Missing Joseph (50 page)

“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 muffled 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.

He was reading the titles of her videotapes—lined up like guardsmen beneath a television—when she returned.

“I like to stay fit,” she said, in apparent explanation of the fact that beyond a copy of Olivier's
Wuthering Heights
, the cassettes all contained exercise tapes, featuring one film actress or another.

He could see that fitness was approximately as important to her as neatness, for aside from the fact that she was herself slender, solid, and athletic looking, the room's only photograph was a framed, poster-sized enlargement of her running in a race with the number 194 on her chest. She was wearing a red headband and sweating profusely, but she'd managed a dazzling smile for the camera.

“My first marathon,” she said. “Everyone's first is rather special.”

“I'd imagine that to be the case.”

“Yes. Well.” She brushed her thumb and middle finger through her hair. Light brown carefully streaked with blonde, it was cut quite short and blown back from her face in a fashionable style that suggested frequent trips to a hairdresser who wielded scissors and colour with equal skill. From the lining round her eyes and in the room's daylight, despite the rain that was beginning to streak the flat's casement windows, Lynley would have placed her in mid to late forties. But he imagined that dressed for business or pleasure, made up, and seen in the forgiving artificial light of one restaurant or another, she looked at least ten years younger.

She was holding a mug from which steam rose aromatically. “Chicken broth,” she said. “I suppose I should offer you something, but I'm not well versed in how one behaves when the police come to call. And you
are
the police?”

He offered her his warrant card. Unlike the receptionist below, she studied it before handing it back.

“I hope this isn't about one of my girls.” She walked to the sofa and sat on the edge with her mug of chicken broth balanced on her left knee. She had, he saw, the shoulders of a swimmer and the unbending posture of a Victorian woman cinched into a corset. “I check into their backgrounds thoroughly when they first apply. No one gets into my files without at least three references. If they get a bad report from more than two of their employers, I let them go. So I never have trouble. Never.”

Lynley joined her, sitting in one of the armchairs. He said, “I've come about a man called Robin Sage. He had the directions to this oast house among his belongings and a reference to
Kate
in his engagement diary. Do you know him? Did he come to see you?”

“Robin? Yes.”

“When?”

She drew her eyebrows together. “I don't recall exactly. It was sometime in the autumn. Perhaps late September?”

“The eleventh of October?”

“It could have been. Shall I check that for you?”

“Did he have an appointment?”

“One could call it that. Why? Has he got into trouble?”

“He's dead.”

She adjusted her grip on the mug slightly, but that was the only reaction that Lynley could read. “This an investigation?”

“The circumstances were rather irregular.” He waited for her to do the normal thing, to ask what the circumstances were. When she didn't, he said, “Sage lived in Lancashire. May I take it that he didn't come to see you about hiring a temporary employee?”

She sipped her chicken bouillon. “He came to talk about Susanna.”

“His wife.”

“My sister.” She pulled a square of white linen from her pocket, dabbed it against the corners of her mouth, and replaced it neatly. “I hadn't seen or heard a word from him since the day of her funeral. He wasn't exactly welcome here. Not after everything that had happened.”

“Between him and his wife.”

“And the baby. That dreadful business about Joseph.”

“He was an infant when he died, as I understand.”

“Just three months. It was a cot death. Susanna went to get him up one morning, thinking that he'd actually slept through the night for the first time. He'd been dead for hours. He was stiff with rigor. She broke three of his ribs between the kiss of life and trying to give him CPR. There was an investigation, of course. And there were questions of abuse when the word got out about his ribs.”

“Police questions?” Lynley asked in some surprise. “If the bones were broken after death—”

“They would have known. I'm aware of that. It wasn't the police. Naturally, they questioned her, but once they had the pathologist's report, they were satisfied. Still, there were whispers in the community. And Susanna was in an exposed position.”

Kate got up and walked to the window where she pushed back the curtains. The rain was pattering against the glass. She said contemplatively but without much ferocity, “I blamed him. I still do. But Susanna only blamed herself.”

“I'd think that's a fairly normal reaction.”

“Normal?” Kate laughed softly. “There was nothing normal about her situation.”

Lynley waited without reply or question. The rain snaked in rivulets against the window-panes. A telephone rang in the office below.

“Joseph slept in their bedroom the first two months.”

“Hardly abnormal.”

She seemed not to hear. “Then Robin insisted he be given a room of his own. Susanna wanted him near her, but she cooperated with Robin. That was her way. And he was very convincing.”

“About what?”

“He kept insisting that a child could be irrevocably damaged by witnessing at any age, even in infancy, what Robin in his infinite wisdom called ‘the primal scene' between his parents.” Kate turned from the window and sipped more broth. “Robin refused to have sex as long as the baby was in the room. When Susanna wanted to…resume relations, she had to go along with Robin's wishes. But I suppose you can imagine what little Joseph's death did to any future primal scenes between them.”

The marriage quickly fell apart, she said. Robin flung himself into his work as a means of distraction. Susanna drifted into depression.

“I was living and working in London at the time,” Kate said, “so I had her come to stay with me. I had her go to galleries. I gave her books to identify the birds in the parks. I mapped out city walks and had her take one each day. Someone had to do something, after all. I tried.”

“To…?”

“To get her back into life. What do you think? She was wallowing in grief. She was luxuriating in guilt and self-loathing. It wasn't healthy. And Robin wasn't helping matters at all.”

“He'd have been feeling his own grief, I dare say.”

“She wouldn't put it behind her. Every day I'd come home and there she would be, sitting on the bed, holding the baby's picture against her breast, wanting to talk and relive it all. Day after day. As if talking about it would have done any good.” Kate returned to the sofa and placed her mug on a round of mosaic that served as a mat on the side table. “She was torturing herself. She wouldn't let it go. I told her she had to. She was young. She'd have another baby, after all. Joseph was dead. He was gone. He was buried. And if she didn't snap out of it and take care of herself, she'd be buried with him.”

“Which she eventually was.”

“I blame
him
for that. With his primal scenes and his miserable belief in God's judgement in our lives. That's what he told her, you know. That Joseph's death was the hand of God at work. What a
beastly
man. Susanna didn't need to hear that sort of rubbish. She didn't need to believe she was being punished. And for what? For what?”

Kate pulled out her handkerchief a second time. She pressed it against her forehead although she didn't appear to be perspiring.

“Sorry,” she said. “There are some things in life that don't bear remembering.”

“Is that why Robin Sage came to see you? To share memories?”

“He was suddenly interested in her,” she said. “He hadn't been the least involved in her life in the six months that led up to her death. But suddenly he cared. What did she do while she was with you, he wanted to know. Where did she go? What did she talk about? How did she act? Whom did she meet?” She chuckled bitterly. “After all these years. I wanted to smack his mournful little face. He'd been eager enough to see her buried.”

“What do you mean?”

“He kept identifying bodies washed up on the coast. There were two or three of them he said were Susanna. The wrong height, the wrong hair colour when there was hair left on them at all, the wrong weight. It didn't matter. He was in such a nasty rush about it all.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I thought at first he had some woman lined up to marry and he needed to have Susanna declared officially dead in order to get on with it.”

“But he didn't marry.”

“He didn't. I assume the woman gave him the brush-off, whoever she was.”

“Does the name Juliet Spence mean anything to you? Did he mention a woman called Juliet Spence when he was here? Did Susanna ever mention Juliet Spence?”

She shook her head. “Why?”

“She poisoned Robin Sage. Last month in Lancashire.”

Kate raised a hand as if to touch it to her perfectly brushed hair. She dropped it, however, before it made contact. Her eyes grew momentarily distant. “How odd. I find I'm glad of the fact.”

Lynley wasn't surprised. “Did your sister ever mention any other men when she was staying with you? Did she see other men once things began to go wrong in her marriage? Could her husband have discovered that?”

“She didn't talk about men. She talked only about babies.”

“There is, of course, an unavoidable connection between the two.”

“I've always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards orgasm without pausing to realise that it's merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense.”

“People get involved with one another. They pursue intimacy along with love.”

“More fools, they,” Kate said.

Lynley got to his feet. Kate moved behind him and made an adjustment to the position of the pillow on his chair. She brushed her fingers across the chair's back.

He watched her, wondering what it had been like for her sister. Grief calls for acceptance and understanding. No doubt she'd felt herself cut off from mankind.

He said, “Have you any idea why Robin Sage might have telephoned Social Services in London?”

Kate picked a hair from the lapel of her dressing gown. “He'd have been looking for me, no doubt.”

“You supply them with temps?”

“No. I've had this business only eight years. Before that, I worked for Social Services. He'd have phoned there first.”

“But your name was in his diary before his calls or visits to Social Services. Why would that be?”

“I couldn't say. Perhaps he wanted to go through Susanna's paperwork in the trip down memory lane he'd been taking. Social Services in Truro would have been involved when the baby died. Perhaps he was tracking her paperwork to London.”

“Why?”

“To read it? To set the record straight?”

“To discover if Social Services knew what someone else claimed to know?”

“About Joseph's death?”

“Is it a possibility?”

She folded her arms beneath her breasts. “I can't see how. If there had been something suspicious about his death, it would have been acted upon, Inspector.”