Missing Joseph

  “On the floor of the barn. Where the animals do it. You remember that.”

  She wrenched her arm away and spun around to run. He caught her skirt as it flared with her movement. He jerked her towards him. The material ripped. He twirled it round his hand and pulled harder. She stumbled but didn’t fall.

  “With my cock inside and you grunting like a sow. You remember that.”

  “Please. No.” She was starting to cry and he found that the sight of her tears inflamed him more than had the thought of her fear. She was penitent sinner. He was avenging god. And her punishment would be a godly justice.

  He grabbed more of the skirt, pulled on it savagely, and heard the satisfactory sound of it giving way. Another pull. Then another. And every time Polly struggled to escape him, the skirt ripped more. “Just like that day in the barn,” he said. “Just what you want.”

  “No. I don’t. Not like this. Col. Please.”

  The name. The name. His hands shot out and tore the rest of the skirt from her body. But she seized the moment of release and ran. She made it to the corridor. She was close to the door. Another three feet and she would escape.

  He leapt and tackled her as her hand grasped the knob of the inner door. They crashed to the floor. She began to flail at him wildly. She didn’t speak. Her arms and legs thrashed. Her body convulsed.

  He struggled to pin down her arms, grunting, “Fuck…you…so…hard.”

  She screamed, “No! Colin!” but he cut her off with his mouth. He drove his tongue inside her, with one hand on her neck pressing and pressing while the other ripped at her underwear. He used his knee to force her legs apart. Her hands tore at his face. She found his spectacles, flung them off. She sought his eyes. But he was close on her, powering his face into hers, filling her mouth with his tongue and then spitting, spitting and every moment fired more and more with the need to show, to master, to punish. She would crawl and beg. She would pray for mercy. She would call upon her Goddess. But he was her god.

  “Cunt,” he grunted into her mouth. “Bitch…cow.” He fumbled with his trousers while she rolled and struggled, kicking against him, her every breath a shriek. She drove her knee upwards, missing his testicles by less than an inch. He slapped her. He liked the feel of the slap—how it brought life and power back to his hand. He hit her again, harder this time. He used his knuckles and admired the red bruising they brought to her skin.

  She was weeping and ugly. Her mouth hung open. Her eyes squeezed shut. Mucous dripped from her nose. He liked her that way. He wanted her weeping. Her terror was a drug. He shoved her legs apart and he fell upon her. He celebrated her punishment like the god he was.

  She thought, This is what it’s like to die. She lay as he had left her, one leg crooked and the other extended, her pullover shoved up beneath her armpits, her bra jerked down to bare one breast where his bite still throbbed like a brand. A sheer piece of nylon edged with lace—“Got yerself some fancies I see,” Rita had chuckled. “Looking for a bloke who likes it wrapped up pretty?”—looped round her left ankle. A shredded ribbon of skirt draped across her neck.

  She stared upwards and followed the threading of a crack that began above the door and spread out like veins against the skin of the ceiling. Somewhere in the house a metallic crank-rattle sounded, followed by a whirring that was steady and low. The boiler, she thought. She wondered why it was heating water since she couldn’t recall having used any that day. She pondered everything she had done in the vicarage, taking each project one step at a time because it seemed so important to know why the boiler was heating water right now. It couldn’t realise, after all, how filthy she was. It was just a machine. Machines didn’t anticipate a body’s needs.

  She made a list. Newspapers first. She’d bound them up like she’d promised herself and discarded them all in the rubbish bin. She’d phoned and cancelled the subscription as well. Potted plants next. There were only four of them, but they were looking poorly and one had lost nearly all of its leaves. She’d been giving them water religiously every day, so she couldn’t understand why they were turning all yellow. She’d taken them to the rear garden and set them on the porch, thinking the poor little things might like some sun, if it ever came out which it hadn’t. Bedding after that. She’d changed the sheets on all three beds—two singles, one double—just like she’d been doing every week since she’d first come to work. Didn’t make any difference that no one used the beds. One had to change the linen to keep it fresh. But she hadn’t done any laundry, so the boiler shouldn’t be at work over that. What was it, then?

  She tried to picture each of her movements that day. She tried to make them appear among the cracks in the ceiling. Newspapers. Telephone. Plants on the porch. And after that…It was too much effort to think beyond the plants. Why? Was it water? Was she frightened of water? Had something happened with water? No, how silly. Think of rooms with water.

  She remembered. She smiled but it hurt because her skin felt stiff like glue had dried upon it so she hurried in her mind from the bedrooms to the kitchen. Because that was it. She’d washed all the dishes, the glassware, the pots, and the pans. She’d scrubbed the cupboards as well. Which is why the boiler was working now. And anyway, didn’t a boiler always work? Didn’t it fire itself up when it felt the water inside start to cool? No one switched it on. It just worked. Like magic.

  Magic. The book. No. She must have no thoughts like that. They painted nightmare pictures in the back of her head. She didn’t want to see.

  The kitchen, the kitchen, she thought. Washing dishes and cupboards and then on to the sitting room which was already clean and tidy as could be but she polished the furniture because she couldn’t seem to make herself leave this place, let go, find another way to live, and then he was with her. And his face wasn’t right. His back seemed too stiff. His arms didn’t hang, they just waited.

  Polly rolled to her side, drew her legs up, and tried to cradle herself. Hurts, she thought. Her legs felt torn away from her body. A hammer pounded down low where he’d slammed and slammed her. And inside, acid burned at her flesh. She felt throbbing and scraped. She was nothing.

  Slowly, she became aware of the cold, a thin current of air that flowed insistently against her bare skin. She shivered. She realised he’d left the inner door open upon his leaving, and the outer door was not completely latched. Her fingers plucked aimlessly at the pullover, and she tried to work it down as a cover, but she got it no farther than beneath her breasts before giving up. It didn’t feel right. The wool abraded her skin.

  From where she lay she could see the stairway, and she began to inch towards it with no thought in mind but to get out of the draught, to find somewhere safe that was dark. But once she rested her head on the bottom stair, she looked up and the light seemed brighter at the top. She thought, Bright means warm, better than dark. It was getting late, but the sun must have come out one final time. It would be a winter sun—milky and distant—but if it fell on the carpet in one of the bedrooms, she could curl within its golden boundaries and let her dying continue there.

  She began to climb. She found she couldn’t manage her legs, so she pulled herself up, hand over hand on the banister. Her knees bumped on the stairs. When she lolled to one side, her hip thudded against the wall which is how she saw the blood. She interrupted her progress to look at it curiously, to touch a finger to its crimson smear, marvelling at how quickly it was able to dry, and how it turned to mahogany when mixed with air. She saw that it was oozing from between her legs, and that it had been oozing quite long enough to create palmate patterns on her inner thighs and crooked rivulets down one leg.

  Dirty, she thought. She would have to bathe.

  The idea of washing inflated in her mind, driving the nightmare pictures away. Holding on to the thought of water and its warmth, she made it to the top of the stairs and crawled to the bath. She shut the door and sat on the cold white tile with her head against the wall, her knees drawn up, and the blood seeping out
against the fist she pressed between her legs.

  After a moment, she rolled her shoulders against the wall, flipped herself two feet, and thus gained the tub. She lowered her head to its side and reached one hand to the tap. Her fingers grappled with it, failed to make it turn, and slipped off altogether.

  She knew somehow she’d be whole again if she could only wash. If she could wash off the scent of him and scrub away the touch of his hands, if the soap could cleanse the inside of her mouth. And as long as she could think about washing—what it would feel like, how the water would rise to her breasts, how long she would lie in the tub and just dream—she wouldn’t have to think about anything else. If she could only make the water run.

  She reached again for the tap. Again she failed. She was doing it by feel because she didn’t want to open her eyes and have to see herself in the mirror that she knew was hanging on the back of the bathroom door. If she saw the mirror, she would have to think, and she was determined not to think again. Except about washing.

  She’d get into the tub and never come out, just letting the water rise and fall. She’d watch its bubbles, she’d listen to its flow. She’d feel it glide between her fingers and toes. She’d love it, hold it, be good to it. That’s what she’d do.

  Only, nothing was forever, not even the washing, and when it was over she would have to feel, which is the one thing she didn’t want to do, didn’t want to face, didn’t want to live through. Because this was dying no matter what she pretended, this was the real ending of things. How funny to think she’d always expected it to come in old age with her lying in a bed all snowy with linens and her grandchildren there and someone who loved her holding her hand so she wouldn’t do her leaving all alone. She saw now that it was all about being alone in the first place, living was. And if living was all about being alone, dying wouldn’t be anything different.

  She could deal with that. Dying alone. But only if it was here and now. Because then it would be over. She wouldn’t have to get up, get into the water, wash him away, and walk out the door. She’d never have to make her way home—oh Goddess, the long walk—and face her mother. More, she would never have to see him, never have to look in his eyes, and never remember over and over, like a film running back and forth in her brain, the moment when she knew he was going to hurt her.

  I don’t know what it means to love anyone, she realised. I thought it was goodness, a wanting to share. I thought it meant like you hold out your hand and someone takes it, holds it hard, and pulls you safe from the river. You talk. You tell him bits of yourself. You say here’s where I hurt and you give it to him and he holds it and gives you where he hurts in return and you hold it and that’s how you learn to love. You lean where he’s strong. He leans where you’re strong. And there’s a joining somewhere. But it’s not like this, not like it was today, here, in this house, it’s not like this.

  That was the worst of it, the filth of loving him that no amount of washing could cleanse. Even through the terror, even in the instant when she knew exactly what he meant to do, even when she begged him not to and he did it anyway—ramming her, tearing her flesh from her flesh, and leaving her lying like used rags on the floor—the worst was that he was the man she loved. And if the man she loved could know that she loved him and still do this to her and grunt with the pleasure of showing her who would dominate and who would submit, then what she had thought was love was nothing. Because it seemed to her that if you loved someone and if he knew you loved him, he’d take care not to hurt you. Even if he didn’t love you full in return, he’d cherish your feelings, hold them to his heart, and feel a fondness of some kind. Because that was what one did for people.

  Only if that wasn’t the truth of living, then she didn’t want to live any more. She’d get into the bath and let the water take her. Let it cleanse her and kill her and carry her off.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  TAKE A LOOK AT THESE.”

  Lynley passed the folder of photographs across the coffee table to St. James. He picked up his pint of Guinness and thought about straightening The Potato Eaters or cleaning the dust from both the frame and the glass of Rouen Cathedral in order to see if it was actually in Full Sunlight as it appeared to be. Deborah seemed to read his mind at least partially. She muttered, “Oh bother, this is driving me crazy,” and dealt with the Van Gogh print before plopping back down on the sofa next to her husband. Lynley said, “Bless you, my child,” and waited for St. James’ reaction to the crime-scene material which Lynley had brought back with him from Clitheroe.

  Dora Wragg had been good enough to see to their needs in the residents’ lounge. While the pub was already closed for the latter part of the afternoon, two elderly women in heavy tweeds and hiking boots had still been sitting by what remained of the fire when Lynley returned from his visits with Maggie, the police, and the medical examiner. Although the two women had been engaged in a sombre but enthusiastic discussion about “Hilda’s sciatica…and isn’t the poor dear a martyr to it, luvvie?” and seemed unlikely to eavesdrop on any conversation unconnected to Hilda’s hips, Lynley had taken one look at their eager, sharp faces and decided that discretion was the better part of conversing openly about anyone’s death.

  So he waited until Dora placed a Guinness, a Harp, and an orange juice on the coffee table in the residents’ lounge and took herself off to the nether regions of the inn before he handed over the folder to his friend. St. James studied the photographs first. Deborah gave them a glance, suffered a frisson of aversion, and quickly looked away. Lynley couldn’t blame her.

  The photographs of this particular death seemed more disquieting than many others he had seen, and at first he couldn’t understand why. He was, after all, no stranger to the myriad ways in which an unexpected death occurs. He was used to the result of strangulations—the cyanosed face, the bulging eyes, the blood-froth at the mouth. He had seen his share of blows to the head. He’d examined a variety of knife wounds—from cut throats to one virtual disembowelment not unlike the Whitechapel murder of Mary Kelly. He’d seen victims of bombings and victims of shootings, their limbs torn off and their bodies mutilated. But there was something personally horrifying about this death, and he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. Deborah did it for him.

  “It went on and on,” she murmured. “It took some time, didn’t it? Poor man.”

  And that was it. Death hadn’t come in an instant for Robin Sage, a moment’s violent visitation via gun, knife, or garrotte with oblivion following hard on its heels. It had taken him slowly enough for him to realise what was happening and for his physical suffering to be acute. The crime-scene pictures illustrated that.

  They’d been taken in colour by the Clitheroe police, but what they captured was predominantly black and white. The latter constituted a good six inches of newly fallen snow covering the ground and powdering the wall next to which the body lay. The former constituted the body itself, dressed in black clerical garb beneath a black overcoat that was bunched round the waist and hips as if the vicar had tried to slither out of it. But even here the black did not achieve complete ascendancy over the white, for the body itself—like the wall its hand reached towards—wore a thin but thorough membrane of snow. This had been documented in seven photographs before the crime-scene team had brushed the snow from the body into the collection jars that would later be deemed non-evidential, considering the circumstances of the death. And once the body was brushed free of snow, the photographer had gone to work once again.

  The rest of the pictures spelled out the nature of Robin Sage’s death agony. Dozens of deep arcing gouges in the ground, thick mud on his heels, earth and flakes of grass beneath his nails testified to the manner in which he had tried to escape the convulsions. Blood on his left temple, three slits on his cheek, one shattered eyeball, and a heavily ensanguined stone beneath his head suggested the strength of those same convulsions and how little he was able to do to master them once he understood there was no escape. The p
osition of his head and neck—thrown back so far that it seemed inconceivable no vertebrae were broken—indicated a frantic battle for air. And the tongue, a swollen mass chewed nearly in half, protruded from the mouth in an eloquent statement about the man’s final moments.

  St. James went through the pictures twice. He set two aside, a close-up of the face and a second of one of the hands. He said, “It’s heart failure if you’re lucky. Asphyxia if you’re not. Poor bastard. He was unlucky as the devil.”

  Lynley didn’t need to examine the photographs St. James had chosen to support his point. He’d seen the bluish colour of the lips and ears. He’d noted the same of the fingernails. The undamaged eye was prominent. Lividity was well-developed. All were indications of respiratory failure.

  “How long do you suppose it took him to die?” Deborah asked.

  “Too long by half.” St. James glanced at Lynley over the autopsy report. “You spoke with the pathologist?”

  “Everything was consistent with hemlock poisoning. No specific lesions of the stomach’s mucous membrane. Gastric irritation and oedema of the lungs. Time of death between ten that night and two the next morning.”

  “What did Sergeant Hawkins have to say? Why did Clitheroe CID buy the accidental-poisoning conclusion so quickly and back off from an investigation? Why did they let Shepherd handle it on his own?”

  “CID had been at the site while Sage’s body was still there. It was clear that, the external injuries he’d done to his face aside, his death was caused by some sort of seizure. They didn’t know what sort. The detective constable on the scene actually thought it was epilepsy when he saw the tongue—”

  “Good God,” St. James muttered.

  Lynley nodded agreement. “So after they took the photographs, they left it up to Shepherd to gather the details leading up to Sage’s death. Essentially, it was his call. At the time, they didn’t even know Sage had been out in the snow all night as no one had even reported him missing until he failed to show up to perform the Townley-Young wedding.”