Missing Joseph

chair. She brushed her fi ngers across the chair’s back.

He watched her, wondering what it had been like for her sister. Grief calls for acceptance and understanding. No doubt she’d felt herself cut off from mankind.

He said, “Have you any idea why Robin Sage might have telephoned Social Services in London?”

Kate picked a hair from the lapel of her dressing gown. “He’d have been looking for me, no doubt.”

“You supply them with temps?”

“No. I’ve had this business only eight years. Before that, I worked for Social Services. He’d have phoned there fi rst.”

“But your name was in his diary before his calls or visits to Social Services. Why would that be?”

“I couldn’t say. Perhaps he wanted to go through Susanna’s paperwork in the trip down memory lane he’d been taking. Social Services in Truro would have been involved when the baby died. Perhaps he was tracking her paperwork to London.”

“Why?”

“To read it? To set the record straight?”

“To discover if Social Services knew what someone else claimed to know?”

“About Joseph’s death?”

“Is it a possibility?”

She folded her arms beneath her breasts. “I can’t see how. If there had been something suspicious about his death, it would have been acted upon, Inspector.”

“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

IT’S THE NASTY LITTLE FACT that he kept misidentifying bodies,” Lynley said. He nodded to the offi cer on duty at the kiosk, flashed his identification, and descended the ramp into the underground car park of New Scotland Yard. “Why keep saying defi nitively 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 justifi able 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 fl oor. “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