Missing Joseph (29 page)

As far as Lynley could tell, the vegetation she indicated was indistinguishable from the vegetation everywhere else. In the spring or summer, perhaps, flowers or fruit might give an indication of the genera—if not the species—that now appeared to be little more than skeletal shrubs and brambles. He recognised nettle easily enough because its toothed leaves still clung to the stem of the plant. And reeds were the same in shape and size from season to season. But as for the rest, he was mystified.

She apparently saw this, for she said, “Part of it is knowing where the plants grow when they're in season, Inspector. If you're looking for roots, they're still in the ground even when the stems, leaves, and flowers are gone.” She pointed to her left where an oblong of ground resembled nothing more than a mat of dead leaves from which a spindly bush grew. “Meadowsweet and wolfbane grow there in the summer. Farther up there's a fine patch of chamomile.” She bent and rooted through the weeds at her feet, saying, “And if you're in doubt, the leaves of the plant don't go much farther than the ground beneath it. They disintegrate ultimately, but the process takes ages and in the meantime, you've got your source of identification right here.” She extended her hand. In it she held the remains of a feathery leaf not unlike parsley in appearance. “This tells you where to dig,” she said.

“Show me.”

She did so. No trowel or hoe was necessary. The earth was damp. It was simple enough for her to uproot a plant by pulling on the crown and the stems that remained of it above the ground. She knocked the root stock sharply against her knee to dislodge the clods of earth that were still clinging to it, and both of them stared, without speaking, at the result. She was holding a thickened stock of the plant from which a bundle of tubers grew. She dropped it immediately, as if, without even being ingested, it still had the power to kill.

“Tell me about Mr. Sage,” Lynley said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

H
ER EYES COULDN'T SEEM TO MOVE from the hemlock she had dropped. “Surely I would have seen the multiple tubers,” she said. “I would have known. Even now, I'd
remember
.”

“Were you distracted? Did someone see you? Did someone call out to you while you were digging?”

Still she didn't look at him. “I was in a rush. I came down the slope, made for this spot, cleared away the snow, and found the parsnip.”

“The hemlock, Mrs. Spence. Just as you did now.”

“It had to have been a single root. I would have seen otherwise. I would have known.”

“Tell me about Mr. Sage,” he repeated.

She raised her head. Her expression seemed bleak. “He came to the cottage several times. He wanted to talk about the Church. And Maggie.”

“Why Maggie?”

“She'd grown fond of him. He'd taken an interest in her.”

“What sort of interest?”

“He knew she and I were having our troubles. What mother and daughter don't? He wanted to intercede.”

“Did you object to this?”

“I didn't particularly enjoy feeling inadequate as a mother, if that's what you mean. But I let him come. And I let him talk. Maggie wanted me to see him. I wanted to make Maggie happy.”

“And the night he died? What happened then?”

“Nothing more than had happened before. He wanted to counsel me.”

“About religion? About Maggie?”

“About both, actually. He wanted me to join the Church, and he wanted me to let Maggie do the same.”

“That was the extent of it?”

“Not exactly.” She wiped her hands on the faded bandana which she took from the pocket of her jeans. She balled it up, tucked it into the sleeve of her sweater to join her mittens, and shivered. Her pullover was heavy, but it would not be enough protection against the cold. Seeing this, Lynley decided to continue the interview right where they were. Her uprooting of the water hemlock had given him the whip hand, if only momentarily. He was determined to use it and to strengthen it by whatever means were available. Cold was one of them.

“Then what?” he asked.

“He wanted to talk to me about parenthood, Inspector. He felt I was keeping too tight a rein on my daughter. It was his belief that the more I insisted upon chastity from Maggie, the more I'd drive her away. He felt if she was having sex, she should be taking precautions against pregnancy. I felt she shouldn't be having sex at all, precautions or not. She's thirteen years old. She's little more than a child.”

“Did you argue about her?”

“Did I poison him because he disagreed with how I was bringing her up?” She was trembling, but not from distress, he thought. Aside from the earlier tears which she had managed to control within moments of being tested by them, she didn't really appear to be the sort of woman who would allow herself an overt display of anxiety in the presence of the police. “He didn't have children. He wasn't even married. It's one thing to express an opinion growing out of a mutual experience. It's quite another to offer advice having no basis in anything but reading psychology texts and possessing a glorified ideal of family life. How could I possibly take his concerns to heart?”

“Despite this, you didn't argue with him.”

“No. As I said, I was willing to hear him out. I did that much for Maggie because she was fond of him. And that's the extent of it. I had my beliefs. He had his. He wanted Maggie to use contraceptives. I wanted her to stop complicating her life by having sex in the first place. I didn't think she was ready for it. He thought it was too late to turn her behaviour around. We chose to disagree.”

“And Maggie?”

“What?”

“Where did she stand in this disagreement?”

“We didn't discuss it.”

“Did she discuss it with Sage?”

“I wouldn't know.”

“But they were close.”

“She was fond of him.”

“Did she see him often?”

“Now and again.”

“With your knowledge and approval?”

She lowered her head. Her right foot dug at the weeds in a spasmodic, kicking motion. “We've always been close, Maggie and I, until this business with Nick. So I knew about it when she saw the vicar.”

The nature of the answer said everything. Dread, love, and anxiety. He wondered if they went hand in hand with motherhood.

“What did you serve him for dinner that night?”

“Lamb. Mint jelly. Peas. Parsnips.”

“What happened?”

“We talked. He left shortly after nine.”

“Was he feeling ill?”

“He didn't say. Only that he had a walk ahead of him and since it had been snowing, he ought to be off.”

“You didn't offer to drive him.”

“I wasn't feeling well. I thought it was flu. I was just as happy to have him leave, frankly.”

“Could he have stopped somewhere along the way home?”

Her eyes moved to the Hall on its crest of land, from there to the oak wood beyond it. She appeared to be evaluating this as a possibility, but then she said firmly, “No. There's the lodge—his housekeeper lives there, Polly Yarkin—but that would have taken him out of his way, and I can't see what reason he'd have to stop by and visit with Polly when he saw her every day at the vicarage. Beyond that, it's easier to get back to the village on the footpath. And Colin found him on the footpath the next morning.”

“You didn't think to phone him that night when you yourself were being sick?”

“I didn't attach my condition to the food. I said already, I thought I'd got flu. If he'd mentioned feeling unwell before he left, I might have phoned him. But he hadn't mentioned it. So I didn't make the connection.”

“Yet he died on the footpath. How far is that from here? A mile? Less? He'd have been stricken rather quickly, wouldn't you say?”

“He must have been. Yes.”

“I wonder how it was that he died and you didn't.”

She met his gaze squarely. “I couldn't say.”

He gave her a long ten seconds of silence in which to move her eyes off him. When she didn't do so, he finally nodded and directed his own attention to the pond. The edges, he saw, wore a dingy skin of ice like a coating of wax that encircled the reeds. Each night and day of continued cold weather would extend the skin farther towards the centre of the water. When entirely covered, the pond would look like the frosty ground that surrounded it, appearing to be an uneven but nonetheless innocuous smear of land. The wary would avoid it, seeing it clearly for what it was. The innocent or oblivious would attempt to cross it, breaking through its false and fragile surface to encounter the foul stagnation beneath.

“How are things between you and your daughter now, Mrs. Spence?” he asked. “Does she listen to you now that the vicar's gone?”

Mrs. Spence took the mittens from the sleeves of her pullover. She thrust her hands into them, her fingers bare. It was clear she intended to go back to work. “Maggie isn't listening to anyone,” she said.

Lynley slipped the cassette into the Bentley's tape player and turned up the volume. Helen would have been pleased with the choice, Haydn's Concerto in E-flat Major, with Wynton Marsalis on the trumpet. Uplifting and joyful, with violins supplying the counterpoint to the trumpet's pure notes, it was utterly unlike his usual selection of “some grim Russian. Good Lord, Tommy, didn't they compose anything just the merest bit listener-friendly? What made them so ghoulish? D'you think it was the weather?” He smiled at the thought of her. “Johann Strauss,” she would request. “Oh, all right. I know. Simply too pedestrian for your lofty taste. Then compromise. Mozart.” And in would pop
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
, the only piece by Mozart which Helen could invariably identify, announcing that her ability to do so kept her free of the epithet
absolute philistine
.

He drove south, away from the village. He put the thought of Helen aside.

He passed beneath the bare tree branches and headed for the moors, thinking about one of the basic tenets of criminology: There is always a relationship between the killer and the victim in a premeditated murder. This is not the case in a serial killing where the killer is driven by rages and urges incomprehensible to the society in which he lives. Nor is it always the case in a crime of passion when a murder grows out of an unexpected, transitory, but nonetheless virulent blaze of anger, jealousy, revenge, or hate. Nor is it like an accidental death in which the forces of coincidence bring the killer and the victim together for one moment of inalterable time. Premeditated murder grows out of a relationship. Sort through the relationships that the victim has had, and inevitably the killer turns up.

This bit of knowlege was part of every policeman's bible. It went hand in glove with the fact that most victims know their killers. It was second cousin to the additional fact that most killings are committed by one of the victim's immediate relatives. Juliet Spence may well have poisoned Robin Sage in a horrible accident the consequences of which she would have to wrestle with for the rest of her life. It would not be the first time someone with a bent towards the natural and organic life picked up a wild-grown bit of root or fungi, flowers or fruit and ended up killing himself or someone else as a result of an error in identification. But if St. James was correct—if Juliet Spence couldn't have realistically survived even the smallest ingestion of water hemlock, if the symptoms of fever and vomiting couldn't be attached to hemlock poisoning in the first place—then there had to be a connection between Juliet Spence and the man who had died at her hands. If this was the case, then the superficial connection appeared to be Juliet's daughter, Maggie.

The grammar school, an uninteresting brick building that sat at the triangle created by the juncture of two converging streets, was not far from the centre of Clitheroe. It was eleven-forty when he pulled into the car park and slid carefully into the space left between an antique Austin-Healey and a conventional Golf of recent vintage with an infant's safety seat riding as passenger. A small homemade sticker reading
Mind The Baby
was affixed to the Golf's rear window.

Lessons were in progress inside the school, judging from both the emptiness of the long linoleum-floored corridors and the closed doors that lined them. The administration offices were just inside, facing one another to the left and the right of the entrance. At one time suitable titles had been painted in black upon the opaque glass that comprised the upper half of their doors, but the passing years had reduced the letters to speckles the approximate colour of wet soot, from which one could barely make out the words
headmistress, bursar, masters' common room
, and
second master
in self-important Graeco-Roman printing.

He chose the headmistress. After a few minutes' loud and repetitive conversation with an octogenarian secretary whom he found nodding over a strip of knitting that appeared to be the sleeve of a sweater appropriate in size for a male gorilla, he was shown into the headmistress' study.
Mrs. Crone
was engraved across a placard that sat on her desk. An unfortunate name, Lynley thought. He spent the moments until her arrival considering all the possible sobriquets the pupils probably had invented for her. They seemed infinite in both variety and connotation.

She turned out to be the antithesis of all of them, in a pencil-tight skirt hemmed a good five inches above the knee and an over-long cardigan with padded shoulders and enormous buttons. She wore discoidal gold earrings, a necklace to match, and shoes whose skyscraper heels directed the eye inexorably to an outstanding pair of ankles. She was the sort of woman who asked for the once-over twice or more, and as he forced his eyes to remain on her face, Lynley wondered how the school's board of governors had ever settled upon such a creature for the job. She couldn't have been more than twenty-eight years old.

He managed to make his request with the minimum of time given to speculating what she looked like naked, forgiving himself for the instant of fantasy by telling himself it was the curse of being male. In the presence of a beautiful woman, he had always experienced that knee-jerk reaction of being reduced—if only momentarily—to skin, bone, and testosterone. He liked to believe that this response to an exposure to feminine stimuli had nothing to do with who he really was and where his loyalties lay. But he could imagine Helen's reaction to this minor and assuredly inconsequential battle with lust-in-the-heart, so he engaged in a mental explanation of his behaviour, using terms like
idle curiosity
and
scientific study
and
for God's sake stop overreacting to things, Helen
, as if she were present, standing in the corner, silently watching, and knowing his thoughts.