Indeed. Maggie was the equation to be solved if he was to win her mother, and he knew it. But she was elusive, a sprite-child who had watched him solemnly from across the courtyard when he left the cottage on that first afternoon. She was clutching a mangy cat in her arms, and her eyes were solemn. She knows, he thought. He said hello and her name, but she disappeared round the side of the Hall. And ever since then, she’d been polite — a very model of good breeding — but he could see the judgement on her face and he could have predicted the manner in which she would exact retribution from her mother long before Juliet realised where Maggie’s infatuation with Nick Ware was heading.
He could have interceded in some way. He knew Nick Ware, after all. He was well-acquainted with the boy’s parents. He could have been useful, had Juliet let him.
Instead, she’d allowed the vicar to enter their lives. And it hadn’t taken Robin Sage long to forge what Colin himself had been unable to create: a fragile bond with Maggie. He saw them talking together outside the church, strolling into the village with the vicar’s heavy hand at rest on the girl’s shoulder. He watched them perched on the graveyard wall with their backs to the road, their faces towards Cotes Fell, and the vicar’s arm arcing out to illustrate the curve of the land or some point he was making. He noted the visits Maggie had paid to the vicarage. And he used these last to broach the subject with Juliet.
“It’s nothing,” Juliet said. “She’s looking for her father. She knows it can’t be you — she thinks you’re too young and besides you’ve never left Lancashire, have you — so she’s trying out Mr. Sage for the role. She thinks her father’s out searching for her somewhere. Why not as a vicar?”
Which gave him the opening: “Who is her father?”
Her face settled into the familiar, firm lines of withdrawal. He sometimes wondered if her silence was a way she maintained his level of passion for her, keeping herself more intriguing than other women and thus challenging him to prove an entirely nonexistent dominance over her by cooperatively continuing to perform in her bed. But she seemed unaffected by that as well, saying only, “Nothing lasts forever, does it, Colin,” whenever his desperation to know the truth forced him to allude to leaving her. Which he never would, which he knew he never could.
“Who is he, Juliet? He isn’t dead, is he?”
The most she had ever said, she said in bed one June night with a wash of moonlight against her skin, making a dappled pattern from the summer leaves outside the window.
She said, “Maggie wants to think that.”
“Is it the truth?”
She closed her eyes briefly. He lifted her hand, kissed its palm, rested it against his chest. “Juliet, is it the truth?”
“I think it is.”
“Think…? Are you married to him still?”
“Colin. Please.”
“Were you ever married to him?”
Her eyes closed again. He could see the faint glimmer of tears beneath the lashes, and for a mindless moment he couldn’t understand the source of either her pain or her sadness. Then he said, “Oh God. Juliet. Juliet, were you raped? Is Maggie…Did someone—”
She whispered. “Don’t humiliate me.”
“You were never married, were you?”
“Please, Colin.”
But that fact made no difference. Still she wouldn’t marry him.
Not, however, too old for the vicar.
Standing in his house, his head pressed against the cool front door, the sound of his father’s departure long faded, Colin Shepherd felt Inspector Lynley’s question bouncing
round his skull like a persistent echo of all his doubts.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
What difference did it make that Mr. Sage had gone out to Cotes Hall just to talk about Maggie? The village constable had merely gone out there to caution a woman about discharging a shotgun, only to find himself tearing off her clothes in a fever to mate after less than an hour in her company. And she didn’t protest. She didn’t try to stop him. If anything, she was as aggressive as he. When one considered it, what kind of a woman was that?
A siren, he thought and he tried to turn away from his father’s voice.
Had she done that with him? With Sage as well? She’d said he was visiting her to talk about Maggie. He meant well, she said, and she ought to listen. She’d declared herself at the end of her rope when it came to reasonable discussion with the girl, so if the vicar had ideas, who was she to turn a deaf ear to them?
And then she’d searched his face. “You don’t trust me, Colin, do you?”
No. Not an inch. Not a moment of being alone with another man in that isolated cottage where the solitude itself was a call for seduction. Nonetheless, he’d said, “Of course I do.”
“You can come as well, if you’d like. Sit between us at the table. Make certain I don’t take off my shoe and rub my foot against his leg.”
“I don’t want that.”
“Then what?”
“I just want things settled between us. I want people to know.”
“Things can’t be settled in the way you’d like.”
And now they never would be, unless and until Scotland Yard cleared her name. Because all her protests of their age difference aside, he knew he couldn’t marry Juliet Spence and maintain his position in Winslough while so many doubts filled the atmosphere with whispered speculations whenever they appeared in public together. And he couldn’t leave Win-slough married to Juliet if he hoped to keep peace with her daughter. He was caught in a trap of his own devising. Only New Scotland Yard CID could spring him.
The doorbell rang above his head, so shrill and unexpected a sound that he started. The dog began barking. Colin waited for him to trot out of the sitting room.
“Quiet,” he said. “Sit.” Leo complied, head cocked to one side, waiting. Colin opened the door.
The sun was gone. Dusk was drawing quickly towards night. The light on the porch which he’d switched on to welcome New Scotland Yard now shone on the wiry hair of Polly Yarkin.
She was clutching a scarf twined between her fingers and pinching closed the collar of her old navy coat. Her felt skirt dangled overlong to her ankles which were themselves encased in battered boots. She moved uneasily from foot to foot. She offered a quick smile.
“I was finishing up in the vicarage, wasn’t I, and I couldn’t help but notice…” She cast a look back in the direction of the Clitheroe Road. “I saw th’ two gentlemen leave. Ben at the pub said Scotland Yard. I wouldn’t have known except Ben phoned — him being a church warden, you know — and told me they’d probably want to have themselves a poke through the vicarage. He said for me to wait. But they didn’t come. Is everything all right?”
One hand squeezed her collar more tightly, and the other grappled with the loose ends of the scarf. He could see her mother’s name upon it, and he recognised it as a souvenir advertising her business in Blackpool. She’d gone through scarves, beer mats, printed matchbook covers — like she was running some posh hotel — and she’d even given out free chopsticks for a while when she was “purely truly positive” that tourism from the Orient was about to reach an all-time high. Rita Yarkin — aka Rita Rularski — was nothing if not a born entrepreneur.
“Colin?”
He realised he was staring at the scarf, wondering why Rita had chosen neon lime green and decorated that colour with crimson diamonds. He stirred, glanced down, saw that Leo was wagging his tail in welcome. The dog recognised Polly.
“Is everything all right?” she asked again. “I saw your dad leave as well and I spoke to him — I was sweeping the porch — but he didn’t seem to hear because he didn’t say anything. So I wondered is everything all right?”
He knew he couldn’t leave her standing on the porch in the cold. He’d known her from childhood after all, and even if that had not been the case, she’d come on an errand that at least wore the guise of a friend’s concern.
