Missing Joseph

met with any of them?”

“When he first got here there was a meeting in the church for the young people. To form the club. I made them scones. I remember that.”

“But only Maggie came here? What about her mother?”

“Missus Spence?” Polly shuffl ed through the material in the carton. She made a show of examining it. It seemed to consist mostly of loose papers filled with typescript. “She never was here, Missus Spence.”

“Did she phone?”

Polly considered the question. Across from her, St. James was going through a sheaf of papers and a stack of pamphlets. “Once. Near supper. Maggie was still here. She wanted her at home.”

“Was she angry?”

“We didn’t speak very long, so I couldn’t say. She just asked was Maggie here, sort of snippy, I guess. I said yes and fetched her. Maggie talked on the phone, mostly Yes, Mummy, No, Mummy, and Please listen,

Mummy. Then she went on home.”

“Upset?”

“A bit grey in the face and dragging her feet. Like she was caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to. She was fond of the vicar, Maggie was. He was fond of her. But her mum didn’t want that. So Maggie came to see him on the sly.”

“And her mother found out. How?”

“People see things. They talk. There’s no secrets in a village like Winslough.”

It seemed a wildly facile statement to Lynley. As far as he had been able to ascertain, there were secrets layered upon secrets in Winslough and nearly all of them had to do with the vicar, Maggie, the constable, and Juliet Spence.

St. James said, “Is this what we’re looking for?” and Lynley saw that he was holding a small engagement diary with a black plastic cover and a spiral spine. St. James handed it over and went on rooting through the carton that he had opened.

Polly said, “I’ll leave you to it, then” and left them. In a moment, they could hear water running in the kitchen.

Lynley put on his spectacles and flipped through the diary from December, backwards, noting first that although the twenty-third was marked with the Townley-Young wedding and the morning of the twenty-second had Power/ Townley-Young scrawled at half past ten, there was no reference on that same day to having dinner with Juliet Spence. The day before had a notation, however. The name Yanapapoulis made a diagonal across the lines for appointments.

“When did Deborah meet him?” Lynley asked.

“When you and I were in Cambridge. November. A Thursday. Was it round the twentieth?”

Lynley flipped the pages forward. They were filled with notations about the vicar’s life. Meetings of the altar society, visitations to the sick, the assembling of his fl edgling teen club, baptisms, three funerals, two weddings, sessions that looked like marital counseling, presentations before the church council, two clerical gatherings in Bradford.

He found what he was looking for on Thursday the sixteenth, SS next to one o’clock. But at that point, the trail went cold. There were names listed next to times further back, all the way to the vicar’s arrival in Winslough. Some were Christian names, some were surnames. But it was impossible to tell if they belonged to parishioners or if they indicated Sage’s business in London.

He looked up. “SS,” he said to St. James. “Does that suggest anything to you?”

“Someone’s initials.”

“Possibly. Except that he’s not used initials any place else. It’s always names except this once. What does that suggest?”

“An organisation?” St. James looked refl ective. “Nazis come to mind.”

“Robin Sage, neo-Nazi? A closet skinhead?”

“Secret Service, perhaps?”

“Robin Sage, Winslough’s budding James Bond?”

“No, it would have been MI5 or 6 then, wouldn’t it? Or SIS.” St. James began replacing items in the carton. “Nothing much in here aside from the diary. Stationery, business cards — his own, Tommy — part of a sermon on the lilies of the field, ink, pens, pencils, farming guides, two packets of seeds for tomatoes, a file of correspondence fi lled with letters of dismissal, letters of application, letters of acceptance. An application for—” St. James frowned.

“What?”

“Cambridge. Partially filled out. Doctor of theology.”

“And?”

“It isn’t that. It’s the application, any application. Partially filled out. It reminded me of what Deborah and I have been…Never mind that. It brings to mind SS. What about Social Services?”

Lynley saw the leap his friend had made from his own life. “He wanted to adopt a child?”

“Or to place a child?”

“Christ. Maggie?”

“Perhaps he saw Juliet Spence as an unfi t mother.”

“That might push her to violence.”

“It’s certainly a thought.”

“But there hasn’t been the slightest whisper of that from any quarter.”

“There usually isn’t if the situation’s abusive. You know how it goes. The child’s afraid to speak, trusting no one. When she fi nally finds someone she can trust…” St. James refolded the carton’s flaps and pressed the tape back down to seal them.

“We may have been looking at Robin Sage through the wrong sort of window,” Lynley said. “All those meetings with Maggie alone. Instead of seduction, he might have been trying to get to the truth.” Lynley sat in the desk chair and set the diary down. “But this is pointless speculation. We don’t know enough. We don’t even know when he went to London because you can’t tell from the diary where he was. It has names and times listed, scores of appointments, but aside from Bradford, there’s no place mentioned.”

“He kept the receipts.” Polly Yarkin spoke from the doorway. She was carrying a tray on which she’d assembled a teapot, two cups and saucers, and a half-crushed package of chocolate digestives. She put the tray on the desk and said, “Hotel receipts. He kept them. You can match up the dates.”

They found the file of Robin Sage’s hotel receipts in the third box they tried. These documented five visits to London, beginning in October and ending just two days before he died, 21 December, when Yanapapoulis was written. Lynley matched the receipt dates to the diary, but he came up with only three more pieces of information that looked even marginally promising: the name Kate next to noon on Sage’s first London visit of 11 October; a telephone number on his second; SS again on his third.

Lynley tried the number. It was a London exchange. An exhausted end-of-the-workingday voice said, “Social Services,” and Lynley smiled and gave St. James a thumb’s-up. His conversation was unprofitable, however. There was no way to ascertain the purpose of any telephone call Robin Sage may have made to Social Services. There was no one there by the name of Yanapapoulis, and it was otherwise impossible to track down the social worker to whom Sage had spoken when, and if, he had made the call. Additionally, if he had paid anyone a visit at Social Services on one of his trips to London, he took that secret with him to his grave. But at least they had something to work with, however little it was.

Lynley said, “Did Mr. Sage mention Social Services to you, Polly? Did Social Services ever phone him here?”

“Social Services? You mean about taking care of old folks or something?”

“For any reason, really.” When she shook her head, Lynley asked, “Did he speak about visiting Social Services in London? Did he ever bring anything back with him? Documents, paperwork?”

“There might be something with the odd bits,” she said.

“What?”

“If he brought anything back and left it round the study, it’ll be in the odd bits carton.”