Missing Joseph

  “God damn it, Shepherd, you knew she had a pistol? What’s she doing with a pistol? Is she a collector? Is it licenced?”

  It wasn’t.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  He didn’t think…It didn’t seem at the time…He knew he should have taken it from her. But he didn’t. That was all.

  Shepherd’s voice was low. He was identifying one more crook to the rules and procedures he’d bent for Juliet Spence from the first, and he knew what the outcome of the revelation would be.

  Lynley jammed his hand against the gear shift and cursed again. They shot forward, north. They had virtually no choice in the matter of pursuit. Providing she had found the track from the reservoir, she had the advantage of darkness and snow. If she was still on the moors and they tried to follow her across by torchlight, she could pick them off when they got within range by simply aiming at the torches’ beams. Their only hope was to drive on to High Bentham and then head south down the road that led to Back End Barn. If she hadn’t reached it, they couldn’t risk waiting for her and taking the chance she’d got lost in the storm. They’d have to set across the moors, back towards the reservoir. They’d have to make an attempt to find her and hope for the best.

  Lynley tried not to think about Maggie, confused and frightened, travelling in Juliet Spence’s furious wake. He had no way of knowing what time they’d left the cottage. He had no idea of the clothes they wore. When St. James said something about having to take hypothermia into consideration, Lynley shoved his way into the Range Rover and slammed his fist against the horn. Not like that, he thought. God damn it to hell. However it ended, it wouldn’t be like that.

  They got no moment’s relief from either the wind or the snow. It was falling so heavily that it seemed as though all of the northwest would be five feet under drifts by the morning. The landscape was changed entirely. The muted greens and russets of winter were moonscape. Heather and gorse were hidden. An endless camouflage of white upon white made grassland, bracken, and heath a uniform sheet upon which the only markers were the boulders whose tops were powdered but still visible, dark specks like blemishes on the skin around them.

  They crawled along, prayed their way up inclines, rode the declivities on brakes and ice. The lights from Constable Garrity’s Range Rover slithered and wavered behind them, but came steadily on.

  “They won’t make it,” Shepherd said, gazing out at the flurries that gusted against the car. “No one could. Not in this.”

  Lynley changed down to first gear. The engine howled. “She’s desperate,” he said. “That might keep her going.”

  “Add the rest, Inspector.” He hunched into his coat. His face looked grey-green in the lights from the dash. “I’m at fault. If they die.” He turned to the window. He fiddled with his spectacles.

  “It won’t be the only thing on your conscience, Mr. Shepherd. But I expect you know that already, don’t you?”

  They rounded a curve. A sign pointing west was printed with the single word Keasden. Shepherd said, “Turn here.” They veered to the left into a lane that was reduced to two ruts the width of a car. It ran through a hamlet that appeared to consist of a telephone box, a small church, and half a dozen signs for public footpaths. They experienced an all-too-brief respite from the storm when they entered a small wood just west of the hamlet. There the trees were bearing most of the snow in their branches and keeping it relatively clear of the ground. But another curve took them into open land again, and the car was instantly buffeted by a gust of wind. Lynley felt it in the steering wheel. He felt the tyres slide. He cursed with some reverence and moved his foot off the gas. He restrained himself from hitting the brakes. The tyres found purchase. The car moved on.

  “If they’re not in the barn?” Shepherd asked.

  “Then we’ll look on the moor.”

  “How? You don’t know what it’s like. You could die out there, searching. Are you willing to risk it? For a murderess?”

  “It’s not only a murderess I’m looking for.”

  They approached the road that connected High Bentham and Winslough. The distance from Keasden to this crossroads was a little over three miles. It had taken them nearly half an hour to drive it.

  They turned left—heading south in the direction of Winslough. For the next half mile, they saw the occasional lights from other houses, most of them set some considerable distance off the road. The land was walled here, the wall itself fast becoming just another white eruption from which individual stones, like staggered peaks, still managed to break through the snow. Then they were out on the moor again. No wall or fence served as demarcation between the land and the road. Only the tracks left by a heavy tractor showed them the way. In another half hour, they too would probably be obliterated.

  The wind was whipping the snow into small, crystal cyclones. They built from the ground as well as from the air. They whirled in front of the car like ghostly dervishes and spun into the darkness again.

  “Snow’s letting up,” Shepherd remarked. Lynley gave him a quick glance in which the other man obviously read the incredulity because he went on with, “It’s just the wind now, blowing it about.”

  “That’s bad enough.”

  But when he studied the view, Lynley could see that Shepherd was not merely acting the role of optimist. The snowfall was indeed diminishing. Much of what the wipers were sweeping away came from what was blowing off the moors, not falling from the sky. It gave little relief other than to make the promise that things weren’t going to get much worse.

  They crept along for another ten minutes with the wind whining like a dog outside. When their headlamps struck a gate that acted as a fence across the road, Shepherd spoke again.

  “Here. The barn’s to the right. Just beyond the wall.”

  Lynley peered through the windscreen. He saw nothing but eddies of snowflakes and darkness.

  “Thirty yards from the road,” Shepherd said. He shouldered open his door. “I’ll have a look.”

  “You’ll do what I tell you,” Lynley said. “Stay where you are.”

  A muscle worked angrily in Shepherd’s jaw. “She’s got a gun, Inspector. If she’s in there in the first place, she isn’t likely to shoot at me. I can talk to her.”

  “You can do many things, none of which you’re going to do right now.”

  “Have some sense! Let me—”

  “You’ve done enough.”

  Lynley got out of the car. Constable Garrity and St. James joined him. They directed their torches’ beams across the snow and saw the stone wall rising in a perpendicular line from the road. They ran their beams along it and found the spot where its flow was interrupted by the red iron bars of a gate. Beyond the gate stood Back End Barn. It was stone and slate, with a large door to admit vehicles, a smaller door for their drivers. It looked due east, so the wind had blown the snow in large drifts against the barn’s face. The drifts were smooth mounds against the larger barn door. Against the smaller, however, a single drift was partially trampled. A V-shaped dent ran through it. Fresh snow dusted its edges.

  “By God, she made it,” St. James said quietly.

  “Someone did,” Lynley replied. He looked over his shoulder. Shepherd, he saw, was out of the Range Rover although he was maintaining his position next to its door.

  Lynley considered the options. They had the element of surprise but she had the weapon. He had little doubt that she would use it the moment he moved against her. Sending in Shepherd was, in truth, the only reasonable way to proceed. But he wasn’t willing to risk anyone’s life when there was a chance of getting her out without gunfire. She was, after all, an intelligent woman. She had run in the first place because she knew that the truth was a moment away from discovery. She couldn’t hope to escape with Maggie and go unapprehended a second time in her life. The weather, her history, and every one of the odds were dead set against her.

  “Inspector.” Something was pressed into his hand. “You might want to use this.” He
looked down, saw that Constable Garrity had given him a loud hailer. “Part of the kit in the car,” she said. She looked embarrassed as she tipped her head towards her vehicle and buttoned the neck of her coat against the wind. “Sergeant Hawkins says a DC’s always got to know what might be needed at a crime scene or in an emergency. Shows initiative, he says. I’ve a rope as well. Life vests. The lot.” Her eyes blinked solemnly behind the wet-streaked lenses of her spectacles.

  “You’re a godsend, Constable,” Lynley said. “Thank you.” He raised the loud hailer. He looked at the barn. Not a sliver of light showed round either of the doors. There were no windows. If she was inside, she was sealed off completely.

  What to say to her, he wondered. Which cinematic inanity would serve their purpose and bring her out? You’re surrounded, you can’t hope to escape, throw out the gun, come out with your hands up, we know you’re inside…

  “Mrs. Spence,” he called. “You have a weapon with you. I don’t. We’re at an impasse. I’d like to get you and Maggie out of here without harm being done to anyone.”

  He waited. There was no sound from the barn. The wind hissed as it slid along three graduated tiers of stone projections that ran the length of the barn’s north side.

  “You’re still nearly five miles from High Bentham, Mrs. Spence. Even if you managed to survive the night in the barn, neither you nor Maggie would be in any condition to walk farther in the morning. You must know that.”

  Nothing. But he could feel her thinking. If she shot him, she could get to his vehicle, a better vehicle than her own, after all, and be on her way. It would be hours before anyone would notice he was missing, and if she hurt him badly enough, he wouldn’t have the strength to crawl back towards High Bentham and find assistance.

  “Don’t make it worse than it already is,” he said. “I know you don’t want to do that to Maggie. She’s cold, she’s frightened, she’s probably hungry. I’d like to get her back to the village now.”

  Silence. Her eyes would be quite used to the darkness. If he burst in on her and had the luck to shine the torchlight directly in her face on the first go, even if she pulled the trigger, it wouldn’t be likely that she’d be able to hit him. It might work. If he could find her the instant he crashed through the door…

  “Maggie’s never seen anyone shot,” he said. “She doesn’t know what it’s like. She hasn’t seen the blood. Don’t make that part of her memory of this night. Not if you love her.”

  He wanted to say more. That he knew her husband and her sister had failed her when she needed them most. That there would have been an end to her mourning the death of her son had she only had someone to help her through it. That he knew she had acted in what she’d believed were Maggie’s interests when she’d snatched her from the car that long-ago night. But he also wanted to say that, in the end, she’d not had the right to determine the fate of a baby belonging to a fifteen-year-old girl. That while she may have indeed done better by Maggie as a result of taking her, they couldn’t know that for sure. And it was because of that simple not knowing that Robin Sage had decided a cruelty-as-justice had to be done.

  He found he wanted to blame what was going to happen this night on the man she had poisoned, on his sententious perspective and his bumbling attempt to set things straight. For in the end, she was his victim as much as he was hers.

  “Mrs. Spence,” he said, “you know we’re at the end of it here. Don’t make it worse for Maggie. Please. You know I’ve been to London. I’ve seen your sister. I’ve met Maggie’s mother. I’ve—”

  A keening rose suddenly above the wind. Eerie, inhuman, it cut to the heart and then took on substance round a single word: Mummy.

  “Mrs. Spence!”

  And then the keening again. It sounded high with terror. It locked round the unmistakable tone of a plea. “Mummy! I’m afraid! Mummy! Mummy!”

  Lynley shoved the loud hailer into Constable Garrity’s hands. He pushed through the gate. And then he saw it. A shape was moving just to his left, beyond the wall as he himself was now.

  “Shepherd!” he shouted.

  “Mummy!” Maggie cried.

  The constable came rapidly onward through the snow. He charged straight for the barn.

  “Shepherd!” Lynley shouted. “God damn it! Stay out!”

  “Mummy! Please! I’m afraid! Mummy!”

  Shepherd reached the barn door as the gun went off. He was inside when she shot again.

  It was long past midnight when St. James finally climbed the stairs to their room. He thought she’d be asleep, but she was waiting for him as she’d said she would be, sitting in bed with the covers drawn up to her chest and an old copy of Elle spread across her lap.

  She said, “You found her” when she saw his face and then “Simon, what happened,” when he nodded and said nothing except “We did.”

  He was tired to the point of weakness. His dead leg felt like a hundredweight hanging from his hip. He dropped his coat and scarf to the floor, tossed his gloves upon them, and left them where they lay.

  “Simon?”

  He told her. He began with Colin Shepherd’s attempt to implicate Polly Yarkin. He ended with the gunshots at Back End Barn.

  “It was a rat,” he said. “She was shooting at a rat.”

  They’d been huddled into a corner when Lynley found them: Juliet Spence, Maggie, and a mangy orange cat called Punkin that the girl had refused to leave behind in the car. When the torchlight fell on them, the cat hissed, spit, and scurried into the darkness, but neither Juliet nor Maggie moved. The girl cowered into the woman’s arms, her face hidden. The woman encircled her as much as possible, perhaps to warm, perhaps to protect.

  “We thought they were dead at first,” St. James said, “a murder and a suicide, but there wasn’t any blood.”

  Then Juliet spoke as if the others weren’t there, saying, It’s all right, darling. If I haven’t hit him, I’ve frightened him to death. He won’t get you, Maggie. Hush. It’s all right.

  “They were filthy,” he said. “Their clothes were soaked. I can’t think they would have lasted the night.”

  Deborah extended her hand to him. “Please,” she said.

  He sat on the bed. She smoothed her fingers beneath his eyes and across his forehead. She brushed back his hair.

  There was no fight in her, St. James said, and no intention to run any farther or, it seemed, to use the gun again. She’d dropped it onto the stone floor of the barn, and she was holding Maggie’s head to her shoulder. She began to rock her.

  “She’d taken off her coat and thrown it round the girl,” St. James said. “I don’t think she actually knew we were there.”

  Shepherd got to her first. He stripped his own heavy jacket off. He wrapped it round her and then flung his arms round them both because Maggie wouldn’t release her hold on her mother’s waist. He said her name, but she didn’t respond other than to say that she’d shot at it, darling, she always hit her mark didn’t she, it was probably dead, there was nothing to fear.

  Constable Garrity ran for blankets. She’d brought a Thermos from home and she poured it saying, Poor lambs poor dears, in a fashion that was far more maternal than professional. She tried to get Shepherd to put his jacket back on, but he refused, wrapping himself in a blanket instead and watching everything—his eyes riveted with a kind of dying on Juliet’s face.

  When they were on their feet, Maggie began to cry for the cat, calling, Punkin! Mummy, where’s Punkin? He’s run off. It’s snowing and he’ll freeze. He won’t know what to do.

  They found the cat behind the door, his fur on end and his ears at the alert. St. James grabbed him. The cat climbed his back in a panic. But he settled well enough when he was returned to the girl.

  She said, Punkin kept us warm, didn’t he, Mummy? It was good to bring Punkin like I wanted, wasn’t it? But he’ll be happy to get home.

  Juliet put her arm round the girl and pressed her face to the top of her head. She said, You take
good care of Punkin, darling.

  And then Maggie seemed to realise. She said, No! Mummy, please, I’m afraid. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want them to hurt me. Mummy! Please!

  “Tommy made the decision to separate them at once,” St. James said.

  Constable Garrity took Maggie—You bring the cat, dear, she said—while Lynley took her mother. He intended to push all the way through to Clitheroe if it took him the rest of the night. He wanted it to be over. He wanted to be clear of it.

  “I can’t blame him,” St. James said. “I won’t soon forget the sound of her screaming when she saw he meant to separate them then and there.”

  “Mrs. Spence?”

  “Maggie. Calling for her mother. We could hear her even after the car drove off.”

  “And Mrs. Spence?”

  There was nothing from Juliet Spence at first. Without expression or reaction, she’d watched Constable Garrity drive away. She’d stood with her hands in the pockets of Shepherd’s jacket and the wind blowing her hair across her face, and she watched the tail lights of the receding car bob and weave as it lurched across the moor in the direction of Winslough. When they began to follow it, she sat in the rear seat next to Shepherd and never looked away from those lights for a moment.

  She said, What else could I do? He said he was going to return her to London.

  “And that was the real hell behind the murder,” St. James said.

  Deborah looked perplexed. “What real hell? What do you mean?”

  St. James got to his feet and walked to the clothes cupboard. He began to undress. “Sage never intended to turn his wife over to the authorities for snatching the baby,” he said. “That last night of his life, he’d brought her enough money to get out of the country. He was perfectly willing to go to prison rather than tell anyone in London where he’d found the girl once he turned her over to Social Services. Of course, the police would have known eventually, but by that time his wife would have been long gone.”

  “That can’t be right,” Deborah said. “She must be lying about what happened.”