Missing Joseph (40 page)

Barbara wanted that independence, or so she kept telling herself. She was thirty-three years old, she'd never established a life of her own unattached to her family and their infinite needs. That she could do so now ought to have been a cause for jubilation at a release from bondage. But somehow it wasn't and it hadn't been since the morning she'd driven her mother to Greenford and settled her into a crisp, new life with Mrs. Flo.

Mrs. Flo had prepared for their arrival in a way that should have set every worry to rest. A welcome sign draped over the narrow stairway's banister, and there were flowers in the entry. Upstairs in her mother's room a porcelain carousel spun round slowly, playing “The Entertainer” in light chiming notes.

“Oh Barbie, Barbie, look!” her mother had breathed, and she rested her chin on the chest of drawers and watched the tiny horses rise and fall.

There were flowers in the bedroom as well, irises in a tall white vase.

“I thought she might need a special moment,” Mrs. Flo said, smoothing her hands against the bodice of her pin-striped shirt-waister. “Ease her in gentle so she knows we mean to make her welcome. I've coffee and poppy seed cakes down below. Bit early for elevenses, isn't it, but I thought you might have to be off fairly quick.”

Barbara nodded. “I'm working on a case in Cambridge.” She looked round the room. It was so clean, crisp, and warm, with the sunlight falling across the daisy carpet. “Thank you,” she said. She wasn't referring to the coffee and cakes.

Mrs. Flo patted her hand. “Don't you worry about Mum. We'll do right by her, Barbie. May I call you Barbie?”

Barbara wanted to tell her that no one but her parents had ever used that name, that it made her feel childlike and in need of care. She was about to correct her, saying, “It's Barbara, please,” when she realised that to do so would be to break the illusion that somehow this was home and these women—her mother, Mrs. Flo, Mrs. Salkild, and Mrs. Pendlebury, one of whom was blind and the other another victim of dementia—constituted a family into which she herself was being offered membership if she cared to accept it. And she did.

So it wasn't so much the prospect of permanently abandoning her mother that caused Barbara to drag her feet from time to time as it became more apparent that her dream of being on her own was about to become reality. It was the prospect of her own abandonment.

For two months now, she had been coming home to an empty house, something she had longed for during the years of her father's lingering illness, something she had deemed completely indispensable when she found herself left to deal with her mother after his death. For what seemed like ages she had sought a solution to caring for her mother, and now that she had one apparently designed by heaven—God, was there another Mrs. Flo anywhere else on earth?—the focus of her plans had shifted from dealing with an ageing parent to dealing with the house. And when the house offered her nothing more to deal with, she'd be face to face with dealing with herself.

Alone, she would have to start thinking about her isolation. And when the King's Arms emptied of her colleagues in the evening—when MacPherson went home to his wife and five children, when Hale went to do increasingly dubious battle with the solicitor who was handling his divorce, when Lynley dashed off to have dinner with Helen, and Nkata drifted off to take one of his six squabbling girlfriends to bed—she'd meander slowly to St. James's Park Station, kicking at rubbish that blew in her path. She'd ride to Waterloo, change to the Northern Line, and hunch on a seat with a copy of
The Times
, feigning interest in national and world events to disguise her growing panic at being alone.

It's no crime to feel this way, she kept telling herself. You've been under someone's thumb for thirty-three years. What else would you expect to feel when the pressure's gone? What do prisoners feel when they're let out of gaol? How about liberated, she answered herself, how about like dancing in the street, like having their hair worked over by one of those posh hairdressers in Knightsbridge who have their windows all draped in black to show off blow-up snaps of gorgeous women with geometric haircuts that never grow out scraggly or get blown by the wind.

Anyone else in her position, she decided, would probably be brimming with plans, working feverishly to get this house in shape to sell so that she could start a new life which, no doubt, would begin with a wardrobe change, a body make-over courtesy of a personal trainer who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger with better teeth, a sudden interest in make-up, and a telephone answering machine to keep track of the messages from a score of admirers all waiting to entwine their lives with hers.

But Barbara had always been a bit more practical than that. She knew change came slowly if it came at all. So right now, the move to Chalk Farm represented nothing more than unknown shops to get used to, unknown streets to navigate, unknown neighbours to meet. All of it would be done on her own, with no voice to hear in the morning save her own, no friendly noise of someone puttering about, and especially no sympathetic companion both ready and eager to listen to her assessment of how things had gone on a given day.

Of course, she'd never had a sympathetic companion involved in her life in the past, only her parents who awaited her nightly arrival, not to engage her in avid conversation but to wolf down supper and get back to the telly where they watched a succession of American melodramas.

Still, her parents had been a human presence in her life for thirty-three long and unbroken years. While they hadn't exactly filled her life with joy and a sense that the future was an unwritten slate, they had been there, needing her. And now no one did.

She realised that she wasn't so much afraid of being alone as she was of becoming one of the nation's invisibles, a woman whose presence in anyone's life had no particular importance. This house in Acton—especially if she brought her mother back to it—would eliminate the chance of her discovering that she was an unnecessary fixture in the world, eating, sleeping, bathing, and eliminating like the rest of mankind, but otherwise expendable. Locking the door, handing over the key to the estate agent, and going on her way meant risking the revelation of her own unimportance. She wanted to avoid that as long as she could.

She crushed out her cigarette, got to her feet, and stretched. Eating Greek food sounded better than did stripping and waxing the kitchen floor. Lamb
souvlakia
on rice,
dolmades
, and a half-bottle of Aristide's marginally drinkable wine. But first the rubbish bag.

It was where she had left it, outside the back door. Barbara was grateful to see that its contents hadn't managed to climb the evolutionary scale from mould and algae to anything with legs. She hoisted it up and trudged along the weed-sprung path to the rubbish bins. She lowered the bag inside just as the telephone began to ring.

“What d'you know, my date for next New Year's,” she muttered. And then, “All right, I'm coming,” as if the caller were telegraphing impatience.

She caught it on the eighth double ring, picking it up to hear a man say, “Ah. Good. You're there. I thought I might have missed you.”

“You mean you don't miss me?” Barbara asked. “And here I was worried you'd be incapable of sleeping with the two of us so many miles apart.”

Lynley chuckled. “How goes the holiday, Sergeant?”

“In fits and starts.”

“You need a change of scenery to take your mind off things.”

“Could be. But why do I think this is heading in a direction I might learn to regret?”

“If the direction's Cornwall?”

“That doesn't sound half bad. Who's buying?”

“I am.”

“You're on, Inspector. When do I leave?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

I
T WAS A QUARTER TO FIVE WHEN Lynley and St. James walked up the short drive to the vicarage. No car was parked there, but a light burned in what appeared to be the kitchen. Another shone behind the curtains from a first-floor room, making a tawny glow against which they could see a figure moving in silhouette, distorted Quasimodo-like from the way the material hung behind the glass. Next to the front door, a collection of rubbish waited to be carted away. It seemed to consist mostly of newspapers, empty containers for household cleaning agents, and dirty rags. These last gave off the distinct and eye-watering smell of ammonia, as if testifying to the victory of antisepsis in whatever war of cleanliness had been waged inside the house.

Lynley rang the bell. St. James looked across the street and frowned thoughtfully at the church. He said, “My guess is that she'll probably have to dig through the local newspapers to get some sort of account of the death, Tommy. I can't think the Bishop of Truro will tell Barbara anything more than his secretary told me. And that's counting on her ability to get in to see him in the first place. He could put her off for days, especially if there
is
something to hide and if Glennaven reported our visit.”

“Havers'll deal with it in one fashion or another. I certainly wouldn't put strong-arming a bishop past her. That sort of thing is her stock in trade.” Lynley rang the bell again.

“But as to Truro's admitting to any nasty proclivities on the part of Sage…”

“That's a problem. But nasty proclivities are only one possibility. We've already seen there are dozens of others, some applying to Sage, some to Mrs. Spence. If Havers uncovers anything questionable, no matter what it is, at least we'll have more to work with than we have at the moment.” Lynley peered through the kitchen window. The light that was on came from a small bulb above the cooker. The room was empty. “Ben Wragg said there was a housekeeper at work here, didn't he?” He rang the bell a third time.

A voice finally responded from behind the door, hesitant and low. “Who's there, please?”

“Scotland Yard CID,” Lynley replied. “I've identification if you'd like to see it.”

The door cracked open, then closed quickly once Lynley had passed the warrant card through. Nearly a minute passed. A tractor rumbled by in the street. A school bus disgorged six uniformed pupils at the edge of the car park in front of St. John the Baptist Church before trundling up the incline with its indicator flashing for the Trough of Bowland.

The door opened again. A woman stood in the entry. She was holding the warrant card mostly enclosed in one fist while her other hand grabbed at the crew neck of her pullover and bunched it up as if she were concerned that it might not be covering her sufficiently. Her hair—a long crinkly mass that looked electrically charged—hid more than half of her face. The shadows hid the rest.

“Vicar's dead, you know,” she said in not much more than a mumble. “Died last month. Constable found him on the footpath. He ate something bad. It was an accident.”

She was stating what she must have known they'd already been told, as if she had no idea at all that New Scotland Yard had been prowling round the village for the last twenty-four hours on the trail of this death. It was difficult to believe that she wouldn't have heard of their presence before this, especially, Lynley realised as he studied her, since she certainly had been sitting in the pub with a male companion on the previous night when St. John Townley-Young had paid his call. Townley-Young had accosted the man with her, in fact.

She didn't move away from the doorway to let them in. But she shivered from the cold, and Lynley looked down to see that her feet were bare. He also saw that she was wearing trousers, fine grey herring bone.

“May we come in?”

“It was an accident,” she said. “Everyone knows that.”

“We won't stay long. And you ought to get out of the cold.”

She gripped her pullover's neck more tightly. She looked from him to St. James and back to him before she stepped away from the door and admitted them into the house.

“You're the housekeeper?” Lynley asked.

“Polly Yarkin,” she said.

Lynley introduced St. James and went on to say, “May we talk to you?” He felt the curious need to be gentle with her, and he couldn't determine exactly why. There was something both frightened and defeated in her air, like a horse that's been broken by an ill-tempered hand. She seemed ready to bolt in an instant.

She led them into the sitting room where she turned the switch on a floor lamp to no effect. She said, “Bulb's gone, isn't it,” and left them alone.

In the diminishing light of dusk, they could see that whatever personal possessions the vicar had owned, they were gone. What was left was a sofa, an ottoman, and two chairs arranged round a coffee table. Across from them a bookshelf reached from floor to ceiling, empty of books. Something glittered on the floor next to this, and Lynley went to investigate. St. James strolled to the window and pushed the curtains to one side, saying, “Nothing much out there. The shrubs look bad. There're plants on the step,” mostly to himself.

Lynley picked up a small globe of silver that lay, unhinged and open, on the carpet. Scattered round it were the desiccated remains of triangular fleshy bits that appeared to be fruit. He picked up one of these as well. It had no scent. Its texture was like a dried sponge. The globe was connected to a matching silver chain. Its clasp was broken.

“That's mine.” Polly Yarkin had returned, lightbulb in hand. “I wondered where it got itself off to.”

“What is it?”

“Amulet. For health. Mum likes me to wear it. Silly. Like garlic. But you can't tell Mum that. She's ever one to believe in charms.”

Lynley handed it to her. She returned his warrant card. Her fingers felt feverish. She went to the floor lamp, changed the bulb, switched it on, and retreated to one of the chairs which she stood behind, her hands curved round its back.

Lynley went to the sofa. St. James joined him. She nodded at them to sit, although it seemed clear that she had no intention of sitting herself. Lynley gestured to the chair, said, “This won't take long,” and waited for her to move.

She did so reluctantly, one hand holding on to the back of the chair as if she would pull herself behind it again. Sitting, she was more fully in the light, and it appeared that light and not their company was what she wished to avoid.

He saw for the first time that the trousers she wore belonged to a man's suit. They were far too long. She'd rolled the bottoms into bulky cuffs.

“Vicar's,” she said in hesitant explanation. “I don't think anyone will mind, do you? I tripped on the back step just a bit ago. Ripped my skirt up proper. Clumsy as an old cow, I am.”

He raised his eyes to her face. An angry red welt curved from under the protective curtain of her hair, marking a path that ended at the corner of her mouth.

“Clumsy,” she said again, and she gave a little laugh. “I'm always running into things. Mum should've gave me an amulet to keep me steady on my feet.”

She pushed her hair forward a bit more. Lynley wondered what else she was trying to hide on her face. Her skin was shiny across what he could see of her forehead, perspiration either from nerves or from illness. It wasn't warm enough in the house for the sheen of sweat to be realistically from anything else. He said, “Are you quite all right? May we phone a doctor for you?”

She rolled the trouser cuffs down to cover her feet and tucked the extra material round them. “I never seen a doctor these past ten years. I just fell. I'm all right.”

“But if you've hit your head—”

“Just banged up my face on that silly door, didn't I?” She backed herself cautiously into the chair and put one hand on each arm. Her movement was slow and it looked deliberate, as if she were digging out of her memory the appropriate way to sit and behave when someone came to call. But something about her manner—perhaps it was the way her arms moved, like mechanical extensions of her body, or the way her fingers uncurled with an effort and lay flat against the chair's upholstery—suggested that she really wanted nothing so much as to cradle herself, doubled over, until some interior pain went away. When neither Lynley nor St. James spoke at once, she said, “Church wardens asked me to keep the place up and get it ready for another vicar. I've been cleaning. Sometimes I work too hard and get a bit sore. You know.”

“You've been working on the house since the vicar died?” It seemed unlikely. The place wasn't that large.

“It takes time, doesn't it, to get things sorted out proper and to make them tidy when someone passes on.”

“You've done a good job.”

“It's just that they always look the vicarage over, don't they, the new ones? It helps them make a decision if they get offered the job.”

“Is that how it worked with Mr. Sage? Did he come to look the vicarage over before he took the position?”

“He didn't mind what it was like. I s'pose it was because he didn't have a family so it didn't much matter about the house. There was only him in it.”

“Did he ever speak of a wife?” St. James asked.

Polly reached for the amulet which lay in her lap. “Wife? Was he thinking of getting married?”

“He'd been married. He was a widower.”

“He never said. I thought…Well, he didn't seem much interested in women, did he?”

Lynley and St. James exchanged a glance. Lynley said, “How do you mean?”

Polly picked up the amulet and closed her fingers round it, returning her hand to the arm of the chair. “He never acted any different with the church-cleaning ladies than he did with the blokes that ring the bells. I always thought…I thought, well, maybe the vicar's too holy. Maybe he doesn't think about ladies and such. He read the Bible lots, after all. He prayed. He wanted me to pray with him. He'd always say, Let's start the day with a prayer, dear Polly.”

“What sort of prayer?”

“‘God, help us to know Your will and to find the way.'”

“That was the prayer?”

“Mostly. But it was longer'n that. I always wondered what way I was s'posed to find.” Her lips curved briefly. “Find the way to cook the meat proper, I guess. Except he never complained about my cooking, the vicar. He said, You cook like Saint Somebody-or-other, dear Polly. I forget who. St. Michael? Did he cook?”

“I think he fought the devil.”

“Oh. Well. I'm not religious. I mean the kind of religion with churches and such. Vicar didn't know that, which is just as well.”

“If he admired your cooking, he must have told you he'd not be home for dinner the night he died.”

“He only said that he wouldn't be wanting any dinner. I didn't know he was going out. I just thought maybe he wasn't feeling right.”

“Why?”

“He'd been holed up in his bedroom all day, hadn't he, and he didn't eat his lunch. He came out once round tea time to use the phone in the study, but he went right back to his room when he was done.”

“What time was this?”

“Round three, I guess.”

“Did you hear his conversation?”

She opened her palm and looked at the amulet. She rolled her fingers against it. “I was a tad worried about him. It wasn't like Mr. Sage not to eat.”

“So you heard his conversation.”

“Just a tad is all. And only because I was worried. It wasn't like I was listening to
hear
. I mean, he wasn't sleeping well, the vicar. His bed was always thrashed up in the morning like he was wrestling with the sheets. And he—”

Lynley leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He said, “It's all right, Polly. You had good intentions. No one's about to judge you for listening at a door.”

She didn't look convinced. Distrust flickered behind the skittish movement of her eyes from Lynley to St. James back to Lynley.

“What did he say?” Lynley asked. “Who was he talking to?”

“You can't judge what happened then. You can't know what's right now. That's in God's hands, not yours.”

“We aren't here to judge. That's up to—”

“No,” Polly said. “That's what I heard. That's what the vicar said. You can't judge what happened then. You can't know what's right now. That's in God's hands, not yours.”

“Was that the only phone call he made that day?”

“Far's I know.”

“Was he angry? Was he shouting, raising his voice?”

“He sounded tired, mostly.”

“You didn't see him afterwards?”

She shook her head. Afterwards, she said, she took tea to the study, only to find that he'd gone back up to his bedroom. She followed him there and knocked on the door, offering him the food which he refused.

“I said, You haven't had a bite all day, Vicar, and you must eat something, and I'm not leaving this spot until you have a bite of these nice toast fingers I've got here. So he finally opened the door. He was dressed, and the bed was made but I knew what he'd been doing.”

“What?”

“Praying. He had this little prayer place in a corner of the room with a Bible on it and a place to kneel. That's where he'd been.”

“How do you know?”

She rubbed her fingers against her knee in explanation. “Trousers. The crease was gone from right here. There were wrinkle places as well, where his leg bent to kneel.”

“What did he say to you?”

“That I was a good soul but I mustn't worry. I asked him was he ill. He said no.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I said, You're wearing yourself out, Vicar, with these trips to London. He'd just got back the day before, see. And every time he went to London, he looked a bit worse than the last time he went. And every time he went, he came home and prayed. Sometimes I wondered…Well, what was he up to in London that he came back so tired and peaky looking? But then, he went on the train, didn't he, so I thought maybe it was just the aggravation of travel and such. Getting to the station, buying all the tickets, switching trains here and there. That sort of thing. Makes you tired, a trip like that.”