Missing Joseph (20 page)

Josie bit her lip but didn't quite manage to catch the grin. “Not
that
kind of rubber. Don't you know what it is?”

Maggie stirred uneasily on the stool. “I know. Of course I do. I know.”

“Right. Look, it's like this squishy plastic stuff he puts on his Thing. Before he puts it in you. So you don't get pregnant. Is he using that?”

“Oh.” Maggie twisted a lock of her hair. “That. No. I don't want him to use it.”

“Don't want…Are you crazy? He
has
to use one.”

“Why?”

“Because if he doesn't, you'll have a baby.”

“But you said before that a woman needs to be—”

“Forget what I said. There are always exceptions. I'm here, aren't I? I'm Mr. Wragg's, aren't I? Mum was panting and moaning with this bloke Paddy Lewis, but I came along when she was cold as ice. That's pretty much proof that anything can happen no matter if you get fulfilled or not.”

Maggie thought this over, running her finger round and round the last button on her coat. “Good then,” she said.

“
Good?
Maggie, bleeding saints on the altar, you can't—”

“I want a baby,” she said. “I want Nick's baby. If he tries to use a rubber, I won't even let him.”

Josie goggled at her. “You're not yet fourteen.”

“So?”

“So you can't be a mummy when you haven't finished school.”

“Why not?”

“What would you do with a baby? Where would you go?”

“Nick and I would get married. Then we'd have the baby. Then we'd be a family.”

“You can't want that.”

Maggie smiled with real pleasure. “Oh yes I can.”

CHAPTER TEN

L
YNLEY MURMURED, “GOOD GOD,” AT the sudden drop in temperature when he crossed the threshold between the pub and the dining room of Crofters Inn. In the pub, the large fireplace had managed to disperse enough heat to create pools of at least moderate warmth in its farthest corners, but the weak central heating of the dining room did little more than provide the uncertain promise that the side of one's body closest to the wall heater would not go numb. He joined Deborah and St. James at their corner table, ducking his head each time he passed beneath one of the low ceiling's great oak beams. At the table, an additional electric fire had been thoughtfully provided by the Wraggs, and from it semisubstantial waves of heat lapped against their ankles and floated towards their knees.

Enough tables were laid with white linen, silverware, and inexpensive crystal to accommodate at least thirty diners. But it appeared that the three of them would be sharing the room only with its unusual display of artwork. This consisted of a series of gilt-framed prints which depicted Lancashire's most prominent claim to fame: the Good Friday gathering at Malkin Tower and the charges of witchcraft that both preceded and followed it. The artist had depicted the principals in an admirably subjective fashion. Roger Nowell, the magistrate, looked suitably grim and barrel-chested, with wrath, vengeance, and the power of Christian Justice incised upon his features. Chattox looked appropriately decrepit: wizened, bent, and dressed in rags. Elizabeth Davies, with her rolling eyes uncontrolled by ocular muscles, looked deformed enough to have sold herself for the devil's kiss. The rest of them comprised a leering group of demon-lovers, with the exception of Alice Nutter who stood apart, eyes lowered, ostensibly maintaining the silence she had taken with her to her grave, the only convicted witch among them who had sprung from the upper class.

“Ah,” Lynley said in acknowledgement of the prints as he shook out his table napkin, “Lancashire's celebrities. Dinner and the prospect of disputation. Did they or didn't they? Were they or weren't they?”

“More likely the prospect of loss of appetite,” St. James said. He poured a glass of fumé blanc for his friend.

“There's truth in that, I suppose. Hanging half-witted girls and helpless old women on the strength of a single man's apopleptic seizure does give one pause, doesn't it? How can we eat, drink, and be merry when dying's as close as the dining room wall?”

“Who are they exactly?” Deborah asked as Lynley took an appreciative sip of the wine and reached for one of the rolls which Josie Wragg had only moments before deposited on the table. “I know they're the witches, but do you recognise them, Tommy?”

“Only because they're in caricature. I doubt I'd know them if the artist had done a less Hogarthian job of it.” Lynley gestured with his butter knife. “You have the God-fearing magistrate and those he brought to justice. Demdike and Chattox—they're the shrivelled ones, I should think. Then Alizon and Elizabeth Davies, the mother-daughter team. The others I've forgotten, save Alice Nutter. She's the one who looks so decidedly out of place.”

“Frankly, I thought she looked like your aunt Augusta.”

Lynley paused in buttering a portion of roll. He gave the print of Alice Nutter a fair examination. “There's something in that. They have the same nose.” He grinned. “I'll have to think twice about dining at aunt's next Christmas Eve. God knows what she'll serve in disguise for wassail.”

“Is that what they did? Mix some sort of potion? Cast a spell on someone? Make it rain toads?”

“That last sounds vaguely Australian,” Lynley said. He looked the other prints over as he munched on his roll and sifted through his memory for the details. One of his papers at Oxford had touched upon the seventeenth-century hue and cry over witchcraft. He remembered the lecturer vividly—twenty-six years old and a strident feminist who was as beautiful a woman as he had ever seen and approximately as approachable as a feeding shark.

“We'd call it the domino effect today,” he said. “One of them burgled Malkin Tower, the home of one of the others, and then had the audacity to wear in public something she'd stolen. When she was brought before the magistrate, she defended herself by accusing the Malkin Tower family of witchcraft. The magistrate might have concluded that this was a ridiculous stab at deflecting culpability, but a few days later, Alizon Davies of that same tower cursed a man who within minutes was stricken with an apopleptic seizure. From that point on, the hunt for witches was on.”

“Successfully, it seems,” Deborah said, gazing at the prints herself.

“Quite. Women began confessing to all sorts of ludicrous misbehaviours once they were brought before the magistrate: having familiars in the form of cats, dogs, and bears; making clay dolls in the persons of their enemies and stabbing thorns into them; killing off cows; making milk go bad; ruining good ale—”

“Now there's crime worthy of punishment,” St. James noted.

“Was there proof?” Deborah asked.

“If an old woman mumbling to her cat is proof. If a curse overheard by a villager is proof.”

“But then why did they confess? Why would anyone confess?”

“Social pressure. Fear. They were uneducated women brought before a magistrate from another class. They were taught to bow before their betters—if only metaphorically. What more effective way to do it than to agree with what their betters were suggesting?”

“Even though it meant their death?”

“Even though.”

“But they could have denied it. They could have kept silent.”

“Alice Nutter did. They hanged her anyway.”

Deborah frowned. “What an odd thing to celebrate with prints on the walls.”

“Tourism,” Lynley said. “Don't people pay to see the Queen of Scots' death mask?”

“Not to mention some of the grimmer spots in the Tower of London,” St. James said. “The Chapel Royal, Wakefield Tower.”

“Why bother with the Crown Jewels when you can see the chopping block?” Lynley added. “Crime doesn't pay, but death brings them running to part with a few quid.”

“Is this irony from the man who's made at least five pilgrimages to Bosworth Field on the twenty-second of August?” Deborah asked blithely. “An old cow pasture in the back of beyond where you drink from the well and swear to Richard's ghost you would have fought for the Yorks?”

“That's not death,” Lynley said with some dignity, lifting his glass to salute her. “That's history, my girl. Someone's got to be willing to set the record straight.”

The door that led to the kitchen swung open, and Josie Wragg presented them with their starters, muttering, “Smoked salmon
here
, pâté
here
, prawn cocktail
here
,” as she set each item on the table, after which she hid both the tray and her hands behind her back. “Enough rolls?” She asked the question of everyone in general, but she made a poor job of surreptitiously examining Lynley.

“Fine,” St. James said.

“Get you more butter?”

“I don't think so. Thanks.”

“Wine okay? Mr. Wragg's got a cellarful if that's gone off. Wine does that sometimes, you know. You got to be careful. If you don't store it right, the cork gets all dried up and shrivelled and the air gets in and the wine turns salty. Or something.”

“The wine's fine, Josie. We're looking forward to the bordeaux as well.”

“Mr. Wragg, he's a connoisseur of wine.” She pronounced it con-NOY-ser and bent to scratch her ankle, from which activity she looked up at Lynley. “You're not here on holiday, are you?”

“Not exactly.”

She straightened up, reclasping the tray behind her. “That's what I thought. Mum said you were a detective from London and I thought at first you'd come to tell her something about Paddy Lewis which she, of course, wouldn't be likely to share with me for fear I'd spread it to Mr. Wragg which, of course, I would definitely not do even if it meant she was to run off with him—Paddy, that is—and leave me here with Mr. Wragg.
I
know what true love's about, after all. But you're not that kind of detective, are you?”

“What kind is that?”

“You know. Like on the telly. Someone you hire.”

“A private detective? No.”

“I thought that's what you were at first. Then I heard you talking on the phone just now. I wasn't exactly eavesdropping. Only, your door was open a crack and I was taking fresh towels to the rooms and I happened to hear.” Her fingers scratched against the tray as she grasped it more tightly behind her before going on. “She's my best friend's mum, you see. She didn't mean any harm. It's like if someone is making preserves and they put in the wrong stuff and a bunch of people get ill. Say they buy the preserves at a church fête even. Strawberry or blackberry. Well, they might do that, huh? And then they take them home and spread them on their toast the next morning. Or on their scones at tea. Then they get sick. And everyone knows it was an accident. See?”

“Naturally. That could happen.”

“And that's what happened here. Only it wasn't a fête. And it wasn't preserves.”

None of them replied. St. James was idly twirling his wineglass by the stem, Lynley had stopped tearing apart his roll, and Deborah was looking from the men to the girl, waiting for one of them to respond. When they didn't, Josie went on.

“It's just that Maggie's my best mate, see. And I've never had a best mate before. Her mum—Missus Spence—she keeps to herself lots. People call that queer, and they want to make something of it. But there's nothing to make. You got to remember that, don't you think?”

Lynley nodded. “That's wise. I'd agree with that.”

“Well then…” She bobbed her ill-clipped head and looked for a moment as if she intended to dip into a curtsy. Instead, she backed away from the table in the direction of the kitchen door. “You'll want to start eating, won't you? The pâté's mum's own recipe, you know. The smoked salmon's real fresh. And if you want anything…” Her voice faded when the door closed behind her.

“That's Josie,” St. James said, “in case you haven't been introduced. A strong advocate of the accident theory.”

“So I noticed.”

“What did Sergeant Hawkins have to say? I take it that's the conversation Josie overheard you having.”

“It was.” Lynley speared a piece of salmon and was pleasantly surprised to find it—as Josie had declared—quite fresh. “He wanted to restate that he was following Hutton-Preston's orders from the first. Hutton-Preston Constabulary got involved through Shepherd's father, and as far as Hawkins was concerned, everything from that moment was on the up and up. Still is, in fact. So he's backing his man in Shepherd, and he's none too pleased that we're poking about.”

“That's reasonable enough. He's responsible for Shepherd, after all. What falls on the village constable's head isn't going to look good on Hawkins' record either.”

“He also wanted me to know that Mr. Sage's bishop had been entirely satisfied with the investigation, the inquest, and the verdict.”

St. James looked up from his prawn cocktail. “He attended the inquest?”

“He sent someone, evidently. And Hawkins seems to feel that if the investigation and inquest had the blessing of the Church, they damn well ought to have the Yard's blessing as well.”

“He won't cooperate, then?”

Lynley speared more salmon onto his fork. “It isn't a question of cooperation, St. James. He knows the investigation was a bit irregular and the best way to defend it, himself, and his man is to allow us to prove their conclusions correct. But he doesn't have to like any of it. None of them do.”

“They're going to start liking it a great deal less when we take a closer look at Juliet Spence's condition that night.”

“What condition?” Deborah asked.

Lynley explained what the constable had told them about the woman's own illness on the night the vicar died. He explained the ostensible relationship between the constable and Juliet Spence. He concluded with, “And I have to admit, St. James, that you might have got me here on a fool's errand after all. It looks bad that Colin Shepherd handled the case by himself with only his father's intermittent assistance and a cursory glance at the scene by Clitheroe CID. But if she was ill too, then the accident theory bears far more weight than we originally thought.”

“Unless,” Deborah said, “the constable's lying to protect her and she wasn't ill at all.”

“There's that, of course. We can't discount it. Although it does suggest collusion between them. But if alone she had no motive to murder the man—a point, of course, which we know is moot—what on earth would theirs together have been?”

“There's more to it than uncovering motives if we're looking for culpability,” St. James said. He pushed his plate to one side. “There's something peculiar about her illness that night. It doesn't hold together.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shepherd told us that she was repeatedly sick. She was burning with fever as well.”

“And?”

“And those aren't symptoms of hemlock poisoning.”

Lynley toyed a moment with the last piece of salmon, squeezed some lemon on top of it, but then decided against eating. After their conversation with Constable Shepherd, he'd been on the path to dismissing most of St. James' earlier concerns regarding the vicar's death. Indeed, he'd been well on his way to chalking the entire adventure up to one hell of a long drive away from London to cool himself off from his morning's altercation with Helen. But now…“Tell me,” he said.

St. James listed the symptoms for him: excessive salivation, tremors, convulsions, abdominal pain, dilation of the pupils, delirium, respiratory failure, complete paralysis. “It acts on the central nervous system,” he concluded. “A single mouthful can kill a man.”