Missing Joseph

She drew her eyebrows together. “I don’t recall exactly. It was sometime in the autumn. Perhaps late September?”

“The eleventh of October?”

“It could have been. Shall I check that for you?”

“Did he have an appointment?”

“One could call it that. Why? Has he got into trouble?”

“He’s dead.”

She adjusted her grip on the mug slightly, but that was the only reaction that Lynley could read. “This an investigation?”

“The circumstances were rather irregular.” He waited for her to do the normal thing, to ask what the circumstances were. When she didn’t, he said, “Sage lived in Lancashire. May I take it that he didn’t come to see you about hiring a temporary employee?”

She sipped her chicken bouillon. “He came to talk about Susanna.”

“His wife.”

“My sister.” She pulled a square of white linen from her pocket, dabbed it against the corners of her mouth, and replaced it neatly. “I hadn’t seen or heard a word from him since the day of her funeral. He wasn’t exactly welcome here. Not after everything that had happened.”

“Between him and his wife.”

“And the baby. That dreadful business about Joseph.”

“He was an infant when he died, as I understand.”

“Just three months. It was a cot death. Susanna went to get him up one morning, thinking that he’d actually slept through the night for the first time. He’d been dead for hours. He was stiff with rigor. She broke three of his ribs between the kiss of life and trying to give him CPR. There was an investigation, of course. And there were questions of abuse when the word got out about his ribs.”

“Police questions?” Lynley asked in some surprise. “If the bones were broken after death—”

“They would have known. I’m aware of that. It wasn’t the police. Naturally, they questioned her, but once they had the pathologist’s report, they were satisfied. Still, there were whispers in the community. And Susanna was in an exposed position.”

Kate got up and walked to the window where she pushed back the curtains. The rain was pattering against the glass. She said contemplatively but without much ferocity, “I blamed him. I still do. But Susanna only blamed herself.”

“I’d think that’s a fairly normal reaction.”

“Normal?” Kate laughed softly. “There was nothing normal about her situation.”

Lynley waited without reply or question. The rain snaked in rivulets against the window-panes. A telephone rang in the office below.

“Joseph slept in their bedroom the fi rst two months.”

“Hardly abnormal.”

She seemed not to hear. “Then Robin insisted he be given a room of his own. Susanna wanted him near her, but she cooperated with Robin. That was her way. And he was very convincing.”

“About what?”

“He kept insisting that a child could be irrevocably damaged by witnessing at any age, even in infancy, what Robin in his infi nite wisdom called ‘the primal scene’ between his parents.” Kate turned from the window and sipped more broth. “Robin refused to have sex as long as the baby was in the room. When Susanna wanted to… resume relations, she had to go along with Robin’s wishes. But I suppose you can imagine what little Joseph’s death did to any future primal scenes between them.”

The marriage quickly fell apart, she said. Robin flung himself into his work as a means of distraction. Susanna drifted into depression.

“I was living and working in London at the time,” Kate said, “so I had her come to stay with me. I had her go to galleries. I gave her books to identify the birds in the parks. I mapped out city walks and had her take one each day. Someone had to do something, after

all. I tried.”

“To…?”

“To get her back into life. What do you think? She was wallowing in grief. She was luxuriating in guilt and self-loathing. It wasn’t healthy. And Robin wasn’t helping matters at all.”

“He’d have been feeling his own grief, I dare say.”

“She wouldn’t put it behind her. Every day I’d come home and there she would be, sitting on the bed, holding the baby’s picture against her breast, wanting to talk and relive it all. Day after day. As if talking about it would have done any good.” Kate returned to the sofa and placed her mug on a round of mosaic that served as a mat on the side table. “She was torturing herself. She wouldn’t let it go. I told her she had to. She was young. She’d have another baby, after all. Joseph was dead. He was gone. He was buried. And if she didn’t snap out of it and take care of herself, she’d be buried with him.”

“Which she eventually was.”

“I blame him for that. With his primal scenes and his miserable belief in God’s judgement in our lives. That’s what he told her, you know. That Joseph’s death was the hand of God at work. What a beastly man. Susanna didn’t need to hear that sort of rubbish. She didn’t need to believe she was being punished. And for what? For what?”

Kate pulled out her handkerchief a second time. She pressed it against her forehead although she didn’t appear to be perspiring.

“Sorry,” she said. “There are some things in life that don’t bear remembering.”

“Is that why Robin Sage came to see you? To share memories?”

“He was suddenly interested in her,” she said. “He hadn’t been the least involved in her life in the six months that led up to her death. But suddenly he cared. What did she do while she was with you, he wanted to know. Where did she go? What did she talk about? How did she act? Whom did she meet?” She chuckled bitterly. “After all these years. I wanted to smack his mournful little face. He’d been eager enough to see her buried.”

“What do you mean?”

“He kept identifying bodies washed up on the coast. There were two or three of them he said were Susanna. The wrong height, the wrong hair colour when there was hair left on them at all, the wrong weight. It didn’t matter. He was in such a nasty rush about it all.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought at first he had some woman lined up to marry and he needed to have Susanna declared officially dead in order to get on with it.”

“But he didn’t marry.”

“He didn’t. I assume the woman gave him the brush-off, whoever she was.”

“Does the name Juliet Spence mean anything to you? Did he mention a woman called Juliet Spence when he was here? Did Susanna ever mention Juliet Spence?”

She shook her head. “Why?”

“She poisoned Robin Sage. Last month in Lancashire.”

Kate raised a hand as if to touch it to her perfectly brushed hair. She dropped it, however, before it made contact. Her eyes grew momentarily distant. “How odd. I fi nd I’m glad of the fact.”

Lynley wasn’t surprised. “Did your sister ever mention any other men when she was staying with you? Did she see other men once things began to go wrong in her marriage? Could her husband have discovered that?”

“She didn’t talk about men. She talked only about babies.”

“There is, of course, an unavoidable connection between the two.”

“I’ve always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards orgasm without pausing to realise that it’s merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense.”

“People get involved with one another. They pursue intimacy along with love.”

“More fools, they,” Kate said.

Lynley got to his feet. Kate moved behind him and made an adjustment to the position of the pillow on his