Missing Joseph Page 6

  But in winter she became Rita Yarkin again, back in Winslough for a three-month stay with her only child. She put her hand-painted sign on the verge of the road and waited for custom which seldom developed. She read magazines and watched the telly. She ate like a docker and painted her nails.

  Polly glanced at these curiously. Purple today, with a tiny strip of gold crossing each one diagonally. They clashed with her kaftan—it was pumpkin orange—but they were a decided improvement over yesterday’s yellow.

  “You tiff with someone this evenin’, luv-doll?” Rita asked. “You got an aura shrivelled to nothing, you do. That a’nt good, is it? Here. Lemme take a look at your face.”

  “It’s nothing.” Polly made herself busier than she needed to be. She banged her boots against the inside of the woodbox next to the door. She took off her scarf and folded it neatly into a square. She put this square in the pocket of her coat and then brushed the coat itself with the flat of her hand, removing both speckles of lint and nonexistent splatters of mud.

  Her mother wasn’t to be easily side-tracked. She pushed her huge mass from the door-jamb. She waddled to Polly and turned her round. She peered at her face. With her hand palm-open and an inch away, she traced the shape of Polly’s head and her shoulders.

  “I see.” She pursed her lips and dropped her arm with a sigh. “Stars and earth, girl, stop being such a fool.”

  Polly stepped to one side and headed for the stairs. “I need my slippers,” she said. “I’ll be down in a minute. I can smell supper. Have you done goulash like you said?”

  “Listen here, Pol. Mr. C. Shepherd a’nt so special,” Rita said. “He got nothing to offer a woman like you. Do you not see that yet?”

  “Rita…”

  “It’s living that counts. Living, you hear? You got life and knowledge like blood in your veins. You got gifts beyond anything I ever had or seen. Use them. Damn it all, don’t throw them away. Gods above, if I had half what you have, I’d own the world. Stop climbing those stairs and listen to me, girl.” She slammed her hand down on the banister.

  Polly felt the stairs tremble. She turned, blowing out a gust of resigned breath. It was only the three months of winter that she and her mother were together, but in the last six years, day tended to drag upon day as Rita used every excuse she could find to examine the manner in which Polly was living her life.

  “That was him went by in the car just now, wasn’t it?” Rita asked. “Mr. C. Shepherd his precious self. With her, wasn’t he? From up at the Hall. That’s what you’re feeling the pain of now, isn’t it?”

  “It’s nothing,” Polly said.

  “And there you’ve got it right. It’s nothing. He’s nothing. Where’s the sorrow in that?”

  But he wasn’t nothing to Polly. He never had been. How could she explain this to her mother, whose only experience of love had ended abruptly when her husband left Winslough on the rainy morning of Polly’s seventh birthday, headed to Manchester “to get something special for my extra-special little girl,” and never came home.

  Deserted was not a word Rita Yarkin ever used to describe what had happened to her and her only child. Blessed she called it. If he didn’t have the sense to know what kind of women he was walking out on, they were both better off without the ugly toad.

  Rita had always seen her life in those terms. Every difficulty, trial, or misfortune could be easily redefined as a blessing in disguise. Disappointments were wordless messages from the Goddess. Rejections were merely indications that the most desired pathway was not the best. For long ago, Rita Yarkin had given herself—heart, mind, and body—into the safekeeping of the Craft of the Wise. Polly admired her for such trust and devotion. She only wished she could feel the same.

  “I’m not like you, Rita.”

  “You are,” Rita said. “You’re more like me than me in the first place. When did you last cast the circle? Not since I’ve been home, surely.”

  “I have done. Yes. Since then. Two or three times.”

  Her mother raised one sceptical, line-drawn eyebrow. “You’re the discreet one, aren’t you? Where you been casting?”

  “Up Cotes Fell. You know that, Rita.”

  “And the Rite?”

  Polly felt prickly heat on the back of her neck. She’d have chosen not to answer, but her mother’s power was becoming stronger every time she made a reply. She could feel it quite distinctly now, as if it were oozing from Rita’s fingers, slithering up the banister and through Polly’s palm.

  “Venus,” she said miserably and tore her eyes from Rita’s face. She waited for the mockery.

  It did not come. Instead Rita took her hand from the banister and studied her daughter thoughtfully. “Venus,” she said. “This i’n’t about making love potions, Polly.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then—”

  “But it’s still about love. You don’t want me to feel it. I know that, Mum. But it’s there all the same and I can’t make it go away just because you’d have me. I love him. Don’t you think I’d stop it if only I could? Don’t you think I pray to feel nothing for him…or at least to feel for him nothing more’n what he feels for me? D’you think I choose to be tortured like this?”

  “I think we all choose our tortures.” Rita lumbered to an ancient rosewood Canterbury made lopsided by the absence of two of its wheels. It leaned against one of the walls in the entry beneath the stairs, and with a grunt to rock her weight to one side, Rita bent as much as her legs would allow and wrestled open its single drawer. She brought out two rectangles of wood. “Here,” she said. “Take ’em.”

  Without question or protest, Polly took the wood. She could smell its unmistakable odour, sharp but pleasant, a permeative scent.

  “Cedar,” she said.

  “Correct,” said Rita. “Burn it to Mars. Pray for strength, girl. Leave love to those who don’t have your gifts.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  MRS. WRAGG LEFT THEM IMMEDIATELY after making her announcement about the vicar. To Deborah’s dismayed “But what happened? How on earth did he die?” she said guardedly, “I couldn’t quite say. A friend of his, are you?”

  No. Of course. They hadn’t been friends. They’d only shared a few minutes’ conversation in the National Gallery on a rainy, blowing November day. Still, the memory of Robin Sage’s kindness and his anxious concern made Deborah feel leaden—struck by a mixture of surprise and dismay—when she was told he was dead.

  “I’m sorry, my love,” St. James said when Mrs. Wragg closed the door upon her own departure. Deborah could see the worry darkening his eyes, and she knew he was reading her thoughts as only a man who had known her all her life could have possibly read them. He didn’t go on to say what she knew he wanted to say: It isn’t you, Deborah. You haven’t death’s touch, no matter what you think…Instead, he held her.

  They finally descended the stairs between the bar and the office at half past seven. The pub was apparently in the process of serving its regular evening crowd. Farmers leaned against the bar engaged in conversation. Housewives gathered at tables enjoying an evening out. Two ageing couples compared walking sticks while six noisy teenagers joked loudly in a corner and smoked cigarettes.

  From the midst of this latter group—among which, accompanied by the ribald comments of their mates, one couple necked heavily, with an occasional pause from the girl to nip at a flask and from the boy to drag deeply on a cigarette—Josie Wragg emerged. She’d changed for the evening into what appeared to be a work uniform. But part of her black skirt’s hem was falling out and her red bow tie was hopelessly askew, dribbling a long, unravelling string down the prairie expanse of her chest.

  She ducked behind the bar where she scooped up two menus, and she said formally, with a wary eye in the direction of the balding man who pulled the pub’s taps with the sort of authority that suggested he had to be Mr. Wragg the proprietor, “Good evening, sir. Madam. You’ve settled in good?”

  “Perfectly,” St.
James replied.

  “Then I expect you’ll want to have a look at these.” She handed the menus over with a low-voiced “But mind you. Don’t forget what I said about the beef.”

  They skirted past the farmers, one of whom was shaking a monitory fist, red-faced and talking about “telling him tha’s a public footpath…public, you hear me” and wound their way through the tables to the fireplace where flames were rapidly working on a cone-shaped pile of silver birch. They met curious glances as they crossed the room—tourists were unusual in Lancashire at this time of year—but to their pleasant good evening, the men nodded brusquely in wordless greeting and the women bobbed their heads. And while the teenagers remained in their far corner of the pub, happily oblivious of everyone but themselves, it seemed less group-egocentricity than it was interest in the continuing entertainment provided by the blonde flask-nipper and her companion, who was at this moment busy snaking his hand under the bright yellow sweat shirt she wore. The material undulated as his fist rose like a mobile third breast.

  Deborah sat on a bench beneath a faded and decidedly unpointillistic needlepoint rendering of A Sunday Afternoon on the Grand Jatte. St. James took the stool opposite her. They ordered sherry and whisky, and when Josie brought the drinks to their table, she positioned her body to block the young entwined lovers from their view.

  “Sorry about that,” she said with a wrinkle of her nose as she placed the sherry in front of Deborah and adjusted it just so. She did the same with the whisky. “Pam Rice, that is. Playing tart for the night. Don’t ask me why. She’s not a bad sort. Just when she gets with Todd. He’s seventeen.”

  This last was offered as if the boy’s age explained all. But perhaps thinking it might not have done, Josie continued. “Thirteen. Pam, that is. Fourteen next month.”

  “And thirty-five sometime next year, no doubt,” St. James noted drily.

  Josie squinted over her shoulder at the young couple. Despite her previous look of disdain, her bony chest rose tremulously. “Yes. Well…” And then she turned back to them with what seemed like effort. “What’ll you have, then? Besides the beef. The salmon’s quite good. So’s the duck. And the veal’s”—The pub’s outer door opened, letting in a gust of cold air that puffed round their ankles like moving silk—“cooked with tomatoes and mushrooms, and we’ve got a sole tonight done with capers and…” Josie’s recitation faltered as, behind her, the hubbub from the Crofters Inn patrons dissolved with remarkable speed into silence.

  A man and woman stood just inside the door, where an overhead light shone down upon the contrast they made. First hair: his roughly the colour of ginger; hers salt and pepper, thick, straight, and bluntly cut to touch her shoulders. Then face: his youthful and handsome but with a pugnacious prominence to the jaw and chin; hers strong and forceful, untouched by make-up to hide middle age. And clothes: his a barbour jacket and trousers; hers a worn navy pea jacket and faded blue jeans with a patch on one knee.

  For a moment, they remained side by side in the entry, the man’s hand resting on the woman’s arm. He wore tortoiseshell spectacles whose lenses caught the light and effectively hid his eyes and his reaction to the hush that greeted his entrance. She, however, looked round slowly, making deliberate contact with every face that had the courage to hold her gaze.

  “…capers and…and…” Josie appeared to have forgotten the rest of her prepared recitation. She poked the pencil into her hair and scratched it against her scalp.

  From behind the bar, Mr. Wragg spoke as he scooped the froth off a glass of Guinness. “Evening to you, Constable. Evening, Missus Spence. Cold night, in’t it? We’re in for a bad snap, you ask me. You, Frank Fowler. Another stout?”

  At last one of the farmers turned from the door. Others began to do the same. “Wouldn’t say no, Ben,” Frank Fowler replied, and knuckled his glass across the bar.

  Ben pulled on the tap. Someone said, “Billy, you got some fags on you?” A chair scraped against the floor like an animal’s howl. The double ring of the telephone sounded from the office. Slowly the pub returned to normal.

  The constable went to the bar where he said, “Black Bush and a lemonade, Ben,” while Mrs. Spence found a table set apart from the others. She walked to it without hurry, quite a tall woman with her head held up and her shoulders straight, but instead of sitting on the bench against the wall, she chose a stool that presented her back to the room. She removed her jacket. She was wearing an ivory wool turtleneck beneath it.

  “How’s things, Constable?” Ben Wragg asked. “Your dad get settled into the pensioners’ home yet?”

  The constable counted out some coins and laid them on the bar. “Last week,” he said.

  “Quite a man, your dad was in his day, Colin. Quite a copper.”

  The constable pushed the money towards Wragg. He said, “Yes. Quite. We all had years to get to know that, didn’t we,” and he picked up the glasses and went to join his companion.

  He sat on the bench, so his face was to the room. He looked from the bar to the tables, one at a time. And one at a time, people looked away. But the conversation in the pub was hushed, so much so that the sound of banging pots in the kitchen was quite distinct.

  After a moment, one of the farmers said, “Guess that’ll be it for the evening, Ben,” and another said, “Got to pop round to see my old gran.” A third merely tossed a five-pound note on the bar and waited for his change. Within minutes of the arrival of the constable and Mrs. Spence, most of the other patrons of Crofters Inn had vanished, leaving behind one lone man in tweeds who swirled his gin glass and slumped against the wall, and the group of teenagers who moved to a fruit machine at the far end of the pub and began to try their luck with its spinning dials.

  Josie had stood by the table during all of this, her lips parted and her eyes wide. It was only Ben Wragg’s barking, “Josephine, be about it,” that brought her back to her explanation of dinner. Even then, all she managed was, “What’ll…for dinner?” But before they had a chance to make their selections, she went on with “The dining room’s just this way, if you’ll follow me.”

  She led them through a low door next to the fireplace where the temperature dropped a good ten degrees and the predominant scent was of baking bread rather than the pub’s cigarette smoke and ale. She put them next to a simmering wall heater and said, “You’ll have the place all to yourselves this evening. No one else is staying here tonight. I’ll just pop into the kitchen and tell them what you’ve—” whereupon she finally seemed to realise that she had nothing at all to tell anyone. She chewed her lip. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not thinking right. You’ve not even ordered.”

  “Is something wrong?” Deborah asked.

  “Wrong?” The pencil went back into her hair, lead first this time and twirling, as if she were drawing a design on her scalp.

  “Is there some sort of problem?”

  “Problem?”

  “Is someone in trouble?”

  “Trouble?”

  St. James put an end to the game of echo. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a local constable clear out a public house so quickly. Without time being called, of course.”

  “Oh, no,” Josie said. “It’s not Mr. Shepherd. I mean…It’s not actually…It’s just that…Things’ve happened round here and you know how it is in a village and…Gosh, p’raps I ought to take your order. Mr. Wragg gets himself in a real fret if I chunter too much with the residents. ‘They haven’t come to Winslough to have their ears gnawed off by the likes of you, Miss Josephine.’ That’s what he says. Mr. Wragg. You know.”

  “Is it the woman with the constable?” Deborah asked.

  Josie flicked a look towards a swinging door that appeared to give access to the kitchen. “I really oughtn’t talk.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” St. James said and consulted his menu. “Stuffed mushrooms to start and the sole for me. And for you, Deborah?”

  But Deborah felt reluctant to be put off. She decided that if
Josie was hesitant to talk about one subject, a switch to another might loosen her tongue. “Josie,” she said, “can you tell us anything about the vicar, Mr. Sage?”

  Josie’s head flew up from her writing pad. “How’d you know?”

  “What?”

  She flung her arm in the direction of the pub. “Out there. How’d you know?”

  “We don’t know anything. Except that he’s dead. We’d come to Winslough in part to see him. Can you tell us what happened? Was his death unexpected? Had he been ill?”

  “No.” Josie dropped her eyes to her writing pad and gave all her concentration to the writing of stuffed mushrooms and sole. “Not exactly ill. Not for long, that is.”

  “A sudden illness, then?”

  “Sudden. Yes. Right.”

  “A heart condition? A stroke? Something like that.”

  “Something…quick it was. He went off quick.”

  “An infection? A virus?”

  Josie looked pained, clearly torn between holding her tongue and spilling her guts. She fiddled her pencil across her pad.

  “He wasn’t murdered, was he?” St. James asked.

  “No!” the girl gasped. “It wasn’t like that at all. It was an accident. Really. Honest and true. She didn’t mean…She couldn’t have…I mean I know her. We all do. She didn’t mean him any harm.”

  “Who?” St. James asked.

  Josie’s eyes went towards the door.

  “It’s that woman,” Deborah said. “It’s Mrs. Spence, isn’t it?”

  “It wasn’t murder!” Josie cried.

  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—