Missing Joseph

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 graffi ti in the middle of which the words Hector sucks cock 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 fl uffi ng up the top of her hair. She did this by pulling it forward from the crown. In defiance of gravity, it formed a drooping cockscomb.

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 fi rst.”

“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 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.”