In The Presence Of The Enemy (56 page)

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“Can’t you have some bloody decency?”

Luxford demanded. “My son’s at home. He’s eight years old. He’s completely innocent. You can’t expect me to include him in this exhibi-tion you’re planning.”

“I’ll watch what I say while he’s present.

You can take him to his room.”

“I hardly think—”

“That’s the extent of the compromise, Mr.

Luxford.”

Lynley parked behind a late-model Mercedes-Benz that was itself parked beneath a portico. The portico overlooked the villa’s front garden, which appeared to be more a wildlife refuge than a traditional display of carefully manicured lawn and burgeoning herbaceous borders. When Luxford got out of the Bentley, he went to the edge of this garden, where a fl agstone path disappeared into the shrubs. He said, “They’re usually watching the birds feed at this time of day.” He called his wife’s name. Then he called to his son.

When no answering cry came from beneath the trees, he turned back to the house. The front door was closed, but not locked. It opened into a marble-floored foyer at the centre of which a flight of stairs rose to the fi rst floor of the house.

“Fiona?” Luxford called. His voice was distorted by the stone floor and plaster walls of the foyer. Again no one responded.

Lynley shut the door behind them. Luxford went through an archway to their left. Here a drawing room was banked by bay windows that gave an unobstructed view of the ponds on the heath. He continued to call his wife’s name.

The house was utterly hushed. Luxford went from one room to another throughout the sprawling villa, but as he did, it became evident to Lynley that this trip to Highgate had been in vain. Fortuitously or not, it was clear that Fiona Luxford was not there to answer his questions. When her husband came down the stairs, Lynley said to him, “You’ll want to phone your solicitor, Mr. Luxford. He can meet us at the Yard.”

“They should be here.” Brow furrowed, Luxford looked from the drawing room where Lynley had waited for him to the entry and the heavy front door. “Fiona wouldn’t go out without locking the front door. They should be here, Inspector.”

“Perhaps she thought she’d locked it.”

“She wouldn’t think. She’d know. It locks with a key.” Luxford went back to the door and pulled it open. He called his wife’s name, more a shout this time. He called his son’s name. He strode back down the slope of the driveway towards the lane where, just inside the walls of his property, a low white building stood. It comprised three garages, and as Lynley watched, Luxford entered the building through a green wooden door, an unlocked green wooden door, Lynley noted. So perhaps there was mild support for Luxford’s claim as to how Charlotte’s glasses came to be in his car.

Lynley stood in the portico. He let his gaze sweep over the garden. He was thinking about insisting that Luxford lock up the house and climb back into the Bentley for the drive to Scotland Yard, when his eyes fell upon the Mercedes in front of him. He decided to test the newspaperman’s assertions about where and when his own car was locked. He tried the driver’s door. It opened. He slid inside.

His knee nudged a pendent object near the steering column. A muted metallic jangling sounded. The car’s keys, he saw, hung from the ignition on a large brass ring.

On the floor of the passenger’s side of the car a woman’s shoulder bag lay. Lynley reached for this. He opened it, rustled past a compact, several lipstick tubes, a brush, a pair of sun-glasses, and a chequebook, and pulled out a leather purse. It contained fi fty-fi ve pounds, a Visa card, and a driving licence with
Fiona
Howard Luxford
printed on it.

A sense of disquiet rose in him, like insects buzzing too close to his ears. He was getting out of the car, the shoulder bag looped over his hand, when Luxford hastened back up the driveway.

“They sometimes take their bikes onto the heath in the afternoon,” he said. “Fiona likes the ride to Kenwood House and Leo loves to look at the paintings. I thought they might have gone there, but their bikes are—” He caught sight of the shoulder bag.

“This was in the car,” Lynley told him.

“Have a look. Are these her keys?”

Luxford’s expression gave Lynley the answer. Once the man saw the keys, he rested both hands against the bonnet of the car, looked out over the garden, and said, “Something’s happened.”

Lynley walked round the Mercedes to the other side. The front tyre was flat. He squatted to have a closer look. He ran his fi ngers along the treads and followed his fingers’

progress with his eyes. He found the fi rst nail a quarter of the way up the tyre. Then a second and a third nail together, some six inches above the fi rst.

He said, “Is your wife generally home at this time of day?”

Luxford said, “Always. She likes to spend time with Leo after school.”

“What time does his school day end?”

Luxford raised his head. His look was stricken. “Half past three.”

Lynley looked at his pocket watch. It was after six. His disquiet heightened, but he said the reasonable thing. “They may have both gone out.”

“She wouldn’t leave her bag. She wouldn’t leave the keys in the car. And the front door unlocked. She wouldn’t do that. Something’s happened to them.”

“There’s no doubt a simple explanation,”

Lynley said. Which was usually the case.

Someone seemed to be missing who was all the while engaged in the most logical of activities, activities that the panicked spouse would have recalled had the panicked spouse not panicked in the first place. Lynley considered what Fiona Luxford’s activities might be, looking for cool reason in the face of Luxford’s growing apprehension. “The front tyre’s gone flat,” he told Luxford. “She’s picked up three nails.”

“Three?”

“So she may have taken the boy somewhere on foot.”

“Someone’s f lattened it,” Luxford said.

“Someone’s flattened the tyre. Listen to me, won’t you? Someone’s fl attened that tyre.”

“Not necessarily. If she was heading out to pick him up from school and found the tyre fl at, she—”

“She wouldn’t.” Luxford pressed his fi ngers to his eyelids. “She
wouldn’t
, all right? I won’t allow her to fetch him.”

“What?”

“I make him walk. I make him walk to school. It’s good for him. I’ve told her it’s good for him. It’ll toughen him up. Oh God. Where are they?”

“Mr. Luxford, let’s go inside and see if she’s left a note somewhere.”

They went back to the house. Maintaining his calm, Lynley instructed Luxford to check every possible spot where his wife might have left him a message. He followed him from the basement gym to a desk in a second fl oor aerie.

There was nothing. Anywhere.

“Your son had no appointments today?”

Lynley asked. They were descending the stairs.

Luxford’s face wore a fine sheen of perspiration. “Your wife had no appointments? Doctor’s? Dentist’s? A place they may have gone together by taxi or underground? By bus?”

“Without her bag? Without her money?

Leaving her keys in the car? For God’s sake, have some sense.”

“Let’s rule out all the possibilities, Mr. Luxford.”

“And while we’re ruling out all the bloody possibilities, she’s out there somewhere…Leo’s out there somewhere…God damn!” Luxford hit his fist on the stair rail.

“Do her parents live nearby? Do yours?”

“There’s no one nearby. There’s nothing.

Nothing.”

“Any friends she might have taken the boy to see? Any colleagues? If she’s discovered the truth about you and Eve Bowen, she may well have decided that she and your son—”

“She hasn’t discovered the truth! There is no possible way that she could have discov-

ered the truth. She should be here in the house or out in the garden or riding her bicycle and Leo should be with her.”

“Has she a diary that we might—”

The front door swung open. Both of them spun towards it as someone outside pushed at it forcefully. It flew to the wall and slammed against it. A woman stumbled into the house.

Tall, with tumbling hair the shade of honey and dirt streaking her wine-coloured leggings, she was breathing raggedly and she clutched her chest as if her heart were in seizure.

Luxford cried, “Fiona!” and pounded down the rest of the stairs. “What in the name of heaven…?”

Her head flew up. Lynley saw she was ashen.

She cried out her husband’s name, and he caught her in his arms.

“Leo,” she said. Her voice was wild. “Dennis, it’s Leo. It’s Leo. Leo!”

And she raised her clenched hands to the level of his face. She opened them. A small boy’s school cap fell to the fl oor.

Her story came out in tatters, torn from her uneven breathing. She’d expected Leo no later than four. When he hadn’t arrived by fi ve, she was irritated enough with his thoughtlessness to set out after him and give him a thorough talking-to when she found him. He knew, after all, that he was always to come directly home after school. But when she tried to take the Mercedes down the driveway, she’d found a tyre was flat, so she set off on foot.

“I walked every route he might have taken,”

she said, and she listed them for her husband as if to prove her point. She sat on the very edge of a sofa in the drawing room, her hands trembling badly as they curved round a tumbler of whisky that Luxford had poured for her. He squatted in front of her, steadying her grip and occasionally reaching forward to push the hair from her face. “And after I’d walked them all—every route—I came home along the cemetery. And the cap…Leo’s cap…” She raised the whisky glass to her mouth. It clattered unsteadily against her teeth.

Luxford seemed to know what she was unwilling to put into words. “In the cemetery?” he asked. “You found Leo’s cap? In the cemetery?”

Tears spilled from her eyes.

“But Leo knows not to go into Highgate Cemetery alone.” Luxford sounded puzzled.

“I’ve told him, Fiona. I’ve told him time and again.”

“Of course he knows, but he’s a boy. A little boy. He’s curious. And the cemetery…You know how it is. Overgrown, wild. A place for adventure. He passes right by it every day.

And he’d have thought—”

“My God, has he talked to you about going in there?”

“Talked to…? Dennis, he’s grown up with that cemetery practically in his back garden.

He’s seen it. He’s been interested in the tombs and catacombs. He’s read about the statues and—”

Luxford rose to his feet. He drove his hands into his pockets and turned away from her.

“What?” she asked. Her voice arced with more panic. “What?
What?
”

He swung round on her. “Did you encourage him?”

“To what?”

“To visit the tombs. The catacombs. To have adventures in that bloody cemetery. Did you encourage him, Fiona? Is that why he went?”

“No! I answered him. I answered his questions.”

“Which piqued his curiosity. Which stimulated his imagination.”

“What was I supposed to do when my son asked questions?”

“Which led him to jump the wall.”

“Are you making me responsible? You, who insisted he walk to school, who downright
demanded
that I never baby him by—”

“Which no doubt led him straight to some pervert who decided he needed an afternoon’s switch from Brompton Cemetery to Highgate.”

“Dennis!”

Lynley intervened quickly. “You’re ahead of yourself, Mr. Luxford. There may be a simple explanation.”

“Bugger your simple explanations.”

“We need to phone the boy’s friends,” Lynley went on. “We need to talk to Leo’s headmaster as well as his teacher. It’s just two hours past the time he was due home, and chances are you’re falling into panic for nothing.”

As if in support of Lynley’s words, the telephone rang. Luxford sprang across the room and snatched up the receiver. He barked a hello. Someone on the other end spoke. His left hand grabbed the mouthpiece and cupped it.

“Leo!” he said. His wife surged to her feet.

“Where the hell are you? Do you have any idea of the state you’ve put us into?”

“Where is he? Dennis, let me speak to him.”

Luxford held his hand up to stop his wife.

He listened in silence for less than ten seconds. Then he said, “Who? Leo, who? God damn it. Tell me
where…
Leo! Leo!”

Fiona grabbed the phone. She cried her son’s name into the mouthpiece. She listened, but obviously listened in vain. The phone clattered from her hand to the fl oor.

“Where is he?” she said to her husband.

“Dennis, what’s happened? Where’s Leo?”

Luxford turned his face to Lynley. It looked carved from chalk.

“He’s been taken,” he said. “Someone’s kidnapped my son.”

“THE MESSAGE WAS VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL
to the one Luxford received about Charlotte,” Lynley said to St. James. “The difference was that this time the child delivered it personally.”

“ ‘Acknowledge your firstborn child on page one?’ ” St. James asked.

“A slight variation of that. According to Luxford, Leo said, ‘You’re to run the story on page one, Daddy. Then he’ll let me go.’ And that’s all.”

“According to Luxford,” St. James repeated. He saw that Lynley followed his thinking.

“When Luxford’s wife grabbed the phone, the line had gone dead. So the answer is yes: He was the only one of us to speak to the boy.”

Lynley reached for the balloon glass that St.

James had placed for him on the coffee table in his Cheyne Row study. He meditated upon its contents as if he would find the answer he was looking for floating on the surface. He looked fairly done in, St. James noted. Permanent exhaustion went hand-in-glove with his line of work.

“It’s not a pretty thought, Tommy.”

“Even less pretty when one considers that the story our putative kidnapper wants to see on page one will actually run in Luxford’s paper tomorrow. There was quite enough time to alter the front page and go to press with it once we’d heard from Leo. That’s rather convenient, wouldn’t you agree?”

“What have you done?”