Missing Joseph Part 48

"This is a murder investigation," he said.

The shop's sole client lowered her magazine. Stace drew her chemical bottle to her breast. Sheelah stared at Lynley and seemed to weigh his words.

"Whose?" she asked.

"His. Robin Sage."

Her features softened and bravado disappeared. She took a long breath. "Right, then. I'm in Lambeth, and my boys are waiting. If you want to talk, we got to do it there."

"I've a car outside," Lynley said, and as they left the shop, Stace shouted after them, "I'm still ringing Harold!"

A new cloudburst erupted as Lynley shut the door behind them. He opened his umbrella, and although it was large enough for them both, Sheelah kept her distance from him by opening a small, collapsible one that she took from the pocket of her mackintosh. She didn't say a word until they were in the car and heading towards Clapham Road and Lambeth.

And then it was only "Some motor, mister. I hope it's got an alarm system on it, else there won't be a bolt left when you leave my flat." She gave the leather seat a caress. "They'd like this, my boys."

"You have three children?"

"Five." She pulled up the collar of her mackintosh and looked out the window.

Lynley gave her a glance. Her att.i.tude was streetwise and her concerns were adult, but she didn't look old enough to have borne five children. She couldn't yet have been thirty.

"Five," he repeated. "They must keep you busy."

She said, "Go left here. You need to take the South Lambeth Road."

They drove in the direction of Albert Embankment and when they hit congestion near Vauxhall Station, she directed him through a maze of back streets that finally took them to the tower block in which she and her family lived. Twenty floors high, it was steel and concrete, unadorned and surrounded by more steel and concrete. Its dominant colours were a rusting gun metal and a yellowing beige.

The lift they rode in smelled of wet nap-pies. Its rear wall was papered with announcements about community meetings, crime-stopping organisations, and crisis hot lines covering every topic from rape to AIDS. Its side walls were cracked mirrors. Its doors comprised a snake nest of illegible graffiti in the middle of which the words Hector sucks c.o.c.k were painted in brilliant and unavoidable red.

Sheelah spent the ride shaking off her umbrella, collapsing it, putting it into her pocket, removing her scarf, and fluffing up the top of her hair. She did this by pulling it forward from the crown. In defiance of gravity, it formed a drooping c.o.c.ks...o...b..

When the lift doors opened, Sheelah said, "It's this way," and led him towards the back of the building, down a narrow corridor. Numbered doors lined each side. Behind them music played, televisions chattered, voices rose and fell. A woman shrieked, "Billy, you let me go!" A baby wailed.

From Sheelah's flat came the sound of a child shouting, "No, I won't! You can't make me!" and the rattle of a snare drum being beaten by someone with only moderate talent for the occupation. Sheelah unlocked the door and swung it open, calling, "Which o' my blokes got a kiss for Mummy?"

She was instantly surrounded by three of her children, all of them little boys eager to oblige, each one shouting louder than the other. Their conversation consisted of: "Philip says we have to mind and we don't, Mum, do we?"

"He made Linus eat chicken soup for breakfast!"

"Hermes has my socks and he won't take them off and Philip says-"

"Where is he, Gino?" Sheelah asked. "Philip! Come give your mummy what for."

A slender maple-skinned boy perhaps twelve years old came to the kitchen door with a wooden spoon in one hand and a pot in the other. "Making mash," he said. "These lousy potatoes keep boiling over. I got to keep watch."

"You got to kiss your mum first."

"Aw, come on."

"You come on." Sheelah pointed to her cheek. Philip trudged over and pecked at his duty. She cuffed him lightly and grabbed on to his hair in which the pick he used to comb it stuck up like a plastic headdress. She plucked it out. "Stop acting like your dad. Makes me crazy, that, Philip." She shoved it into the rear pocket of his jeans and slapped his bottom. "These're my boys," she said to Lynley. "These are my extra-special blokes. And this here is a policeman, you lot. So watch yourselfs, hear?"

The boys stared at Lynley. He did his best not to stare back at them. They looked more like a miniature United Nations than they did the members of a family, and it was obvious that the words your dad had a different meaning for every one of the children.

Sheelah was introducing them, giving a pinch here, a kiss there, a nibble on the neck, a noisy spluttering against a cheek. Philip, Gino, Hermes, Linus.

"My lamb chop, Linus," she said. "Him with the throat that kept me up all night." "And Peanut," Linus said, patting his mother's stomach. "Right. And how many does that make, luv?" Linus held up his hand, the fingers spread, a grin on his face and his nose running freely. "And how many are those?" his mother asked him.

"Five."

"Lovely." She tickled his stomach. "And how old are you?" "Five!" "Tha's right." She took off her mackintosh and handed it to Gino, saying, "Let's move this confab into the kitchen. If Philip's making mash, I got to see to the bangers. Hermes, put that drum away and help Linus with his nose. Christ, don't use your bleeding shirttail to do it!"

The boys trailed her into the kitchen, which was one of four rooms that opened off the sitting room, along with two bedrooms and a bathroom jammed with plastic lorries, b.a.l.l.s, two bicycles, and a pile of dirty clothes. The bedrooms, Lynley saw, looked out on the companion tower block next door, and furniture made movement impossible in either: two sets of bunkbeds in one of the rooms, a double bed and a baby cot in the other.

"Harold ring this A.M. ?" Sheelah was asking Philip when Lynley entered the kitchen.

"Naw." Philip scrubbed at the kitchen table with a dish cloth that was decidedly grey. "You got to cut that bloke loose, Mum. He's bad news, he is."

She lit a cigarette and, without inhaling, set it in an ashtray and stood over its plume of smoke, breathing deeply. "Can't do that, luv. Peanut needs her dad."

"Yeah. Well, smoking's not good for her, is it?"

"I'm not smoking, am I? D'you see me smoking? D'you see a f.a.g hanging out of this mouth?"

"That's just as bad. You're breathing it, aren't you? Breathing it's bad. We could all die from cancer."

"You think you know everything. Just-"

"Like my dad."

She pulled a frying pan from one of the cupboards and went to the refrigerator. Two lists hung upon it, held in place with yellowing cello tape. RULES was printed at the top of one, JOBS at the top of the other. Diagonally across both, someone had scrawled Sod You, Mummy! Sheelah ripped the lists off and swung round on the boys. Philip was at the cooker seeing to his potatoes. Gino and Hermes were scrambling round the legs of the table. Linus was dipping his hand into a carton of corn flakes that had been left on the floor.

"Which of you lot did this?" Sheelah demanded. "Come on. I want to know. Which of you b.l.o.o.d.y did this?"

Silence fell. The boys looked at Lynley, as if he'd come to arrest them for the crime.

She crumpled the papers and threw them on the table. "What's rule number one? What's always been rule number one? Gino?"

He stuck his hands behind his back as if afraid they'd be smacked. "Respecting property," he said.

"And whose property was that? Whose property did you decide to write all over?"

"I didn't!"

"You didn't? Don't give me that rubbish. Whoever causes trouble if it isn't you? You take these lists to the bedroom and write them over ten times."

"But Mum-"

"And no bangers and mash till you do. You got it?"

"I didn't-"

She grabbed his arm and thrust him in the direction of the bedrooms. "I don't want to see you till the lists are done."

The other boys shot sly looks at one another when he'd gone. Sheelah went to the work top and breathed in more smoke. "I couldn't go it cold turkey," she said to Lynley in reference to the cigarette. "I could do with other stuff, but not with this."

"I used to smoke myself," he said.

"Yeah? Then you know." She took the bangers from the refrigerator and slid them into the frying pan. She turned on the burner, looped her arm round Philip's neck and kissed him soundly on the temple. "Jesus, you're a handsome little bloke, you know that? Five more years and the girls'll be mad for you. You'll be beating them off you like they was flies."

Philip grinned and shrugged her arm off him. "Mum!"

"Yeah, you'll like that plenty when you get a bit older. Just-"

"Like my dad."

She pinched his bottom. "Little sod." She turned to the table. "Hermes, watch these bangers. Bring your chair here. Linus, set the table. I got to talk to this gentleman."

"I want cornflakes," Linus said.

"Not for lunch."

"I want them!"

"And I said not for lunch." She s.n.a.t.c.hed the box away and threw it into a cupboard. Linus began to cry. She said, "Stow it!" And then to Lynley, "It's his dad. Those d.a.m.n Greeks. They'll let their sons do anything. They're worse than Italians. Let's talk out here."

She took her cigarette back into the sitting room, pausing by an ironing board to wrap a frayed cord round the bottom of an iron. She used her foot to shove to one side an enormous laundry basket spilling clothes onto the floor.

"Good to sit down." She sighed as she sank into a sofa. Its cushions wore pink slipcovers. Burn holes in them showed the original green beneath. Behind her, the wall was decorated with a large collage of photographs. Most of them were snapshots. They grew out in a star-burst pattern from a professional studio portrait in the centre. Although adults were featured in some of them, all of them showed at least one of her children. Even photographs of Sheelah's wedding-she stood at the side of a swarthy man in wire-rimmed spectacles with a noticeable gap between his front teeth- also contained two of her children, a much younger Philip dressed as ring bearer and Gino, who could not have been more than two.

"Is that your work?" Lynley asked, nodding at the collage.

She craned her neck to look at it. "You mean did I make it? Yeah. The boys helped. But mostly it was me. Gino!" She leaned forward on the sofa. "Get back to the kitchen. Eat your lunch."

"But the lists-"

"Do what I tell you. Help your brothers and shut up."

Gino plodded back into the kitchen, casting a chary look at his mother and hanging his head. The cooking noises became subdued.

Sheelah knocked ash from her cigarette and held it under her nose for a moment. When she replaced it in the ashtray, Lynley said, "You saw Robin Sage in December, didn't you?"

"Just before Christmas. He came to the shop, like you. I thought he wanted a hair-cut-he could of used a new style-but he wanted to talk. Not there. Here. Like you."

"Did he tell you he was an Anglican priest?"

"He was all done up in a priest uniform or whatever it's called, but I figured that was just a disguise. It'd be like Social Services, wouldn't it, to send someone snooping round dressed up like a priest on the prowl for sinners. I've had my fill of that lot, I can tell you. They're here at least twice a month, waiting like vultures to see if I'll knock about one of my boys so they can take 'em away and put 'em in what they think's a proper home." She laughed bitterly. "They can wait till they're grey. f.u.c.king old biddies."

"What made you think he was from Social Services? Did he have some sort of referral from them? Did he show you a card?"

"It was the way he acted once he got here. He said he wanted to talk about religious instructions. Like: Where was I sending my kids to learn about Jesus? And: Did we go to church and where? But all the time he kept looking round the flat like he was measuring it up to see was it fit for Peanut when she comes. And he wanted to talk about being a mother and how if I loved my kids did I show them regular and how did I show them and how did I discipline. The sort of rot social workers always talk about." She leaned over and turned on a lamp. Its shade had been covered somewhat haphazardly with a purple scarf. When the lightbulb glowed, great splodges of glue looked like the Americas beneath the material. "So I thought he was going to be my new social worker and this was his not-so-clever way of getting to know me."

"But he never told you that."

"He just looked at me the way they always do, with his face all wrinkled and his eyebrows squished." She gave a fair imitation of fact.i.tious empathy. Lynley tried not to smile, and failed. She nodded. "I've had that lot coming round since I had my first kid, mister. They never help out and they never change a thing. They don't believe you're trying to do your best and if something happens, they blame you first. I hate the lot of them. They're why I lost my Tracey Joan."

"Tracey Jones?"

"Tracey Joan. Tracey Joan Cotton." She shifted her position and pointed to the studio photograph at the centre of her collage. In it, a laughing baby in pink held a stuffed grey elephant. Sheelah touched her fingers to the baby's face. "My little girl," she said. "This is my Tracey that was."

Lynley felt hair rise on the back of his hands. She'd said five children. Because she was pregnant, he had misunderstood. He got up from his chair and took a closer look at the picture. The baby didn't look more than four or five months old. "What happened to her?" he asked.

"She got s.n.a.t.c.hed one night. Right outa my car."

"When?"

"I don't know." Sheelah went hastily on when she saw his expression. "I went into the pub to meet her dad. I left her sleeping in the car 'cause she'd been feverish and she'd finally stopped her squalling. When I came out, she was gone."

"I meant how long ago did this happen?" Lynley asked.

"Twelve years last November." Sheelah shifted again, away from the photograph. She brushed at her eyes. "She was six months old, was my Tracey Joan, and when she got s.n.a.t.c.hed, Social bleeding Services did nothing about it but hand me over to the local police."

Lynley sat in the Bentley. He thought about taking up cigarettes again. He remembered the prayer from Ezekiel that had been marked off in Robin Sage's book: "When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive." He understood.

That's what it all came down to in the end: He had wanted to save her soul. But she had wanted to save the child.

Lynley wondered what sort of moral dilemma the priest had faced when he finally traced down Sheelah Yanapapoulis. For surely, his wife would have told him the truth. The truth was her only defence and her best chance of convincing him to turn a blind eye to the crime she had committed so many years in the past.

Listen to me, she would have said to him. I saved her, Robin. Do you want to know what Kate's records said about her parents, her background, and what happened to her? Do you want to know everything, or are you just going to condemn me without the facts?

He would have wanted to know. He was at heart a decent man, concerned with doing what was right, not just what was prescribed by law. So he would have listened to the facts and then he would have verified them himself, in London. First by going to see Kate Gitterman and trying to discover if his wife had indeed had access to her sister's case reports in that long-ago time when she worked for Social Services. Then by going to Social Services itself to track down the girl whose baby had had a fractured skull and a broken leg before she was even two months old and then had been kidnapped off a street in Sh.o.r.editch. It wouldn't have been a difficult project to gather the information.

Her mother was fifteen years old, Susanna would have told him. Her father was thirteen. She didn't stand a chance in a life with them. Can't you see that? Can't you? Yes, I took her, Robin. And I'd do it again.

He would have come to London. He would have seen what Lynley saw. He would have met her. Perhaps as he sat talking with her in the crowded flat, Harold would have arrived as well, saying, "How's my baby? How's my sweet mama?" as he spread his dusky hand across her belly, a hand on which the gold wedding band glittered. Perhaps he too would have heard Harold whispering, "Can't make it tonight, babe. Now don't cause a scene, Sheel, I just can't do it," in the corridor as he left.

Do you have any idea how many second chances Social Services give an abusive mother before they take a child? she would have demanded. Do you know how difficult it is to prove abuse in the first place if the child can't talk and there appears to be a reasonable explanation behind the accident?

"I never touched a hair of her head," Sheelah had said to Lynley. "But they didn't believe me. Oh, they let me keep her 'cause they couldn't prove nothing, but they made me go to cla.s.ses and I had to check with them every week and-" She smashed out her cigarette. "All the time it was Jimmy. Her bleeding stupid dad. She was crying and he didn't know how to get her to stop and I'd left her with him for only an hour and Jimmy hurt my baby. He lost his temper...He threw her...The wall...I never. I wouldn't. But no one believed me and he wouldn't say."

So when the baby vanished and young Sheelah Cotton-not-yet-Yanapapoulis swore she'd been kidnapped, Kate Gitterman phoned the police and gave them her professional a.s.sessment of the situation. They'd eyed the mother, measured the level of her hysteria, and searched for a corpse instead of looking for a potential trail left by the baby's abductor. And no one involved in the investigation ever connected the suicide of a young woman off the coast of France with a kidnapping in London nearly three weeks later.

"But they couldn't find a body, could they?" Sheelah had said, wiping at her cheeks. "Because I never hurt her and I never would. She was my baby. I loved her. I did." The boys had come to the door of the kitchen as she wept, and Linus crept across the sitting room and crawled onto the sofa beside her. She hugged him to her and rocked him, her cheek pressed against the top of his head. "I'm a good mother, I am. I take care of my boys. No one says I don't. And no one-b.l.o.o.d.y no one-is goin' to take my kids away."

Sitting in the Bentley with the windows steaming and the traffic hissing by on the Lambeth street, Lynley remembered the end of the story of the woman taken in adultery. It was about casting stones: Only the man without sin-and interesting, he thought, that it was men and not women who would do the stoning-could stand in judgement and administer punishment. Anyone whose soul was not unblemished had to move aside.

You go to London if you don't believe me, she would have said to her husband. You check on the story. You see if she'd be better off living with a woman who fractured her skull.

So he had come. He had met her. And then he had faced the decision. He was not without sin, he would have realised. His inability to help his wife come to terms with her grief when their own child died had been part of what led her to commit this crime. How could he now begin to lift a stone against her when he was responsible, if only in part, for what she had done? How could he begin a process that would destroy her forever at the same time as it ran the risk of also harming the child? Was she, in truth, better for Maggie than this white-haired woman with her rainbow children and their absent fathers? And if she was, could he turn away from a crime by calling its retribution a greater injustice?