Missing Joseph Read Online Free PDF Page B

the thick lattice of bare branches from the oaks and horse chestnuts hid both the road itself and the lichenous limestone wall that had been edging it. Where they were now, the roadside’s demarcation consisted of a skeletal hedge, denuded by winter and blackened by twilight. “It wasn’t a sign for the hotel, was it? Did you see a drive?”
    Her husband shook off the reverie in which he’d spent much of the long drive from Manchester airport, half-admiring the winter landscape of Lancashire with its subdued blend of moorland russets and farmland sage, half-brooding over the possible identification of the tool which had cut a thick electrical wire prior to its being used to bind together the hands and the feet of a female body found last week in Surrey.
    â€œA drive?” he asked. “There might have been one. I didn’t notice. But the sign was for palm reading and a psychic in residence.”
    â€œYou’re joking.”
    â€œI’m not. Is that a feature of the hotel you’ve not told me about?”
    â€œNot that I know.” She peered through the windscreen. The road began to slope upwards, and the lights from a village shimmered in the distance, perhaps a mile farther on. “I suppose we haven’t gone far enough.”
    â€œWhat’s the place called?”
    â€œCrofters Inn.”
    â€œDecidedly, then, the sign didn’t say that. It must be an advertisement for someone’s line of employment. This is Lancashire, after all. I’m surprised the hotel isn’t called The Cauldron.”
    â€œWe wouldn’t have come had it been, my love. I’m becoming superstitious in my advancing years.”
    â€œI see.” He smiled in the growing darkness.
Her advancing years
. She was only twenty-five. She had all the energy and the promise of her youth.
    Still, she looked tired—he knew she hadn’t been sleeping well—and her face was wan. A few days in the country, long walks, and rest were what she needed. She’d been working too much in the past several months, working more than he, keeping late hours in the darkroom and going out far too early on assignments only marginally connected to her interests in the first place. I’m trying to broaden my horizons, she would say. Landscapes and portraits aren’t enough, Simon. I need to do more. I’m thinking of a multimedia approach, perhaps a new show of my work in the summer. I can’t get it ready if I don’t get out there and see what’s what and try new things and stretch myself and make some more contacts and…He didn’t argue or try to hold her back. He just waited for the crisis to pass. They’d weathered several during the first two years of their marriage. He always tried to remember that fact when he began to despair of their weathering this.
    She pushed a tangle of coppery hair behind her ear, put the car back into gear, and said, “Let’s go on to the village, then, shall we?”
    â€œUnless you’d like to have your palm read first.”
    â€œFor my future, you mean? I think not, thank you.”
    He’d intended it as nothing. From the false brightness of her reply, he knew she hadn’t taken it that way. He said, “Deborah…”
    She reached for his hand. Driving, her eyes on the road, she pressed his palm to her cheek. Her skin was cool. It was soft, like the dawn. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is our time together. Don’t let me mess it about.”
    But she didn’t look at him. More and more, at tense moments she wasn’t meeting his eyes. It was as if she believed that the act of doing so would give him an advantage she did not want him to have, while all the time he felt every single advantage between them was hers.
    He let the moment pass. He touched her hair. He rested his hand on her thigh. She drove on.
    From the palm reader’s sign, it was little over a mile into