Missing Joseph

  His father’s fists clenched. He raised his arms then dropped them. “You’re as stubborn an ass as you were twenty years ago. As stupid as well.”

  Colin shrugged.

  “You have no choice now. You know that, don’t you? You’ve the whole sodding village in a quagmire over this wet fanny you’ve got such a fancy for.”

  Colin’s own fist clenched. He forced himself to release it. “That’s it, Pa. Be on your way. As I recall, you’ve a fanny of your own waiting somewhere this evening.”

  “You’re not too old to be beaten, boy.”

  “True. But this time, you’d probably lose.”

  “After what I did—”

  “You didn’t need to do anything. I didn’t ask you to be here. I didn’t ask you to follow me round like a hound with a good scent of fox up his nose. I had it under control.”

  His father gave a sharp, derisive nod. “Stubborn, stupid, and blind as well.” He left the kitchen and went to the front door where he battled his way into his jacket and shoved his left foot into one of his boots. “You’re lucky they’ve come.”

  “I don’t need them. She did nothing.”

  “Save poison the vicar.”

  “By accident, Pa.”

  His father jerked on the second boot and straightened up. “You’d better pray on that, son. Because there’s one hell of a cloud hanging over you now. In the village. In Clitheroe. All the way to Hutton-Preston. And the only way it’s about to clear off is if the Yard’s CID don’t smell something nasty in your lady friend’s bed.”

  He fished his leather gloves from his pocket and began to pull them on. He didn’t speak again until he’d squashed his peaked cap on his head. Then he peered at his son sharply.

  “You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you? You’ve done no holding back?”

  “Pa—”

  “Because if you’ve covered up for her, you’re through. You’re sacked. You’re indicted. That’s the number. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Colin saw the anxiety in his father’s eyes and heard it beneath the anger in his voice. He knew there was a measure of paternal solicitude in it, but he also knew that beyond the reality that a cover-up would lead to an investigation and a trial, it was the complete incomprehensibility of the fact that he wasn’t hungry that picked at his father’s peace. He had never been restless. He didn’t yearn for a higher rank and the right to sit comfortably behind a desk. He was thirty-four years old and still a village constable and as far as his father was concerned, there had to be a good reason why. I like it wasn’t good enough. I love the countryside would never do. The Chief Inspector might have bought I can’t leave my Annie a year ago, but he’d fly into a rage if Colin spoke of Annie while Juliet Spence was part of his life.

  And now, there was the potential humiliation of his son’s involvement in the cover-up of a crime. He’d rested easy when the coroner’s jury had reached their verdict. He’d be in a hornets’ nest of dread until Scotland Yard completed their investigation and verified that there had been no crime.

  “Colin,” his father said again. “You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you? Nothing held back?”

  Colin met his gaze directly. He was proud he could do so. “Nothing held back,” he said.

  It was only when he’d closed the door upon his father that Colin felt his legs weaken. He grasped onto the knob and leaned his forehead against the wood.

  It was nothing to concern himself with. No one would ever need to know. He’d not even thought of it himself until the Scotland Yard DI had asked his question and triggered the memory of Juliet and the gun.

  He’d gone to speak to her after receiving three angry phone calls from three frightened sets of parents whose sons had been out for a frolic on the grounds of Cotes Hall. She’d been living at the Hall in the caretaker’s cottage just a year then, a tall, angular woman who kept to herself, made her money from growing herbs and brewing up potions, hiked vigorously across the moors with her daughter, and seldom came into the village for anything. She bought groceries in Clitheroe. She bought gardening supplies in Burnley. She examined crafts and sold plants and dried herbs in Laneshawbridge. She took her daughter on the occasional excursion, but her choices were always a margin off-beat, like the Lewis Textile Museum rather than Lancaster Castle, like Hoghton Tower’s collection of dolls’ houses rather than Blackpool’s diversions by the sea. But these were things he discovered later. At first, bucking down the rutted lane in his old Land Rover, he thought only of the idiocy of a woman who’d shoot into the darkness at three young boys making animal noises at the edge of the woods. And a shotgun at that. Anything could have happened.

  The sun was filtering through the oak wood on that afternoon. Beads of green lined the branches of trees as a late winter day gave way to spring. He was rounding a bend in the blasted road that the Townley-Youngs had been refusing to repair for the better part of a decade when through the open window came the sharp scent of cut lavender and with it one of those stabbing memories of Annie. So blinding it was, so momentarily real that he trod on the brake, half expecting her to come at a run from the woods, there where the lavender had been planted thickly at the edge of the road more than one hundred years ago when Cotes Hall lay in readiness for its bridegroom who had never arrived.

  They’d been out here a thousand times, he and Annie, and she usually plucked at the lavender bushes as she made her way along the lane, filling the air with the scent of both the flowers and the foliage, collecting the buds to use in sachets among the wools and the linens at home. He remembered those sachets as well, clumsy little gauze pouches tied with frayed purple ribbon. They always came apart within a week. He was always picking bits of lavender out of his socks and brushing them off the sheets. And despite his protest of “Come on, girl. What good do they do?” she kept industriously tucking the pouches into every corner of the house, even once into his shoes, saying, “Moths, Col. We can’t have moths, can we?”

  After she died, he rid the house of them in an ineffective attempt to rid the house of her. Directly he swept her medicines from the bedside table, directly he pulled her clothes from their hangers and pushed her shoes into rubbish bags, directly he took her scent bottles into the rear garden and smashed them one by one with a hammer as if by that action he could smash away the rage, he went on a search for Annie’s sachets.

  But the smell of lavender always thrust her before him. It was worse than at night when his dreams allowed him to see her, remember, and long for what she once had been. In the day, with only the scent to haunt him, she was just out of reach, like a whisper carried past him on the wind.

  He thought Annie, Annie and stared at the lane with his hands gripping the steering wheel.

  So he didn’t see Juliet Spence at once, and thus she had the initial advantage over him, which he sometimes thought she maintained to this day. She said, “Are you quite all right, Constable?” and he snapped his head to the open window to see that she had come out of the woods with a basket on her arm and the knees of her blue jeans crusted with mud.

  It didn’t seem the least odd that Mrs. Spence should know who he was. The village was small. She would have seen him before now even though they had never been introduced. Beyond that, Townley-Young would have told her that he made periodic visits to the Hall as part of his evening rounds. She might even have noticed him on occasion from her cottage window when he rumbled through the courtyard and shone his torch here and there against the boarded windows of the mansion, checking to make sure that its crumble to ruin stayed in the hands of nature and was not usurped by man.

  He ignored her question and got out of the Rover. He said, although he knew the answer already, “It’s Mrs. Spence, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “Are you aware of the fact that last night you discharged your shotgun in the direction of three twelve-year-old boys? In the direction of children, Mrs. Spence?”

  She had odd bits of greenery, ro
ots, and twigs in her basket, along with a trowel and a pair of secateurs. She picked up the trowel, dislodged a heavy clod of mud from its tip, and rubbed her fingers along the side of her jeans. Her hands were large and dirty. Her fingernails were clipped. They looked like a man’s. She said, “Come to the cottage, Mr. Shepherd.”

  She turned on her heel and walked back into the woods, leaving him to jostle and jolt the last half mile along the road. By the time he’d crunched into the courtyard across the gravel and pulled to a halt in the shadow of the Hall, she’d got rid of her basket, brushed the mud from her jeans, washed her hands so thoroughly that her skin looked abraded, and set a kettle to boil on the cooker.

  The front door stood open and when he mounted the single step that did for a porch, she said, “I’m in the kitchen, Constable. Come in.”

  Tea, he thought. Questions and answers all controlled through the ritual of pouring, passing sugar and milk, shaking Hob Nobs onto a chipped floral plate. Clever, he thought.

  But instead of making tea, she poured the boiling water slowly into a large metal pan in which glass jars stood in water of their own. She set the pan onto the cooker as well.

  “Things need to be sterile,” she said. “People die so easily when someone is foolish and thinks of making preserves without sterilising first.”

  He looked round the kitchen and tried to get a glimpse of the larder beyond it. The time of year seemed decidedly odd for what she was proposing. “What are you preserving?”

  “I might ask the same of you.”

  She went to a cupboard and took down two glasses and a decanter from which she poured a liquid that was in colour somewhere just between dirt-toned and amber. It was cloudy, and when she placed a glass in front of him on the table where he’d gone to sit unbidden in an attempt to establish some sort of authority over her, he picked it up suspiciously and sniffed. What did it smell like? Bark? Old cheese?

  She chuckled and swallowed a healthy portion of her own. She put the decanter on the table, sat down across from him, and circled her hands round her glass. “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s made from dandelion and elder. I drink it every day.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “I use it for purging.” She smiled and drank again.

  He lifted the glass. She watched. Not his hands as he lifted, not his mouth as he drank, but his eyes. That was what struck him later when he thought about their first encounter: how she never took her eyes from his. He himself was curious and gathered quick impressions about her: she wore no make-up; her hair was greying but her skin was lined only faintly so she couldn’t be that much older than he; she smelled vaguely of sweat and earth, and a smudge of dirt made a patch above her eye like an oval birth mark; her shirt was a man’s, over-large, frayed at the collar and ripped at the cuffs; at the V made where it buttoned, he could see the initial arc of one breast; her wrists were large; her shoulders were broad; he imagined the two of them could wear each other’s clothes.

  “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.