completely. And the only people who can understand are the ones who've gone through it as well.”

Of course, he thought. Her husband. He said, “I loved her. Then I hated her. Then I loved her again. She needed more than I had to give.”

“You gave what you could.”

“Not in the end. I wasn't strong when I should have been. I put myself first. While she was dying.”

“Perhaps you'd borne enough.”

“She knew what I'd done. She never said a word, but she knew.” He felt confined, the walls too close. He put on his spectacles. He pushed away from the table and walked to the sink where he rinsed out his glass. He looked out the window. It faced not the Hall but the woods. She'd planted an extensive garden, he saw. She'd repaired the old greenhouse. A wheelbarrow stood to one side of it, filled with what looked like manure. He imagined her shoveling it into the earth, with the strong, bold movements that her shoulders promised. She'd sweat as she did it. She'd pause to wipe her forehead on her sleeve. She wouldn't wear gloves—she'd want to feel the wooden handle of the shovel and the sunlit heat of the earth—and when she was thirsty the water she drank would pour down the sides of her mouth to dampen her neck. A slow trickle of it would run between her breasts.

He made himself turn from the window to face her. “You own a shotgun, Mrs. Spence.”

“Yes.” She stayed where she was, although she changed her position, one elbow on the table, one hand curved round her knee.

“And you discharged it last night?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“The land's posted, Constable. Approximately every one hundred yards.”

“There's a public footpath superseding any posting. You know that very well. As does Townley-Young.”

“These boys weren't on the path to Cotes Fell. Nor were they headed back towards the village. They were in the woods behind the cottage, circling up towards the Hall.”

“You're sure of that.”

“From the sound of their voices, of course I'm sure.”

“And you warned them off verbally?”

“Twice.”

“You didn't think to phone for help?”

“I didn't need help. I just needed to be rid of them. Which, you must admit, I did fairly well.”

“With a shotgun. Blasting into the trees with pellets that—”

“With salt.” She ran her thumb and middle finger back through her hair. It was a gesture that spoke more of impatience than vanity. “The gun was loaded with salt, Mr. Shepherd.”

“And do you ever load it with anything else?”

“On occasion, yes. But when I do, I don't shoot at children.”

He noticed for the first time that she was wearing earrings, small gold studs that caught the light when she turned her head. They were her only jewellery, save for a wedding band that, like his own, was unadorned and nearly as thin as the lead of a pencil. It too caught the light when her fingers tapped restlessly against her knee. Her legs were long. He saw that she'd taken off her boots somewhere and wore nothing now but grey socks on her feet.

He said, because he needed to say something to keep his focus, “Mrs. Spence, guns are dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced.”

She said, “If I had wanted to hurt someone, believe me, I would have done, Mr. Shepherd.”

She stood. He expected her to cross the kitchen, bringing her glass to the sink, returning the decanter to the cupboard, invading his territory. Instead, she said, “Come with me.”

He followed her into the sitting room, which he'd passed earlier on his way to the kitchen. The late afternoon's light fell in bands on the carpet, flashed light and dark against her as she walked to an old pine dresser against one wall. She pulled open the left top drawer. She took out a small package of towelling that was done up with twine. Uncoiled and unwrapped, the towelling fell away to expose a handgun. A revolver, looking particularly well-oiled.

She said again, “Come with me.”

He followed her to the front door. It still stood open, and the March air was crisp with a breeze that lifted her hair. Across the courtyard, the Hall stood empty—broken windows boarded, old rainpipes rusted, stone walls chipped. She said, “Second chimney pot from the right, I think. Its left corner.” She lifted her arm, aimed the gun, and fired. A wedge of terra cotta shot off the second chimney like a missile launched.

She said once again, “If I had wanted to hurt someone, I would have done, Mr. Shepherd.” She returned to the sitting room and placed the gun on its wrapping which lay on the dresser top, between a basket of sewing and a collection of photographs of her daughter.

“Do you have a licence for that?” he asked her.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It wasn't necessary.”

“It's the law.”

“Not for the way I bought it.”

She was standing with her back against the dresser. He stayed in the doorway. He thought about saying what he ought to say. He considered doing what the law required of him. The weapon was illegal, she was in possession of it, and he was supposed to remove it from the premises and charge her with the crime. Instead, he said:

“What do you use it for?”

“Target practice mostly. But otherwise protection.”

“From whom?”

“From anyone who isn't warned off by a shouting voice or a shotgun blast. It's a form of security.”

“You don't seem insecure.”

“Anyone with a child in the house is insecure. Especially a woman on her own.”

“Do you always keep it loaded?”

“Yes.”

“That's foolish. That's asking for trouble.”

A smile flickered briefly round her mouth. “Perhaps. But I've never fired it in the company of anyone other than Maggie before today.”

“It was foolish of you to show it to me.”

“Yes. It was.”

“Why did you?”

“For the same reason I own it. Protection, Constable.”

He stared at her across the room, feeling his heart beating rapidly and wondering when it had begun to do so. From somewhere in the house he heard water dripping, from out-of-doors the sharp trill of a bird. He saw the rise and fall of her chest, the
V
of her shirt where her skin seemed to glisten, the stretch of blue jeans across her hips. She was gangly and sweaty. She was more than unkempt. He couldn't have left her.

Without a single coherent thought, he took two strides, and she met him in the centre of the room. He pulled her into his arms, his fingers diving through her hair, his mouth on hers. He hadn't known that such hunger for a woman could even exist. Had she resisted in the least, he knew he would have forced her, but she didn't resist and she clearly didn't want to. Her hands were in his hair, at his throat, against his chest and then her arms encircled him as he pulled her closer, cradling her buttocks and grinding grinding grinding against her. He heard the snap of buttons falling away as he pulled off her shirt, seeking her breasts. And then his own shirt was off and her mouth was on him, kissing and biting a trail to his waist where she knelt, fumbled with his belt, and pushed down his trousers.

Jesus God, he thought. Jesus Jesus Jesus. He knew only two terrors: that he might actually explode into her mouth, that she might release him before he could do so.

CHAPTER NINE

S
HE COULDN'T POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN less like Annie. Perhaps that had been the initial attraction. In place of Annie's soft, willing compliance, he had put Juliet's independence and strength. She was easily taken and eager to be taken, but not easily known. During the first hour of their lovemaking on that March afternoon, she'd said only two words:
God
and
harder
, the second of which she repeated three times. And when they'd had enough of each other—long after they'd moved from the sitting room up the stairs to her bedroom where they'd tried out both the floor and the bed—she turned on her side with one arm cradling her head, and she said, “What's your Christian name, Mr. Shepherd, or am I to go on calling you Mr. Shepherd?”

He traced the faint lightning bolt of skin that puckered her stomach and was the only indication—besides the child herself—that she'd given birth. He felt there wasn't sufficient time in his life to come to know every inch of her body well enough, and as he lay beside her, having had her four times already, he began to ache to have her again. He'd never made love to Annie more than once in any twenty-four-hour period. He'd never thought to try. And while the loving of his wife had been tender and sweet, leaving him feeling at once at peace and somehow in her debt, the loving of Juliet had ignited his senses, unearthing a desire that no amount of having her seemed to sate. After an evening, a night, an afternoon together, he could catch the scent of her—on his hands, on his clothes, when he combed his hair—and find himself wanting her, driven to telephone her, saying only her name to which her low voice would respond, “Yes. When.”

But to her first question, he merely said, “Colin.”

“What did your wife call you?”

“Col. And your husband?”

“I'm called Juliet.”

“And your husband?”

“His name?”

“What did he call you?”

She ran her fingers along his eyebrows, the curve of his ear, his lips. “You're terribly young,” was her reply.

“I'm thirty-three. And you?”

She smiled, a small, sad movement of her mouth. “I'm older than thirty-three. Old enough to be…”

“What?”

“Wiser than I am. Far wiser than I've been this afternoon.”

His ego replied. “You wanted it, didn't you?”

“Oh yes. As soon as I saw you sitting in the Rover. Yes. I wanted. It. You. Whatever.”

“Was that some sort of potion you had me drink?”

She raised his hand to her mouth, took his index finger between her lips, sucked on it gently. He caught his breath. She released him and chuckled. “You don't need a potion, Mr. Shepherd.”

“How old are you?”

“Too old for this to be anything more than a single afternoon.”

“You don't mean that.”

“I have to.”

Over time, he'd chipped away at her reluctance. She revealed her age, forty-three, and she surrendered time and again to desire. But when he talked of the future, she turned to stone. Her answer was always the same.

“You need a family. Children to raise. You were meant to be a father. I can't give that to you.”

“Rot. Women older than you have babies.”

“I've had my baby, Colin.”

Indeed. Maggie was the equation to be solved if he was to win her mother, and he knew it. But she was elusive, a sprite-child who had watched him solemnly from across the courtyard when he left the cottage on that first afternoon. She was clutching a mangy cat in her arms, and her eyes were solemn. She knows, he thought. He said hello and her name, but she disappeared round the side of the Hall. And ever since then, she'd been polite—a very model of good breeding—but he could see the judgement on her face and he could have predicted the manner in which she would exact retribution from her mother long before Juliet realised where Maggie's infatuation with Nick Ware was heading.

He could have interceded in some way. He knew Nick Ware, after all. He was well-acquainted with the boy's parents. He could have been useful, had Juliet let him.

Instead, she'd allowed the vicar to enter their lives. And it hadn't taken Robin Sage long to forge what Colin himself had been unable to create: a fragile bond with Maggie. He saw them talking together outside the church, strolling into the village with the vicar's heavy hand at rest on the girl's shoulder. He watched them perched on the graveyard wall with their backs to the road, their faces towards Cotes Fell, and the vicar's arm arcing out to illustrate the curve of the land or some point he was making. He noted the visits Maggie had paid to the vicarage. And he used these last to broach the subject with Juliet.

“It's nothing,” Juliet said. “She's looking for her father. She knows it can't be you—she thinks you're too young and besides you've never left Lancashire, have you—so she's trying out Mr. Sage for the role. She thinks her father's out searching for her somewhere. Why not as a vicar?”

Which gave him the opening: “Who is her father?”

Her face settled into the familiar, firm lines of withdrawal. He sometimes wondered if her silence was a way she maintained his level of passion for her, keeping herself more intriguing than other women and thus challenging him to prove an entirely nonexistent dominance over her by cooperatively continuing to perform in her bed. But she seemed unaffected by that as well, saying only, “Nothing lasts forever, does it, Colin,” whenever his desperation to know the truth forced him to allude to leaving her. Which he never would, which he knew he never could.

“Who is he, Juliet? He isn't dead, is he?”

The most she had ever said, she said in bed one June night with a wash of moonlight against her skin, making a dappled pattern from the summer leaves outside the window. She said, “Maggie wants to think that.”

“Is it the truth?”

She closed her eyes briefly. He lifted her hand, kissed its palm, rested it against his chest. “Juliet, is it the truth?”

“I think it is.”

“Think…? Are you married to him still?”

“Colin. Please.”

“Were you ever married to him?”

Her eyes closed again. He could see the faint glimmer of tears beneath the lashes, and for a mindless moment he couldn't understand the source of either her pain or her sadness. Then he said, “Oh God. Juliet. Juliet, were you raped? Is Maggie…Did someone—”

She whispered. “Don't humiliate me.”

“You were never married, were you?”

“Please, Colin.”

But that fact made no difference. Still she wouldn't marry him.
Too old for you
was the excuse she gave.

Not, however, too old for the vicar.

Standing in his house, his head pressed against the cool front door, the sound of his father's departure long faded, Colin Shepherd felt Inspector Lynley's question bouncing round his skull like a persistent echo of all his doubts.
Was it likely she'd take on a lover after so brief an acquaintance?

He squeezed his eyes shut.

What difference did it make that Mr. Sage had gone out to Cotes Hall just to talk about Maggie? The village constable had merely gone out there to caution a woman about discharging a shotgun, only to find himself tearing off her clothes in a fever to mate after less than an hour in her company. And she didn't protest. She didn't try to stop him. If anything, she was as aggressive as he. When one considered it, what kind of a woman was that?

A siren, he thought and he tried to turn away from his father's voice.
You got to take the upper hand with a woman, boy-o, and you got to keep it. Right from the first. They'll make you a ninny, give 'em the chance
.

Had she done that with him? With Sage as well? She'd said he was visiting her to talk about Maggie. He meant well, she said, and she ought to listen. She'd declared herself at the end of her rope when it came to reasonable discussion with the girl, so if the vicar had ideas, who was she to turn a deaf ear to them?

And then she'd searched his face. “You don't trust me, Colin, do you?”

No. Not an inch. Not a moment of being alone with another man in that isolated cottage where the solitude itself was a call for seduction. Nonetheless, he'd said, “Of course I do.”

“You can come as well, if you'd like. Sit between us at the table. Make certain I don't take off my shoe and rub my foot against his leg.”

“I don't want that.”

“Then what?”

“I just want things settled between us. I want people to know.”

“Things can't be settled in the way you'd like.”

And now they never would be, unless and until Scotland Yard cleared her name. Because all her protests of their age difference aside, he knew he couldn't marry Juliet Spence and maintain his position in Winslough while so many doubts filled the atmosphere with whispered speculations whenever they appeared in public together. And he couldn't leave Winslough married to Juliet if he hoped to keep peace with her daughter. He was caught in a trap of his own devising. Only New Scotland Yard CID could spring him.

The doorbell rang above his head, so shrill and unexpected a sound that he started. The dog began barking. Colin waited for him to trot out of the sitting room.

“Quiet,” he said. “Sit.” Leo complied, head cocked to one side, waiting. Colin opened the door.

The sun was gone. Dusk was drawing quickly towards night. The light on the porch which he'd switched on to welcome New Scotland Yard now shone on the wiry hair of Polly Yarkin.

She was clutching a scarf twined between her fingers and pinching closed the collar of her old navy coat. Her felt skirt dangled overlong to her ankles which were themselves encased in battered boots. She moved uneasily from foot to foot. She offered a quick smile.

“I was finishing up in the vicarage, wasn't I, and I couldn't help but notice…” She cast a look back in the direction of the Clitheroe Road. “I saw th' two gentlemen leave. Ben at the pub said Scotland Yard. I wouldn't have known except Ben phoned—him being a church warden, you know—and told me they'd probably want to have themselves a poke through the vicarage. He said for me to wait. But they didn't come. Is everything all right?”

One hand squeezed her collar more tightly, and the other grappled with the loose ends of the scarf. He could see her mother's name upon it, and he recognised it as a souvenir advertising her business in Blackpool. She'd gone through scarves, beer mats, printed matchbook covers—like she was running some posh hotel—and she'd even given out free chopsticks for a while when she was “purely truly positive” that tourism from the Orient was about to reach an all-time high. Rita Yarkin—aka Rita Rularski—was nothing if not a born entrepreneur.

“Colin?”

He realised he was staring at the scarf, wondering why Rita had chosen neon lime green and decorated that colour with crimson diamonds. He stirred, glanced down, saw that Leo was wagging his tail in welcome. The dog recognised Polly.

“Is everything all right?” she asked again. “I saw your dad leave as well and I spoke to him—I was sweeping the porch—but he didn't seem to hear because he didn't say anything. So I wondered is everything all right?”

He knew he couldn't leave her standing on the porch in the cold. He'd known her from childhood after all, and even if that had not been the case, she'd come on an errand that at least wore the guise of a friend's concern. “Come in.”

He closed the door behind her. She stood in the entry, balling up her scarf, rolling it round and round in her hands before shoving it into her pocket. She said, “I've got these muddy old boots on, don't I?”

“It's all right.”

“Sh'll I leave them here?”

“Not if you've just put them on at the vicarage.”

He returned to the sitting room with the dog at his heels. The fire was still burning, and he added another log to it, watching fresh wood settle into flame. He felt the heat reaching out in waves towards his face. He remained where he was and let it bake his skin.

Behind him, he heard Polly's hesitant footsteps. Her boots squeaked. Her clothing rustled.

“Haven't been here in a while,” she said diffidently.

She would find it considerably changed: Annie's chintz-covered furniture gone, Annie's prints off the wall, Annie's carpet torn out, and everything replaced helter-skelter without taste, merely to meet need. It was functional, which was all he'd required of the house and its furnishings once Annie had died.

He expected her to remark upon it, but she said nothing. He finally turned from the fire. She hadn't removed her coat. She had only come three paces into the room. She smiled at him tremulously.

“Bit cold in here,” she said.

“Stand by the fire.”

“Ta. Think I will.” She held her hands out towards the flames, then unbuttoned her coat but didn't remove it. She was wearing an overlarge lavender pullover that clashed with both the rust of her hair and the magenta of her skirt. A faint odour of mothballs seemed to rise from its wool. “You all right, Colin?”

He knew her well enough to realise she'd go on asking the question until he answered it. She'd never been one to make the connection between refusal to respond and reluctance to reveal. “Fine. Would you like a drink?”

Her face lit. “Oh, yes. Ta.”

“Sherry?”

She nodded. He went to the table and poured her some, taking nothing for himself. She knelt by the fire and petted the dog. When she took the glass from him, she stayed where she was, on her knees, resting on the heels of her boots. There was a substantial crust of dried mud upon them. Speckles of it had settled on the floor.

He didn't want to join her, although it would have been the natural thing to do. They'd sat with Annie in a ring before this fireplace many times before she died, but their circumstances had been different then: No sin made a lie of their friendship. So he chose the armchair and sat on the edge of it, resting his arms against his knees, his hands clasped loosely like a barrier in front of him.