Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

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 fi ngers 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, balls, 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 fag 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 fl oor.

“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 fl ies.”

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 fl oor.

“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. 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.”