In The Presence Of The Enemy (16 page)

St. James told her first what Helen and Deborah had managed to unearth after their day in Marylebone. He had met with them at the Rising Sun pub at five o’clock. And they, like him, had been satisfied that the information they were gathering was beginning to form a pattern that might prove to be the trail which would lead them to Charlotte Bowen.

From her photograph, the little girl had been recognised in more than one shop.

“Chatty little thing,” or “Quite the talker, that missy,” was the general assessment of her.

While no one had been able actually to name her, those who had recognised her were able to say with at least a fair degree of certainty when they had seen her last. And California Pizza on Blandford Street, along with Chimes Music Shop on the high street and Golden Hind Fish and Chips on Marylebone Lane, had been able to pinpoint exactly their last sighting of the girl. In the case of the pizza place and the music shop, Charlotte had been in the company of another girl from St. Bernadette’s, a girl with a happy willingness to allow Charlotte Bowen to spend a fi stful of five-pound notes on her: on pizza and Cokes in the former location, on CDs at the latter.

This had been on the Monday and the Tuesday, respectively, prior to Charlotte’s disappearance. At the Golden Hind—the shop closest to the music teacher’s home and hence the shop closest to the possible location of Charlotte’s abduction—they discovered that the little girl was a regular visitor on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays she fi ngered a handful of sticky coins across the glass counter and always made the same purchase of a bag of chips and a Coke. She doused the chips with enough vinegar to cross the eyes of a creature with more sensitive taste buds, and she took them along with her to eat. When asked, the shop owner chewed over the possibility of Charlotte’s being in the company of another girl at the time of her purchases. He said at first no, then yes, then perhaps, then he declared he couldn’t really say for a certainty because the fish and chips shop was a regular hang-out for the local “little buggers” after school, and he couldn’t tell the girls from the boys these days, let alone who was with who.

However, from the pizza place and the music shop, Helen and Deborah had obtained a description of the girl who had been in Charlotte’s company on the afternoons preceding her disappearance. She was frizzy-haired, she favoured fuchsia berets or, alternately, neon headbands, she was heavily freckled, she bit her fingernails down to the quick. And, like Charlotte, she wore the school uniform of St.

Bernadette’s.

“Who is this?” Eve Bowen asked. “And why is she with Charlotte when Charlotte is supposed to be at a dancing lesson or with her psychologist?”

Chances were, St. James told her, that Charlotte was in her company prior to her afternoon’s assigned activity. Both shops confi rmed that the girls had been there in the half hour immediately after school. The girl in question was called Brigitta Walters. Did Eve Bowen know her?

The MP said she didn’t. She’d never met the girl. She said she herself had little enough opportunity to be with Charlotte, so when the time allowed, she chose to spend it with her daughter alone or with her daughter and her husband, but not in the company of her daughter’s friends.

“So chances are you don’t know Breta either,” St. James said.

“Breta?”

He recounted what he knew about Charlotte’s friend. He said, “I thought at fi rst that Breta and Brigitta were one and the same since Mr. Chambers told us that Breta generally accompanies Charlotte to her music lesson on Wednesdays.”

“But they aren’t one and the same?”

In answer, St. James told her about his meeting with Brigitta, who was tucked up in bed with a furious headcold in Wimpole Street.

He’d met with the girl under the watchful eye of her crimp-haired grandmother, who sat in the corner of her bedroom in a rocking chair like a suspicious duenna. As soon as he had walked into the child’s room, he had known this was Charlotte’s unnamed companion at California Pizza and Chimes Music Shop.

Even if her hair hadn’t been as frizzy as freshly gathered fleece, even if her neon-green headband hadn’t given her away, she was chewing on her fingernails with the singular passion of a performance artist, and she ceased only when a reply to one of his questions was necessary.

He’d thought at first that he was at the end of the trail, with Breta at last. But she wasn’t Breta and Breta wasn’t a nickname for hers.

She
had no nicknames, she informed him. She was, in fact, named for her great-aunt who was Swedish and who lived in Stockholm with her fourth husband, with seven greyhounds, and with gobs of money. More money than Lottie Bowen ever had, she said. Brigitta visited her great-aunt every summer hols, along with Gran. And here was Auntie’s picture, if he wanted to see it.

St. James had asked the child if she knew Breta. Indeed she did. Lottie’s mate from one of Marylebone’s
state
schools, she confi ded with a meaningful look in her grandmother’s direction, where they had
normal
teachers who dressed like
humans
, not ancient old
ladies
who
slobbered
when they talked.

“Have you any idea what school this might be?” St. James asked Eve Bowen.

She considered the question. “It might be the Geoffrey Shenkling School,” she told him.

It was in Crawford Place, not far from the Edgware Road. The MP named it as a likely location where St. James might find Breta because the Shenkling school was where Charlotte had wished to be enrolled. “She wanted to go there rather than to St. Bernadette’s. She still wants to, in fact. I’ve no doubt that some of the scrapes she gets into are designed to get her expelled from St. Bernadette’s so that I’ll have to send her to Shenkling.”

“Sister Agnetis did tell me that Charlotte caused a small scene when she took your cosmetics to school.”

“She’s always into my make-up. If not that, then my clothes.”

“It’s something you row about?”

The minister rubbed the skin above her eyes with thumb and forefinger, as if urging her headache to be on its way. She returned her glasses to her nose. “She isn’t the easiest child to discipline. She’s never seemed to have any particular need either to please or be good.”

“Sister Agnetis told me that Charlotte was punished for taking your make-up. She used the term ‘punished severely,’ in fact.”

Eve Bowen regarded him evenly before replying. “I don’t ignore it when my daughter disobeys me, Mr. St. James.”

“How does she generally react to punishment?”

“She generally sulks. After which she even more generally works herself up to disobedience again.”

“Has she ever run off? Or threatened to run off?”

“I note your wedding band. Have you children of your own? No? Well, if you did, you would know that the most common threat a child makes to a parent when being corrected for an act of defiance is ‘I’m going to run away and then you’ll be sorry. See if you won’t.’ ”

“How might Charlotte have met this other girl: Breta?”

The MP got to her feet. She walked restlessly to the window, hands cradling elbows.

“I see the direction you’re heading in, naturally. Charlotte reveals to Breta that her mother beats her—which would no doubt be the manner in which my daughter would portray five hard smacks on the bum administered, by the way, only upon the third occasion of her pinching my lipstick. Breta suggests that the two of them give Mum a proper little shake-up. So they scarper off and wait for Mum to learn her lesson.”

“It’s something to consider. Children often act without full comprehension of how their behaviour is going to affect their parents.”

“Children don’t act like that often. They act like that all the time.” She studied Parliament Square below them. She raised her eyes and appeared to reflect upon the Gothic architecture of the Palace of Westminster. She said without turning from the view, “If the other girl goes to the Shenkling school, Charlotte probably met her in my constituency offi ce.

She’s there each Friday afternoon. Breta most likely came to my surgery with one of her parents and wandered off while we were talking.

If she’d poked her head into the conference room, she would have seen Charlotte doing her schoolwork.” She turned back from the window. “But this isn’t about Breta, whoever she is. Charlotte isn’t with Breta.”

“Nonetheless, I need to talk with her. She’s the best possible chance we have of getting a description of whoever it is holding Charlotte.

She may have seen him yesterday afternoon.

Or earlier, if he was stalking your daughter.”

“You don’t need to find Breta to get a description of whoever snatched Charlotte.

You already have the description since you’ve met him yourself. Dennis Luxford.”

At the window, framed by an early evening sky, she told him of her meeting with Luxford.

She related Luxford’s tale about the telephone call from the kidnapper. She told him about the threat to Charlotte’s life and the demand that the story of her birth—with names, dates, and places included—be run on the front page of tomorrow’s
Source
and written by Dennis Luxford himself.

Every mental alarm went off in his head when St. James heard that a threat had been made against the child’s life. He said fi rmly,

“This changes everything. She’s in danger.

We must—”

“Rubbish. Dennis Luxford wants me to
think
she’s in danger.”

“Ms. Bowen, you’re wrong. And we’re phoning the police. Now.”

She walked back to the credenza. She poured herself another cupful of water from the Thermos. She drank it down, looked at him steadily, and said with utter calm, “Mr.

St. James, have another think. I’d like to point out how easily I could obstruct an unnecessary police investigation into this matter. It’s as easy as making a single phone call. And if you think I can’t—or won’t—do that from my position at the Home Office, then you don’t understand much about who wields what power and where.”

St. James felt astonishment coursing through him. He would not have believed that such an obdurate lack of reason was possible in any man or woman caught up in such circumstances. But when she continued with her previous line of conversation, he not only recognised the situation for what it was, but he also realised that there was only one course left open to him. He cursed himself for having become involved in this wretched mess.

As if she were a party to his mental processes and to the conclusion he’d reached, she went on. “You can imagine what publication of the story would do for Mr. Luxford’s circulation and his advertising revenue. The fact that he himself is intimately involved in the story will hardly adversely affect the sale of newspapers. On the contrary, his involvement will probably stimulate sales and he knows it.

Oh, he’ll be a little embarrassed to have been caught out, but Charlotte is, after all, living evidence of Mr. Luxford’s virility, and I think you’ll agree that men tend to be boyishly sheepish—and only momentarily sheepish—

over public revelations of their sexual prowess.

In our society, it’s the woman who pays the bigger price for being publicly unveiled as a sinner.”

“But Charlotte’s illegitimacy isn’t a secret.”

“No. Indeed. Her paternity is. And it’s her paternity—and what will be seen as my unfortunate and inarguably hypocritical choice of lovers—that will go down as my sin. Because despite what you think, this is about politics, Mr. St. James. This isn’t about life or death.

This isn’t even about morality. And while I’m not as high profile a politician as the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, publication of this story—following hard on the heels of Sinclair Larnsey and his rent boy—will cost me my career. Oh, I shall be able to remain Marylebone’s MP for the present. In a constituency where I began with a mere eight hundred vote majority, I’m unlikely to be asked to stand down and thus force a by-election. But odds are very good that I’ll be deselected by my committee at the next general election. And even if that isn’t the case, and even if the Government manages to survive this latest blow, to what level of political power do you expect I’ll be able to rise after my romp with Dennis Luxford is made public? This isn’t a situation in which I had a long-term love affair, in which my foolish little female heart ached for a man I adored but could not have, in which I was seduced like Tess of the bloody D’Urbervilles.

This is about sex, hard and sweaty sex. With, of all people, the Conservative Party’s public enemy number one. Now, Mr. St. James, do you honestly expect the Prime Minister to reward me for that? But what a story it will make across the front page, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

St. James could see that she was fi nally shaking. When she uncradled her elbows long enough to adjust her spectacles on her nose, her

hands were trembling. She looked round the office and seemed to see in its collection of notebooks, binders, reports, letters, photographs, and framed commendations the newly defi ned limits of her political life. She said, “He’s a monster. The only reason he’s never run the story before is that the occasion wasn’t right. With Larnsey and the rent boy, now it is.”

“There have been other exposés of sexual misconduct in the last ten years,” St. James pointed out. “It’s difficult to believe that Luxford would wait until now.”

“Look at the polls, Mr. St. James. The PM’s approval rating has never been this low. A Labour newspaper couldn’t have a better moment to whack away at the Tories and hope against hope that their whacking is enough to fell the entire Government. For which whacking, I assure you, I shall be held responsible.”

“But if Luxford’s behind this,” St. James said,

“he’s risking everything himself. He stands to go to prison for kidnapping if we can construct a chain of evidence that leads to him.”

“He’s a newspaperman,” she pointed out.

“They risk everything as a matter of course, if it means a story.”

A flash of yellow dressing gown at the laboratory doorway caught his attention and St.