Missing Joseph (54 page)

“Which of you lot did this?” Sheelah demanded. “Come on. I want to know. Which of you bloody 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 snatched 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 damn 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 starburst 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 haircut—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. Fucking 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 factitious 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 snatched 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 snatched, 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 Shoreditch. 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 classes 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 assessment 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—bloody 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?

He had prayed to know the difference between that which is moral and that which is right. His telephone conversation with his wife on that final day of his life had telegraphed what his decision would be:
You can't judge what happened then. You can't know what's right now. That's in God's hands, not yours
.