In The Presence Of The Enemy (3 page)

He could prevent that. All it would take was a single phone call and an answer to the only questions possible at this point: Have you told someone, Eve? Anyone? At any time? In the last ten years? About us? Have you told?

If she hadn’t, the letter was nothing but an attempt to rattle him, and easily dismissable at that. If she had, she needed to know that both of them were about to come under a full-blown siege.

HAVING PREPARED HER AUDIENCE
, Deborah St. James lined up three large black-and-white photographs on one of the worktables in her husband’s laboratory. She adjusted the fl uorescent lights and stood back to wait the judgement of her husband and of his work-mate, Lady Helen Clyde. She’d been experi-menting with this new series of photographs for four months now, and while she was fairly pleased with the results, she was also feeling more and more these days the pressure to make a real financial contribution to their household. She wanted this contribution to be a regular one, not one restricted to the spo-radic assignments she had so far been able to glean from beating on the doors of advertising agencies, talent agencies, magazines, wire services, and publishers. In the last few years since completing her training, Deborah had begun to feel as if she were spending most of her waking hours lugging her portfolio from one end of London to the other, when all along what she wanted was to be successful shooting her photographs as pure art. From Stieglitz to Mapplethorpe, other people had done it. Why not she?

Deborah pressed her palms together and waited for either her husband or Helen Clyde to speak. They’d been in the midst of evaluat-ing the transcript of a forensic deposition Simon had given a fortnight ago on water-gel explosives, and they had intended to go on from there to an analysis of tool marks made on the metal surround of a doorknob in an attempt to establish a case for the defence in an upcoming murder trial. But they’d been willing enough to take a break. They’d been going at it since nine that morning with only a pause for lunch and a second for dinner, and from what Deborah could see now at half past nine in the evening, Helen, at least, was ready to call it a day.

Simon was bent over the photograph of a National Front skinhead. Helen was studying a West Indian girl who stood with an enormous Union Jack curled through her hands.

Both the skinhead and the girl were positioned in front of a portable backdrop that Deborah had devised from large triangles of solidly painted canvas.

When neither Simon nor Helen spoke, she said, “You see, I want the pictures to be personality specific. I don’t want to objectify the subject in my old way. I control the background—that’s the canvas I was working on in the garden last February, do you remember, Simon?—but the personality is specifi c to the individual picture. The subject can’t hide.

He—or she, of course—can’t falsify himself because the film speed’s too slow and the subject can’t sustain artifice for as long as it takes to get the proper exposure. So. What d’you think?”

She told herself that it didn’t matter what either of them thought. She was on to something with this new approach, and she meant to keep with it. But it would help to have someone’s independent verification that the work was as good as she believed it was. Even if that someone was her own husband, the person least likely to find fault with her efforts.

He moved away from the skinhead, skirted Helen who was still studying the West Indian flag holder, and went to the third picture, a Rastafarian in an impressively beaded shawl that covered his hole-dotted T-shirt. He said,

“Where did you take these, Deborah?”

She said, “Covent Garden. Near the theatre museum. I’d like to do St. Botolph’s Church next. The homeless. You know.” She watched Helen move to another picture. She kept herself from gnawing at her thumbnail as she waited.

Helen finally looked up. “I think they’re wonderful.”

“_Do_ you? Do you really? I mean, do you think…You see, they’re rather different, aren’t they? What I wanted…I mean…I’m using a twenty-by-twenty-four-inch Polaroid, and I’ve left in the sprocket marks as well as the marks from the chemicals on the prints because I want them to sort of
announce
that they’re pictures. They’re the artificial reality while the subjects themselves are the truth. At least…

Well, that’s what I’d like to think…” Deborah reached for her hair and shoved its copper-coloured mass away from her face. Words left her in a muddle. They always had. She sighed.

“That’s what I’m trying…”

Her husband put his arm round her shoulders and soundly kissed the side of her head.

“A fine job,” he said. “How many have you taken?”

“Oh dozens. Hundreds. Well, perhaps not hundreds, but a great many. I’ve only just started making these oversize prints. What I’m really hoping is that they’ll be good enough to show…in a gallery, I mean. Like art.

Because, well, they
are
art after all and…” Her voice drifted off as her eyes caught movement at the edge of her vision. She turned to the door of the lab to see that her father—a long-time member of one or another of the St.

James family’s households—had come quietly to the top of the Cheyne Row house.

“Mr. St. James,” Joseph Cotter said, adhering to his history of never once using Simon’s Christian name. The length of their marriage aside, he had never been able to adjust fully to the fact that his daughter had married her father’s youthful employer. “You’ve visitors.

I’ve put them in the study.”

“Visitors?” Deborah asked. “I didn’t hear…

did the doorbell ring, Dad?”

“Don’t need the doorbell, these visitors, do they?” Cotter replied. He entered the lab and frowned down at Deborah’s photographs.

“Nasty bloke, this,” he said in reference to the National Front ruffian. And to Deborah’s husband, “It’s David. Along with some mate of

’is, done up in fancy braces and fl ashy shoes.”

“David?” Deborah asked. “David St. James?

Here? In London?”

“Here in the ’ouse,” Cotter pointed out.

“And looking ’is usual worse for wear. Where that bloke buys ’is clothes is a mystery to me.

Oxfam, I think. You want coffee all round?

They both look like they could do with a cup.”

Deborah was already heading down the stairs calling, “David? David?” as her husband said, “Coffee, yes. And knowing my brother, you’d better bring along the rest of that chocolate cake.” He said to Helen, “Let’s put the rest of this on hold till tomorrow. Will you be off, then?”

“Let me say hello to David first.” Helen switched off the fluorescent lights and trailed St. James to the stairs, which he took with a slow care necessitated by his braced left leg.

Cotter followed them.

The door to the study was open. Within the room, Deborah was saying, “What are you
doing
here, David? Why didn’t you phone?

Nothing’s wrong with Sylvie or the children, I hope?”

David was brushing his sister-in-law’s cheek with a kiss, saying, “Fine. They’re fi ne, Deb.

Everyone’s fine. I’m in town for a conference on Euro-trade. Dennis tracked me down there. Ah. Here’s Simon. Dennis Luxford, my brother Simon. My sister-in-law. And Helen Clyde. Helen, how are you? It’s been years, hasn’t it?”

“Last Boxing Day,” Helen replied. “At your parents’ house. But there was such a crush that you’re forgiven for not remembering.”

“No doubt I spent most of the afternoon grazing at the buffet table anyway.” David slapped both hands against his paunch, the one feature he possessed that distinguished him from his younger brother. Otherwise he and St. James were, like all the St. James siblings, remarkably similar in appearance, sharing the same curling black hair, the same height, the same sharp angularity of features, and the same eye colour that could never decide between grey or blue. He was indeed dressed as Cotter had described him: oddly.

From his Birkenstock sandals and argyll socks to his tweed jacket and his polo shirt, David was eclecticism personified, the sartorial despair of his family. He was a genius in business, having increased the profits of the family’s shipping company fourfold since their father’s retirement. But one would never guess it to behold him.

“I need your help.” David chose one of the two leather armchairs near the fi replace. With the assurance of a man who commands a legion of employees, he directed everyone else to sit. “Rather more to the point, Dennis needs your help. That’s why we’ve come.”

“What sort of help?” St. James observed the man who had come with his brother. He was standing more or less out of the direct light, near the wall on which Deborah regularly hung a changing display of her photographs.

Luxford, St. James saw, was extremely fit-looking, a middle-aged man of relatively modest stature whose natty blue blazer, silk tie, and fawn trousers suggested a beau but whose face wore an expression of mild distrust that at the moment appeared to be mixing with a fair amount of incredulity. St. James knew the source of the latter, although he never saw it without a momentary sinking of his spirits.

Dennis Luxford wanted help in some matter or another, but he didn’t expect he’d be able to receive it from someone who was obviously crippled. St. James wanted to say, “It’s just the leg, Mr. Luxford. My intellect continues to function as always.” Instead, he waited for the other man to speak while Helen and Deborah made places for themselves on the sofa and the ottoman.

Luxford didn’t seem pleased that the women had apparently settled in for the duration of the interview. He said, “This is a personal matter. It’s extremely confidential. I’m not willing—”

David St. James interposed. “These are the three people in the country least likely to sell your story to the media, Dennis. I dare say they don’t even know who you are.” And then to the others, “Do you, in fact? Never mind. I can see by your faces that you don’t.”

He went on to explain. He and Luxford, he said, had been together at Lancaster University, adversaries in the debating society and boozing mates after exams. They’d stayed in touch through the years since leaving the University, keeping tabs on each other’s successful career. “Dennis is a writer,” David said.

“Damned finest writer I’ve ever known, truth to tell.” He’d come to London to make his mark in literature, David told them, but he’d got sidetracked into journalism and decided to stay there. He started out as a political correspondent for the
Guardian
. Now he was an editor.

“Of the
Guardian?
” St. James asked.

“_The Source_.” Luxford said it with a look that directed a challenge towards any of them who might choose to comment. To begin at the
Guardian
and end up at
The Source
might not exactly be considered a celestial ascent in one’s fortunes, but Luxford, it seemed, was not about to be judged.

David appeared oblivious of the look. He said with a nod in Luxford’s direction, “He took over
The Source
six months ago, Simon, after making the
Globe
number one. He was the youngest editor in Fleet Street history when he ran the
Globe
, not to mention the most successful. Which he still is. Even the
Sunday Times
admitted that. They did quite a spread on him in the magazine. When was that, Dennis?”

Luxford ignored the question and seemed to chafe under David’s encomium. He appeared to ruminate for a moment. “No,” he finally said to David. “This isn’t going to work.

There’s too much at risk. I shouldn’t have come.”

Deborah stirred. “We’ll leave,” she said.

“Helen. Shall we?”

But St. James was studying the newspaper editor, and something about him—was it a smooth ability to manipulate the situation?—

made him say, “Helen works with me, Mr.

Luxford. If you need my help, you’re going to end up with hers as well, even if that doesn’t appear to be the case at the moment. And I do share most of my work with my wife.”

“That’s it, then,” Luxford said and made a movement to depart.

David St. James waved him back. “You’re going to have to trust someone,” he said and went on to his brother. “The problem is, we’ve got a Tory career on the line.”

“I should think that would please you,” St.

James said to Luxford. “_The Source_ has never made a secret of its political leaning.”

“This is a rather special Tory career,” David said. “Tell him, Dennis. He can help you. It’s either him or a stranger who might not have Simon’s ethics. Or you can choose the police.

And you know where that leads.”

As Dennis Luxford was considering his options, Cotter brought in the coffee and chocolate cake. He set the large tray on the coffee table in front of Helen and looked back to the door where a small long-haired dachshund hopefully watched the activity. “You,”

Cotter said. “Peach. Didn’t I tell you to stop in the kitchen?” The dog wagged her tail and barked. “Likes chocolate, she does,” Cotter said in explanation.

“Likes everything,” Deborah amended. She moved to take cups from Helen as she poured the coffee. Cotter scooped the dog up and headed again towards the back of the house.

In a moment they heard him climbing the stairs. “Milk and sugar, Mr. Luxford?” Deborah asked amiably, as if Luxford hadn’t been questioning her integrity a moment earlier.

“Will you have some cake as well? My father made it. He’s an extraordinary cook.”

Luxford looked as if he knew the decision to break bread with them—or in this case cake—

would be crossing a line he would prefer not to cross. Still, he accepted. He moved to the sofa, where he sat on the edge and brooded while Deborah and Helen continued passing round the cake and the coffee. He finally spoke. “All right. I can see that I have little choice.” He reached into his blazer’s inner pocket, revealing the paisley braces that had impressed Cotter. He brought out an envelope, which he passed to St. James with the explanation that it had come to him in the afternoon’s post.

St. James studied the envelope before removing its contents. He read the brief message. He went at once to his desk and rooted in the side drawer for a moment, bringing forth a plastic jacket into which he slipped the single piece of paper. He said, “Has anyone else handled this?”