Missing Joseph (51 page)

“Perhaps it was something borderline, something that could have been interpreted either way.”

“But why would he take a sudden interest in that now? From the moment Joseph died, Robin showed no interest in anything other than his ministry. ‘We'll get through this by the grace of God,' he told Susanna.” Kate's lips pressed into a line of distaste. “Frankly, I wouldn't have blamed her in the least if she'd had the luck to find someone else. Just to forget about Robin for a few hours would have been heaven.”

“Could she have done? Did you get a sense of that?”

“Not from her conversation. When she wasn't talking about Joseph, she was trying to get me to talk about my cases. It was just another way to punish herself.”

“You were a social worker, then. I'd thought—” He gestured in the general direction of the stairway.

“That I was a secretary. No. I had much larger aspirations. I once believed I could actually help people. Change lives. Make things better. What an amusing laugh. Ten years in Social Services took care of that.”

“What sort of work did you do?”

“Mothers and infants,” she said. “Home visits. And the more I did it, the more I understood what a myth our culture has created about childbirth, depicting it as woman's highest purpose fulfilled. What contemptible rot, all of it generated by men. Most of the women I saw were utterly miserable when they weren't too uneducated or too impossibly ignorant to be able to recognise the extent of their plight.”

“But your sister believed in the myth.”

“She did. And it killed her, Inspector.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I
T'S THE NASTY LITTLE FACT THAT HE kept misidentifying bodies,” Lynley said. He nodded to the officer on duty at the kiosk, flashed his identification, and descended the ramp into the underground car park of New Scotland Yard. “Why keep saying definitively that each one was his wife? Why not say he wasn't certain? It didn't matter, after all. A postmortem would have been performed on the bodies in any case. And he must have known that.”

“It sounds like shades of Max de Winter to me,” Helen replied.

Lynley pulled into a space conveniently close to the lift now that the day was long over and the vast clerical staff was gone. He thought about the idea. “We're meant to believe she deserved to die,” he mused.

“Susanna Sage?”

He got out of the car and opened her door. “Rebecca,” he said. “She was evil, lewd, lubricious, lascivious—”

“Just the sort of person one longs to have at a dinner party to liven things up.”

“—and she pushed him into killing her by telling him a lie.”

“Did she? I can't remember the whole story.”

Lynley took her arm and led her towards the lift. He rang for it. They waited as the machinery creaked and groaned. “She had cancer. She wanted to commit suicide, but she lacked the courage to kill herself. So, because she hated him, she pushed him into doing it for her, destroying him and herself at the same time. And when the deed was done and he'd sunk her boat in the Manderley cove, he had to wait until a female body washed ashore somewhere along the coast so that he could identify it as Rebecca, gone missing in a storm.”

“Poor thing.”

“Which one?”

Lady Helen tapped her cheek. “That's the problem, isn't it? We're meant to feel compassion for someone, but it does leave one a bit tarnished, doesn't it, to be siding with the murderer?”

“Rebecca was wanton, entirely without conscience. We're meant to think it was justifiable homicide.”

“And was it? Is it ever?”

“That's the question,” he said.

They took the lift in silence. The rain had begun falling in earnest on his drive back into the city. A snarl of traffic in Blackheath had made him despair of ever getting back across the Thames. But he'd managed to reach Onslow Square by seven, they'd made it to Green's for dinner by a quarter past eight, and now at twenty minutes before eleven, they were heading up to his office for a look at whatever Sergeant Havers had managed to fax from Truro.

They were operating under an undeclared ceasefire. They'd discussed the weather, his sister's decision to sell her land and her sheep in West Yorkshire and return to the south to be near his mother, a curious revival of
Heartbreak House
that Shavians were denouncing and critics were beatifying, and a Winslow Homer exhibition that was coming to London. He could sense her need to hold him at a distance, and he cooperated without much liking it. Helen's timeline for opening her heart to him wasn't what he would like it to be. But he knew that he stood a better chance of winning her confidence through patience rather than confrontation.

The lift doors slid open. Even in CID, the night staff was significantly smaller than the day, so the floor seemed deserted. But two of Lynley's fellow DI's were standing in the doorway to one of their offices, drinking from plastic cups, smoking, and talking about the latest government minister to get caught with his trousers down behind King's Cross Station.

“There he was, poking some tart while the country goes to hell,” Phillip Hale was remarking blackly. “What is it with these blokes, I ask you?”

John Stewart flicked cigarette ash onto the floor. “Stuffing some dolly in a leather skirt's more immediately gratifying than solving a fiscal crisis, I'd guess.”

“But this wasn't a call girl. This was a ten-quid whore. Good Christ, you
saw
her.”

“I've also seen his wife.”

The two men laughed. Lynley glanced at Helen. Her face was unreadable. He guided her past his colleagues with a nod.

“Aren't you on holiday?” Hale called after them.

“We're in Greece,” Lynley said.

In his office, he waited for her reaction as he took off his coat and hung it on the back of the door. But she said nothing about the brief exchange they'd heard. Instead, she went back to their previous topic, although, when he evaluated it, he realised that she wasn't digressing too far thematically from her central concern.

“Do you think Robin Sage killed her, Tommy?”

“It was night, a rough crossing. There were no witnesses who saw his wife throw herself from the ferry, nor was there anyone who came forward to support his claim of going to the bar for a drink when he left the lounge.”

“But a priest? Not only to do it in the first place but then to manage carrying on with his ministry afterwards?”

“He didn't carry on, exactly. He left his position in Truro directly she died. He took up a different sort of ministry as well. And he took it up in places where he wasn't known to the congregation.”

“So if he had something to hide from them, they wouldn't necessarily recognise that fact from a changed behaviour since they didn't know him in the first place?”

“Possibly.”

“But why kill her? What would have been his motive? Jealousy? Anger? Revenge? An inheritance?”

Lynley reached for the telephone. “There seem to be three possibilities. They'd lost their only child six months before.”

“But you said it was a cot death.”

“He may have held her responsible. Or he may have been involved with another woman and knew as a priest he couldn't divorce and expect his career to go anywhere.”

“Or she may have been involved with another man and he found out about it and acted in rage?”

“Or the final alternative: The truth is what it appears to be, a suicide combined with an honest mistake made by a grieving widower in misidentifying bodies. But no conjecture satisfactorily explains why he went to see Susanna's sister in October. And where in the maze does Juliet Spence fit?” He picked up the phone. “You know where the fax is, don't you, Helen? Would you see if Havers sent the newspaper articles?”

She left to do so, and he phoned Crofters Inn.

“I left a message with Denton,” St. James told him when Dora Wragg rang through to their room. “He said he hadn't seen a hair of you all day and hadn't expected to. I imagine about now he's phoning every hospital between London and Manchester, thinking you've had a crash somewhere.”

“I'll check in. How was Aspatria?”

St. James gave him the facts they'd managed to gather during their day in Cumbria, where, he informed Lynley, the snow had begun falling at noon and followed them all the way back to Lancashire.

Prior to moving to Winslough, Juliet Spence had been employed as a caretaker at Sewart House, a large estate some four miles outside of Aspatria. Like Cotes Hall, it was in an isolated location and, at the time, inhabited only during August when the son of the owner came up from London with his family for an extended holiday.

“Was she sacked for some reason?” Lynley asked.

Not at all, St. James told him. The house was deeded over to the National Trust when the owner died. The Trust asked Juliet Spence to stay on once they'd opened the grounds and the buildings for public viewing. She moved on to Winslough instead.

“Any problems while she was in Aspatria?”

“None. I spoke to the owner's son, and he had nothing but unqualified praise for her and great affection for Maggie.”

“So there's nothing,” Lynley mused.

“Not quite. Deborah and I have been working the phones for you most of the day.”

Before Aspatria, St. James said, she'd worked in Northumberland, outside the small village of Holystone. There, she'd been a combination of housekeeper and companion to an elderly invalid called Mrs. Soames-West, who lived alone in a small Georgian mansion to the north of the village.

“Mrs. Soames-West had no family in England,” St. James said. “And she didn't sound as if she'd had a visitor in years. But she thought a great deal of Juliet Spence, hated to lose her, and wanted to be remembered to her.”

“Why did the Spence woman leave?”

“She gave no reason. Just that she'd found another job and she thought it was time.”

“How long had she been there?”

“Two years there. Two years in Aspatria.”

“And before that?” Lynley glanced up as Helen returned with at least a metre's worth of fax hanging over her arm. She handed it to him. He laid it on the desk.

“Two years on Tiree.”

“The Hebrides?”

“Yes. And before that Benbecula. You're seeing the pattern, I take it?”

He was. Each location was more remote than the last. At this rate, he expected her first place of employment to be Iceland.

“That's where the trail went cold,” St. James said. “She worked in a small guesthouse on Benbecula, but no one there could tell me where she'd been employed before that.”

“Curious.”

“Considering how long ago it was, I can't say there's great cause for suspicion in the fact. On the other hand, her life-style itself sounds rather suspect to me, but I suppose I'm more tied to home and hearth than most.”

Helen sat down in the chair facing Lynley's desk. He'd turned on the desk lamp rather than the fluorescent lights overhead, so she was partially in shadow with a streak of brightness falling mostly across her hands. She was wearing, he noted, a pearl ring he'd given her for her twentieth birthday. Odd that he'd not noticed before now.

St. James was saying, “So despite their wanderlust, at least they won't be going anywhere for the moment.”

“Who?”

“Juliet Spence and Maggie. She wasn't at school today, according to Josie, which made us think at first that they'd heard you'd gone to London and done a bunk as a result.”

“You're sure they're still in Winslough?”

“They're here. Josie told us at considerable length over dinner that she'd spoken with Maggie for nearly an hour on the phone round five o'clock. Maggie claims to have flu, which may or may not be the case since she also appears to have had a falling out with her boyfriend and according to Josie, she may have been skipping out on school for that reason. But even if she isn't ill and they're getting ready to run, the snow's been coming down for more than six hours and the roads are hell. They're not going anywhere unless they plan to do it on skis.” Deborah said something quietly in the background after which St. James added, “Right. Deborah says you might want to hire a Range Rover rather than drive the Bentley back up here. If the snow keeps up, you won't be able to get in any more than anyone else will be able to get out.”

Lynley rang off with a promise to think about it.

“Anything?” Helen asked as he picked up the fax and spread it across the desk.

“It's curiouser and curiouser,” he replied. He pulled out his spectacles and began to read. The amalgamation of facts were out of order—the first article was about the funeral—and he realised that, with an inattention to detail unusual in her, his sergeant had fed the copies of the newspaper articles into the facsimile machine haphazardly. Irritated, he took a pair of scissors, cut the articles, and was reassembling them by date, when the telephone rang.

“Denton thinks you're dead,” Sergeant Havers said.

“Havers, why in God's name did you fax me this mess out of order?”

“Did I? I must have got distracted by the bloke using the copy machine next to me. He looked just like Ken Branagh. Although what Ken Branagh would be doing making copies of a handout for an antiques fair is well beyond me. He says you drive too fast, by the way.”

“Kenneth Branagh?”

“Denton, Inspector. And since you haven't phoned him, he assumes you're squashed bug-like somewhere on the M1 or M6. If you'd move in with Helen or she'd move in with you, you'd be making things a hell of a lot easier on all of us.”

“I'm working on it, Sergeant.”

“Good. Give the poor bloke a call, will you? I told him you were alive at one o'clock, but he wasn't buying that since I hadn't actually seen your face. What's a voice on the phone, after all? Someone could have been impersonating you.”

“I'll check in,” Lynley said. “What do you have? I know Joseph's was a cot death—”

“You've been a busy bloke, haven't you? Make that a double and you'll have put your finger on Juliet Spence as well.”

“What?”

“Cot death.”

“She had a child die of cot death?”

“No. She died of it herself.”

“Havers, for God's sake. This is the woman in Winslough.”

“That may be the case, but the Juliet Spence connected to the Sages in Cornwall is buried in the same graveyard as they are, Inspector. She died forty-four years ago. Make that forty-four years, three months, and sixteen days.”