Missing Joseph Part 5

She offered them the story in bits and pieces between serving the dinner, pouring the wine, bringing the cheese board, and presenting the coffee.

Food poisoning, she told them, December last. The story came in gulps, fits, and starts, with frequent glances in the direction of the kitchen, apparently to make sure no one would catch her in the midst of telling the tale. Mr. Sage had been making his rounds of the parish, visiting each family for afternoon tea or an evening meal- "Eating his way towards righteousness and glory, according to Mr. Wragg, but you got to ignore him if you know what I mean because he never goes to church 'less it's Christmas or a funeral."

-and he went to Mrs. Spence on a Friday night. It was just the two of them because Mrs. Spence's daughter- "She's my best mate Maggie."

-was spending the evening with Josie right here. Mrs. Spence had always made it clear to anyone who asked that she didn't think much of going to church as a general rule despite its being the sole, dependable social event in the village, but she wasn't one to be rude to a vicar, so when Mr. Sage wanted to try to talk her into giving the C of E another chance in her life, she was willing to listen. She was always polite. That was her way. So the vicar went out to her cottage for the evening, prayer book in hand, all ready to bring her back to religion. He was supposed to be at a wedding the next morning- "Tying up that skinny cat Becca Townley-Young and Brendan Power...him that's out there in the bar drinking gin, did you see him?"

-but he never showed up and that's how everyone found out he was dead.

"Dead and stiff with his lips all b.l.o.o.d.y and his jaws locked up like they was wired shut."

"That certainly sounds like an odd bit of food poisoning," St. James remarked doubtfully. "Because if food's gone bad-"

It wasn't that kind of food poisoning, Josie informed them with a pause to scratch her bottom through her threadbare skirt. It was real food poisoning.

"You mean poison in the food?" Deborah asked.

The poison was the food. Wild parsnip picked down by the pond near Cotes Hall. "Only it wasn't wild parsnip like Missus Spence thought. Not at all. Not-at-all."

"Oh no," Deborah said as the circ.u.mstances of the vicar's death began to take on more clarity. "How dreadful. What a terrible thing."

"It was water hemlock," Josie said in breathless summation. "Like what Socrates drunk with his tea in Greece. She thought it was parsnip, did Missus Spence, and so did the vicar and he ate it and..." She grabbed her throat and made appropriate death noises after which she glanced round furtively. "Only don't tell Mum I did like that, will you? She'll tan me if she knows I made light of his dying. It's sort of a black joke 'mongst the blokes in the village: See-cute-a-now and see-you-dead in-a-minute."

"See-what?" Deborah asked.

"Cicuta," St. James said. "The Latin name for its genus. Cicuta maculata. Cicuta virosa. The species depends on the habitat." He frowned and absently toyed with the knife that he had used to cut a wedge of double Gloucester, pressing its point into a fragment of the cheese that was left on his plate. But instead of seeing it, for some reason he found himself teasing a memory from the edge of his subconscious. Professor Ian Rutherford at the University of Glasgow, who insisted upon wearing surgical garb even to lectures, whose bywords had been y'can't take a scunner to a corpse, lads and la.s.sies. Where the h.e.l.l had he come from, St. James wondered, swirling like a Scots banshee out of the past.

"He never showed up for the wedding next morning," Josie was continuing affably. "Mr. Townley-Young's still got himself in a twist over that. It took till half past two to get another vicar, and the wedding breakfast was a total ruin. More'n half the guests had already left the church. Some people think it was Brendan's doing-'cause it was a forced marriage, and no one can imagine any bloke facing a lifetime of marriage to Becca Townley-Young without trying to do something desperate to stop it-but then that's making light of things again and if Mum knows I'm doing it, I'll be in real trouble. She liked Mr. Sage, did Mum."

"And you?"

"I liked him as well. Everyone did 'cept for Mr. Townley-Young. He said the vicar was 'too low church by half' because Mr. Sage wouldn't use incense and he wouldn't tart himself up in satin 'n' lace. But there's more important stuff'n that in being a proper vicar, if you ask me. And Mr. Sage saw to the important stuff."

St. James half-listened to the girl prattle on. She was pouring coffee and presenting them with a decorative, porcelain plate upon which lay six pet.i.t fours with remarkable and gastronomically questionable rainbow icings.

The vicar was a great one for visiting in the village, Josie explained. He started a youth group-she was social chair and vice-president, by the way-and he looked in on the housebound and he tried to get people to come back to church. He knew everyone in the village by name. On Tuesday afternoons, he read to the children in the primary school. He answered his own front door when he was home. He didn't put on airs.

"I met him briefly in London," Deborah said. "He did seem quite nice."

"He was. Truly. And that's why when Missus Spence comes round, things get a bit difficult." Josie leaned over their table and made an adjustment to the paper doily under the pet.i.t fours, centring it carefully on the plate. The plate itself she pushed closer to the table's small ta.s.sel-shaded lamp, the better to highlight the confections' icing. "I mean, it's not like just anyone made the mistake, is it? Crimminy-crimeny, it's not like Mum did it."

"But surely no matter who made the mistake, that person would have spent some time being looked on with a leery eye," Deborah noted. "Especially as Mr. Sage was well-liked."

"Isn't like that," Josie said in quick reply. "She's a herbalist, is Missus Spence after all, so she should have b.l.o.o.d.y well known what she was digging out of the ground before she put it on the flaming table. That's what people say, at least. In the pub. You know. They chew on the story and they won't let it go. Doesn't matter to them what the inquest said."

"A herbalist who didn't recognise hemlock?" Deborah asked.

"That's what's got them in a dither all right."

St. James listened silently, tilting the fragment of double Gloucester with his knife, gazing at the crater-like surface of the cheese. Unbidden, Ian Rutherford returned, lining up on the worktable specimen jars which he removed from a trolley with a connoisseur's care while all the time the smell of formaldehyde that emanated from him like a ghoulish perfume put a premature end to anyone's thoughts of lunch. On to primary symptoms, my luvlies, he was announcing gaily as he produced each jar with a flourish. Burning pain in th' gullet, excessive salivation, nausea. Next, giddiness before the convulsions begin. These are spasmodic, rendering the musculature rigid. Vomition's precluded by convulsive closure of the mouth. He gave a satisfied rap on the metallic lid of one of the jars in which appeared to be floating a human lung. Death in fifteen minutes, or up to eight hours. Asphyxia. Heart failure. Complete respiratory shutdown. Another rap on the lid. Questions? No? Good. Enough of cicutoxin. On to curare. Primary symptoms...

But St. James was having symptoms of his own and he felt them even as Josie chattered on: disquiet at first, a distinct unease. Now here's a case in point, Rutherford was saying. But the point he was making and the nature of the case were elusive as eels. St. James set down his knife and reached for one of the pet.i.t fours. Josie beamed her apparent approval of his choice.

"Iced them myself," she said. "I think the pink-and-green ones look best."

"What sort of herbalist?" he asked her.

"Missus Spence?"

"Yes."

"The doctoring sort. She picks stuff in the forest and up on the hills and she mixes it good and mashes it up. For fevers and cramps, head colds and stuff. Maggie-Missus Spence's her mum and she's my best mate and she's ever so nice-she's never even been to a doctor, far's I know. She gets a sore, her mum whips up a plaster. She gets a fever, her mum makes some tea. She made me a throat wash from creeping jenny when I was out to the Hall on a visit-that's where they live, up by Cotes Hall-and I gargled for a day and the soreness was gone."

"So she knows her plants."

Josie's head bobbed. "That's why when Mr. Sage died, it looked real bad. How could she not know, people've wondered. I mean, I wouldn't know wild parsnip from hay but Missus Spence..." Her voice drifted off and she held out her hands in a what's-a-body-tothink sort of gesture.

"But surely the inquest dealt with all that," Deborah said.

"Oh yes. Right above stairs in the Magistrate's Court-have you seen it yet? Pop in for a look before you go to bed."

"Who gave evidence?" St. James asked. The answer promised a renewal of disquiet, and he was fairly certain what that answer would be. "Other than Mrs. Spence herself."

"Constable."

"The man who was with her tonight?"

"Him. Mr. Shepherd. That's right. He found Mr. Sage-the body, I guess-on the footpath that goes to Cotes Hall and the Fell on Sat.u.r.day morning."

"Did he conduct the investigation alone?"

"Far's I know. He's our constable, isn't he?"

St. James saw his wife turning to him curiously, one of her hands raising to finger a twisted curl of her hair. She said nothing, but she understood him well enough to realise where his thoughts were heading.

It was, he thought, none of their business. They'd come to this village for a holiday. Away from London and away from their home, there would be no professional or domestic distractions to prevent the dialogue in which they needed to engage.

Yet it wasn't that easy to walk away from the two dozen scientific and procedural questions that were second nature to him and shouting to be answered. It was even less easy to walk away from the persistent monologue of Ian Rutherford. Even now, it was playing like a nagging, nameless melody inside his skull. Y've got to hae the thickened portion of the plant, m' luvlies. Very characteristic, this little beauty, stem and root. Stem is thickened as y' will note and not one but several roots are attached. When we cut into the surface of the stem like so, we have oursel's the very scent of raw parsnip. Now, to review...who sh'll do the honours? And under eyebrows that looked like wild plants themselves, Rutherford's blue eyes would dart round the laboratory, always on the lookout for the hapless student who appeared to have a.s.similated the least information. He had a special gift for recognising both confusion and ennui, and whoever was experiencing either reaction to Rutherford's presentation was most likely to be called upon to review the material at the lecture's end. Mr. Allcourt-St. James. Enlighten us. Please. Or do we ask too much of you this fair morning?

St. James heard the words as if he still stood in that room in Glasgow, all of twenty-one years old and thinking not of organic toxins but of the young woman he'd finally taken to bed on his last visit home. His reverie disturbed, he made a valiant attempt at bluffing his way through a response to the professor's request. Cicuta virosa, he said and he cleared his throat in an effort to buy time, toxic principle cicutoxin, acting directly on the central nervous system, a violent convulsant, and...The rest was a mystery.

And, Mr. St. James? And? And?

Alas. His thoughts were too firmly attached to the bedroom. He remembered nothing more.

But here in Lancashire, more than fifteen years later, Josephine Eugenia Wragg gave the answer. "She always kept roots in the cellar. Potatoes and carrots and parsnips and everything, each in their separate bin. So a whisper went round that if she didn't feed it to the vicar on purpose, someone might've snuck in and mixed the hemlock with the other parsnips and just waited till it was cooked and eaten. But she said at the inquest that couldn't have happened 'cause the cellar was always locked up tight. So then everyone said all right we'll accept that that's the case but then she should have known it wasn't wild parsnip in the first place 'cause..."

Of course she should have known. Because of the root. And that had been Ian Rutherford's main point. That was what he'd been waiting impatiently for his daydreaming, negligent student to say.

Ye don't have a prayer in science, my lad.

Yes. Well. They would see about that.

CHAPTER FOUR.

HERE IT WAS, THAT NOISE again. it sounded like hesitant footsteps treading on gravel. At first she had thought it was coming from the courtyard, and although she knew it wasn't proper to be relieved at the idea, her fears were at least moderately soothed by the fact that whoever it was creeping round in the dark, he seemed to be heading in the direction not of the caretaker's cottage but of Cotes Hall. And it had to be a he, Maggie Spence decided. Prowling about old buildings at night wasn't the sort of behaviour a she would engage in.

Maggie knew she ought to be on the alert, considering everything that had gone on at the Hall over the past few months, considering especially the ruination of that fancy-pants carpet only last weekend. Being on the alert was, after all, the only thing aside from her school prep that Mummy had asked her to do prior to leaving with Mr. Shepherd this evening.

"I'll only be gone a few hours, darling," Mummy had said. "If you hear anything, don't go outside. Just phone. All right?"

Which is, by rights, what Maggie knew she ought to do now. After all, she had the numbers. They were downstairs next to the telephone in the kitchen. Mr. Shepherd's home, Crofters Inn, and the Townley-Youngs just in case. She had looked them over as Mummy left, wanting to say in mock innocence, "But you're just going to the inn, aren't you, Mummy? So why've you given me Mr. Shepherd's number as well?" But she knew the answer to that question already, and if she asked, it would only have been to embarra.s.s the both of them.

Sometimes, though, she wanted to embarra.s.s them. She wanted to shout, March twenty-third! I know what happened, I know that's when you did it, I even know where, I even know how. But she never did. Even if she hadn't seen them in the sitting room together- having arrived home too early after a tiff in the village with Josie and Pam-and even if she hadn't slipped away from the window with her legs gone all peculiar at the sight of Mummy and what she'd been doing, and even if she hadn't gone to sit and think about it all on the weed-choked terrace of Cotes Hall with Punkin curled in a mangy ball of tabby-orange at her feet, she still would have known. It was pretty obvious, with Mr. Shepherd looking at Mummy ever since with his eyes all bleary and his mouth gone soft and Mummy being careful as careful not to look at him.

"They're doing it?" Josie Wragg had whispered breathlessly. "And you actually in reality without a doubt in the world saw them doing it? Naked and stuff? In the sitting room? Maggie!" She lit a Gauloise and lay back on her bed. All the windows were open to remove the smoke so that her mummy wouldn't know what she was getting up to. But Maggie couldn't see how all the breeze in the world could come close to eliminating the foul odour produced by the French cigarettes that Josie favoured. She placed her own between her lips and filled her mouth with smoke. She blew it out. She hadn't mastered the inhaling part yet and wasn't sure she wanted to.

"They didn't have all their clothes off," she said. "Mummy didn't, at least. I mean, she wasn't actually undressed at all. She didn't really need to be."

"Didn't need...? Then what were they doing?" Josie demanded.

"Oh G.o.d, Josephine." Pam Rice yawned. She tossed her head of perfectly bobbed blond hair and it fell, as it always did, perfectly in place. "Develop a clue in life, won't you? What d'you think they were doing? I thought you were supposed to be the expert round here."

Josie frowned. "But I don't see how...I mean if she had all her clothes on."

Pam raised her eyes to the ceiling in a display of martyred patience. She drew in deeply on her cigarette and exhaled and inhaled in something she called Frenching. "It was in her mouth," she said. "M-o-u-t-h. Do I have to draw you a picture, or do you get it now?"

"In her..." Josie looked fl.u.s.tered. She touched her fingertips to her tongue as if doing so would allow her to understand more completely. "You mean his thing was actually-"

"His thing? G.o.d. It's called a p.e.n.i.s, Josie. P-e-n-i-s. All right?" Pam rolled onto her stomach and gazed with narrowed eyes at the glowing tip of her cigarette. "All I can say is I hope she got something, which she probably didn't if she was wearing all her clothes." Again, a toss of that perfect head of hair. "Todd knows better than to finish it off before I've come and that's a fact."

Josie's forehead creased. She was obviously still trying to come to terms with the information. Always presenting herself as the living authority on female s.e.xuality-courtesy of a dog-eared copy of The Female s.e.xual Animal Unleashed At Home (Vol. I), which she'd pinched from the rubbish bin where her mother had deposited it after, at the insistence of her husband, she had spent two months attempting to "become lidibinous or something like that"- she was out of her depth with this one.

"Were they-" She seemed to struggle for a word. "Were they moving or anything, Maggie?"

"Christ in dirty knickers," Pam said. "Don't you know anything? No one needs to move. She just needs to suck."

"To..." Josie mashed out her cigarette on the windowsill. "Maggie's mum? With a bloke? That's disgusting!"

Pam chuckled languidly. "No. It's Unleashed. Right and proper, if you ask me. Didn't your book get round to mentioning that, Jo? Or was it all about dipping your t.i.ts in clotted cream and serving them up with the strawberries at tea? You know the sort of thing. 'Make life for your man a constant surprise.'"

"There's nothing wrong with a woman becoming attuned to her sensual nature," Josie replied with some dignity. She lowered her head and picked at a scab on her knee. "Or to a man's, for that matter."

"Yes. Too right. A real woman ought to know what gives who a tickle and where. Don't you think so, Maggie?" Pam used her unnerving ability to make her eyes look at once both purely innocent and bluer than blue. "Don't you think it's important?"

Maggie crossed her legs Indian fashion and gave a pinch to the heel of her hand. It was the way she reminded herself to admit to nothing.

She knew what information Pam wanted from her-she could see that Josie knew it as well- but she'd never sneaked on a soul in her life, and she wasn't about to sneak on herself.

Josie came to the rescue. "Did you say anything? After you saw them, I mean."

She hadn't, not then at least. And when she finally brought it up, as a shrill accusation hurled half in anger and half in self-defence, Mummy had reacted by slapping her face. Not once but twice and as hard as she could. One second afterwards-and maybe it was seeing the expression of surprise and shock on Maggie's face because Mummy had never hit her in her life-she'd cried out like she'd been struck herself, grabbed Maggie to her, and hugged her so fiercely Maggie felt her breath leave. But still, they hadn't talked about any of it. "It's my business, Maggie," Mummy had said firmly.

Fine, Maggie thought. And my business is mine.

But it wasn't, really. Mummy wouldn't let it be. She had brought the sludgy tea to Maggie's bedroom every morning for a fortnight after their row. She had stood and made sure Maggie drank every drop. To her protestations, she said, "I know what's best." To her whimpers when the pain cramped through her stomach, she said, "It will pa.s.s, Maggie." And she wiped her brow with a cool, soft cloth.

Maggie studied the inky shadows in her bedroom and listened again, concentrating in order to discern the sound of footsteps from the wind jostling an old plastic bottle against the gravel outside. She hadn't turned on any of the lights upstairs, and she crept to the window and peered out into the night, feeling secure in the knowledge that she could see without being seen. Below her in the courtyard, shadows from the east wing of Cotes Hall made great caves of dark. Cast from the mansion's gables, they loomed like open pits and offered more than ample protection for anyone wishing to hide himself. She squinted at them one by one, trying to distinguish whether a hulking form against a far wall was only a yew bush in need of clipping or a prowler trying the window. She couldn't tell. She wished Mummy and Mr. Shepherd would return.

She'd never minded being left alone in the past, but early on after their arrival in Lancashire, she'd developed a dislike of staying in the cottage by herself, either day or night. Perhaps it was baby-stuff to feel that way, but the minute Mummy drove off with Mr. Shepherd, the minute she slipped into the Opel to go off on her own, or headed in the direction of the footpath, or went into the oak wood on a search for plants, Maggie felt the walls start inching close about her. She was uniquely aware of being by herself on the grounds of Cotes Hall, and while Polly Yarkin lived just at the far end of the drive, it was nearly a mile away and no matter how she screamed and shouted, if she ever needed Polly's help for any reason, she wouldn't hear.

It didn't matter to Maggie that she knew where Mummy kept her pistol. Even if she had used it before for target practice-which she never had-she couldn't imagine actually pointing it at anyone, let alone pulling the trigger. So instead, when she was by herself, she burrowed into her bedroom like a mole. If it was night, she kept the lights off and waited for the sound of a returning car or of Mummy's key sc.r.a.ping in the locked front door. And while she waited, she listened to Punkin's soft feline snores rising like steady puffs of auditory smoke from the centre of her bed. With her vision fixed on the small birch bookcase atop of which lumpy old Bozo the elephant presided among the other stuffed animals with comforting grace, she clutched her sc.r.a.pbook to her chest. She thought about her father.

He existed in fantasy, Eddie Spence, dead before he was thirty, his body twisted along with the wreckage of his racing car in Monte Carlo. He was the hero of an untold story Mummy had hinted at a single time, saying, "Daddy died in a car crash, darling" and "Please, Maggie. I can't speak of it to anyone," with her eyes filled with tears when Maggie tried to ask more. Maggie often tried to conjure up his face from her memory, but she failed in the effort. So what there was of Daddy she held in her arms: the pictures of formula-one race cars she clipped and collected, placing them into her Important Events Book along with careful notations about every Grand Prix.

She plopped onto the bed, and Punkin stirred. He raised his head, yawned, and then p.r.i.c.ked his ears. They turned like radar in the direction of the window, and he rose in a single, lissome movement and leapt silently from the bed to the sill. There, he hunkered, his tail making restless, tapping movements as it circled round his front paws.

From the bed, Maggie watched him surveying the courtyard much as she had done, his eyes blinking slowly as his tail continued to tap in silence. She knew from studying up on the subject in his kitten-days that cats are hypersensitive to changes in the environment, so she rested more easily in the knowledge that Punkin would tell her the very moment there was anything outside that she ought to fear.

An old lime tree stood just beyond the window, and its branches creaked. Maggie listened hard. Twigs scratched in vibrato against the gla.s.s. Something rasped on the old tree's furrowed bark. It was only the wind, Maggie told herself, but even as she thought this, Punkin gave the signal that something wasn't right. He rose with an arching back.

Maggie's heart thumped jerkily. Punkin launched himself from the window-sill and landed on the rag rug. He was through the door in a streak of orange locomotion before Maggie had time to realise that someone must have climbed the tree.

And then it was too late. She heard the soft thud of a body landing on the slate roof of the cottage. The quiet tread of footsteps followed. Then came the sound of gentle rapping on the gla.s.s.

This last made no sense. As far as she knew, housebreakers didn't announce themselves. Unless, of course, they were trying to see if anyone was at home. But even then, it seemed more sensible to think that they'd just knock on the door or ring the front bell and wait for an answer.

She wanted to shout, You've got the wrong place, whoever you are, you want the Hall, don't you? But instead she lowered her sc.r.a.pbook to the floor next to the bed and slid along the wall into the deeper shadows. Her palms felt itchy. Her stomach rolled. She wanted more than anything to call out for her mummy, but that would be of less than no use. A moment later she was glad of the fact.

"Maggie? Are you there?" she heard him call softly. "Open up, will you? I'm freezing my b.u.m off."

Nick! Maggie dashed across the room. She could see him, crouched on the slope of roof just outside the dormer window, grinning at her, his silky black hair brushing against his cheeks like soft bird's wings. She fumbled with the lock. Nick, Nick, she thought. But just as she was about to fling up the sash, she heard Mummy saying, "I don't want you alone with Nick Ware again. Is that clear, Margaret Jane? No more of that. It's over." Her fingers failed her.

"Maggie!" Nick whispered. "Let me in! It's cold."

She'd given her word. Mummy had been driven close to tears during their row, and the sight of her eyes red-rimmed and full over Maggie's behaviour and Maggie's stinging words had wrung the promise from her without a thought of what it would really mean to give it.

"I can't," she said.

"What?"

"Nick, Mummy isn't home. She's gone into the village with Mr. Shepherd. I promised her-"