In The Presence Of The Enemy (52 page)

Alex took the blouse from her. He couldn’t tell if it was the work of his exhausted imagination or if the scent was still on the material.

But it smelled like Charlie. It seemed saturated with her little-girl odours of licorice, school rubbers, and pencil shavings.

“They didn’t fit her right,” Mrs. Maguire was saying. “Most days when she got home, she’d be flinging her uniform on the fl oor and the blouse on top of it. Sometimes, she’d tramp them down with her shoes. And those shoes, God love her, she didn’t like them either.”

“What did she like?” He should have known.

He must have known. But he couldn’t remember.

“From her clothes, d’you mean?” Mrs.

Maguire asked. She reached with quick assurance past the dresses and skirts, the proper coats and jerseys, and said, “This.”

Alex looked down at the faded Oshkosh overalls. Mrs. Maguire rustled through the clothing and brought out a striped T-shirt.

“And this,” she said. “Charlie wore them together. With her trainers. She loved her trainers as well. She wore them without laces, with the tongues hanging out. I told her, did I not, that ladies don’t dress like scamps, Miss Charlotte. But when, I ask you, did Charlie care a fig for what ladies dressed like?”

“The overalls,” he said. “Of course.” He’d seen her in them a hundred times or more.

He’d heard Eve say, “You are
not
going out with us dressed like that, Charlotte Bowen,”

every time Charlie had bounced down the stairs and out to the car with her overalls on.

“I am, I am!” Charlie would crow. But Eve always prevailed and the result saw Charlie grumbling and squirming in a picture-perfect lacy dress—in her Christmas dress, by God—

and black patent leather shoes. “This stuff is
scritchy
,” Charlie moaned, and with a scowl she tugged at the collar. Just as she must have

tugged at her white school blouses, worn buttoned to the top for reasons of purity so that no black marks went down against her in the book.

“Let me have these.” Alex took the overalls from the hanger. He folded them along with the T-shirt. He saw the laceless trainers in the corner of the cupboard and scooped them up as well. For once, he thought, in front of God and everyone, Charlie Bowen would wear what she liked.

In Salisbury, Barbara Havers found MP

Alistair Harvie’s constituency association office without much trouble. But when she showed her identification and requested some routine background information on the MP, she came up against the strong will of his association chairman. Mrs. Agatha Howe wore a haircut at least fifty years out of date and a shoulder-padded suit straight out of a Joan Crawford film. The moment she heard the words
New Scotland Yard
in conjunction with the name of their esteemed Member of Parliament, she shared only the fact that Mr. Harvie had been in Salisbury from Thursday night until Sunday evening—“as always, he’s our MP, isn’t he?”—but her lips tightened over the additional information that Barbara sought.

She made it clear that neither crowbar nor Semtex nor unveiled threats regarding the consequences of failing to assist the police would pry those lips open, at least not until Mrs. Howe had “a word with our Mr. Harvie.” She was the sort of woman Barbara always itched to squash beneath her heel, the sort who assumed that her jolly hockey sticks education gave her some right of supremacy over the rest of mankind.

As Mrs. Howe consulted her diary to see where she might locate their MP at this time of day in London, Barbara said, “Right. Do what you want. But you might want to know that this is a rather high-profi le investigation, with journalists dusting out everybody’s cupboards. So you can talk to me now and I can be on my way or you can take a few hours to track down Harvie and run the risk of the press finding out that he’s just become part of our enquiry. That should make a nice headline in tomorrow’s papers:
Harvie Under
the Gun
. How big’s his majority, by the way?”

Mrs. Howe’s eyes slitted to fi ngernail width.

She said, “Are you actually threatening me?

Why, you little—”

“I think you mean to say
Sergeant
,” Barbara cut in. “‘Why, you little Sergeant.’ Right? Yes.

Well, I certainly understand your sentiments.

Rough stuff having my sort come in here and offend your sensibilities. But time’s rather an issue for us, and I’d like to get on with things if I can.”

“You’ll have to wait until I speak to Mr.

Harvie,” Mrs. Howe insisted.

“I can’t do that. My guv at the Yard is requiring daily reports and mine is due to him”—here Barbara studied the wall clock for effect—“just about now. I’d hate to have to tell him that Mr. Harvie’s constituency chair refused to cooperate. Because that’ll turn the light on Mr. Harvie himself. And everyone’ll wonder what he’s got to hide. And since my guv gives reports to the press every night, Mr.

Harvie’s name is bound to come up. Unless there’s no reason for it to do so.”

Mrs. Howe saw the dawn of reason, but she wasn’t chairman of the local Conservative association for nothing. She was a dealmaker and she made her requirements clear: tit for tit, tat for tat, and question for question. She wanted to know what was going on. She put the desire obliquely, stating, “The constituency’s interests are foremost in my mind. They must be served. If for some reason Mr. Harvie has come across some impediment to serving our interests…”

Blah de blah blah, Barbara thought. She got the point. She made the deal. What Mrs.

Howe learned from her was that the investigation in question was the one heading up the nightly news and the same one headlining the morning and evening papers—the kidnapping and drowning of the ten-year-old daughter of the Home Office Undersecretary. Barbara didn’t tell Mrs. Howe anything that she couldn’t have learned for herself by doing something more than spending her time checking up on Mr. Harvie’s movements in London and bullying the local constituency office’s ageing secretary. But she imparted it all confidentially, with an air of
seulement entre
nous, darling
, that was apparently convincing enough for the constituency chairman to part with some pearls of information in exchange.

Mrs. Howe didn’t much like Mr. Harvie, as Barbara soon discovered. He was too much the cat with the cream round the ladies. But he had a way with the voters and he’d managed to fend off two serious challenges by the Liberal Democrats, so he was owed some loyalty for that.

He’d been born in Warminster. He’d gone to school at Winchester, and then on to university at Exeter. He’d read economics, successfully managed investment portfolios at Barclay’s Bank right here in Salisbury, worked hard for the party, and ultimately presented himself as a potential candidate for Parliament when he was twenty-nine years old. He’d held his seat for thirteen years.

He’d been married to the same woman for eighteen years. They had the politically required two children, a boy and a girl, and when not away at school—which, of course, they were at the moment—they lived with their mother just outside Salisbury in the hamlet of Ford. The family farm—

“Farm?” Barbara interrupted. “Harvie’s a farmer? I thought you said he’d been a banker?”

The farm was his wife’s inheritance from her parents. The Harvies lived in the house, but the land was worked by a tenant. Why?

Mrs. Howe wanted to know. Her nose quivered. Was the farm important?

Barbara didn’t have a conclusive answer to that question even when she saw the farm some forty-five minutes later. It sat at the very edge of Ford and when Barbara lurched to a stop in the farm’s trapezoidal-shaped courtyard, the only creatures who came out to greet her Mini were six extremely well-fed white geese. Their clamorous honking raised enough ruckus to alert anyone who might have been in the immediate vicinity. When no one came out of the steel-walled barn with pitchfork at the ready or out of the imposing brick and tile house with rolling pin rampant, Barbara concluded that she had the farmyard, if not its surrounding fields and pastures, to herself.

From her car, with the geese still furiously honking at a menacing Doberman volume, Barbara made her bow to scoping out the scene. The farmyard comprised the house, the barn, an old stone linhay, and an even older dovecote constructed of bricks. This last caught her attention. It was cylindrical in shape, topped with a slate roof and a glassless lantern cupola that gave birds access to the interior of the building. One side of it was overgrown with ivy. Gaps in the roof marked spots where tiles had either been removed or broken off. Its deeply recessed door was splintered and grey with age, crusty with lichen and looking as if no one had opened it within the last twenty years.

But something about it dragged at her memory. She catalogued the details in an attempt to decide what that something was: the slate roof, the lantern cupola, the heavy growth of ivy, the battered door…Something Sergeant Stanley had said, the pathologist had said, Robin Payne had said, Lynley had said…

It was no good. She couldn’t remember. But Barbara was troubled enough by the sight of the dovecote to ease the Mini’s door open into the beaks of the angry geese.

Their honking rose to a frenzied pitch. They were better than watchdogs. Barbara opened her glove box and rooted through its contents to see if she had something edible that might occupy them while she had a look round. She came up with a half bag of salt and vinegar crisps which she herself briefl y regretted not having found the previous night when she’d been caught in traffic without a restaurant in sight. She sampled them. Slightly stale, but what the hell. She thrust her arm out of the open window and scattered the crisps on the ground, as a libation to the avian gods. The geese tucked in at once. The problem was solved, at least temporarily.

Barbara tipped her hat to formality by ringing the doorbell at the house. She did the same by calling a cheerful “Hullo?” into the barn.

She walked the length of the yard, sauntering at last to the dovecote as if a perusal of it were the natural outcome of her wanderings.

The doorknob rattled loosely in the wood of the door. It was gritty with rust. It didn’t turn, but when Barbara pushed upon the wood with her shoulder, the door creaked open some seven inches before its movement was thwarted by its own rain-swollen condition and an uneven patch in the old stone floor. A sudden flutter of wings told Barbara that the dovecote was at least partially in use. She squeezed herself inside as the last of the birds escaped through the lantern cupola.

Light, thick with rising dust motes, fi ltered down from that cupola and from the gaps in the roof. It illuminated tier upon tier of nesting boxes for the birds, a stone fl oor lumpy with pungent guano, and in this fl oor’s centre a ladder with three fractured rungs which had once been used to collect eggs in the days when pigeons and doves were themselves raised as poultry.

Barbara did her best to dodge all bird droppings that were still shimmering with their youth. She approached the ladder. She saw that although it was fixed at its top to an upright pole by means of an extended rung, it wasn’t intended to be stationary. Rather, it had been designed to move round the dovecote, giving the potential egg-gatherer easy access to all of the nesting boxes that lined the circumference of the building from a height of about two feet from the floor to the roofl ine some ten feet above.

The ladder, Barbara found, was still mobile despite its age and condition. When she pushed upon it, it creaked, hesitated, then began to move. It followed the curve of the brick walls of the dovecote in a movement achieved by means of the upright pole. Fitted to a primitive gear-and-sprocket device in the lantern cupola, the pole revolved and thus rotated the ladder.

Barbara looked from the ladder to the pole.

Then from the pole to the nesting boxes.

Where some of them had collapsed over time and had gone unreplaced, she could see the unfi nished brick walls of the dovecote behind them. They were rough-looking, those walls, and where they didn’t wear the speckling of bird droppings, in the subdued light, they looked redder than they had looked outside with the sun upon them. Odd, that red.

Almost as if they weren’t bricks at all. Almost as if—

She remembered with a rush. It was bricks, Barbara thought. Bricks and a pole. She could hear Charlotte’s tape-recorded voice as Lynley had played it for her over the phone.
There’s
bricks and a maypole
, the child had said.

Barbara felt the hair stir on the back of her neck as she looked from the bricks to the pole in the centre of the room. Holy hell, she thought, Jesus Christ, this is it. She made a move to go to the door, which is when she realised that the geese outside had gone completely silent. She strained to hear the slightest noise from them. Even a mild satiated honk would do. But there was nothing. They couldn’t still be eating those crisps, could they? she wondered. Because there hadn’t been enough to last this long.

This realisation suggested that someone had thrown them a handful of additional food once Barbara had gone into the dovecote. This in turn suggested that she wasn’t alone in the farmyard any longer. This in its own turn suggested that if she wasn’t alone and if whoever was out there was as intent upon silence as she, then whoever was out there was probably at this very moment creeping from barn to house to linhay. He held a pitchfork raised or perhaps a carving knife, his eyes a little wild, Anthony Perkins come to slice Janet Leigh to ribbons. Except that Janet Leigh had been in a shower, not in a dovecote. And she’d thought she was safe, whereas Barbara knew quite well that she wasn’t. Particularly not here, where the location, the structure, the bricks, and the pole all made a claim upon her powers of deduction at the very same time as they seemed to close in on her so that any moment with her bowels gone loose and her palms gone sweaty—

Bloody hell, Barbara thought. Get a grip, all right? Get a bleeding, fl aming, sodding little
grip
.

She needed a crime scene team to go over this building in a search for anything that would place Charlotte here. The axle grease, a hair from her head, a fibre from her clothes, her fi ngerprints, a drop of her blood from the cut on her knee. That’s what was called for, and making the arrangements was going to take some decided finesse, both with Sergeant Stanley, who wasn’t likely to greet her directive with the joy of the newly converted, and with Mrs. Alistair Harvie, who was more than likely going to pick up the phone and place a call to her husband and put him on the alert.