Missing Joseph

“You thought we might not?”

“I never know quite what to think with you, frankly.”

She raised her knees and rested her chin on them, pulling her dress close round her legs. Her gaze was on the bathroom door. She said, “Please don’t ever think that, my love. Don’t let who I am — or what I do — make you think we’ll drift apart. I’m diffi cult, I know—”

“You were ever that.”

“—but the together of us is the most important thing in my life.” When he didn’t respond at once, she turned her head to him, still resting it against her knees. “Do you believe that?”

“I want to.”

“But?”

He coiled a lock of her hair round his fi nger and examined how it caught the light. It was, in colour, somewhere on the scale between red, chestnut, and blonde. He couldn’t have named it. “Sometimes the business of life and its general messiness get in the way of together,” he settled on saying. “When that happens, it’s easy to lose sight of where you began, where you were heading, and why you took up with each other in the fi rst place.”

“I’ve never had a single problem with any of that,” she said. “You were always in my life and I always loved you.”

“But?”

She smiled and side-stepped with greater skill than he would have thought she possessed. “The night you first kissed me, you ceased being my childhood hero Mr. St. James and became the man I meant to marry. It was simple for me.”

“It’s never simple, Deborah.”

“I think it can be. If two minds are one.” She kissed him on the forehead, the bridge of his nose, his mouth. He shifted his hand from her hair to the back of her neck, but she hopped off the bed and unzipped her dress, yawning.

“Did we waste our time going to Bradford, then?” She wandered to the clothes cupboard and fished for a hanger.

He watched her, nonplussed, trying to make the connection. “Bradford?”

“Robin Sage. Did you find nothing in the vicarage about his marriage? The woman taken in adultery? And what about St. Joseph?”

He accepted her change in conversation, for the moment. It kept things easier, after all.

“Nothing. But his things were packed away in cartons and there were dozens of those, so there may be something still to be uncovered. Tommy seems to think it unlikely, however. He thinks the truth’s in London. And he thinks it has to do with the relationship between Maggie and her mother.”

Deborah pulled her dress over her head, saying in a voice muffled from within its folds, “Still, I don’t see why you’ve rejected the past. It seemed so compelling — a mysterious wife’s even more mysterious boating accident and all of that. He may have been phoning Social Services for reasons having nothing to do with the girl in the fi rst place.”

“True. But phoning Social Services in London? Why wouldn’t he have phoned a local branch if it was in reference to a local problem?”

“For that matter, even if his phoning had to do with Maggie, why would he phone London about her?”

“He wouldn’t want her mother to know, I expect.”

“He could have phoned Manchester or Liverpool, then. Couldn’t he? And if he didn’t, why didn’t he?”

“That’s the question. One way or the other, we need to find the answer. Suppose he was telephoning with regard to something that Maggie had confi ded in him. If he was invading what Juliet Spence saw as her own patch — the upbringing of her daughter — and if he was invading it in a way that threatened her and if he revealed this invasion to her, perhaps to force her hand in some way, don’t you suppose she may have reacted to that?”

“Yes,” Deborah said. “I tend to think she would have done.” She hung up her dress and straightened it on the hanger. She sounded thoughtful.

“But you’re not convinced?”

“It’s not that.” She reached for her dressing gown, donned it, and rejoined him on the bed. She sat on the edge, studying her feet. “It’s just that…” She frowned. “I mean…I think it more likely that, if Juliet Spence murdered him and if Maggie’s at the bottom of why she murdered him, she did it not because she herself was threatened, but because Maggie was. This is her child, after all. You can’t forget that. You can’t forget what it means.”

St. James felt trepidation send its current of warning through the shorter hairs on the back of his neck. Her final statement, he knew, could lead to treacherous ground between them. He said nothing and waited for her to continue. She did so, dropping her hand to trace a pattern between them on the counterpane.

“Here’s this creature that grew inside her for nine months, listening to her heartbeat, sharing the flow of her blood, kicking and moving in those final months to make her presence known. Maggie came from her body. She sucked milk from her breasts. Within weeks, she knew her face and her voice. I think—” Her fingers paused in their tracing. Her tone tried and ultimately failed to become practical. “A mother would do anything to safeguard her child. I mean…Wouldn’t she do anything to protect the life she created? And don’t you honestly think that’s what this killing’s all about?”

Somewhere below them in the inn, Dora Wragg’s voice called, “Josephine Eugenia! Where’ve you got yourself to? How many times do I have to tell you—” A slamming door cut off the rest of the words.

St. James said, “Not everyone is like you, my love. Not everyone sees a child that way.”

“But if it’s her only child…”

“Born under what circumstances? Having what kind of impact on her life? Trying her patience in what sort of ways? Who knows what’s gone on between them? You can’t look at Mrs. Spence and her daughter through the filter of your own desires. You can’t stand in her shoes.”

Deborah gave a bitter laugh. “I do know that.”

He saw how she had grasped his words and turned them round on herself to wound. “Don’t,” he said. “You can’t know what the future has in mind for you.”

“When the past is its prologue?” She shook her head. He couldn’t see her face, just a sliver of her cheek like a small quarter moon nearly covered by her hair.

“Sometimes the past is prologue to the future. Sometimes it isn’t.”

“Holding on to that sort of belief is a damned easy way to avoid responsibility, Simon.”

“It can be, indeed. But it can also be a way of getting on with things, can’t it? You always look backwards for your auguries, my love. But that doesn’t seem to give you anything but pain.”

“While you don’t look for auguries at all.”

“That’s the worst of it,” he admitted. “I don’t. Not for us, at least.”

“And for others? For Tommy and Helen? For your brothers? For your sister?”

“Not for them either. They’ll go their own way in the end, despite my brooding over what led up to their eventual decisions.”

“Then who?”

He made no reply. The truth of the matter was that her words had jogged a fragment of conversation loose in his memory, giving rise to thought. But he was wary of a change in topic that she might misinterpret as further indication of his detachment from her.

“Tell me.” She was starting to bristle. He could see it in the way her fi ngers spread out then clutched the counterpane. “Something’s on your mind and I don’t much like to be cut out when we’re talking about—”

He squeezed her hand. “It has nothing to do with us, Deborah. Or with this.”

“Then…” She was quick to read him. “Juliet Spence.”

“Your instincts are generally good about people and situations. Mine aren’t. I always look for bald facts. You’re more comfortable

with conjectures.”

“And?”

“It was what you said about the past being prologue to the future.” He loosed his tie and pulled it over his head, throwing it in the direction of the chest of drawers. It fell short and draped against one of the pulls. “Polly Yarkin overheard Sage having a conversation on the telephone the day he died. He was talking about the