Free Missing Joseph by Elizabeth George Page B

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.
    â€œHow’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.
    â€œQuite 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.”
    â€œIs something wrong?” Deborah asked.
    â€œWrong?” The pencil went back into her hair, lead first this time and twirling, as if she were drawing a design on her scalp.
    â€œIs there some sort of problem?”
    â€œProblem?”
    â€œIs someone in trouble?”
    â€œTrouble?”
    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