Missing Joseph Part 46

"-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 ash.o.r.e 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 compa.s.sion 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 justifi able 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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 h.e.l.l," 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 wh.o.r.e. 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 c.u.mbria, where, he informed Lynley, the snow had begun falling at noon and followed them all the way back to Lancas.h.i.+re.

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?"

"She gave no reason. Just that she'd found another job and she thought it was time."

"How long had she been there?"

"Two years there. Two years in Aspatria."

"And before that?" Lynley glanced up as Helen returned with at least a metre's worth of fax hanging over her arm. She handed it to him. He laid it on the desk.

"Two years on Tiree."

"The Hebrides?"

"Yes. And before that Benbecula. You're seeing the pattern, I take it?"

He was. Each location was more remote than the last. At this rate, he expected her first place of employment to be Iceland.

"That's where the trail went cold," St. James said. "She worked in a small guesthouse on Benbecula, but no one there could tell me where she'd been employed before that."

"Curious."

"Considering how long ago it was, I can't say there's great cause for suspicion in the fact. On the other hand, her life-style itself sounds rather suspect to me, but I suppose I'm more tied to home and hearth than most."

Helen sat down in the chair facing Lynley's desk. He'd turned on the desk lamp rather than the fluorescent lights overhead, so she was partially in shadow with a streak of brightness falling mostly across her hands. She was wearing, he noted, a pearl ring he'd given her for her twentieth birthday. Odd that he'd not noticed before now.

St. James was saying, "So despite their wanderl.u.s.t, at least they won't be going anywhere for the moment."

"Who?"

"Juliet Spence and Maggie. She wasn't at school today, according to Josie, which made us think at first that they'd heard you'd gone to London and done a bunk as a result."

"You're sure they're still in Winslough?"

"They're here. Josie told us at considerable length over dinner that she'd spoken with Maggie for nearly an hour on the phone round five o'clock. Maggie claims to have flu, which may or may not be the case since she also appears to have had a falling out with her boyfriend and according to Josie, she may have been skipping out on school for that reason. But even if she isn't ill and they're getting ready to run, the snow's been coming down for more than six hours and the roads are h.e.l.l. They're not going anywhere unless they plan to do it on skis." Deborah said something quietly in the background after which St. James added, "Right. Deborah says you might want to hire a Range Rover rather than drive the Bentley back up here. If the snow keeps up, you won't be able to get in any more than anyone else will be able to get out."

Lynley rang off with a promise to think about it.

"Anything?" Helen asked as he picked up the fax and spread it across the desk.

"It's curiouser and curiouser," he replied. He pulled out his spectacles and began to read. The amalgamation of facts were out of order-the first article was about the funeral- and he realised that, with an inattention to detail unusual in her, his sergeant had fed the copies of the newspaper articles into the facsimile machine haphazardly. Irritated, he took a pair of scissors, cut the articles, and was rea.s.sembling them by date, when the telephone rang.

"Denton thinks you're dead," Sergeant Havers said.

"Havers, why in G.o.d's name did you fax me this mess out of order?"

"Did I? I must have got distracted by the bloke using the copy machine next to me. He looked just like Ken Branagh. Although what Ken Branagh would be doing making copies of a handout for an antiques fair is well beyond me. He says you drive too fast, by the way."

"Kenneth Branagh?"

"Denton, Inspector. And since you haven't phoned him, he a.s.sumes you're squashed bug-like somewhere on the M1 or M6. If you'd move in with Helen or she'd move in with you, you'd be making things a h.e.l.l of a lot easier on all of us."

"I'm working on it, Sergeant."

"Good. Give the poor bloke a call, will you? I told him you were alive at one o'clock, but he wasn't buying that since I hadn't actually seen your face. What's a voice on the phone, after all? Someone could have been impersonating you."

"I'll check in," Lynley said. "What do you have? I know Joseph's was a cot death-"

"You've been a busy bloke, haven't you? Make that a double and you'll have put your finger on Juliet Spence as well."

"What?"

"Cot death."

"She had a child die of cot death?"

"No. She died of it herself."

"Havers, for G.o.d's sake. This is the woman in Winslough."

"That may be the case, but the Juliet Spence connected to the Sages in Cornwall is buried in the same graveyard as they are, Inspector. She died forty-four years ago. Make that forty-four years, three months, and sixteen days."

Lynley pulled the stack of clipped and sorted faxes towards him as Helen said, "What is it?" and Havers continued to speak.

"The connection you wanted wasn't between Juliet Spence and Susanna. It was between Susanna and Juliet's mother, Gladys. She's still in Tresillian, as a matter of fact. I had late tea with her this afternoon."

He scanned the information in the first article at the same time as he prolonged the moment when he would have to examine the dark, grainy photograph that accompanied it and make a decision.

"She knew the entire family-Robin grew up in Tresillian, by the by, and she used to keep house for his parents-and she still does the flowers for the church here. She looks about seventy and my guess is she could take us both on in tennis and rout us in a minute. Anyway, she got close to Susanna for a time when Joseph died. Since she'd been through the same thing herself, she wanted to help her, as much as Susanna would let her which, obviously, wasn't a great deal."

He reached in the drawer for a magnifying gla.s.s, played it over the faxed photograph, and wished uselessly that he had the original. The woman in the photograph was fuller of face than was Juliet Spence, with darker hair that curled loosely round her head to her shoulders and below. But more than a decade had pa.s.sed since it had been taken. This woman's youth might have given way to another's middle-age, thinning the face and greying the hair. The shape of the mouth looked right. The eyes seemed similar.

Havers was continuing. "She said she and Susanna spent some time together after they buried him. She said it's something a woman never gets over, losing a child and particularly losing an infant that way. She said she still thinks of her Juliet every day and never forgets her birthday. She always wonders what she might have turned out like. She said she still has dreams about the afternoon when the baby never woke up from her nap."

It was a possibility, as indistinct as the photograph itself, but still undeniably real.

"She had two more children after Juliet, did Gladys. She tried to use that fact to help Susanna see that the worst of her grief would pa.s.s when other babies came. But Gladys'd had one other before Juliet as well and that one lived, so she could never break through to her completely because Susanna'd always remind her of that."

He set down the magnifying gla.s.s and the photograph. There was only one fact he needed to confirm before he moved forward.

"Havers," he said, "what about Susanna's body? Who found it? Where?"

"According to Gladys, she was fish bait. No one ever found her. They had a funeral service, but there's sod all in the grave. Not even a coffin."

He replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle and removed his spectacles. Carefully, he polished them on a handkerchief before returning them to his nose. He looked at his notes-Aspatria, Holystone, Tiree, Benbecula-and saw what she had attempted to do. The why of it all, he was certain, remained where it always had been, with Maggie.

"They're the same person, aren't they?" Helen left her chair and came to stand behind his where she could look over his shoulder at the material spread out before him. She put her hand on his shoulder.

He reached for it. "I think they are," he said.

"What does it mean?"

He spoke contemplatively. "She would have needed a birth certificate for a different pa.s.sport so that she could slip off the ferry when it docked in France. She could have got a copy of the Spence child's certificate at St. Catherine's House-no, it would have been Somerset House then-or she could have pinched the original from Gladys without her knowledge. She'd been visiting her sister in London before her 'suicide.' She would have had time to set everything up."

"But why?" Helen asked. "Why did she do it?"

"Because she may have been the woman taken in adultery after all."

A stealthy movement of the bed awakened Helen the next morning, and she cracked open one eye. A grey light was sifting through the curtains and falling upon her favourite armchair across whose back an overcoat was flung. The clock on the bedside table said just before eight. She murmured, "G.o.d," and plumped her pillow. She closed her eyes with some deliberation. The bed moved again.