Missing Joseph

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.”

Lynley pulled the stack of clipped and sorted faxes towards him as Helen said, “What is it?” and Havers continued to speak.

“The connection you wanted wasn’t between Juliet Spence and Susanna. It was between Susanna and Juliet’s mother, Gladys. She’s still in Tresillian, as a matter of fact. I had late tea with her this afternoon.”

He scanned the information in the fi rst article at the same time as he prolonged the moment when he would have to examine the dark, grainy photograph that accompanied it and make a decision.

“She knew the entire family — Robin grew up in Tresillian, by the by, and she used to keep house for his parents — and she still does the flowers for the church here. She looks about seventy and my guess is she could take us both on in tennis and rout us in a minute. Anyway, she got close to Susanna for a time when Joseph died. Since she’d been through the same thing herself, she wanted to help her, as much as Susanna would let her which, obviously, wasn’t a great deal.”

He reached in the drawer for a magnifying glass, played it over the faxed photograph, and wished uselessly that he had the original. The woman in the photograph was fuller of face than was Juliet Spence, with darker hair that curled loosely round her head to her shoulders and below. But more than a decade had passed since it had been taken. This woman’s youth might have given way to another’s middle-age, thinning the face and greying the hair. The shape of the mouth looked right. The eyes seemed similar.

Havers was continuing. “She said she and Susanna spent some time together after they buried him. She said it’s something a woman never gets over, losing a child and particularly losing an infant that way. She said she still thinks of her Juliet every day and never forgets her birthday. She always wonders what she might have turned out like. She said she still has dreams about the afternoon when the baby never woke up from her nap.”

It was a possibility, as indistinct as the photograph itself, but still undeniably real.

“She had two more children after Juliet, did Gladys. She tried to use that fact to help Susanna see that the worst of her grief would pass when other babies came. But Gladys’d had one other before Juliet as well and that one lived, so she could never break through to her completely because Susanna’d always remind her of that.”

He set down the magnifying glass and the photograph. There was only one fact he needed to confirm before he moved forward.

“Havers,” he said, “what about Susanna’s body? Who found it? Where?”

“According to Gladys, she was fi sh bait. No one ever found her. They had a funeral service, but there’s sod all in the grave. Not even a coffi n.”

He replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle and removed his spectacles. Carefully, he polished them on a handkerchief before returning them to his nose. He looked at his notes — Aspatria, Holystone, Tiree, Benbecula — and saw what she had attempted to do. The why of it all, he was certain, remained where it always had been, with Maggie.

“They’re the same person, aren’t they?” Helen left her chair and came to stand behind his where she could look over his shoulder at the material spread out before him. She put her hand on his shoulder.

He reached for it. “I think they are,” he said.

“What does it mean?”

He spoke contemplatively. “She would have needed a birth certificate for a different passport so that she could slip off the ferry when it docked in France. She could have got a copy of the Spence child’s certificate at St. Catherine’s House — no, it would have been Somerset House then — or she could have pinched the original from Gladys without her knowledge. She’d been visiting her sister in London before her ‘suicide.’ She would have had time to set everything up.”

“But why?” Helen asked. “Why did she do it?”

“Because she may have been the woman taken in adultery after all.”

A stealthy movement of the bed awakened Helen the next morning, and she cracked open one eye. A grey light was sifting through the curtains and falling upon her favourite armchair across whose back an overcoat was fl ung. The clock on the bedside table said just before eight. She murmured, “God,” and plumped her pillow. She closed her eyes with some deliberation. The bed moved again.

“Tommy,” she said, fumbling for the clock and turning it to face the wall, “I don’t think it’s even dawn yet. Truly, darling. You need to get more sleep. What time did we fi nally get to bed? Was it two?”

“Damn,” he said quietly. “I know it. I know it.”

“Good. Then lie down.”

“The rest of the answer’s right here, Helen. Somewhere.”

She frowned and rolled over to see that he was sitting against the headboard with his spectacles perched on the end of his nose, letting his eyes travel over piles of paper scraps, handouts, tickets, programmes, and other miscellanea that he’d spread across her bed. She yawned and simultaneously recognised the piles. They’d pawed through Robin Sage’s odd bits carton three times before giving it up and going to bed last night. But Tommy wasn’t done with it, it seemed. He leaned forward, riffl ed through one of the piles, and rested against the headboard once more, as if awaiting inspiration to strike.

“The answer’s here,” he said. “I know it.”

Helen stretched out an arm beneath the covers and rested her hand on his thigh. “Sherlock Holmes would have solved it by now,” she noted.

“Please don’t remind me.”

“Hmmm. You’re warm.”

“Helen, I’m making an attempt at deductive thought.”

“Am I getting in the way?”

“What do you think?”

She chuckled, reached for her dressing gown, draped it round her shoulders, and joined him against the headboard. She picked up one of the piles at random and leafed through it. “I thought you had the answer last night. If Susanna knew she was pregnant, and if the baby wasn’t his, and if there was no way she could pass it off as his because they’d stopped having sex, which according to her sister appears to have been the case…What more do you want?”

“I want a reason she’d kill him. What we have right now is a reason he’d kill her.”

“Perhaps he wanted her back and she didn’t want to go.”

“He could hardly force her.”

“But if he decided to claim the child was his? To force her hand through Maggie?”

“A genetic test would take the wind out of that plan.”

“Then perhaps Maggie was his after all. Perhaps he was responsible for Joseph’s death. Or perhaps Susanna thought he was, so when she discovered she was pregnant again, she wasn’t about to let him have a go with another child.”

Lynley made a noise of dismissal and reached for Robin Sage’s engagement diary. Helen noticed that, while she slept, he’d also rummaged round the flat for the telephone directory, which was lying open at the foot of the bed.

“Then…Let me see.” She fl ipped through her small stack of papers and wondered why on earth anyone would have kept these grimy handouts, the sort that were continually thrust at pedestrians on the street. She would have dropped them into the nearest dustbin. She hated to refuse to take them altogether when the people passing