In The Presence Of The Enemy (38 page)

“No. Forget him. Follow the trail.”

“The trail?”

“You think there’s a connection, don’t you?

The kid, the birth certificate, all that?”

Corsico settled his shoulders and adjusted his spine. If he’d been wearing a tie, he’d probably have straightened its knot. He said,

“Yeah. I wouldn’t be going after it if it wasn’t there.”

“Then find the connection. Bring it to me.”

“And then what? Luxford—”

“Bugger Luxford. Dog the story. I’ll do the rest.”

Corsico flicked a glance at the door of the editor’s office. “It’s a hell of a story,” he said, but for the first time he sounded uneasy.

Rodney grabbed his shoulder and gave it a jerk. “It is,” he said. “Go after it. Write it. Give it to me.”

“And then?”

“I’ll know what to do with it, Mitch.”

Dennis Luxford pressed the button that would switch on the monitor of his computer terminal. He dropped into his chair. The fi gures on the monitor began to glow, but his eyes didn’t focus on them. Switching on the monitor was merely an excuse for something to do. He could turn to it and display an avid perusal of its gibberish should anyone suddenly walk into his office and expect to see
The Source
editor watching over the pursuit of a story that no doubt at this moment had every reporter in London doing industrious spade-work into Eve Bowen’s life. Mitch Corsico was only one of them.

Luxford knew how unlikely it was that Mitch Corsico and Rodney Aronson had been convinced by his show of editorial outrage. In all the years that he had run
The Source
and the
Globe
before it, he had never moved to block a story that held as much scurrilous promise as did this tale of MP Bowen’s failure to phone the local police about the abduction of her child. And it was a Tory tale to boot. He should have been glorying in the number of pleasing opportunities such a story presented.

He should have been rabid in his eagerness to mould the revelation that Evelyn had failed to phone the police into a clever and sententious indictment of the entire Tory party. There they were, religiously touting their Recommitment to Basic British Values, one of which—

one could only presume—was supposed to be the Basic British Family. And when the family was threatened in the most heinous of fash-ions, through the abduction of a child, a noted Tory minister did not, our sources tell us, so much as involve the proper authorities in a search for that child. Here was an opportunity to massage meagre facts into a story that would portray the Tories once again as the fl im-fl ammers they truly were. And he had not only not grasped that opportunity. He had done his best to eradicate it.

At the most, Luxford knew, he had only bought some time. That Corsico had got on to the birth certificate so quickly—that he had a sensible plan for excavating Evelyn’s past—told Luxford how unreasonable it was to expect the secret of Charlotte’s birth to remain a secret now she was dead. Mitchell Corsico had the kind of initiative which he—Luxford—would once have revelled in. The boy’s instinct for ferreting out the path to the truth was astounding, and his ability to cajole people into telling that truth was in itself a work of art. Luxford could hobble his progress by placing restric-tions upon him, by laying down specious sur-mises about the Home Secretary and New Scotland Yard and ordering the boy to check each one out. But he could not halt that progress save by giving him the sack. Which would serve only to prompt him to take his notebooks, his Filofax, and his nose for news to a competitor, the
Globe
most likely. And the
Globe

wouldn’t have Luxford’s reasons for thwarting a story that would expose the truth.

Charlotte. God, Luxford thought, he’d never even seen her. He’d seen the propaganda photographs when Evelyn was standing for Parliament, the candidate posing at home with her devoted, smiling family at her side. But that had been the extent of it. And even then he’d passed over the pictures with nothing more than the contemptuous glance he gave to all the candidates’ posturing during a general election. He hadn’t really looked at the child. He hadn’t bothered to study her. She was his, and all he actually knew of her was her name. And—now—the fact that she was dead.

He’d phoned Marylebone from the bedroom on Sunday night. When he’d heard her voice, he’d said tersely, “The television news.

Evelyn, a body’s been found.”

She’d said, “My God. You monster. You’ll stoop to anything to bend my will, won’t you?”

“No! Just listen to me. It’s in Wiltshire. A child. A girl. Dead. They don’t know who she is. They’re asking for information. Evelyn.

Evelyn
.”

She’d hung up on him. He hadn’t talked to her since.

Part of him said she deserved to be ruined.

She deserved a very public objurgation. She deserved to see every detail of Charlotte’s gen-esis, her life, her disappearance, and her death put on display for the judgement of her coun-trymen. And she deserved to be toppled from her position of power as a result. But another part of him couldn’t be a party to her down-fall. Because he wanted to believe that whatever her sins, she had paid for them fully with the death of this child.

He hadn’t loved her those few days in Blackpool, any more than she had loved him. Their shared experience had been nothing more than bodies connecting, their concupiscence heightened by the fact that they were polar extremes. They had nothing in common but their ability to debate their opposing view-points and their desire to be seen as the victor in every polemic they embarked upon. She was swift-witted and confident. He, a verbal swordsman, hadn’t intimidated her in the least. Their disputes generally ended in draws, but he was used to decimating his opponents thoroughly and failing to decimate her with words, he had sought other means. He’d been young enough and stupid enough that he still believed a woman’s submission in bed was a declaration of male supremacy. When he’d finished with her and was flush with the swag-ger of what he’d brought her to and how, he’d expected radiant eyes, a somnolent smile, followed by a delicate and decidedly feminine fading into the closest woodwork from which she would henceforth allow him to reign among their colleagues supreme.

The fact that she hadn’t faded into any woodwork at all after the seduction, the fact that she had acted as if nothing had happened between them, the fact that her wits were, if anything, sharper than ever, served only to infuriate him first and then to make him want her more. At least in bed, he’d thought, there would be neither symmetry nor equality between them. At least in bed, he’d thought, what conquest there was would always be his. Men dominate, he’d believed, and women submit.

But not Evelyn. Nothing he did and nothing he swore that she felt ever took away her self-possession. Intercourse was just another battleground for them, with pleasure instead of words the weapon.

The worst of it was that she knew all along what he was trying to do to her. And the fi nal time she’d come, on that last hurried morning when both of them had trains to catch and deadlines to meet, she’d raised his face shiny with her fluids to hers and she’d said, “I am not diminished, Dennis. In any way. Not even by this.”

He was shamed by the knowledge that an innocent life had grown from their loveless mating. So indifferent had he been to the consequences of skewering her in the only way he could, he hadn’t bothered to take a single precaution and he hadn’t cared in the least whether she was taking any. He hadn’t even thought of what they were doing in terms of possibly creating a life. He’d seen it only as mastery, a necessary step in proving to her—and above all to himself—his supremacy.

He hadn’t loved her. He hadn’t loved the child. He had wanted neither. He’d assuaged what few twinges of conscience he’d had by

“taking care of matters” in a way that meant he would never be touched personally by either of them. So by rights he should feel nothing now, other than bitterness and shock that Evelyn’s single-minded recalcitrance had cost a human life.

But the truth was that what he felt went far beyond bitterness and shock. He felt knotted inside by guilt, anger, anguish, and regret.

Because while he was responsible for the life of a child he had never tried to see, he knew very well that he was also responsible for the death of a child he would never know. Nothing could change that fact for him now. Nothing ever would.

Numbly, he drew the computer’s keyboard towards him. He accessed the story that would have saved Charlotte’s life. He read the fi rst line: “When I was thirty-six years old, I made a woman pregnant.” Into the silence of his office—a silence undercut by the exterior noises from the newspaper he’d been hired to rebuild from nearly nothing—he recited the conclusion to the sordid story: “When I was forty-seven, I killed the child.”

WHEN LYNLEY REACHED
Devonshire Place Mews, he saw that Hillier had already been at work meeting the Home Secretary’s demands for an effi cient operation. Sawhorses had been erected at the entrance to the mews.

These were manned by a police constable, while another constable stood guard at the front door of Eve Bowen’s home.

Behind the sawhorses and swelling out onto Marylebone High Street, the media were gathered in the dusk. They were represented by several television crews who were in the process of fixing up lights to fi lm their correspondents’ evening reports, print journalists who were barking questions at the constable nearest to them, and photographers who were restlessly waiting for the opportunity to take pictures of anyone related to the case.

When Lynley stopped the Bentley to show his identification to the sawhorse guard, the reporters surged round the car. A babble of questions rose. Was the death being labelled a homicide? If so, were there any suspects yet? Was there truth to the rumour that the Bowen child had a history of doing a bunk whenever she was unhappy? Would Scotland Yard be working with the local police?

Was it true that important evidence was going to be removed from the MP’s house this evening? Would DI Lynley comment upon any aspects of the case that related to child abuse, to the white slave trade, to devil worship, pornography, and ritual sacrifice?

Did the police suspect IR A involvement?

Had the child been molested before she died?

Lynley said, “No comment.” And, “Constable, clear a path please.” He guided the Bentley into Devonshire Place Mews.

As he got out of the car, he heard brisk footsteps coming in his direction, and he turned to see Detective Constable Winston Nkata approaching from the far end of the mews.

“Well?” Lynley said when Nkata joined him.

“No score at all.” Nkata surveyed the street.

“Folks are home in all but two of the houses.

But no one saw anything. They all knew the girl—seems like she was a friendly little bird who liked to chunter with most anyone who’d listen—but no one saw her last Wednesday.”

Nkata slipped a small leather-bound notebook into the interior pocket of his jacket. He followed it with a mechanical pencil, carefully retracting its lead first. He said, “Had a long chat with an older bloke, pensioner in a hospital bed on the fi rst fl oor of Number Twenty-one, see? He keeps a pretty good eye on the street most days. He said nothing out of the ordinary went down last week at all, far as he could tell. Just the normal comings and goings.

Postman, milkman, residents, the like. And

’ccording to him, the comings and goings at the Bowen place work just like a clock, so he’d know it if something p’culiar was happening.”

“Any suggestion of tramps in the neighbourhood?” Lynley told Nkata what he’d learned from St. James.

Nkata shook his head. “Not a whisper of it, man. And that old bloke I mentioned? He’d be likely to remember. He knows what’s what in the neighbourhood, top to bottom. Even told me who likes having it off with fine young specimens of the opposite sex when her man’s not round. Which, he assured me, goes on three-four days a week.”

“You made careful note of that, I take it?”

Nkata grinned and raised a hand in denial.

“I’m living clean as dish soap these days. Have been for the last six months. Nothing sticks to my mum’s favourite boy that I don’t want stuck there. Believe it.”

“I’m glad to hear the news.” Lynley nodded towards Eve Bowen’s house. “Has anyone been in or out?”

“Home Secretary was there for an hour or so. A tall, skinny bloke with serious hair after that. He was there quarter of an hour, maybe more. He brought a stack of notebooks and folders with him, and he left with an older piece, heavy-set bird with a canvas tote bag.

Hustled her into the car and out of here fast.

Housekeeper, I’d say by the look of her. Crying into the sleeve of her sweater. Either that or hiding her face from the photogs.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s it. Unless someone parachuted into their back garden. Which, truth to tell, I wouldn’t put past that lot for a moment. How’d they get here so fast, anyway?” Nkata demanded about the reporters.

“Assisted by Mercury or beamed down from the
Enterprise
. Take your pick.”

“I should get so lucky. I got caught in a jam in front of Buck House. Why’n’t they move that damn place to some other part of town?

It’s sitting smack in the middle of a roundabout, doing nothing but obstructing traffi c.”

“Which,” Lynley noted, “certain Members of Parliament would find an apt metaphor, Winston. But not Ms. Bowen, I dare say. Let’s have a talk with her.”

The constable at the door took a look at Lynley’s identification before he admitted them. Inside, another constable was seated on a wicker chair at the foot of the stairs. She was doing
The Times
crossword puzzle, and she got to her feet—a thesaurus in her hand—as Lynley and Nkata entered. She led them into the sitting room off which a dining area opened. At a table there, a meal was spread out: lamb chops congealing in their juices, mint jelly, peas, and potatoes. Two places were laid. A bottle of wine stood open. But nothing had been either eaten or drunk.