Missing Joseph (39 page)

“Perhaps it wasn't boys.”

“You're thinking of Maggie. And Mrs. Spence killing him to put an end to…what? Molestation? Seduction? If that's the case, why wouldn't she say?”

“It's still murder, St. James. She's the girl's only parent. Could she depend upon a jury seeing it her way, acquitting, and leaving her free to care for the child who depends upon her? Would she take that risk? Would anyone? Would you?”

“Why not report him to the police? To the Church?”

“It's her word against his.”

“But the daughter's word…”

“What if Maggie chose to protect the man? What if she wanted the involvement in the first place? What if she fancied herself in love with him? Or fancied he loved her?”

St. James rubbed the back of his neck. Deborah sank her chin into the palm of her hand. Both of them sighed. Deborah said, “I feel like the Red Queen in
Alice
. We need to run twice as fast, and I'm already out of breath.”

“It's not looking good,” St. James agreed. “We need to know more, and all they need to do is hold their tongues to keep us permanently in the dark.”

“Not necessarily,” Lynley said. “There's still Truro to consider. We've plenty of room to manoeuvre there. We've got the wife's death to dig into, as well as Robin Sage's background.”

“God, that's a hike. Will you go there, Tommy?”

“I won't.”

“Then who?”

Lynley smiled. “Someone on holiday. Just like the rest of us.”

In Acton, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers turned on the radio that sat on the top of the refrigerator, and interrupted Sting in the midst of warbling about his father's hands. She said, “Yeah, baby. Sing it, you hunk,” and chuckled at herself. She liked listening to Sting. Lynley claimed her interest was rooted solely in the fact that Sting appeared to shave only once a fortnight, in a display of putative virility that was geared to attract a largely feminine following. Barbara pooh-poohed this. She argued that, for his part, Lynley was a musical snob, saying that if a piece had been composed within the last eighty years, he wouldn't offend his aristocratic ears by exposing them to it. She herself had no real predilection for rock and roll, but given her preference, she always chose it over classical, jazz, blues, or what Constable Nkata referred to as “honky Grandma tunes” which usually featured something from the forties inoffensively rendered by a full orchestra with a heavy emphasis on the strings. Nkata himself was devoted to blues, although Havers knew he'd sell his soul in an instant—not to mention his growing collection of CD's—for just five minutes alone with Tina Turner. “Never you mind she's old enough to be my mum,” he'd say to his colleagues. “My mum look like that, I'd'a never left home.”

Barbara turned up the volume and opened the refrigerator. She was hoping that the sight of something inside would stimulate her appetite. Instead the odour of five-day-old plaice made her retreat to the other side of the kitchen, saying, “Jesus bloody hell,” with some considerable reverence while she considered how best to be rid of the leaking package of fish without having to touch it. She wondered what other malodorous surprises were waiting for discovery, wrapped in foil, stored in plastic cases, or brought home in cartons for a hasty meal and long since forgotten. From her position of safety, she spied something green climbing the edges of one container. She wanted to believe it was leftover mushy peas. The colour seemed right, but the fibrous consistency suggested mould. Next to it, a new life-form seemed to be evolving from what once had been a plate of spaghetti. In fact, the entire refrigerator looked like an unsavoury experiment-in-progress, conducted by Alexander Fleming with another trip to Stockholm in mind.

With her eyes fastened suspiciously on this mess and the back of one index finger pressed beneath her nose to breathe against shallowly, Barbara edged over to the kitchen sink. She rustled through cleansers, scrubbing pads, brushes, and a few stiffened lumps that had once been dish-cloths. She unearthed a carton of rubbish bags. Armed with one of these and a spatula, she advanced to do battle. The plaice went into the sack first, splatting against the floor and sending up a death howl in the form of an odour that made Barbara shudder. The mushy peas-
cum
-antibiotic went next, followed by the spaghetti, a wedge of double Gloucester that appeared to have grown some sort of interesting beard, a plate of petrified bangers and mash, and a carton of pizza which she could not get up the nerve to open. Leftover chow mein joined the mess, as did the spongy remains of half a tomato, three grapefruit halves, and a carton of milk she distinctly remembered having purchased last June.

Once Barbara developed a rhythm to this catharsis of comestibles, she decided to carry it to its logical conclusion. Anything that wasn't sealed in a jar, permanently and professionally pickled, or posing as a condiment unaffected by the passage of time—out with the mayonnaise, in with the ketchup—joined the plaice and its companions-in-decomposition. By the time she was done, the refrigerator shelves were bare of anything that made even the smallest promise of a meal, but she wasn't a mourner for the edible loss. Whatever appetite she may have been trying to stimulate with her sentimental journey through the territory of ptomaine had long since disappeared.

She slammed the door home and tied up the rubbish bag with its length of wire. She opened the back door, shoved the bag outside and waited for a moment to see if it would develop legs and slither off to join the rest of the household rubbish on its own. When it didn't, she made a mental note to handle it later.

She lit a cigarette. The scent of the match and of the burning tobacco did much to mask the residual foul odour of food gone bad. She lit a second match and then a third, while all the time she inhaled the smoke from the cigarette as deeply as she could.

Not a total loss, she thought, nothing for tea or supper, but look at it this way: another job's done. All she had to do was scrub down the shelves and wash out the single drawer and the refrigerator would be ready to sell, a little old, a bit unreliable, but priced accordingly. She couldn't take it with her when she moved to Chalk Farm—the studio was far too tiny to accommodate anything larger than munchkin size—so she was going to have to clean it out eventually, sooner or later…when she was ready to move…

She went to the table and sat, her chair noisily scraping one bare metal foot against the sticky linoleum floor. She twirled the end of her cigarette between thumb and index finger and idly watched the progress of the paper burning, as the tobacco it held continued to smoulder. The occasion of having to deal with this refrigerated putrefaction had, she realised, informed against her. One more job done meant one more item ticked off the list, which put her one step closer to shutting the house, selling it, and taking herself off to an unknown new life.

By alternate days she felt ready for the move and unaccountably terrified of the change it implied. She'd been to Chalk Farm half a dozen times already, she'd paid her deposit on the little studio, she'd talked to the landlord about different curtains and about the installation of the telephone. She'd even got a brief glimpse of one of her fellow tenants, sitting in a pleasant square of sun at the window of his lower ground-level flat. Yet even while that part of her life—marked FUTURE—drew her steadily onwards, the larger part—marked PAST—kept her standing in place. She knew that there was no turning back once this house in Acton was sold. One of the last ties to her mother would be severed.

Barbara had spent the morning with her. They'd walked to the hawthorn-lined common in Greenford and sat on one of the benches that surrounded the play area, watching a young mother twirling a laughing toddler on a round-about.

It had been one of her mother's good days. She recognised Barbara, and although she slipped three times and called her Doris, she didn't argue the point when Barbara gently reminded her that Auntie Doris had been dead and gone for nearly fifty years. She merely said with a wispy smile, “I forget, Barbie. But I'm good today. Shall I come home soon?”

“Don't you like it here?” Barbara asked. “Mrs. Flo likes you. And you get on well with Mrs. Pendlebury and Mrs. Salkild, don't you?”

Her mother scrabbled at the ground beneath her feet, then held her legs out straight, like a child. She said, “Like my new shoes, Barbie.”

“I thought you might.” They were high-top trainers, lavender with silver stripes on the side. Barbara had found them in a rainbow selection in Camden Lock Market. She'd bought a pair for herself in red and gold—snickering at the thought of Inspector Lynley's horrified face when he saw them on her feet—and although they hadn't had any in her mother's size, she'd bought the lavender ones anyway because they were the most outrageous and consequently the most likely to please. She'd thrown in two pairs of purple-and-black argyle socks to fill up the space between her mother's feet and the shoes, and she'd smiled at the pleasure Mrs. Havers had taken at unwrapping the package and fishing through the tissue for her “supprise.”

Barbara had got into the habit of bringing a little something with her on these biweekly visits to Hawthorn Lodge where, for the past two months, her mother had been living with two other elderly women and Mrs. Florence Magentry—Mrs. Flo—who cared for them. Barbara told herself that she did it for the joy of seeing her mother's face brighten at the sight of a gift. But she knew each package served as coin to purchase her freedom from guilt.

She said again, “You like it here with Mrs. Flo, don't you, Mum?”

Mrs. Havers was watching the toddler in the round-about. She was swaying to some interior tune. “Mrs. Salkild messed her pants last night,” she said confidentially. “But Mrs. Flo didn't even get crossed, Barbie. She said, ‘These things happen, dearie, as we get older so you mustn't worry yourself to bits.' I didn't mess my pants.”

“That's good, Mum.”

“I helped as well. I got the washing flannel and the plastic basin and I held it just so, so Mrs. Flo could clean her. Mrs. Salkild cried. She said, ‘I'm sorry. I couldn't tell. I didn't know.' I felt bad for her. I gave her some of my chocolates after. I didn't mess my pants, Barbie.”

“You're a big help to Mrs. Flo, Mum. She probably couldn't get along without you.”

“She
does
say that, doesn't she? She'll be sad when I leave. Am I coming home today?”

“Not today, Mum.”

“Soon though?”

“But not today.”

Barbara sometimes wondered if it would be better to leave her mother in Mrs. Flo's more-than-capable hands, if she should simply pay her expenses, disappear, and hope that her mother would forget in time that she had a daughter not far away. She did continual flip-flops on the efficacy of these visits to Greenford. She went from believing they did nothing more than put momentary plasters on the sores of her own guilt at the expense of disrupting Mrs. Havers' routine to convincing herself that her steady presence in her mother's life would keep her from complete mental disintegration. There was no literature available on either position as far as Barbara knew. And even if she had tried to find it—which she couldn't bring herself to do—what difference would some conveniently removed social scientist's theories make? This was her mother, after all. She couldn't abandon her.

Barbara stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray on the kitchen table and counted the stubs that lay crushed there already. Eighteen cigarettes she'd smoked since this morning. She had to quit. It was unclean, unhealthy, and disgusting. She lit another.

From her chair, she could see down the corridor all the way to the front door. She could see the stairway to the right, the sitting room to the left. It was impossible to avoid noticing how far along the renovation of the house had moved. The interior was painted. New carpet was laid. Fixtures were repaired or replaced in the bathroom and the kitchen. The stove and oven were cleaner than they had been in twenty years. The linoleum floor still needed to be stripped completely and then rewaxed, and wallpaper still waited to be hung. But once those two jobs were taken care of, along with washing or replacing the curtains which hadn't been touched as far as Barbara knew since her family's move to the house in her childhood, she could turn her efforts to the exterior.

The back garden was a nightmare. The front garden was nonexistent. And the house itself needed massive effort: There were gutters to replace, woodwork to paint, windows to wash, a front door to refinish. And while her savings were rapidly dwindling and her own time was limited because of her job, things were still moving slowly forward according to her original plan. If she didn't do something to slow down the wheels of this entire project—initially taken on to guarantee she would have sufficient funds to keep her mother at Hawthorn Lodge indefinitely—the time for being on her own would be fast upon her.