Missing Joseph

“How’s things, Constable?” Ben Wragg asked. “Your dad get settled into the pensioners’ home yet?”

The constable counted out some coins and laid them on the bar. “Last week,” he said.

“Quite a man, your dad was in his day, Colin. Quite a copper.”

The constable pushed the money towards Wragg. He said, “Yes. Quite. We all had years to get to know that, didn’t we,” and he picked up the glasses and went to join his companion.

He sat on the bench, so his face was to the room. He looked from the bar to the tables, one at a time. And one at a time, people looked away. But the conversation in the pub was hushed, so much so that the sound of banging pots in the kitchen was quite distinct.

After a moment, one of the farmers said, “Guess that’ll be it for the evening, Ben,” and another said, “Got to pop round to see my old gran.” A third merely tossed a fi ve-pound note on the bar and waited for his change. Within minutes of the arrival of the constable and Mrs. Spence, most of the other patrons of Crofters Inn had vanished, leaving behind one lone man in tweeds who swirled his gin glass and slumped against the wall, and the group of teenagers who moved to a fruit machine at the far end of the pub and began to try their luck with its spinning dials.

Josie had stood by the table during all of this, her lips parted and her eyes wide. It was only Ben Wragg’s barking, “Josephine, be about it,” that brought her back to her explanation of dinner. Even then, all she managed was, “What’ll…for dinner?” But before they had a chance to make their selections, she went on with “The dining room’s just this way, if you’ll follow me.”

She led them through a low door next to the fireplace where the temperature dropped a good ten degrees and the predominant scent was of baking bread rather than the pub’s cigarette smoke and ale. She put them next to a simmering wall heater and said, “You’ll have the place all to yourselves this evening. No one else is staying here tonight. I’ll just pop into the kitchen and tell them what you’ve—” whereupon she finally seemed to realise that she had nothing at all to tell anyone. She chewed her lip. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not thinking right. You’ve not even ordered.”

“Is something wrong?” Deborah asked.

“Wrong?” The pencil went back into her hair, lead first this time and twirling, as if she were drawing a design on her scalp.

“Is there some sort of problem?”

“Problem?”

“Is someone in trouble?”

“Trouble?”

St. James put an end to the game of echo. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a local constable clear out a public house so quickly. Without time being called, of course.”

“Oh, no,” Josie said. “It’s not Mr. Shepherd. I mean…It’s not actually…It’s just that… Things’ve happened round here and you know how it is in a village and…Gosh, p’raps I ought to take your order. Mr. Wragg gets himself in a real fret if I chunter too much with the residents. ‘They haven’t come to Winslough to have their ears gnawed off by the likes of you, Miss Josephine.’ That’s what he says. Mr. Wragg. You know.”

“Is it the woman with the constable?” Deborah asked.

Josie flicked a look towards a swinging door that appeared to give access to the kitchen. “I really oughtn’t talk.”

“Perfectly understandable,” St. James said and consulted his menu. “Stuffed mushrooms to start and the sole for me. And for you, Deborah?”

But Deborah felt reluctant to be put off. She decided that if Josie was hesitant to talk about one subject, a switch to another might loosen her tongue. “Josie,” she said, “can you tell us anything about the vicar, Mr. Sage?”

Josie’s head flew up from her writing pad. “How’d you know?”

“What?”

She flung her arm in the direction of the pub. “Out there. How’d you know?”

“We don’t know anything. Except that he’s dead. We’d come to Winslough in part to see him. Can you tell us what happened? Was his death unexpected? Had he been ill?”

“No.” Josie dropped her eyes to her writing pad and gave all her concentration to the writing of stuffed mushrooms and sole. “Not exactly ill. Not for long, that is.”

“A sudden illness, then?”

“Sudden. Yes. Right.”

“A heart condition? A stroke? Something like that.”

“Something…quick it was. He went off quick.”

“An infection? A virus?”

Josie looked pained, clearly torn between holding her tongue and spilling her guts. She fiddled her pencil across her pad.

“He wasn’t murdered, was he?” St. James asked.

“No!” the girl gasped. “It wasn’t like that at all. It was an accident. Really. Honest and true. She didn’t mean…She couldn’t have…I mean I know her. We all do. She didn’t mean him any harm.”

“Who?” St. James asked.

Josie’s eyes went towards the door.

“It’s that woman,” Deborah said. “It’s Mrs. Spence, isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t murder!” Josie cried.

She offered them the story in bits and pieces between serving the dinner, pouring the wine, bringing the cheese board, and presenting the coffee.

Food poisoning, she told them, December last. The story came in gulps, fits, and starts, with frequent glances in the direction of the kitchen, apparently to make sure no one would catch her in the midst of telling the tale. Mr. Sage had been making his rounds of the parish, visiting each family for afternoon tea or an evening meal —

“Eating his way towards righteousness and glory, according to Mr. Wragg, but you got to ignore him if you know what I mean because he never goes to church ’less it’s Christmas or a funeral.”

— and he went to Mrs. Spence on a Friday night. It was just the two of them because Mrs. Spence’s daughter—

“She’s my best mate Maggie.”

— was spending the evening with Josie right here. Mrs. Spence had always made it clear to anyone who asked that she didn’t think much of going to church as a general rule despite its being the sole, dependable social event in the village, but she wasn’t one to be rude to a vicar, so when Mr. Sage wanted to try to talk her into giving the C of E another chance in her life, she was willing to listen. She was always polite. That was her way. So the vicar went out to her cottage for the evening, prayer book in hand, all ready to bring her back to religion. He was supposed to be at a wedding the next morning—

“Tying up that skinny cat Becca Townley-Young and Brendan Power…him that’s out there in the bar drinking gin, did you see him?”

— but he never showed up and that’s how everyone found out he was dead.

“Dead and stiff with his lips all bloody and his jaws locked up like they was wired shut.”

“That certainly sounds like an odd bit of food poisoning,” St. James remarked doubtfully. “Because if food’s gone bad—”

It wasn’t that kind of food poisoning, Josie informed them with a pause to scratch her bottom through her threadbare skirt. It was real food poisoning.

“You mean poison in the food?” Deborah asked.

The poison was the food. Wild parsnip picked down by the pond near Cotes Hall. “Only it wasn’t wild parsnip like Missus Spence thought. Not at all. Not — at — all.”

“Oh no,” Deborah said as the circumstances of the vicar’s death began to take on more clarity. “How dreadful. What a terrible thing.”

“It was water hemlock,” Josie said in breathless summation. “Like what Socrates drunk with his tea in Greece. She thought it was parsnip, did Missus Spence, and so did the vicar and he ate it and…” She grabbed her throat and made appropriate death noises after which she glanced round furtively. “Only don’t tell Mum I did like