Missing Joseph

“Mag?” he said.

“Yes.”

He smiled, brushed his mouth against hers. His lips were dry. It didn’t feel like a kiss. “Then wait here,” he said. “I’ll be right back. If we’re gonna bunk off, it’s best that no one see us together in town and remember for when your mum phones the police.”

“Mummy won’t. She won’t dare.”

“I wouldn’t take odds on that.” He turned up the collar of his jacket. He looked at her earnestly. “You okay here, then?”

She felt her heart warm. “Okay.”

“Don’t mind sleeping rough tonight?”

“Not so long as I’m sleeping with you.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

COLIN ATE HIS TEA AT THE kitchen sink. Sardines on toast, with the oil slipping through his fi ngers and splatting onto the potscarred porcelain. He didn’t feel hungry in the least, but he’d been light-headed and weak in the limbs for the past thirty minutes. Food seemed the obvious solution.

He’d made his walk back to the village along the Clitheroe Road, which was closer to the lodge than was the Cotes Fell footpath. His pace was brisk. He told himself that a need to avenge was what drove him so rapidly onwards. He kept repeating her name in his head as he walked: Annie, Annie, Annie my girl. It was a way to avoid hearing the words love and death three times pulse with the blood in his skull. By the time he reached his house, he was hot in the chest but ice to the bone in his hands and feet. He could hear his heart’s erratic thumping inside his eardrums, and his lungs couldn’t seem to get enough air. He ignored the symptoms for a good three hours but when there was no improvement, he decided to eat. Teatime, he thought in irrational response to his body’s behaviour, that’ll take care of it, must have a bite to eat.

He washed down the fish with three bottles of Watney’s, drinking the first one while the bread was toasting. He pitched the bottle into the rubbish and opened another as he rooted in the cupboard for the sardines. The tin gave him trouble. Curling the metal lid round the key required a steadiness that he wasn’t able to muster. He got it halfway unrolled when his fingers slipped and the sharp edge of the top sliced into his hand. Blood spurted out. It mixed with the fish oil, started to sink, then formed perfect small beads that fl oated like scarlet lures for the fish. He felt no pain. He wrapped his hand in a tea towel, used the end of it to sop the blood off the surface of the oil, and tilted the beer bottle up to his mouth with the hand that was free.

When the toast was ready, he dug the fi sh from the tin with his fingers. He lined them up on the bread. He added salt and pepper and a thick slice of onion. He began to eat.

There was no particular taste or smell to it, which he found rather odd because he could distinctly remember how his wife once complained about the scent of sardines. Makes my eyes water, she would say, that fish smell in the air, Col, it makes my stomach go peculiar.

Her cat clock ticked on the wall above the AGA, wagging its tail and moving its eyes. It seemed to be repeating her name with the sound of its clicking wheels and gears: No longer tick-tock but An-nie, An-nie, Annie, it said. Colin concentrated intently on this. Just like the rhythm of his earlier footsteps, the repetition of her name drove other thoughts away.

He used the third beer to clear his mouth of the fish that he couldn’t taste. Then he poured a small whisky and drank that down in two swallows to try to bring back feeling to his limbs. But still he couldn’t quite vanquish the cold. This caused him confusion because the furnace was on, he still wore his heavy jacket, and by all rights he should have been soaking in sweat.

Which he was, in a manner of speaking. His face was so fiery that his skin was throbbing. But the rest of him trembled like a birch in the wind. He drank another whisky. He moved from the sink to the kitchen window. He looked across to the vicar’s house.

And then he heard it again, as distinctly as if Rita were standing directly behind him. Love and death three times. The words were so clear that he swung round with a cry which he strangled the instant he saw that he was alone. He cursed aloud. The sodding words meant nothing. They were merely a stimulus of the sort used by every palm-reader in the world, giving you a small piece of a nonexistent life jigsaw and whetting your incipient desire to have more.

Love and death three times needed no elucidation from anyone as far as Colin was concerned. It translated to pounds and pence each week, hard-earned coins pressed into the palm of the palmist by dried-up spinsters, naive housewives, and lonely widows, all seeking meaningless reassurance that their lives weren’t as futile as they appeared to be.

He turned back to the window. Across his drive, across the vicar’s, the other house watched him in return. Polly was within, as she had continued to be in the weeks since Robin Sage’s death. She was no doubt doing what she always did — scrubbing, polishing, dusting, and waxing in a fervent display of her utility. But that wasn’t all, as he fi nally understood. For Polly was also biding her time, patiently waiting for the moment when Juliet Spence’s blind need to take blame resulted in her incarceration. While Juliet in gaol wasn’t quite the same as Juliet dead, it was better than nothing. And Polly was too clever in her ways to make another attempt on Juliet’s life.

Colin wasn’t a religious man. He’d given up on God during the second year of Annie’s dying. Still, he had to acknowledge that the hand of a greater power than his own had been active in the Cotes Hall cottage on that night in December when the vicar had died. By all rights, it should have been Juliet eating alone in the vicar’s place. And if it had been, the coroner would have affixed the label accidental poisoning/self- administered to her dying, with no one wise to the manner in which that convenient accident had been brought about.

She would have rushed in to minister to his grief, would have Polly. More than anyone he knew, she excelled at sympathy and fellow-feeling.

Roughly, he rubbed his hands clean of sardine oil and used two plasters to cover the cut. He paused to pour himself one more swallow of whisky which he gulped down before heading out the door.

Bitch, he thought. Love and death three times.

She didn’t come to the door when he knocked, so he pressed his finger to the bell and held it. He took some satisfaction from the shrill jangle it made. The sound grated on the nerves.

The inner door opened. He could see her form, behind the opaque glass. Top-heavy and inflated by too many garments, she looked like a miniature of her mother. He heard her say, “Glory. Get off the bell, will you,” and she yanked the door open, ready to speak.

She didn’t, when she saw him. Instead, she looked beyond him to his house, and he wondered if she’d been watching as usual, if she’d stepped away from the window for a moment and thus missed his approach. She’d missed little else in the past few years.

He didn’t wait for her to ask him in. He squeezed past her. She shut both the outer and the inner doors behind him.

He followed the narrow corridor to the right and walked straight along to the sitting room. She’d been working in here. The furniture gleamed. A tin of beeswax, a bottle of lemon oil, and a box of rags sat in front of an empty bookshelf. There wasn’t a trace of dust anywhere. The carpet was vacuumed. The lace window curtains hung crisp and clean.

He turned to face her, unzipping his jacket. She stood awkwardly in the doorway — the sole of one sock-clad foot pressed to the other’s ankle, the toes moving in an unconscious scratch — and she followed his movements with her eyes. He threw his jacket on the sofa. It fell just short and slid to the fl oor. She moved towards it, eager to put everything in its rightful place. Just doing her job, was Polly.

“Leave it be.”

She stopped. Her fingers gripped the ribbing on the bottom edge of her bulky, brown pullover. It hung, loose and misshapen, to her hips.

Her lips parted when he began to unbutton his shirt. He saw her catch her tongue between her teeth. He knew well enough what she was thinking and wanting, and he took a distinctly gut-warming pleasure from the