Missing Joseph

  She sank back in her chair, staring at him. “Christ,” she said. “How the hell does Helen put up with you?”

  He smiled briefly and removed his spectacles which he returned to his pocket. “She doesn’t, at the moment, actually.”

  “No trip to Corfu?”

  “I’m afraid not. Unless she goes alone. Which, as we both know, she’s been perfectly willing to do before.”

  “Why?”

  “I upset her equilibrium.”

  “I don’t mean why then. I mean why now.”

  “I see.” He swivelled the chair, not towards the cabinet and the picture of Helen, but towards the window where the upper floors of the dreary post-war construction that was the Home Office nearly matched the colour of the leaden sky. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “We fell out over a tie, I’m afraid.”

  “A tie?”

  As a means of clarification, he gestured to the one he was wearing. “I’d hung a tie on the door knob last night.”

  Barbara frowned. “Force of habit, you mean? Like squeezing toothpaste from the middle of the tube? Something that gets on one’s nerves once the stars of romance start twinkling less brightly?”

  “I only wish.”

  “Then what?”

  He sighed. She could tell he didn’t want to go into it. She said, “Never mind. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I mean the holiday. I know you were looking forward to it.”

  He played with the knot at his throat. “I’d left my tie on the door knob—outside the door—before we went to bed.”

  “So?”

  “I didn’t pause to think she might notice, and beyond that it’s something I’m used to doing on occasion.”

  “So?”

  “And she didn’t notice, actually. But she did ask how it was that Denton has never once disturbed us in the morning since we’ve been…together.”

  Barbara saw the dawn. “Oh. I get it. He sees the tie. It’s a signal. He knows that someone’s with you.”

  “Well…yes.”

  “And you told her that? Jesus, what an idiot, Inspector.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I was wandering like a schoolboy in that blithering state of sexual euphoria when no one thinks. She said, ‘Tommy, how is it that Denton has never once stumbled in with your morning tea on the nights I’ve stayed?’ And I actually told her the truth.”

  “That you’d been using the tie to tell Denton that Helen was in the bedroom?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you’d done it with other women in the past?”

  “God no. I’m not that much of an idiot. Although it wouldn’t have made any difference had I said it. She assumed I’d been using it that way for years.”

  “And had you?”

  “Yes. No. Well, not recently, for God’s sake. I mean, only with her. Which isn’t meant to imply that I didn’t put a tie on the knob for someone else. But there hasn’t been anyone else since she and I…Oh blast it.” He waved off the rest.

  Barbara nodded solemnly. “I’m certainly getting the idea of how the old grave was dug.”

  “She claims it’s an example of my inherent misogyny: my valet and I exchanging a lubricious chuckle over breakfast about who’s been moaning the loudest in my bed.”

  “Which you’ve never done, of course.”

  He swung his chair back to her. “What exactly do you take me for, Sergeant?”

  “Nothing. Just yourself.” She poked at the hole on her knee with more interest. “Of course, you always could have given up early morning tea all together. I mean, once you started having women spend the night. That way you’d never have needed a signal. Or you could have started brewing morning tea yourself and nipping back up to your bedroom with the tray.” She pressed her lips together at the thought of Lynley stumbling round his kitchen—assuming he even knew where it was in the first place—trying to find the kettle and to work the cooker. “I mean, it would have been sort of liberating for you, sir. You might even have ultimately ventured into toast.”

  And then she giggled, although it sounded more like a snort, slipping out from between her pressed lips. She covered her mouth and watched him over the top of her hand, half in shame at her making a joke of his situation and half in amusement at the thought of him—in the midst of frenzied, determined seduction—surreptitiously hanging a tie on his door knob in such a way that his lady love wouldn’t notice and question why he was doing it.

  His face was wooden. He shook his head. He fingered the rest of Hillier’s report. “I don’t know,” he said gravely. “I don’t see how I could ever manage toast.”

  She guffawed. He chuckled.

  “At least we don’t have that sort of trouble in Acton.” Barbara laughed.

  “Which is, no doubt, partially why you’re reluctant to leave.”

  What a marksman, she thought. He wouldn’t miss an opening if he was wearing a blindfold. She got up from her chair and walked to the window, slipping her fingers into the rear pockets of her jeans.

  “Isn’t that why you’re here?” he asked her.

  “I told you why. I was in the area.”

  “You were looking for distraction, Havers. As was I.”

  She gazed out the window. She could see the tops of the trees in St. James’s Park. Completely bare, rustling in the wind, they looked like sketchings against the sky.

  “I don’t know, Inspector,” she said. “It seems like a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. I know what I want to do. I’m scared to do it.”

  The telephone rang on Lynley’s desk. She started to answer it.

  “Leave it,” he said. “We’re not here, remember?” They both watched it as it continued to ring, the way people do when they expect their collective will to have some small influence over another’s actions. It finally stopped.

  “But I suppose you can relate to that,” Barbara went on as if the telephone had not interrupted them.

  “It’s something about the gods,” Lynley said. “When they want to make you mad, they give you what you most desire.”

  “Helen,” she said.

  “Freedom,” he said.

  “We’re one hell of a pair.”

  “Detective Inspector Lynley?” Dorothea Harriman stood in the doorway, wearing a trim black suit relieved by grey piping on collar and lapels. A pillbox hat was perched on her head. She looked ready for an appearance on the balcony of Buck House on Remembrance Sunday should she be summoned to dwell among the royals. Only the poppy was missing.

  “Yes, Dee?” Lynley asked.

  “Telephone.”

  “I’m not here.”

  “But—”

  “The sergeant and I are unavailable, Dee.”

  “But it’s Mr. St. James. He’s phoning from Lancashire.”

  “St. James?” Lynley looked at Barbara. “Haven’t he and Deborah gone on holiday?”

  Barbara raised her shoulders. “Haven’t we all?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LYNLEY WAS DRIVING UP THE ACCLIVITY of the Clitheroe Road towards the village of Winslough by late afternoon. Mellow sunlight, fading as day drew towards night, pierced the winter mist that lay over the land. In narrow bands, it glanced against the old stone structures—church, school, houses, and shops that rose in a serried display of Lancashire’s stalwart architecture—and it changed the colour of the buildings to ochre, from their normally sombre tan-soaked-with-soot. Beneath the tyres of the Bentley, the road was wet, as it always seemed to be in the North at this time of year, and pools of water from both ice and frost, which gathered and melted and gathered again on a nightly basis, glimmered in the light. Upon their surfaces the sky was reflected, as were the vertebral forms of hedges and trees.

  He slowed the car some fifty yards from the church. He parked on the verge and got out into the knife-sharp air. He could smell the smoke from a fresh, dry-wood fire nearby. This argued for dominance with the prevalent odours of manure, turned earth, wet and rottin
g vegetation which emanated from the expanse of open land lying just beyond the brambly hedge that bordered the road. He looked past this. To his left, the hedge curved northeast with the road, giving way to the church and then, perhaps a quarter of a mile farther on, to the village itself. To his far right, a stand of trees thickened into an old oak wood above which rose a hill that was sided by frost and topped by a wavering wreath of mist. And directly in front of him, the open field dipped languidly down to a crooked stream from which the land lifted again on the other side in a patchwork of drystone walls. Among these stood farms, and from them even at this distance Lynley could hear the bleating of sheep.

  He leaned against the side of the car and gazed at St. John the Baptist’s. Like the village itself, the church was a plain structure, roofed in slate and ornamented only by its clock-faced bell tower and Norman crenellation. Surrounded by a graveyard and chestnut trees, backdropped by a misty egg-shell sky, it didn’t much look like a player in a set piece with murder at its core.

  Priests, after all, were supposed to be minor characters in the drama of life and death. Theirs was the role of conciliator, counsellor, and general intermediary between the penitent, the petitioner, and the Lord. They offered a service elevated both in efficacy and importance as a result of its connection to the divine, but because of this fact there was a measured distance between them and the members of their congregation, one which seemed to preclude the sort of intimacy that led to murder.

  Yet this chain of thought was sophistry, Lynley knew. Everything from the monitory aphorism about the wolf in sheep’s clothing to that time-worn hypocrite the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale bore evidence of that. Even if this were not the case, Lynley had been a policeman long enough to know that the most guileless exterior—not to mention the most exalted position—had the fullest potential to hide culpability, sin, and shame. Thus, if murder had shattered the peace of this somnolent countryside, the fault did not lie in the stars or in the ceaseless movement of the planets, but rather at the centre of a guarded heart.

  “There’s something peculiar going on,” St. James had said on the phone that morning. “From what I’ve been able to gather, the local constable apparently managed to avoid calling in his divisional CID for anything more than a cursory investigation. And he seems to be involved with the woman who fed this priest—Robin Sage—the hemlock in the first place.”

  “Surely there was an inquest, St. James.”

  “There was. The woman—she’s called Juliet Spence—admitted doing it and claimed it was an accident.”

  “Well, if the case went no further and the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of accidental poisoning, we have to assume that the autopsy and whatever other evidence there was—no matter who gathered it—verified her account.”

  “But when you consider the fact that she’s a herbalist—”

  “People make mistakes. Consider how many deaths have risen from a putative fungi expert’s picking the wrong sort of wild mushroom in the woods and cooking it up for dinner and death.”

  “This isn’t quite the same.”

  “You said she mistook it for wild parsnip, didn’t you?”

  “I did. And that’s where the story goes bad.”

  St. James set forth the facts. While it was true, he said, that the plant was not immediately distinguishable from a number of other members of its family—the Umbelliferae—the similarities among the genera and the species were confined largely to the parts of the plant that one wouldn’t be drawn to eating in the first place: the leaves, the stems, the flowers, and the fruit.

  Why not the fruit, Lynley wanted to know. Didn’t this entire situation arise from the act of picking, cooking, and eating the fruit?

  Not at all, St. James told him. Although the fruit was as poisonous as the rest of the plant, it consisted of dry, two-part capsules that, unlike a peach or an apple, weren’t fleshy and hence gastronomically attractive. Someone harvesting water hemlock, thinking it was wild parsnip, would not be eating the fruit at all. Rather, he’d be digging up the plant and using the root.

  “And that’s the rub,” St. James said.

  “The root bears the distinguishing characteristics, I take it.”

  “It does.”

  Lynley had to admit that, while the characteristics weren’t legion, they were enough to rouse his own sleeping disquiet. This was, in part, why he unpacked the clothing he’d put in his suitcase for a week in the mild winter of Corfu, repacked it for the insidious bone-chill of the North, and made his way up the M1 to the M6 and thence deep into Lancashire with its desolate moors, its cloud-covered fells, and its antique villages from which more than three hundred years ago had sprung his country’s ugliest fascination with witchcraft.

  Roughlee, Blacko, and Pendle Hill were none of them too distant in either miles or memory from the village of Winslough. Nor was the Trough of Bowland through which twenty women were marched to their trials and their deaths at Lancaster Castle. It was historical fact that persecution raised its nasty head most often when tensions rose and a scapegoat was needed to diffuse and displace them. Lynley wondered idly if the death of the local vicar at the hands of a woman was tension enough.

  He turned from his contemplation of the church and went back to the Bentley. He switched on the ignition, and the tape he’d been listening to since Clitheroe resumed. Mozart’s Requiem. Its sombre combination of strings and woodwinds, accompanying the solemn, low intonation of the choir, seemed appropriate to the circumstances. He guided the car back into the road.

  If it wasn’t a mistake that killed Robin Sage, it was something else, and the facts suggested that something else was murder. As did the plant, that conclusion grew from the root.

  “One distinguishes water hemlock from other members of the Umbelliferae by the root,” St. James had explained. “Wild parsnip has a single root stock. Water hemlock has a tuberous bundle of roots.”

  “But isn’t it within the realm of possibility that this particular plant had only one root stock?”

  “It’s possible, yes. Just as another sort of plant might have its opposite: two or three adventitious roots. But statistically speaking, it’s unlikely, Tommy.”

  “Still, one can’t discount it.”

  “Agreed. But even if this particular plant had been an anomaly of that sort, there are other characteristics to the underground portion of the stem that one would think a herbalist would notice. When cut open lengthwise, the stem of water hemlock displays nodes and internodes.”

  “Help me out here, Simon. Science isn’t my field.”

  “Sorry. I suppose you’d call them chambers. They’re hollow, with a diaphragm of pith tissue running horizontally across the cavity.”

  “And wild parsnip doesn’t have these chambers?”

  “Nor does it exude a yellow oily liquid when its stem is cut.”

  “But would she have cut the stem? Would she have opened it lengthwise?”

  “The latter, no. I admit it’s doubtful. But as to the former: How could she have removed the root—even if it was the anomaly, a single one—without cutting the stem in some way? Even breaking the root off from the stem would have produced that singular oil.”

  “And you believe that’s enough of a warning to a herbalist? Isn’t it possible that she might have been distracted from noticing? What if someone was with her when she was digging it up? What if she were talking to a friend or arguing with her lover or distracted in some way? Perhaps even deliberately distracted.”

  “Those are possibilities. And they bear looking into, don’t they?”

  “Let me make a few phone calls.”

  He had done so. The nature of the answers he’d managed to dig up had piqued his interest. Since the holiday in Corfu had turned into another one of life’s promises unkept, he threw tweeds, blue jeans, and sweaters in his suitcase and stowed that along with gumboots, hiking shoes, and anorak into the boot of his car. He’d been wanting to get out of London for weeks. While
he’d have preferred his escape to be effected by a flight to Corfu with Helen Clyde, Crofters Inn and Lancashire would have to do.

  He rolled past the terraced houses that signalled entry into the village proper and found the inn at the junction of the three roads, just where St. James had told him it would be. St. James himself, along with Deborah, Lynley found in the pub.

  The pub itself was not yet open for its evening business. The iron wall sconces with their small tasselled shades hadn’t been lit. Near the bar, someone had set out a blackboard upon which the night’s specialities had been printed in a hand that employed oddly pointed letters, sloping lines, and a devotion to fuchsia-coloured chalk. Lasagnia was offered, as were Minuet Steak and Steamed Toffy Pudding. If the spelling was any indication of the cooking, things didn’t look promising. Lynley made a mental note to try the restaurant in lieu of the pub.

  St. James and Deborah were seated beneath one of the two windows that looked out onto the street. On the table between them, the remains of an afternoon tea mixed with beer mats and a stapled sheaf of papers that St. James was in the act of folding and stuffing into his inside jacket pocket. He was saying:

  “Listen to me, Deborah,” to which she was replying, “I won’t. You’re breaking our agreement.” She crossed her arms. Lynley knew that gesture. He slowed his steps.

  Three logs burned in the fireplace next to their table. Deborah turned in her chair and looked into the flames.

  St. James said, “Be reasonable.”

  She said, “Be fair.”

  Then one of the logs shifted and a shower of sparks rained onto the hearth. St. James worked the fire brush. Deborah moved away. She caught sight of Lynley. She said, “Tommy” with a smile and looked a mixture of saved and relieved as he stepped into the greater light that the fire provided. He set his suitcase by the stairway and went to join them.