Missing Joseph

“And it isn’t fair because I love you, Colin. I loved you first. I’ve loved you longer than her.”

“Her? Who? How am I punishing you?”

“I know you better than anyone ever could. You need me. You’ll see. Mr. Sage even told me.”

Her final statement brought gooseflesh upon him. “Told you what?”

“That you need me, that you don’t know it yet but you will soon enough if I just stay true. And I have been true. All these years. Always. I live for you, Colin.”

Her avowal of devotion was less than important when the implication behind Mr. Sage even told me demanded exploration and action.

“Sage talked to you about Juliet, didn’t he?” Colin asked. “What did he say? What did he tell you?”

“Nothing.”

“He gave you some sort of assurance. What was it? That she would end things between us?”

“No.”

“You know something.”

“I don’t.”

“Tell me.”

“There’s nothing—”

He stood. He was three feet from her but still she shrank back. Leo raised his head, his ears perking up, a growl in his throat as he sensed the tension. Polly set her sherry glass on the hearth and kept her eyes and one hand on its base, as if it might take flight should she not keep watch.

“What do you know about Juliet?”

“Nothing. I told you. I said that already.”

“About Maggie?”

“Nothing.”

“About her father? What did Robin Sage tell you?”

“Nothing!”

“But you were sure enough about me and Juliet, weren’t you? He made you sure. What did you do to get the information from him, Polly?”

Her hair sailed round her shoulders as her head flew up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Did you sleep with him? You were alone with the man for hours in the vicarage every day. Did you try some kind of spell?”

“I never!”

“Did you see a way to ruin things between us? Did he give you an idea?”

“No! Colin—”

“Did you kill him, Polly? Is Juliet taking the blame?”

She jumped to her feet, planted them apart, punched her fists to her hips. “Just listen to yourself. You talk about me. She’s got you bewitched. She put you in place, got you eating from her hand, murdered the vicar, and got away with it clean. And you’re so blinded by your own stupid lust that you can’t even see how she’s used you.”

“It was an accident.”

“It was murder, murder, murder and she did it and everyone knows she did it. No one can think you could be such a fool as to believe a single word that she says. Except we all know why you believe her, don’t we, we all know what you’re getting, we even know when, so don’t you imagine she might have been giving our precious little vicar just a bit of the same?”

The vicar…the vicar…Colin felt it all at once: bones, blood, and heat. His muscles coiling and his mother’s voice shouting No, Ken, don’t! as his arm soared up right palm to left shoulder and he made the primary lunge to strike. Lungs full, heart raging, wanting contact and pain and retribution and—

Polly cried out, staggered back. Her boot hit the sherry glass. It flew towards the fi re and broke on the fender. The sherry dripped and sizzled. The dog began to bark.

And Colin stood there at the ready, aching to strike. With Polly not Polly and himself not himself and the past and the present howling round him like the wind. Arm raised, features twisted into an expression he’d seen a thousand times but never felt on his face, never thought to feel, never dreamed to feel. Because he couldn’t actually be the man he’d sworn to himself would never exist.

Leo’s barking turned to yelps. They sounded wild and fearful.

“Quiet!” Colin snapped.

Polly cringed. She took another step backwards. Her skirt skimmed the fl ames. Colin grabbed her arm to draw her from the fi re. She jerked away. Leo backed off. His nails scraped on the floor. Aside from the fi re and Colin’s torn breathing, they made the only sound in the room.

Colin held his hand up at the level of his chest. He stared at the shaking fi ngers and palm. He’d never struck a woman in his life. He wouldn’t have thought he was even capable of doing so. His arm dropped like a weight.

“Polly.”

“I cast the circle for you. For Annie as well.”

“Polly, I’m sorry. I’m not thinking right. I’m not thinking at all.”

She began to button her coat. He could see that her hands were trembling worse than his, and he made a move to help her but stopped when she cried No! as if with the expectation of being struck.

“Polly…” His voice sounded desperate, even to himself. But he didn’t know what he wanted to say.

“She’s got you not thinking,” Polly said. “That’s what it is. But you don’t see that, do you? You don’t even want to. ’Cause how can you face it if the very same thing that makes you hate me is what keeps you from seeing the truth about her.” She took out her scarf, made a shaky attempt to fold it into a triangle, and fl ipped it over her head to hold down her hair. She knotted its ends beneath her chin. She moved past him without a glance, squeaking across the room in her ancient boots. She paused at the door and spoke without looking back.

“While you were fucking that day in the barn,” she said quite clearly, “I was making love.”

“On the sitting room sofa?” Josie Wragg asked incredulously. “You mean right here? With your mum and dad in the house? You never!” She got as close as she could to the mirror above the basin and applied the eyeliner with an inexpert hand. A blob of it went into her lashes. She blinked, then squinted when it made contact with her eyeball. “Ooooh. It stings. Oh crikey Moses. Now look what I’ve done.” She’d given herself a makeup black eye. She rubbed it with a tissue and spread the mess across her cheek. “You didn’t really,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

Pam Rice balanced on the edge of the bathtub and blew cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. To do it, she let her head hang back on her neck in a lazy movement that Maggie was sure she’d seen in an old American film. Bette Davis. Joan Crawford. Maybe Lauren Bacall.

“Want to see the stain for yourself?” Pam asked.

Josie frowned. “What stain?”

Pam flicked ash into the bathtub and shook her head. “Lord. You don’t know anything, do you, Josephine Bean?”

“I most certainly do.”

“Really? Great. You tell me what stain.”

Josie worked this one over. Maggie could tell she was trying to think up a reasonable answer even though she pretended to be concentrating on the mess she’d made of her eyes. This was second to the mess she’d already made of her nails last night, having purchased a do-it-yourself acrylic nail kit through the post when her mother had refused to allow her to make a trip to Blackpool in order to have artificial nails put on by a stylist. The result of Josie’s attempt to extend her own stubs to what she called drive-men-wild length looked like elephant-man-of-the-fi ngers.

They were in the upstairs and only bathroom of Pam Rice’s terraced house, across the street from Crofters Inn. While directly below them in the kitchen Pam’s mummy fed the twins an afternoon tea of scrambled eggs and beans on toast — to the accompaniment of Edward’s happy shouting and Alan’s laugh-ter — they watched Josie experiment with her most recent cosmetic acquisition: a half-bottle of eyeliner purchased from a fifth former who’d pinched it from his sister’s chest of drawers.

“Gin,” Josie finally announced. “Everyone knows you drink it. We’ve seen the fl ask.”

Pam laughed and did her smoke-at-the-ceiling routine again. She flipped her cigarette into the toilet. It made a sound like psst as it sank. She held on to the edge of the bathtub and leaned back