Missing Joseph

that, will you? She’ll tan me if she knows I made light of his dying. It’s sort of a black joke ’mongst the blokes in the village: See-cute-a-now and see-you-dead

in-a-minute.”

“See-what?” Deborah asked.

“Cicuta,” St. James said. “The Latin name for its genus. Cicuta maculata. Cicuta virosa. The species depends on the habitat.” He frowned and absently toyed with the knife that he had used to cut a wedge of double Gloucester, pressing its point into a fragment of the cheese that was left on his plate. But instead of seeing it, for some reason he found himself teasing a memory from the edge of his subconscious. Professor Ian Rutherford at the University of Glasgow, who insisted upon wearing surgical garb even to lectures, whose bywords had been y’can’t take a scunner to a corpse, lads and lassies. Where the hell had he come from, St. James wondered, swirling like a Scots banshee out of the past.

“He never showed up for the wedding next morning,” Josie was continuing affably. “Mr. Townley-Young’s still got himself in a twist over that. It took till half past two to get another vicar, and the wedding breakfast was a total ruin. More’n half the guests had already left the church. Some people think it was Brendan’s doing—’cause it was a forced marriage, and no one can imagine any bloke facing a lifetime of marriage to Becca Townley-Young without trying to do something desperate to stop it — but then that’s making light of things again and if Mum knows I’m doing it, I’ll be in real trouble. She liked Mr. Sage, did Mum.”

“And you?”

“I liked him as well. Everyone did ’cept for Mr. Townley-Young. He said the vicar was ‘too low church by half’ because Mr. Sage wouldn’t use incense and he wouldn’t tart himself up in satin ’n’ lace. But there’s more important stuff’n that in being a proper vicar, if you ask me. And Mr. Sage saw to the important stuff.”

St. James half-listened to the girl prattle on. She was pouring coffee and presenting them with a decorative, porcelain plate upon which lay six petit fours with remarkable and gastronomically questionable rainbow icings.

The vicar was a great one for visiting in the village, Josie explained. He started a youth group— she was social chair and vice-president, by the way — and he looked in on the housebound and he tried to get people to come back to church. He knew everyone in the village by name. On Tuesday afternoons, he read to the children in the primary school. He answered his own front door when he was home. He didn’t put on airs.

“I met him briefly in London,” Deborah said. “He did seem quite nice.”

“He was. Truly. And that’s why when Missus Spence comes round, things get a bit difficult.” Josie leaned over their table and made an adjustment to the paper doily under the petit fours, centring it carefully on the plate. The plate itself she pushed closer to the table’s small tassel-shaded lamp, the better to highlight the confections’ icing. “I mean, it’s not like just anyone made the mistake, is it? Crimminy-crimeny, it’s not like Mum did it.”

“But surely no matter who made the mistake, that person would have spent some time being looked on with a leery eye,” Deborah noted. “Especially as Mr. Sage was well-liked.”

“Isn’t like that,” Josie said in quick reply. “She’s a herbalist, is Missus Spence after all, so she should have bloody well known what she was digging out of the ground before she put it on the flaming table. That’s what people say, at least. In the pub. You know. They chew on the story and they won’t let it go. Doesn’t matter to them what the inquest said.”

“A herbalist who didn’t recognise hemlock?” Deborah asked.

“That’s what’s got them in a dither all right.”

St. James listened silently, tilting the fragment of double Gloucester with his knife, gazing at the crater-like surface of the cheese. Unbidden, Ian Rutherford returned, lining up on the worktable specimen jars which he removed from a trolley with a connoisseur’s care while all the time the smell of formaldehyde that emanated from him like a ghoulish perfume put a premature end to anyone’s thoughts of lunch. On to primary symptoms, my luvlies, he was announcing gaily as he produced each jar with a fl ourish. Burning pain in th’ gullet, excessive salivation, nausea. Next, giddiness before the convulsions begin. These are spasmodic, rendering the musculature rigid. Vomition’s precluded by convulsive closure of the mouth. He gave a satisfied rap on the metallic lid of one of the jars in which appeared to be floating a human lung. Death in fi fteen minutes, or up to eight hours. Asphyxia. Heart failure. Complete respiratory shutdown. Another rap on

the lid. Questions? No? Good. Enough of cicutoxin. On to curare. Primary symptoms…

But St. James was having symptoms of his own and he felt them even as Josie chattered on: disquiet at first, a distinct unease. Now here’s a case in point, Rutherford was saying. But the point he was making and the nature of the case were elusive as eels. St. James set down his knife and reached for one of the petit fours. Josie beamed her apparent approval of his choice.

“Iced them myself,” she said. “I think the pink-and-green ones look best.”

“What sort of herbalist?” he asked her.

“Missus Spence?”

“Yes.”

“The doctoring sort. She picks stuff in the forest and up on the hills and she mixes it good and mashes it up. For fevers and cramps, head colds and stuff. Maggie — Missus Spence’s her mum and she’s my best mate and she’s ever so nice — she’s never even been to a doctor, far’s I know. She gets a sore, her mum whips up a plaster. She gets a fever, her mum makes some tea. She made me a throat wash from creeping jenny when I was out to the Hall on a visit — that’s where they live, up by Cotes Hall — and I gargled for a day and the

soreness was gone.”

“So she knows her plants.”

Josie’s head bobbed. “That’s why when Mr. Sage died, it looked real bad. How could she not know, people’ve wondered. I mean, I wouldn’t know wild parsnip from hay but Missus Spence…” Her voice drifted off and she held out her hands in a what’s-a-body-tothink sort of gesture.

“But surely the inquest dealt with all that,” Deborah said.

“Oh yes. Right above stairs in the Magistrate’s Court — have you seen it yet? Pop in for a look before you go to bed.”

“Who gave evidence?” St. James asked. The answer promised a renewal of disquiet, and he was fairly certain what that answer would be. “Other than Mrs. Spence herself.”

“Constable.”

“The man who was with her tonight?”

“Him. Mr. Shepherd. That’s right. He found Mr. Sage — the body, I guess — on the footpath that goes to Cotes Hall and the Fell on Saturday morning.”

“Did he conduct the investigation alone?”

“Far’s I know. He’s our constable, isn’t he?”

St. James saw his wife turning to him curiously, one of her hands raising to finger a twisted curl of her hair. She said nothing, but she understood him well enough to realise where his thoughts were heading.

It was, he thought, none of their business. They’d come to this village for a holiday. Away from London and away from their home, there would be no professional or domestic distractions to prevent the dialogue in which they needed to engage.

Yet it wasn’t that easy to walk away from the two dozen scientific and procedural questions that were second nature to him and shouting to be answered. It was even less easy to walk away from the persistent monologue of Ian Rutherford. Even now, it was playing like a nagging, nameless melody inside his skull. Y’ve got to hae the thickened portion of the plant, m’ luvlies. Very characteristic, this little beauty, stem and root. Stem is thickened as y’ will note and not one but several roots are attached. When we cut into the surface of the stem like so, we have oursel’s the very scent of raw parsnip. Now, to review…who sh’ll do the honours? And under eyebrows that looked like wild plants themselves, Rutherford’s blue eyes would dart round