In The Presence Of The Enemy (29 page)

“Nonetheless, let me see.”

He waited until Luxford had driven off before he went back to the house. Stone answered the door.

“I think it’s high time you buggered off,” he said. “She’s been through enough. Jesus.

When I think I almost bought into his performance myself, it makes me want to punch holes in the walls.”

“I’m not on anyone’s side, Mr. Stone,” St.

James said. “Let me talk to your wife. I haven’t finished telling her what she needs to know about today’s investigation. She has a right to that information. You’ll agree with that.”

Stone evaluated St. James’s words through eyes that narrowed. Like Luxford, he looked worn to nearly nothing. But Eve Bowen, St.

James realised, had not looked like that at all.

She had looked ready to go another fi fteen rounds and ready to come out the victor.

Stone nodded and stepped back from the door. He climbed the stairs heavily as St.

James returned to the sitting room and tried to think what to say, what to do, and how to move the woman into action before it was too late. He saw that in place of the altar that Mrs.

Maguire had set up, on the coffee table a chess set was now spread out. The pieces were untraditional, however. St. James picked up the opposing kings. Harold Wilson was one.

Margaret Thatcher was the other. He replaced them carefully.

“He’s made you think he cares about Charlotte, hasn’t he?”

St. James looked up to see Eve Bowen in the doorway. Her husband stood behind her, a hand on her elbow.

“He doesn’t, you know. He’s never even seen her. One would think, in the ten years of her life, that he might have tried. I wouldn’t have allowed it, of course.”

“Perhaps he knew that.”

“Perhaps.” She came into the room. She sat in the same chair she had chosen on Wednesday night, and the light from the table lamp showed her face as composed. “He’s a master dissembler, Mr. St. James. I know that better than anyone. He’ll want you to think that I’m bitter about our affair and how things turned out. He’ll want you to see my behaviour as a reaction to the weakness in myself that caused me to fall victim to his plethora of charms all those years ago. And while your attention is focused on me and on my refusal to recognise Dennis Luxford’s essential decency, he’ll move nimbly behind the scenes, orchestrating our anxiety from one level to the next.” She rested her head against the back of the chair.

She closed her eyes. “The tape was a nice touch. I might have believed it all myself had I not known he would stoop to anything.”

“It was your daughter’s voice.”

“Oh yes. It was Charlotte.”

St. James went to the sofa. His bad leg burdened him like a hundredweight; his back ached from the strain of heaving his body over brick walls. All he would need to make affl iction complete was one of his migraines. There was a decision to be taken, and the very reluctance he felt pulling at his body with every movement told him how necessary it was that he take it.

He said, “I’ll tell you what I know at this point.”

She said, “And then you’ll leave us to fend for ourselves.”

“Yes. I can’t in good conscience carry on with this.”

“You believe him, then.”

“Ms. Bowen, I do. I don’t particularly like him. I don’t much like what he stands for. I think his newspaper ought to be blasted from the earth. But I do believe him.”

“Why?”

“Because, as he’s said, he could have told his story ten years ago. He could have told his story when you first stood for Parliament. He has no reason to tell his story now. Except to save your daughter. His daughter.”

“His offspring, Mr. St. James. Not his daughter. Charlotte is Alex’s daughter.” She opened her eyes and turned her head to him without lifting it from the back of the chair.

“You don’t understand politics, do you?”

“At your level? No. I suppose I don’t.”

“Well, this is politics, Mr. St. James. As I’ve said from the first, this is all about politics.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I know. That’s why we’re at an impasse.”

She made a weary gesture in his direction.

“All right. Give us the rest of the facts. Then go. We’ll decide what to do and your hands will be utterly clean of the decision.”

Alexander Stone sat in the pillowlike chair that matched the sofa, next to the fi replace and across from his wife. He sat on the edge of it, elbows on his knees, head bent, eyes on his feet.

Released from a responsibility he hadn’t wanted to assume in the first place, St. James didn’t find himself freed at all. Rather, the weight he was carrying felt heavier and more dreadful. He tried to work past it. This was not his obligation, he told himself. But still he felt the tremendous effort attendant to shrugging it off.

He said, “I went to the Shenkling school, as we discussed.” He saw Alexander Stone raise his head. “I spoke to girls from eight to twelve years old. The girl we’re looking for wasn’t there. I have a list of the absentees from today if you’d like to phone them.”

“What’s this about?” Stone asked.

“A friend of Charlotte’s,” his wife explained as St. James passed her the list.

St. James said, “Charlotte’s music teacher—”

“Chambers,” Stone said.

“Damien Chambers. Yes. He told us Charlotte was generally in the company of another girl on the Wednesdays of her music lessons.

This girl was apparently with Charlotte this past Wednesday as well. We’ve been looking for her in the hope she’d be able to tell us something about what happened that afternoon. So far, we haven’t been able to fi nd her.”

“But the description of the vagrant,” Eve Bowen said. “That gives us something.”

“Yes. And if you can find the girl and get her to confirm that description—perhaps to confi rm that the vagrant was back in the area at the time Charlotte went in to her music lesson—you’d have something more solid to give the authorities.”

“Where else could she be?” Eve Bowen asked. “If not at St. Bernadette’s and not at the Shenkling school?”

“One of the other schools in Marylebone.

Or there are other possibilities. Her dancing class, for instance. Someone from the neighbourhood. A child who sees the same psychotherapist. She has to be somewhere.”

Eve Bowen nodded. She raised her fi ngers to her temple in a thoughtful gesture. “I hadn’t thought before this, but the name…Are you certain it’s a girl we’re looking for?”

“The name’s unusual, but everyone I’ve spoken to says it’s a girl.”

Alexander Stone spoke. “Unusual name?

Who is it? Why isn’t it someone we know?”

“Mrs. Maguire knows her. Or at least knows of her. As do Mr. Chambers and at least one of Charlotte’s mates from St. Bernadette’s.

She’s apparently a girl Charlotte sees on a catch-as-catch-can basis.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s a girl called Breta,” Eve Bowen said to her husband. “Do you know her, Alex?”

“Breta?” Alexander Stone rose. He went to the fireplace, where he picked up a photograph of a toddler on a swing, himself behind the swing laughing into the camera. “God,” he said. “Jesus.”

“What?” Eve asked.

“Have you spent the last two days looking for Breta?” Stone asked St. James wearily.

“In large part, yes. Until we had the information about the vagrant, it was the only thing we had to go on.”

“Well, let’s hope your information about the vagrant is more viable than your information about Breta.” Stone gave a desperate-sounding laugh. He set the photograph facedown on the mantel. “Brilliant.” He looked at his wife and then away. “Where have you been, Eve?

Where the bloody fuck have you been? Do you live in this house or just make visits?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Charlie. I’m talking about Breta. I’m talking about the fact that your daughter—my daughter, our daughter, Eve—doesn’t have a single friend in the world and you don’t even know it.”

St. James felt the ice washing through his veins as what Stone said and what he might mean began to coalesce ineluctably. Eve Bowen, he saw, had finally for a moment lost a vestige of her mien of cool tranquillity.

“What is this?” she demanded.

“The truth,” Stone said. And he laughed again, but this time the laugh rose the scale and teetered on the verge of hysteria. “Breta is no one, Eve. She’s no one.
No one
. Breta isn’t real. You’ve had your hired gun spend the last two days combing Marylebone for Charlie’s imaginary friend.”

CHARLOTTE WHISPERED, “BRETA
. Best friend Breta,” but her lips felt caked and her mouth felt like it was filled with crumbs of old dried bread. So she knew that Breta couldn’t hear her and, more important, that she wouldn’t respond.

Her body was achy. Every place it was supposed to bend, it hurt. She couldn’t tell at all how long it had been since she’d made the tape for Cito, but it seemed like days and months and years. It seemed like forever.

She was hungry and thirsty. Her eyes felt like there was a cloud behind them that pressed against her eyelids and filled the rest of her head. She didn’t know when she had ever been so tired, and if she hadn’t felt so draggy in the body and heavy in the arms and legs, she might have been more than a little cut up about the fact that her tummy had started to hurt because it had been so long since the shepherd’s pie and the apple juice.

But she could still taste them—couldn’t she?—

if she rubbed her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

A pang shot through her stomach. Lying where she was on the damp blanket, she dragged her knees up and clutched herself round the middle, which dislodged the blanket a degree or two and exposed her to the dank air of her lightless prison. She said,

“Cold,” through those same caked lips, and she released her stomach to tighten her cardigan round her body. She put one hand between her legs to keep it warm. The other she stuffed into her cardigan’s pocket.

She felt him, then, inside that pocket, and her eyes opened to the darkness all round her as she wondered how she’d forgotten little Widgie. Poor friend
she
was, thinking about herself, wishing she could talk to Breta when all the time Widgie was no doubt cold and anxious and hungry and thirsty, just like Lottie.

She murmured, “Sorry, Widge,” and closed her fingers over the hump of clay, which had—

as Cito had carefully explained—been fi red and glazed and long ago put into a Christmas cracker for a child who had lived decades and decades before Charlotte’s own birth. She felt the ridges on Widgie’s back and the point at one end that served as his snout. She and Cito had seen him one day among a display of other similarly tiny figurines in a shop in Camden Passage, where they’d gone to scout out something special for Mummy for Mothering Sunday. “Hedgehog, hedgehog!” Lottie had squealed and pointed at the tiny creature.

“Cito, he’s just like Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.”

“Not exactly like, Charlie,” Cito had said.

Which was true, because, unlike Mrs.

Tiggy-Winkle, the hedgehog in question wasn’t wearing a striped petticoat, a cap, or a gown. He wasn’t wearing anything at all except his hedgehog prickles and his especially precious hedgehog face. But despite his lack of attire, he was still a hedgehog and hedgehogs were Lottie’s favourite extraspecial live things. So Cito had bought him for her and presented him to her on the palm of his hand, and he had ridden in her pocket ever since, like a lucky charm, no matter where she went.

How had she managed to forget about Widgie when he’d been with her all along?

Lottie took him from her pocket and held him against her cheek. At the touch of him, she felt a blueness settle inside her. He was cold, like ice. She should have kept him warm-er. She should have kept him safer. He depend-ed upon her and she had failed him.

She patted in the darkness for a corner of the blanket on which she was lying, and she rolled the hedgehog into it. She said through the lips she could hardly move, so caked they were, “Snug like that, Widge. Don’t you worry.

We’ll be going home soon.”

Because they
would
be going home. She knew that Cito would tell the story that the kidnapper wanted, and that would be the end of all this. No more dark. No more cold. No more bricks for a bed and bucket for a loo.

She only hoped that Cito asked Mrs. Maguire for help with his story before he told it. He wasn’t very good at telling stories, and they always started out the same. “Once upon a time, there was an evil, ugly, twisted magician and a very
very
beautiful little princess with short brown hair and spectacles…” If the kidnapper wanted something different for his story, Cito was going to need Mrs. Maguire’s help.

Lottie tried to gauge how long it had been since she’d made that tape for Cito. She tried to gauge how long it would take Cito to create his story once he heard the tape. She tried to decide what kind of story would please the kidnapper best and she wondered how Cito would get the story to him. Would he say it into the tape recorder like she had? Would he tell it on the phone?

She was too tired to think up answers to her questions. She was too tired to even suppose what the answers might be. With one hand scrunched deep into her cardigan pocket and her other hand tucked tightly between her legs and her knees drawn up so that her stomach didn’t hurt, she closed her eyes and thought about sleep. Because she was so tired. She was so awfully and terribly tired…

Light and sound crashed upon her simultaneously. They came like lightning, only in reverse. First a furious crank and a desperate
smash-boom
, then the backs of her eyelids suddenly were red and glowing, and Lottie opened her eyes.

She gave a gasp because it hurt so much to have light falling on her. Not the regulated incandescence from a lantern this time, but real light that came from the sun. It blazed through a doorway in the wall and for a second nothing else was there. Just the light, so bright, so difficult to look at. She felt like a mole, cringing back and squinting and giving a cry that sounded like, “Ahtch,” and curling farther into a ball.