Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

In the meantime, Helen manned the telephone. By the time he had the breakfast ready, she’d gone through five of the six entries for the name Yanapapoulis, made a list of four Greek restaurants she’d not yet tried, received one recipe for a poppy-seed cake soaked in ouzo—“Goodness, that sounds rather terrifyingly inflammable, my dear”—promised to pass along to her “superiors” a complaint about police mishandling of a burglary near Notting Hill Gate, and defended her honour against the accusations of a shrieking woman who assumed she was the mistress of her errant husband.

Lynley was setting their plates on the table and pouring coffee and orange juice when Helen struck gold with her final call. She had asked to speak to Mummy or Daddy. The reply went on at some length. Lynley was spooning orange marmalade onto his plate when Helen said,

“I am sorry to hear that, my dear. What about Mummy? Is she there?…But you aren’t home alone, are you? Shouldn’t you be in school?… Oh. Well, of course, someone must see to Linus’ headcold…. Do you have Meggezones? They work awfully well for a sore throat.”

“Helen, what in God’s name—”

She held up a hand to stop him. “She’s where?…I see. Can you give me the name, dear?” Lynley saw her eyes widen, saw the smile begin to curve her lips. “Lovely,” she said. “That’s wonderful, Philip. You’ve been such a help. Thank you so much…Yes, dear, you give him the chicken soup.” She hung up the phone and left the kitchen.

“Helen, I’ve got breakfast—”

“Just a moment, darling.”

He grumbled and forked up a portion of eggs. They weren’t half-bad. It wasn’t a combination of flavours that Denton would have either served or approved of, but then Denton had always possessed tunnel vision when it came to food.

“Here. Look.” With her dressing gown fl ying round in a whirl of burgundy silk, Helen clattered back into the kitchen — she was the only woman Lynley knew who actually wore high-heeled slippers with snowball tufts dyed to match the rest of her nightly ensembles— and presented him with one of the handouts they’d been looking at earlier.

“What?”

“The Hair Apparent,” she said. “Clapham High Street. Lord, what a ghastly name for a hairdresser. I always hate these puns: Shear Ecstasy, The Mane Attraction. Who comes up with them?”

He spread some marmalade on a wedge of toast as Helen slid into her seat and spooned up three pieces of grapefruit with “Tommy, darling, you can actually cook. I might think about keeping you.”

“That warms my heart.” He squinted at the paper in his hand. “‘Unisex styling,’” he read. “‘Discount prices. Ask for Sheelah.’”

“Yanapapoulis,” Helen said. “What’ve you put in these eggs? They’re wonderful.”

“Sheelah Yanapapoulis?”

“The very same. And she must be the Yanapapoulis we’re looking for, Tommy. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise that Robin Sage would have gone to see one Yanapapoulis and just happened to have in his possession a handout with the place of employment of an entirely different Yanapapoulis printed upon it. Don’t you agree?” She didn’t wait, merely went on, saying, “That was her son I was speaking to on the phone, by the way. He said to ring her at work. He said to ask for Sheelah.”

Lynley smiled. “You’re a marvel.”

“And you’re a fine cook. If you’d only been here to do Daddy’s breakfast yesterday morning…”

He set the handout to one side and went back to his eggs. “That can always be remedied,” he said casually.

“I suppose.” She added milk to her coffee and spooned in sugar. “Do you vacuum carpets and wash windows, as well?”

“If put to the test.”

“Heavens, I might actually be getting the better part of the bargain.”

“Is it, then?”

“What?”

“A bargain.”

“Tommy, you’re absolutely ruthless.”

ALTHOUGH THE SON OF SHE elah yanapapoulis had recommended a telephone call to The Hair Apparent, Lynley decided upon a personal visit. He found the hairdresser’s on the ground floor of a narrow soot-stained Victorian building that was shoe-horned between an Indian take-away and an appliance repair shop on Clapham High Street. He’d driven across the river on Albert Bridge and skirted Clapham Common upon whose north side Samuel Pepys had come to be lovingly tended in his declining years. The area had been referred to as “Paradisian Clapham” during Pepys’ time, but it had been a country village then, with its buildings and cottages spread out in a curve from the northeast corner of the common, and with fields and market gardens in place of the closely packed streets that had accompanied the arrival of the railway. The common remained, essentially inviolate, but many of the pleasant villas that once looked upon it had long since been demolished and replaced by the smaller and less inspired buildings of the nineteenth century.

The rain that had begun on the previous day was continuing to fall as Lynley drove along the high street. It rendered the usual kerbside collection of wrappers, sacks, newspapers, and assorted rubbish into sodden lumps that seemed bled of all colour. It also had the effect of eliminating virtually all pedestrian traffic. Aside from an unshaven man in a threadbare tweed coat who shuffl ed along, talking to himself and holding a newspaper spread over his head, the only other creature on the pavement at the moment was a mongrel dog sniffing at a shoe that lay on top of an upended wooden crate.

Lynley found a place to park on St. Luke’s Avenue, grabbed his coat and umbrella, and walked back to the hairdresser’s where he discovered that the rain had evidently put a damper on the hair business as well. He opened the door, was assailed by the eye-smarting odour that accompanies someone inflicting a perm upon another’s innocent head of hair, and saw that this malodorous operation of beauty was being performed on the hairdresser’s single customer. She was a plump woman perhaps fifty years old who clutched a copy of Royalty Monthly in her fi sts and said, “Cor, lookit this, will you, Stace? That dress she wore to the Royal Ballet must of cost four hundred quid.”

“Gloriamus on toast,” was Stace’s reply, delivered somewhere between polite enthusiasm and heavy ennui. She squirted a chemical onto one of the tiny pink rolls on her client’s head and gazed at her own reflection in the mirror. She smoothed her eyebrows, which came to curious points on her forehead and exactly matched the colour of her ramrod, coal hair. Doing this allowed her to catch sight of Lynley, who stood behind the glass counter dividing the tiny waiting area from the rest of the shop.

“We don’t do men, luv.” She tossed her head in the direction of the next work station, a movement that clicked her long jet earrings like small castanets. “I know it says unisex in all the adverts, but that’s Mondays and Wednesdays when our Rog is here. Which he isn’t, as you can see. Today, I mean. It’s just me and Sheel. Sorry.”

“Actually, I’m looking for Sheelah Yanapapoulis,” Lynley said.

“Are you? She doesn’t do men either. I mean”—with a wink—“she doesn’t do them that way. As for the other…well, she’s always been lucky, that girl, hasn’t she?” She called towards the rear of the shop: “Sheelah! Get out here. This is your lucky day.”

“Stace, I tol’ you I was heading out, din’t I? Linus’s got a bad throat and I was up all night. I got no one on the book coming in this afternoon so there’s no point to me staying.” Movement in a back room accompanied the voice, which sounded plaintive and tired. A handbag clicked closed with a metallic snick; a garment snapped as it was shaken out; galoshes slapped against the fl oor.