Missing Joseph Part 25

"He's at risk in any number of ways at this point, Mrs. Spence. The investigation is filled with irregularities. He needed to hand the case over to a CID team from c.l.i.theroe. Since he didn't do that, he'd have been wise to conduct any interrogations with an official witness present. And considering his involvement with you, he should have stepped out of the process altogether."

"He wants to protect me."

"That may be the case but it looks a far sight nastier than that."

"What do you mean?"

"It looks as if Shepherd's covering up his own crime. Whatever that may have been."

She pushed herself abruptly from the central table against which she had been leaning. She walked two paces away from him, then back again, pulling off her headband. "Look. Please. These are the facts." Her words were terse. "I went out to the pond. I dug up water hemlock. I thought it was parsnip. I cooked it. I served it. Mr. Sage died. Colin Shepherd had no part of this."

"Did he know Mr. Sage was coming to dinner?"

"I said he had no part of this."

"Did he ever ask you about your relationship with Sage?"

"Colin's done nothing!"

"Is there a Mr. Spence?"

She balled the bandana into her fist. "I... No."

"And your daughter's father?"

"That's none of your business. This has absolutely nothing to do with Maggie. Not at all. She wasn't even here."

"That day?"

"For the dinner. She was in the village, spending the night with the Wraggs."

"But she was here that day, earlier, when you went out to look for the wild parsnip in the first place? Perhaps while you were cooking?"

Her face seemed rigid. "Hear me, Inspector. Maggie isn't involved."

"You're avoiding the questions. That tends to suggest you've something to hide. Something about your daughter?"

She moved past him towards the door of the greenhouse. The s.p.a.ce was confined. Her arm brushed against him as she pa.s.sed, and it would have taken little enough effort to detain her, but he chose not to do so. He followed her out. Before he could ask another question, she spoke.

"I'd gone to the root cellar. There were only two left. I needed more. That's the extent of it."

"Show me, if you will."

She led him across the garden to the cottage where she opened the door to what appeared to be the kitchen and removed a key from a hook just inside. Not ten feet away, she unfastened the padlock on the sloping cellar door and lifted it.

"A moment," he said. He lowered and lifted it for himself. Like the gate in the wall, it moved easily enough. And like the gate, it moved without noise. He nodded and she descended the steps.

There was no electricity in the root cellar. Light was supplied from the doorway and from a single small window at the level of the ground. This was the size of a shoe carton and partially obstructed by the straw which covered the plants outside. The result was a chamber of moisture and shadow, comprising perhaps an eight-foot square. Its walls were an unfinished mixture of stone and earth. Its floor was the same, although some effort had been expended at one time to make it even.

Mrs. Spence gestured towards one of four roughly hewn shelves bolted to the wall that was farthest from the light. Aside from a neat stack of bushel baskets, the shelves were all the room contained save what they themselves held. On the top three sat rows of canning jars, their labels indecipherable in the gloom. On the bottom stood five small wire bins.

Potatoes, carrots, and onions filled three. The other two held nothing.

Lynley said, "You've not replenished your supply."

"I don't think much of eating parsnips any longer. And certainly not wild ones."

He touched the rim of one of the empty bins. He moved his hand to the shelf that held it. There was no sign of either dust or disuse.

He said, "Why do you keep the cellar door locked? Have you always done?"

When she didn't reply at once, he turned from the shelves to look at her. Her back was to the muted light of morning that shone through the door, so he couldn't read her expression.

"Mrs. Spence?"

"I've kept it locked since October last."

"Why?"

"It has nothing to do with any of this."

"I'd appreciate an answer nonetheless."

"I've just given one."

"Mrs. Spence, shall we pause to look at the facts? A man is dead at your hands. You've a relationship with the police official who investigated the death. If either of you thinks-"

"All right. Because of Maggie, Inspector. I wanted to give her one less place to have s.e.x with her boyfriend. She'd already used the Hall. I'd put a stop to that. I was trying to eliminate the rest of the possibilities. This seemed to be one of them, so I locked it up. Not that it mattered, as I've since discovered."

"But you kept the key on a hook in the kitchen?"

"Yes."

"In plain sight?"

"Yes."

"Where she could get to it?"

"Where I could get to it quickly as well." She ran an impatient hand back through her hair. "Inspector, please. You don't know my daughter. Maggie tries to be good. She thought she'd been wicked enough already. She gave me her word that she wouldn't have s.e.x with Nick Ware again, and I told her I'd help her keep the promise. The lock itself was sufficient to keep her out."

"I wasn't thinking about Maggie and s.e.x," Lynley said. He saw her glance move from his face to the shelves behind him. He knew what she was looking at largely because she didn't allow her eyes to rest upon it longer than an instant. "When you go out, do you lock your doors?"

"Yes."

"When you're in the greenhouse? When you make your rounds of the Hall? When you leave to look for wild parsnips?"

"No. But then I'm not out for long. And I'd know if someone were prowling round."

"Do you take your handbag? Your car keys? The keys to the cottage? The cellar key?"

"No."

"So you didn't lock up when you went out to look for parsnips on the day that Mr. Sage died?"

"No. But I know where you're heading and it isn't going to work. People can't come and go here without my knowing. That simply doesn't happen. It's like a sixth sense. Whenever Maggie met with Nick, I knew."

"Yes," Lynley said. "Quite. Please show me where you found the water hemlock, Mrs. Spence."

"I've told you I thought it was-"

"Indeed. Wild parsnip."

She hesitated, one hand lifted as if there was a point she wanted to make. She dropped both, saying, "This way," quietly.

They went out through the gate. Across the courtyard, three of the workers were having morning coffee in the bed of the open-back lorry. Their Thermos jugs were lined up on one stack of lumber. Another they used as their chairs. They watched Lynley and Mrs. Spence with undisguised curiosity. It was clear that this visit was going to be fuel for the fires of gossip by the end of the day.

In the better light, Lynley took a moment to evaluate Mrs. Spence as they crossed the courtyard and walked round the gabled east wing of the Hall. She was blinking rapidly as if in an effort to free her eyes of soot, but the cowlneck of her pullover showed how the muscles of her neck were straining. He realised that she was trying not to cry.

The worst part of policework lay buried in the effort it took not to empathise. An investigation required a heart that attached itself to the victim alone or to a crime whose commission called out for justice. While Lynley's sergeant had mastered the ability to wear emotional blinkers when it came to a case, Lynley found himself, more often than not, torn in a dozen unlikely directions as he gathered information and came to know the facts and the princ.i.p.als involved. They were rarely black or white, he had come to find. It was, inconveniently, not a black-or-white world.

He paused on the terrace outside the east wing. The paving stones here were cracked and clotted with winter-dead weeds and the view was of a frost-coated hillside. This sloped down to a pond beyond which another hillside rose steeply, its summit hidden by the mist.

He said, "You've had trouble here, as I understand. Work disrupted. That sort of thing. It sounds as if someone doesn't want the newlyweds to take over the Hall."

She seemed to misunderstand his intentions in speaking, seeing it as another attempt at accusation rather than as an opportunity for a moment's reprieve. She cleared her throat and rebounded from whatever distress she was feeling. "Maggie used it less than half a dozen times. That's all."

He briefly toyed with the idea of rea.s.suring her about the nature of his comments. He rejected it, and followed her lead. "How did she get in?"

"Nick-her boyfriend-loosened a board covering one of the windows in the west wing.

I've nailed it shut since. Unfortunately, that hasn't put a stop to the mischief."

"You didn't know at once that Maggie and her friend were using the Hall? You couldn't tell someone had been prowling round?"

"I was referring to someone prowling round the cottage, Inspector Lynley. Surely you yourself would be aware if some sort of intruder had been in your own home."

"If he conducted a search or took something, yes. Otherwise, I'm not certain."

"Believe me, I am."

With the toe of her boot, she dislodged a tangle of flowerless dandelions from between two of the terrace stones. She picked up the weed, examined several rosettes of the scratchy, toothed leaves, and hurled it aside.

"But you've never managed to catch the prankster here? He-or she-has never made a sound to attract your attention, never stumbled into your garden by mistake?"

"No."

"You've never heard a car or a motorbike?"

"I haven't."

"And your rounds have been varied enough that someone bent on mischief wouldn't be able to predict when you'd be likely to take another turn round the grounds?"

Impatiently, she shoved her hair behind her ears. "That's correct, Inspector. May I ask what this has to do with what happened to Mr. Sage?"

He smiled affably. "I'm not entirely sure." She looked in the direction of the pond at the base of the hill, her intention clear. But he found that he wasn't quite ready to move on. He gave his attention to the east wing of the house. Its lower bay windows were boarded over. Two of the upper ones bore seamlike cracks. "It looks as if it's stood vacant for years."

"It's never been lived in, aside from three months shortly after it was built."

"Why not?"

"It's haunted."

"By whom?"

"The sister-in-law of Mr. Townley-Young's great-grandfather. What does that make her? His great-grandaunt?" She didn't wait for reply. "She killed herself here. They thought she'd gone out for a walk. When she didn't return by evening, they began a search. It was five days before they thought of searching the house."

"And?"

"She'd hanged herself from a beam in the luggage room. Next to the garret. It was summer. The servants were tracking down the smell."

"Her husband couldn't face continuing life here?"

"A romantic thought, but he was dead already. He'd been killed on their wedding trip. They said it was a hunting accident, but no one was ever particularly forthcoming about how it happened. His wife returned alone, so everyone thought. They didn't know at first she brought syphilis with her, his gift to their marriage, evidently." She smiled without humour, not at him but at the house. "According to legend, she walks the upper corridor, weeping. The Townley-Youngs like to think it's with remorse for having killed her husband. I like to think it's with regret for having married the man in the first place. It was 1853 after all. There was no easy cure."

"For syphilis."

"Or for marriage."

She strode off the terrace in the direction of the pond. He watched her for a moment. She took long steps despite her heavy boots. Her hair lifted with her movement, in two greying arcs sweeping back from her face.

The slope he followed her down was icy, its gra.s.s long defeated by purslane and furze. At its base, the pond lay in the shape of a kidney bean. It was thickly overgrown, resembling a marsh, with water that was murky and, no doubt in the summer, a breeding ground for everything from insects to disease. Unkempt reeds and denuded weeds grew waist-tall round it. The latter sent out tendrils to grasp at clothes. But Mrs. Spence seemed oblivious of this. She waded into their midst and brushed the clinging bits of them aside.

She stopped less than a yard from the water's edge. "Here," she said.

As far as Lynley could tell, the vegetation she indicated was indistinguishable from the vegetation everywhere else. In the spring or summer, perhaps, flowers or fruit might give an indication of the genera-if not the species-that now appeared to be little more than skeletal shrubs and brambles. He recognised nettle easily enough because its toothed leaves still clung to the stem of the plant. And reeds were the same in shape and size from season to season. But as for the rest, he was mystifi ed.

She apparently saw this, for she said, "Part of it is knowing where the plants grow when they're in season, Inspector. If you're looking for roots, they're still in the ground even when the stems, leaves, and flowers are gone." She pointed to her left where an oblong of ground resembled nothing more than a mat of dead leaves from which a spindly bush grew. "Meadowsweet and wolfbane grow there in the summer. Farther up there's a fine patch of chamomile." She bent and rooted through the weeds at her feet, saying, "And if you're in doubt, the leaves of the plant don't go much farther than the ground beneath it. They disintegrate ultimately, but the process takes ages and in the meantime, you've got your source of identification right here." She extended her hand. In it she held the remains of a feathery leaf not unlike parsley in appearance. "This tells you where to dig," she said.

"Show me."

She did so. No trowel or hoe was necessary. The earth was damp. It was simple enough for her to uproot a plant by pulling on the crown and the stems that remained of it above the ground. She knocked the root stock sharply against her knee to dislodge the clods of earth that were still clinging to it, and both of them stared, without speaking, at the result. She was holding a thickened stock of the plant from which a bundle of tubers grew. She dropped it immediately, as if, without even being ingested, it still had the power to kill.

"Tell me about Mr. Sage," Lynley said.