In The Presence Of The Enemy (21 page)

“It’s a privilege to go to a school like Baverstock.”

“You always say privilege is bosh,” Leo pointed out.

“I don’t mean privilege that way. I mean that to be able to go to a school like Baverstock is something not to be turned from lightly, since any boy in his right mind would be happy to take your place.” Luxford watched his son toy with his knife and fork, balance the blade of the one between the tines of the other. He couldn’t have looked less impressed with the privilege his father was attempting to explain to him. Luxford went on. “The teaching’s top notch. And it’s up-to-date. You’ll work with computers.

You’ll learn advanced science. They have a technical activities centre where you can build anything you’d like…a hovercraft, even, if you’ve a mind for it.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“You’ll make dozens of friends, and within the year you’ll be enjoying it so much that you won’t even want to come home for half terms.”

“I’m too little,” Leo said.

“Don’t be absurd. You’re nearly twice the size of other boys your age, and by the time you get there in the autumn, you’ll be six inches taller than anyone else in your year.

What is it you’re afraid of? Being bullied? Is that it?”

“I’m too little,” Leo insisted. He slumped in his chair and stared at the knife-and-fork sculpture he’d made.

“Leo, I’ve already pointed out that your size—”

“I’m only eight years old,” he said fl atly.

And he looked at his father with those high-land-sky eyes of his—damn if he didn’t have Fiona’s eyes as well—brimming with tears.

“For God’s sake, don’t cry about it,” Luxford said. Which, of course, caused the fl ood-gates to open. “Leo!” Luxford said his name in a tightened-jaw command. “For God’s sake. Leo!”

The boy lowered his head to the table. His shoulders shook.

“Stop it,” Luxford hissed. “Sit up. Right now.”

Leo tried to control himself but only ended up sobbing, “C…c…can’t. Daddy, c…can’t.”

The waitress chose this moment to arrive with their food. She said, “Should I…would you…is he…” and stood a hesitant three steps from the table with a plate in each hand and her face dissolving into an expression of sympathy. “Oh, the poor dear little one,” she said in a voice one would use to coo to a bird. “Can I get him something special?”

Some backbone, Luxford thought, which I doubt is on the menu. He said, “He’s all right.

Leo, your lunch is here. Sit up.”

Leo raised his head. His face looked mot-tled like strawberry skin. His nose had begun to dribble. He heaved a breath. Luxford fi shed out his handkerchief and handed it to him.

“Wipe,” he said. “And then eat.”

“Perhaps he’d like a nice sweet,” the waitress said. “Would you like that, luv?” And to Luxford in a lower voice, “What a beautiful face on him! He looks like one of them painted angels.”

“Thank you,” Luxford said, “but he has all he needs at the moment.”

But beyond the moment? Luxford didn’t know. He picked up his knife and fork and cut into the veal. Leo drew disconsolate squiggles of brown sauce across his network of chips. He set the bottle down and looked at his plate, his lips quivering. More tears were forecast.

Luxford said past the veal, which to his surprise was succulently cooked and absolutely delicious, innocent baby cow or not, “Eat your lunch, Leo.”

“Not hungry. My mouth feels peculiar.”

“Leo, I said eat.”

Leo snuffled and picked up a single chip from which he took a chipmunk-size bite that he proceeded to chew between his front teeth.

Luxford forked up more veal, and he eyed his son. Leo took a second tiny bite from the chip and then a third that was even smaller. He had always been an artist at telegraphing defi ance through an act of ostensible obedience. Luxford knew he could bully him into eating properly, but he didn’t want another round of public tears.

He said, “Leo.”

“I’m eating.” Leo picked up half of the sandwich and held it in such a way that a third of its cottage cheese and pineapple slid from between the slices of bread onto the tabletop.

“Yuck,” he said.

“You’re behaving like a…” Luxford sought another word as he heard his wife’s reasonable voice say, “He’s behaving like a child because he is a child, Dennis. Why do you expect him to be what he can’t possibly be when he’s only eight years old? He certainly has no unreasonable expectations of you.”

With his fingers, Leo scooped up the cottage cheese and pineapple and let it plop onto the top of his chips. He took more brown sauce and poured it onto the mess. He stirred it with his index finger. He was trying to push his father, and Luxford knew it. He didn’t need a session with one of Fiona’s psychology books to tell him that. He also didn’t intend to be pushed.

He said, “I know you’re frightened about going away.” And when the lips began to quiver again, he went hastily on. “That’s normal, Leo. But it’s not as if Baverstock is that far away. You’ll be only eighty miles from home.”

But he could see from the boy’s face that
only
eighty miles
translated into the distance from the earth to Mars, with his mother on one planet and himself on another. Luxford knew that nothing he could possibly say was going to change the fact that when Leo went to Baverstock, Fiona wouldn’t be going with him. So he said in finality, “You’re going to have to trust me, son. Some things are for the best, and believe me this is one of them. Now eat your lunch.”

He gave his attention fully to his own lunch, his actions implying that their discussion was over. But it hadn’t gone as he’d intended and the single tear trailing down Leo’s cheek told him he’d made a botch of their encounter. He’d be hearing as much from Fiona tonight.

He sighed. His shoulders ached, a physical manifestation of everything he seemed to be carrying round at the moment. He had too much on his mind. He couldn’t deal simultaneously with Leo, with Fiona, with Sinclair Larnsey’s peripatetic roguery, with Eve, with whatever Rod Aronson was up to at work, with anonymous letters, with threatening phone calls, and most of all with what had happened to Charlotte.

He’d tried to dismiss the little girl from his mind and he’d succeeded in doing so for most of the morning, telling himself that it was upon Evelyn’s head that the sin of inaction would lie should anything happen to Charlotte. He was no part of her life—at the wish of her mother—and nothing he could do would make himself part of her life now. He was not responsible for what happened to the child. Except that he was. In the single but most profound manner, he was utterly responsible for Charlotte, and he knew it.

Last night he’d sat at his desk with his gaze on the telephone, saying, “Come on, Evelyn.

Phone me. Come
on
,” until he could hold up the presses no longer. He had the story written. The names, the dates, and the places were there. All he needed was a phone call from her and the story would run on page one where her abductor wanted it and Charlotte would be released and returned to her home. But the phone call hadn’t come. The paper had run with the rent boy story on the front page. And now Luxford waited for the sky to fall in whatever way it might.

He tried to tell himself that the kidnapper would merely take the story to another paper, the
Globe
being the most logical choice. But the moment he had himself nearly convinced that it was only publicity the kidnapper wanted, publicity that could come from any source, he heard the voice at the other end of the telephone again. “I’ll kill her if you don’t run that story.” And he did not know which part of the message took precedence in the kidnapper’s mind: the threat to kill, the demand for the story itself, or the requirement that the story run in Luxford’s own paper.

In not running the story, he was calling a bluff that he had no right to call in the fi rst place. The fact that Evelyn was doing the same did nothing to alleviate his anxiety. She’d made it clear at Harrods that she believed he was behind Charlotte’s disappearance and thinking that, she would call what she thought was his bluff indefinitely, secure in the knowledge that he’d never lift a hand to harm his own child.

There was only one solution that he could see. He had to alter Evelyn’s belief. He had to do battle with her entire pattern of thinking.

He had to make her understand that he wasn’t the man she thought he was.

He hadn’t the vaguest idea how to go about it.

HELEN CLYDE COULDN’T RECALL
where she had first heard the expression “pay dirt.”

It had probably been part of the dialogue in one of the American detective programmes that she used to watch with her father during her formative years. Her father was nothing if not a devotee of the hardest of hard-boiled gumshoes. When he wasn’t engaged in one sort of financial wizardry or another, he was reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to tide him over until the next Humphrey Bogart film was shown for the thousandth time on television. He preferred Humphrey Bogart to everyone else if he could get him. And on the desperate occasions when Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe were on assignment elsewhere from the BBC, Helen’s father made do with the pale counterfeits of more recent years. This is where “pay dirt”

must have come from, a seed from the dialogue, planted in her mind during hours in front of those shifting images from the cath-ode-ray tube. The seed sprang to full fl ower during her morning’s efforts in the environs of Cross Keys Close in Marylebone. And pay dirt was what she triumphantly hit when she interviewed the inhabitant of Number 4.

They’d made a three-way division of labour at the St. James house at half past nine that morning. St. James would continue on the path to Breta, taking on the Geoffrey Shenkling School. Deborah would collect a sample of Dennis Luxford’s printing in order to eliminate him as a potential author of the kidnapping notes. Helen would question the denizens of Cross Keys Close to fi nd out if anyone had been lurking in the area in the days preceding Charlotte’s disappearance.

“The Luxford business is probably unnecessary,” St. James had told them. “I can’t believe he’d write the note himself if he took the girl. But we need to eliminate him as a matter of course. So, my love, if you don’t mind taking on
The Source…
”

Deborah flushed. She said, “Simon. Good grief. I’m terrible at this sort of thing. You know that. What on earth shall I
say
to him?”

“The truth will do,” St. James had told her.

Deborah looked unconvinced. Her entire experience in this line of work had so far been limited to a single episode of quasi-breaking-and-entering in Helen’s company nearly four years in the past, and even then Helen had sallied forth in the lead, requiring Deborah only to footsoldier along behind her.

“Darling,” Helen told her, “just think of Miss Mar ple. Or Tuppence. T hink of Tuppence. Or Harriet Vane.”

Deborah had finally settled upon taking her cameras with her as a security blanket to shelter her from the inclement weather of the vast unknown. “It’s a newspaper office after all,”

she explained anxiously, lest St. James and Helen rush her out of the Chelsea house unarmed. “I won’t feel quite so odd if I have them with me. I won’t look out of place. They have photographers there, don’t they? Lots of photographers? At the newspaper offi ce? Yes.

Of course. Well, of course they do.”

“Incognito,” Helen cried. “Darling, that’s it. The very absolute thing. No one who sees you will know why you’re there and Mr. Luxford will be so appreciative of your thoughtfulness in sparing him that he’ll cooperate forthwith. Deborah, you were made for this line of work.”

Deborah had chuckled, her most reliable trait an ability to be joked out of her natural reticence. She’d gathered her cameras and gone on her way. St. James and Helen had done likewise.

From the time he had dropped her at the corner of Marylebone High Street and Marylebone Lane, heading himself west towards the Edgware Road, Helen had been asking questions. She’d started in the shops along Marylebone Lane, and she’d framed her questions round the disappearance of a child whose photograph she f lashed once again but whose name she was careful not to give. Helen pinned the highest of her hopes upon the owner of the Golden Hind Fish and Chips Shop. Since Charlotte stopped there as a matter of course on Wednesdays prior to her music lesson, what better place was there for someone to wait for her and to watch for her than at one of the Golden Hind’s five wobble-legged tables?

There was one specifically where a watcher could have waited, tucked into a corner behind a fruit machine but with a clear view of anyone who might have come strolling along Marylebone Lane.

But the shop owner, despite Helen’s encouraging mantra-like murmuring of “It could have been a man, it could have been a woman, it might well have been someone you’ve never seen here before,” shook his head and continued pouring vegetable oil into one of his capacious cooking vats. There might have been someone new hanging about, he said, but how was he to know? His shop was busy—and thank the Lord for that in these sorts of times—and if someone new was to come in for a nice bit of cod, chances are he’d think it was someone from one of the businesses that backed onto Bulstrode Place.
That’s
where she should be asking round, anyway. The buildings that them businesses were in had picture windows looking down on the street. More’n once he’d seen a secretary or a clerk-type gawping out the windows instead of seeing to their work. Which is why, tell you, Miss, the whole f lipping country is going to hell. No work ethic. Too many bloody bank holidays. Everybody with a hand out, looking for the government to lay something in their palms. When he took a breath to expatiate further upon his chosen theme, Helen thanked him hastily and left him St. James’s card. If he did happen to remember anything…

The businesses backing onto Bulstrode Place took up several hours of her time. She had to bring to bear all of her skills at artfully blending persuasion and prevarication in order to manoeuvre past receptionists and security personnel so as to gain access to anyone having a work station, office, or desk near the windows that overlooked Bulstrode Place and Marylebone Lane. But here, again, she gained nothing but a questionable job offer for a more questionable job from a leering executive.