Missing Joseph

  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.

  Lynley glanced at his pocket watch. It was half past one. He would fly to Manchester and hire a Range Rover. That would get him to Winslough sometime in the evening.

  He picked up the car phone and punched in Helen’s number. She heard it all when he said her name.

  “Shall I come with you?” she asked.

  “No. I’m not fit company now. I won’t be later.”

  “That doesn’t matter, Tommy.”

  “It does. To me.”

  “I want to help in some way.”

  “Then be here for me when I get back.”

  “How?”

  “I want to come home and have home mean you.”

  Her hesitation was prolonged. He thought he could hear her breathing but knew it was impossible, considering the connection. He was probably only listening to himself.

  “What will we do?” she asked.

  “We’ll love each other. Marry. Have children. Hope for the best. God, I don’t know any longer, Helen.”

  “You sound horrible.” Her own voice was bereft. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to love you.”

  “I don’t mean here. I mean Winslough. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to wish to be Solomon and be Nemesis instead.”

  “Oh, Tommy.”

  “Say it. You’ve got to say it sometime. It might as well be now.”

  “I’ll be here. Always. When it’s over. You know that.”

  Slowly, with great care, he replaced the phone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  WAS HE LOOKING FOR HER, TOMMY?” Deborah asked. “D’you think he never believed she drowned in the first place? Is that why he moved from parish to parish? Is that why he came to Winslough?”

  St. James stirred another spoonful of sugar into his cup and regarded his wife thoughtfully. She had poured their coffee but added nothing to her own. She was playing the small cream jug between her hands. She didn’t look up as she waited for Lynley’s answer. It was the first time she had spoken.

  “I think it was pure chance.” Lynley forked up a portion of his veal. He’d arrived at Crofters Inn as St. James and Deborah were finishing dinner. Although they hadn’t had the dining room to themselves this night, the two other couples who had been enjoying beef Wellington and rack of lamb had moved to the residents’ lounge for their coffee. So between Josie Wragg’s appearances in the dining room to serve one portion of Lynley’s late meal or another, he had told them the story of Sheelah Cotton Yanapapoulis, Katherine Gitterman, and Susanna Sage.

  “Consider the facts,” he went on. “She didn’t go to church; she lived in the North while he remained in the South; she kept on the move; she chose isolated locations. When the locations promised to become less isolated, she merely moved on.”

  “Except this last time,” St. James noted.

  Lynley reached for his wine-glass. “Yes. It’s odd that she didn’t move at the end of her two years here.”

  “Perhaps Maggie’s at the root of that,” St. James said. “She’s a teenager now. Her boyfriend’s here and according to what Josie was disclosing last night with her usual passion for detail, that’s a fairly serious relationship. She may have found it difficult—as we all do—to walk away from someone she loves. Perhaps she refused to go.”

  “That’s a reasonable possibility. But isolation was still essential to her mother.”

  Deborah’s head darted up at that. She began to speak, but she appeared to stop herself.

  Lynley was continuing. “It seems odd that Juliet—or Susanna, if you will—didn’t do something to force the issue. After all, their isolation at Cotes Hall was due to end any time. When the renovation was complete, Brendan Power and his wife—” He paused in the act of spearing up a piece of new potato. “Of course,” he said.

  “She was the mischief-maker at the Hall,” St. James said.

  “She must have been. Once it was occupied, she increased her chances of being seen. Not necessarily by people from the village, who would have seen her occasionally already, but by guests coming to call. And with a new baby, Brendan Power and his wife would have had guests: family, friends, out-of-town visitors.”

  “Not to mention the vicar.”

  “She wouldn’t have wanted to take the risk.”

  “Still, she must have heard the name of the new vicar long before she saw him,” St. James said. “It’s odd that she didn’t invent some sort of crisis and run for it then.”

  “Perhaps she tried. But it was autumn when the vicar arrived in Winslough. Maggie was already in school. If indeed her mother had rashly agreed to stay on in the village for Maggie’s happiness, she’d be hard-pressed to come up with an excuse to leave.”

  Deborah released her hold on the cream jug and pushed it away. “Tommy,” she said in a voice so carefully controlled that it sounded strung, “I don’t see how you can be sure of all this.” When Lynley looked at her, she went on quickly. “Perhaps she didn’t even need to run. What sort of proof do you actually have that Maggie isn’t her real daughter in the first place? She could be hers, couldn’t she?”

  “That’s unlikely, Deborah.”

  “But you’re drawing conclusions without having all the facts.”

  “What more facts do I need?”

  “What if—” Deborah grabbed her spoon and clutched it as if she would use it to strike the table while she made a point. Then she dropped it, saying in a dispirited voice, “I suppose she…I don’t know.”

  “My guess is that an X-ray of Maggie’s leg will show it was once broken and that DNA testing will tell the rest of the tale,” Lynley told her.

  She got to her feet in response, shoving her hair away from her face. “Yes. Well. Look, I’m…Sorry, but I’m a bit tired. I think I’ll go up. I’ll…No, please stay, Simon. No doubt you and Tommy have lots to discuss. I’ll just say good night.”

  She was out of the room before they could respond. Lynley stared after her, saying to St. James, “Did I say something?”

  “It’s nothing.” Pensively, St. James watched the door, thinking Deborah might reconsider and return. When she didn’t after a moment, he turned back to his friend. Their reasons for questioning Lynley were disparate, he knew, but Deborah had a point, if not the one she was intending to make. “Why didn’t she brazen it out?” he asked. “Why didn’t she claim Maggie was her own child, the product of an affair?”
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  “I wondered about that myself initially. It seemed the logical way to go. But Sage had met Maggie first, remember. I imagine he knew how old she was, the same age as their son Joseph would have been. So Juliet had no choice. She knew she couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes. She could only tell him the truth and hope for the best.”

  “And did she? Tell him the truth, that is?”

  “I expect so. The truth was bad enough, after all: unmarried teenagers with an infant who’d already suffered a fractured skull and a broken leg. I’ve no doubt she saw herself as Maggie’s saviour.”

  “She might have been.”

  “I know. That’s the hell of it. She might have been. And I imagine Robin Sage knew that as well. He had visited Sheelah Yanapapoulis the adult. He couldn’t have known what she would have been like as a fifteen-year-old girl in possession of an infant. He could make surmises based upon her other children: how they were turning out, what she said about them and their upbringing, how she acted round them. But he couldn’t know for certain what it would have been like for Maggie had she grown up with Sheelah instead of Juliet Spence for a mother.” Lynley poured himself another glass of wine and smiled bleakly. “I’m only glad I’m not in the position Sage was. His decision was agonising. Mine is only devastating. And even then, it’s not going to be devastating to me.”

  “You’re not responsible,” St. James pointed out. “A crime’s been committed.”

  “And I serve the cause of justice. I know that, Simon. But, frankly, it gives me no pleasure.” He drank deeply of the wine, poured more, drank again. He placed the glass on the table. The wine shimmered in the light. He said, “I’ve been trying to keep my mind off Maggie all day. I’ve been trying to keep it focussed on the crime. I keep thinking that if I continue to re-examine what Juliet did—all those years ago and this past December as well—I might forget about why she did it. Because the why of it isn’t important. It can’t be.”

  “Then let the rest of it go.”