Missing Joseph Part 44

"About what?"

"About having you...settled, I suppose."

"Settled?" Lady Helen speared a sweet pickle and chewed it thoughtfully, watching him.

"My G.o.d, don't tell me you're really that provincial."

"I didn't intend-"

"You can't honestly believe that a woman's place is to be settled, Tommy. Or," she asked shrewdly, "is it just my place?"

"No. Sorry. It was a poor choice of words."

"Choose again, then."

He placed his yogurt carton on the table. Its contents had tasted fairly good for the first few spoonfuls, but they didn't wear well on the palate after that. "We're dancing round the issue and we may as well stop. Your father knows that I want to marry you, Helen."

"Yes. What of it?"

He crossed his legs, uncrossed them. He lifted his hand to loosen the knot of his tie, only to discover and recall that he wasn't wearing one. He sighed. "d.a.m.n it all. Nothing of it. It merely seems to me that marriage between us wouldn't be such a miserable thing."

"And G.o.d knows that it would please Daddy well enough."

He felt stung by her sarcasm and answered in kind. "I have no idea about pleasing your father, but there are-"

"You used the word pleased less than a minute ago. Or have you conveniently forgotten?"

"But there are moments-and frankly this isn't turning out to be one of them-when I'm actually blind enough to think that it might please me."

She looked stung in turn. She sat back in her chair. They stared at each other. The telephone, mercifully, began to ring.

"Let it go," he said. "We need to thrash this out, and we need to do it now."

"I don't think so." She got up. The phone was on the work top, next to the coffee maker. She poured them each a cup as she spoke to her caller, saying, "What a good guess. He's sitting right here in my kitchen, eating salami and yogurt..." She laughed. "Truro? Well, I hope you're running his credit cards to the limit...No, here he is...Really, Barbara, don't give it a thought. We weren't discussing anything more earthshaking than the merits of sweet pickles over dill."

She had a way of knowing when he felt most betrayed by her levity, so Lynley wasn't surprised when Helen didn't meet his eyes as she handed him the phone and said, unnecessarily, "It's Sergeant Havers. For you."

He caught her fingers under his when he took the receiver. He didn't release her until she looked at him. And even then, he said nothing, because, d.a.m.n it all, she was at fault and he wasn't going to apologise for lashing out when she drove him to it.

When he said h.e.l.lo to his sergeant, he realised that Havers must have heard more in his voice than he intended to convey, for she launched into her report without prefatory remarks of any kind, saying, "You'll be chuffed to know that the C of E take police work dead to heart down here in Truro. The bishop's secretary kindly gave me an appointment to see him a week from tomorrow, thank you very much. Busy as a bee in the roses, the bishop, if his secretary's to be believed." She blew out a long, loud breath. She'd be smoking, as usual. "And you should see the digs these two blokes live in. Sodding b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l. Remind me to hold on to my money the next time the collection plate is pa.s.sed round in church. They should be supporting me, not vice versa."

"So it's been a waste." Lynley watched Helen return to the table where she sat and began unfolding the corners of the magazine pages she'd previously folded down. She was pressing each one deliberately flat and smoothing it with her fingers. She wanted him to see the activity. He knew that as well as he knew her. Realising this, he felt the momentary grip of an anger so irrationally powerful that he wanted to kick the table through the wall.

Havers was saying, "So evidently the term 'boating accident' was a euphemism."

Lynley tore his eyes from Helen. "What?"

"Haven't you been listening?" Havers asked. "Never mind. Don't answer. When did you tune in?"

"With the boating accident."

"Right." She began again.

Once she had realised that the bishop of Truro wasn't going to be of help, she'd gone to the newspaper office, where she'd spent the morning reading back issues. There she discovered that the boating accident that had claimed the life of Robin Sage's wife- "Her name was Susanna, by the way."

-hadn't occurred on a boat in the first place and hadn't been deemed an accident in the second.

"It was the ferry that runs from Plymouth to Roscoff," Havers said. "And it was suicide, according to the newspaper."

Havers sketched in the story with the details she'd gathered from her perusal of the newspaper accounts. The Sages had been making a crossing in bad weather, on their way to begin a two-week holiday in France. After a meal midway through the crossing- "It's a six-hour ride, you know."

-Susanna had gone off to the Ladies' while her husband returned to the lounge with his book. It was more than an hour before he realised that she ought to have turned up, but as she'd been feeling a bit low, he a.s.sumed she wanted some time alone.

"He said he had a tendency to hover when she was in a mood," Havers explained. "And he wanted to give her some s.p.a.ce. My words, not his."

According to the information Havers had been able to gather, Robin Sage had left the lounge two or three times during the remainder of the crossing, to stretch his legs, to get a drink, to purchase a chocolate bar, but not to look for his wife about whose continued absence, it seemed, he did not appear to be worried. When they docked in France, he went below to the car, a.s.suming that she would be there waiting. When she failed to show up as the pa.s.sengers began to leave, he set about looking for her.

"He didn't raise the alarm until he noticed that her handbag was on the front pa.s.senger seat of the car," Havers said. "There was a note inside. Here, let me..." Lynley heard the noise of pages turning. "It said, 'Robin, I'm sorry. I can't find the light.' There was no name but the writing was hers."

"Not much of a suicide note," Lynley remarked.

"You're not the only one who thought that," Havers said.

The crossing had been made in bad weather after all. It was dark for the latter half of it. It was cold, as well, so no one had been on deck to see a woman throw herself from the railing.

"Or be thrown?" Lynley asked.

Havers agreed obliquely. "The truth is that it could have been suicide, but it could have been something else as well. Which is, apparently, what the rozzers on both sides of the Channel thought. Sage was put through the wringer twice. He came up clean. Or as clean as he could because no one witnessed anything at all, including Sage's trip to the bar or his saunters to stretch his legs."

"And the wife couldn't simply have slipped off the boat when it docked?" Lynley asked.

"An international crossing, Inspector. Her pa.s.sport was in her handbag, along with her money, her driving licence, credit cards, and the whole b.l.o.o.d.y bit. She couldn't have got off the boat at either end. And they searched every inch of it in France and in England."

"What about the body? Where was she found? Who identifi ed her?"

"I don't know yet, but I'm working that angle. D'you want to place any bets?"

"Sage liked to talk about the woman taken in adultery," Lynley said, more to himself than to her.

"And since there were no stones handy on the boat, he gave her the old heave-ho as her just deserts?"

"Perhaps."

"Well, whatever happened, they're sleeping in the bosom of Jesus right now. In the graveyard in Tresillian. They all are, in fact. I went to check."

"They all are?"

"Susanna, Sage, and the kid. All of them. Lying in a tidy little row."

"The kid?"

"Yeah. The kid. Joseph. Their son."

Lynley frowned, listening to his sergeant and watching Helen. The former was supplying the rest of the details. The latter was playing a knife across the wedge of brie in an aimless pattern, her magazines closed and set to one side.

"He was three months old when he died," Havers said. "And then her death...let me see...here it is. She died six months later. That supports the suicide theory, doesn't it? She'd have been depressed as h.e.l.l, I'd guess, to have her baby die. And how did she put it? She couldn't find the light."

"What was his cause of death?"

"Don't know."

"Find out."

"Right." She rustled some papers, jotting down instructions in her notebook, probably. She said suddenly, "h.e.l.l, Inspector, he was three months old. D'you think this bloke Sage might've...or even the wife..."

"I don't know, Sergeant." On the other end of the line, he heard the brief, distinct snap of a match being struck. She was lighting up again. He longed to do so himself. He said, "Dig a little deeper on Susanna as well. See if you can find anything at all about her relationship to Juliet Spence."

"Spence...Got it." More paper crinkled. "I've made copies of the newspaper articles for you. They're not much, but shall I fax them to the Yard?"

"For what they're worth, I suppose so." It seemed little enough.

"Right. Well." He could hear her drawing on the cigarette. "Inspector..." The word was not so much spoken as drawled.

"What?"

"Soldier on up there. You know. Helen."

Easy to say, he thought as he replaced the phone. He returned to the table, saw that Helen had cross-hatched the entire top of the brie. She'd given up eating her yogurt, and the salami was still only partially cut. At the moment, she was using a fork to roll a black olive round her plate. Her expression was disconsolate. He felt oddly moved to compa.s.sion.

"I expect your father wouldn't approve of your playing with your food, either," he said quietly.

"No. Cybele never plays with her food. And Iris never eats, as far as I know."

He sat and looked without hunger at the brie he'd spread on a biscuit. He picked it up, put it down, reached for the pickle bowl, pushed it away.

He finally said, "Right. I'll be off. I must go out to-" just as she said quickly, "I'm so sorry, Tommy. I don't mean to keep hurting you. I don't know what comes over me or why I do it."

He said, "I push you. We push each other."

She took the ribboned elastic from her hair and played the elastic round her hand. She said, "I think I'm looking for evidence, and when it isn't there, I create it from nothing."

"This is a relationship, Helen, not a court of law. What are you trying to prove?"

"Unworthiness."

"I see. Mine." He tried to sound objective but knew he didn't manage it.

She looked up. Her eyes were dry, but her skin was blotched. "Yours. Yes. Because G.o.d knows I already feel my own."

He reached for the ribbon she'd twisted in her hands. She'd bound them loosely together, and he unwove the binding. "If you're waiting for me to end things between us, it's not going to happen. So you'll have to do the ending yourself."

"I can, if you ask me."

"I don't intend to."

"It would be so much easier."

"Yes. It would. But only at first." He stood. "I must go out to Kent for the afternoon. Will you have dinner with me?" He smiled. "Will you have breakfast as well?"

"Love-making isn't what I'm avoiding, Tommy."

"No," he agreed. "Making love is easy enough. It's living with it that's the devil."

Lynley pulled into the car park of the train station in Sevenoaks just as the first raindrops. .h.i.t the windscreen of the Bentley. He fumbled in his overcoat pocket for the directions they'd found among the vicar's belongings in Lancashire.

They were simple enough, taking him to the high street for a brief jaunt before heading out of the town altogether. A few turns past the point where the prehurricane, eponymous oaks of the town had once stood, and he was in the country. Down two more lanes and up a slight rise, and he found himself following a short drive labelled Wealdon Oast. This led to a house, with white tile cladding above and brick below, decorated by the distinctive, bent-chimneyed oast roundel attached to the building at its north end. The house had a view of Sevenoaks to the west and a mixture of farmland and woodland to the south. The land and the trees were winter-drab now, but the rest of the year, they would provide an ever-changing palette of colour.

As he parked between a Sierra and a Metro, Lynley wondered if Robin Sage had walked this distance out from the town. He wouldn't have driven all the way from Lancashire, and the set of directions seemed to indicate two facts: He had arrived by train with no intention of taking a taxi from the station, and no one had met him or intended to meet him, either at the station or somewhere in the town.

A wooden sign, neatly lettered in yellow and affixed to the left of the front door, identifi ed the oast house not as a home but as a place of business. Gitterman Temps, it read. And beneath that in smaller letters of yellow, Katherine Gitterman, Prop.

Kate, Lynley thought. Another answer was emerging to the questions that had arisen from Sage's engagement diary and the odd bits carton.

A young woman looked up from a reception desk as Lynley entered the house. What had once been the sitting room was now an office with ivory walls, green carpeting, and modern oak furniture that smelled faintly of lemon oil. The girl nodded at him, as she said into the thin wire headpiece of a telephone receiver, "I can let you have Sandy again, Mr. Coatsworth. She got on well with your staff and her skills...Well, yes, she's the one with the braces on her teeth." She rolled her eyes at Lynley. They were, he noted, skilfully shaded with an aquamarine shadow that exactly matched the jumper she wore. "Yes, of course, Mr. Coatsworth. Let me see..." On her desk, which was otherwise free of clutter, lay six manila folders. She opened the first. "It's no trouble, Mr. Coatsworth. Really. Please, don't give it a thought." She riffled through the second. "You've not tried Joy, have you?...No, she doesn't wear braces. And she types...let me see..."

Lynley glanced to his left through the door that opened into the roundel. Into its circular wall a half-dozen neat cubicles had been built. At two of them, girls were pecking at electric typewriters while a timer ticked to one side. In a third, a young man worked upon a word processor, shaking his head at the screen and saying, "Jesus, this is screwed for sure. I'll bet a hundred quid it was another power surge." He leaned towards the floor and rattled through a repair case filled with circuit boards and arcane equipment. "Disk crash city," he murmured. "I sure as h.e.l.l hope she was backing up."

"May I help you, sir?"

Lynley swung back to the reception desk. Aquamarine held a pencil poised as if to take notes. She'd cleared the desk of the folders and replaced them with a yellow legal pad. Behind her, from a vase on a glistening credenza, a single petal fell from a spray of hot-house roses. Lynley expected a harried custodian with dustpan in hand to appear from nowhere and whisk the offending bit of floribunda from sight.

"I'm looking for Katherine Gitterman," he said, and produced his warrant card. "Scotland Yard CID."

"You want Kate?" The young woman's incredulity apparently prevented her from giving his warrant card any attention at all. "Kate?"

"Is she available?"

Eyes still on him, she nodded, lifted a finger to keep him in place, and punched in three numbers on the telephone. After a brief and m.u.f.fled conversation which she conducted with her chair swivelled in the direction of the credenza, she led him past a second desk on which a maroon leather blotter held the day's post, arranged artfully into a fan with a letter opener acting the part of its handle. She opened the door beyond the desk and gestured towards a stairway.

"Up there," she said and added with a smile, "You've put a spanner in her day. She doesn't much like surprises."

Kate Gitterman met him at the top of the stairs, a tall woman dressed in a tailored, plaid flannel dressing gown whose belt was tied in a perfectly symmetrical bow. The predominant colour of the garment was the same green as the carpeting, and she wore beneath it pyjamas of an identical shade.

"Flu," she said. "I'm battling the last of it. I hope you don't mind." She didn't give him the opportunity to respond. "I'll see you in here."

She led him down a narrow corridor that gave way to the sitting room of a modern, well-appointed flat. A kettle was whistling as they entered and with a "Just a moment, please," she left him. The soles of her slim leather slippers clattered against the linoleum as she moved about the kitchen.

Lynley glanced round the sitting room. Like the offices below, it was compulsively neat, with shelves, racks, and holders in which every possession appeared to have its designated place. The pillows on the sofa and on the armchairs were poised at identical angles. A small Persian rug before the fireplace lay centred perfectly. The fireplace itself burned neither wood nor coal but a pyramid of artificial nuggets that were glowing in a semblance of embers.