Read In The Presence Of The Enemy Online
Authors: Elizabeth George
Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Crime, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Adult
“Not with the way they’ve been boarded up.
But no one would chance going in through the front anyway. The street’s too busy.
There’s too much risk of someone seeing, remembering, and later phoning the authorities.”
“Phoning…?” Helen looked from the tenements to St. James. Her voice quickened with excitement. “Simon, you don’t think Charlotte’s here, do you? In one of these buildings?”
He was frowning at the buildings. He didn’t respond until she said his name and repeated the questions. Then it was only to say, “We need to talk to him, Helen. If he exists.”
“The vagrant? Two different people in Cross Keys Close mentioned having seen him.
How on earth could he not exist?”
“I agree they saw someone,” St. James said.
“But didn’t anything about Mr. Pewman’s description of the man strike you as odd?”
“Just the fact that he could describe him so accurately.”
“There’s that. But didn’t the description seem remarkably generic, exactly what one would expect a dosser to look like? The duffel bag, the old khaki clothes, the knitted cap, the hair, the weathered face. Particularly the face.
The memorable face.”
Helen’s own face brightened. “Are you saying the man was in a disguise?”
“What better way to recce the area for a few days?”
“But of course. Of
course
. He could rustle through rubbish bins and keep his eye peeled for Charlotte’s movements. But he wouldn’t be able to snatch Charlotte dressed like that, would he? She’d have been terrified. She’d have caused a scene which someone would have remembered. So when he knew her comings and goings well enough, he’d drop the disguise altogether and snatch her then, wouldn’t he?”
“But he would have needed a place to change. To change without being seen. To become the tramp and then unbecome him when it was time to take Charlotte.”
“The squats,” she said.
“It’s a possibility. Shall we have a look around?”
Although squatters were protected by law in the country, there was a procedure one had to go through in order to avoid being charged with breaking and entering private property.
A squatter was required to change the locks on the doors and to put up a sign declaring his intention of occupying an abandoned residence. He was also required to do this prior to police intervention. But someone who didn’t wish to draw attention to himself, someone who especially didn’t want to be an object of interest to the local police, would not seize the rights to a building or a flat in the typical manner. Rather, he would make his takeover as surreptitious as possible, gaining access to a building through a less conventional means.
“Let’s try round the back,” St. James said.
The row of buildings was offset at either end by an alley. St. James and Helen chose the closest one and followed it to a small square.
One side of the square was taken up by a multi-storey car park, two sides by the backs of buildings on other streets, one side by the back gardens of the tenements on George Street. These back gardens were walled in, enclosed by at least twelve feet of sooty bricks with their tops overgrown by whatever straggling plantlife was able to flourish without a gardener’s care. Unless a squatter had come prepared with rock-climbing equipment in order to clamber over the wall, the only way in appeared to be at the near end of the alley.
Here, two unlocked wooden gates opened into a small brick-walled courtyard, one side of which comprised the looming wall of one of the back gardens. This courtyard was fi lled with the detritus of previous inhabitants of the building: mattresses, box springs, dustbins, a hosepipe, an old perambulator, a broken ladder.
The ladder looked promising. St. James dragged it out from behind one of the mattresses. But its wood was rotten and its rungs—where they existed at all—didn’t look as if they’d support a child’s weight, let alone the weight of a fully grown man. So St. James discarded it and considered instead a large abandoned and empty dumpster. It sat behind one of the courtyard’s wooden gates.
“It’s on wheels,” Helen noted. “Shall we?”
“I think so,” St. James said.
The dumpster was rusty. It didn’t look as if its wheels would turn. But when St. James and Helen positioned themselves on either side of it and began to heave it towards the garden wall, they found it rolled quite easily, as if it had been oiled for the purpose.
Once it was in position, St. James could see that the dumpster would easily provide a means of scrambling over the wall. He tested the strength of the metal sides and the lid.
They appeared sound. Then he saw Helen watching him uneasily, a frown drawing a line between her eyebrows. He knew what she was thinking: Not exactly an activity for a man in your condition, Simon. She wouldn’t say it, though. She wouldn’t want to run the risk of wounding him with a reminder of his disability.
“It’s the only way in,” he responded to her unspoken concern. “I can manage it, Helen.”
“But how are you going to get back over the wall from the other side?”
“There’ll be something in the building I can use. If there isn’t, you’ll have to go for help.” She looked doubtful about this plan.
He said again, “It’s the only way.”
She thought about it, apparently accepted the idea, and yielded, saying, “Let me at least help you get over. All right?”
He gauged the height of the wall and the height of the dumpster. He nodded his agreement to her modification of his plan. He heaved himself awkwardly to the top of the dumpster, assisted by an upper-body strength which had increased over the years since his lower body had been disabled. Once standing on the lid, he turned back to Helen and pulled her up to join him. From where they stood, they could reach the top of the brick wall, but they could not see over it. Helen was right, St. James realised. He was going to need her assistance.
He cupped his hands for one of her feet.
“You first,” he said. “I’ll need your help to get to the top.” He gave her a boost. She gripped the mound of mortar that fashioned the wall’s cap. With a grunt and a heave, she straddled it. Once in a secure position, she took a moment to examine the back of the building and its garden.
“This is it,” she said.
“What?”
“Someone’s been here.” Her voice was tinged with the thrill of the chase. “There’s an old sideboard that’s been upended next to the wall inside. So someone could get in and out easily. Here.” She extended her hand to him.
“Come have a look. There’s a chair as well, for getting down off the sideboard. And there’s even a path that’s been tramped through the weeds. It looks fairly fresh to me.”
With his right hand on the wall and his left gripped in hers, St. James strained his way up to join her. It was no easy feat, despite his words of assurance to her a moment earlier.
One dead leg encased in a brace however light-weight did nothing to make his life easy. His forehead was damp with perspiration when he’d finally completed the activity.
He saw what she was talking about, however. The sideboard—weathered enough to look as if it had spent years in the back garden even while the building was still occupied—
appeared to have been dragged from beneath one of the windows, in part creating the path through the weeds that Helen had mentioned.
And the path did indeed look fresh. Where it cut through shrubbery, the broken ends of the branches of overgrown bushes had not yet browned with exposure to the weather.
“Pay dirt,” Helen murmured.
“What?”
She smiled. “Nothing. There’s a clear way out of here if we use the sideboard. Shall I join you, then?”
He nodded, glad of her company. She lowered herself to the upended sideboard and from there to the chair that stood next to it.
St. James followed her.
The garden was little more than a square measuring twenty feet on all sides, and it was densely overgrown with weeds, with ivy, and with broom. This shrub had apparently fl ourished under a regime of neglect: A blaze of yellow blooms burned like sunlight along three sides of the garden’s perimeter and next to the building’s back door.
This, they found, was a security door, a single piece of steel cut to fit the frame and bolted straight into the wood. There was neither doorknob to turn nor hinges to remove.
The only way to get through it and into the building beyond it was to unbolt the entire affair.
The back windows on the ground f loor, however, had not been made so secure. While they were boarded on the inside, their glass was broken on the outside and, upon inspection, St. James found that one of the boards had been loosened enough so that without too much trouble someone could easily climb in and out. Helen fetched the chair as he worked the board out of their way.
She said, “With the door closed up like that, one wonders why the owners didn’t do more with the windows.”
St. James used the chair to lift himself to the sill, saying, “Perhaps they thought the door would be discouragement enough. I can’t think that someone would want to continually use this as a means of entrance and exit.”
“But as a temporary measure…” Helen spoke thoughtfully. “It
is
perfect, isn’t it?”
“It’s that,” St. James said.
The window, he found, gave in to what seemed to be a storage room for whatever business would occupy the ground floor of the building. It contained cupboards, shelves, and a dusty linoleum floor across which—even in the dim light—he could see footprints.
St. James eased from the window to the floor, waited for Helen to join him, and slipped a torch from his pocket. He directed it along the path of the footprints, which went towards the front of the building.
The air in the storeroom was tinctured with the odours of mildew and wood rot. As they carefully picked their way along a corridor that led to the front of the building, they became aware of additional smells: the throat closing foetid scent of excrement and urine seeping out of a lavatory where a long-unflushed toilet stood, the sharp smell of plaster emanating from holes that had been kicked into the corridor’s walls, the sickly sweet odour of a dead body’s decay. This last appeared to be rising from a partially eaten rat that lay at the foot of the stairs, where the storeroom behind joined the shop in front.
The footprints, they saw, did not go into the shop, which was as dark as nighttime because of its metal-covered windows and door. Rather, they climbed the stairs. Before climbing them in turn, St. James fl ashed his torchlight round the room that would have served as the shop. There was nothing to be seen, aside from a toppled magazine rack, an ancient refrigerated storage bin missing its lid, a collection of yellowed newspapers, and perhaps half a dozen crushed cardboard boxes.
St. James and Helen turned back to the stairs. They followed the footprints, Helen sidestepping the dead rat with a shudder and compulsively gripping St. James’s arm.
“Lord, are those
mice
moving in the walls?”
she whispered.
“Rats, more likely.”
“It’s hard to imagine someone actually staying here.”
“It’s not the Savoy,” St. James admitted. He climbed to the fi rst floor, where the unboarded windows allowed the late afternoon sunlight to illuminate the rooms.
There appeared to be one flat on each of the upper fl oors. The footprints they were following, which seemed to come and go and constantly overlap on the stairs, led them past the fi rst fl oor flat, where a glance inside its partially unhinged door showed them little more than a room with graffi ti spray-painted onto the walls—featuring “Kop Killers Deuce Two” in large blue letters surrounded by hieroglyphs ostensibly translatable only by fellow graffiti artists—and orange carpeting ripped up in great patches. There was little else helpful in this flat, aside from an astounding array of cigarette ends, crumpled cigarette packets, empty bottles, beer cans, and fast-food paper cups and bags, as well as a gaping hole in the ceiling which told them that the lighting fixture had been nicked.
The second fl oor flat was much the same, with the variation being the graffi ti artists’
choice of spray paint. Here the colour was red, which had apparently inspired the painters to use more blood-thirsty imagery along with their hieroglyphs. “Kop Killers Deuce Two”
was accompanied by drawings of disembow-elled policemen. Here also the carpeting was in tatters and littered with rubbish. A sofa and armchair that stood on either side of the kitchen door sported burn holes in them, one large enough to qualify as evidence of a bonafi de fi re.
The footprints continued to the top of the building. They went into the fi nal fl at where they were absorbed by what carpeting was left there. This, like the other two flats’, was orange and while it had been pulled away from the walls at one time, more recently it had been rolled back into place. It wasn’t ripped, but it bore ancient stains in a variety of hues suggesting everything from red wine to dog urine.
Like the other two flats’, the door was standing open, but it was still on its hinges. Addi-tionally, a hasp was fixed onto its exterior, its hinge on the door frame and its staple on the door itself. St. James fingered the hinge refl ectively as Helen moved past him into the room.
The hasp looked new: It was scratchless and clean.
He joined Helen inside the flat. The hasp suggested an accompanying padlock nearby, and he glanced about for it. He saw that unlike the two flats they had already seen, this one was free of rubbish although its walls bore graffiti not much different to the other fl ats’.
There was no lock lying on the floor or on any of the shelves of the metal bookcase fi xed to one wall, so he went into the kitchen to see if he could locate a lock there.
He looked through drawers and cupboards, finding a tin cup, a tine-bent fork, some loose nails, and two dirty jars. Water dripped from the tap in the kitchen sink, and he turned it on to note that the water ran perfectly clear, not cloudy or brownish as if it had lain in rusting pipes for a year or two.
He returned to the sitting room as Helen emerged from the bedroom. Her face was bright with discovery.