In The Presence Of The Enemy (57 page)

He’d done what was called for by the situation, Lynley explained, despite his unease and his growing suspicions about Dennis Luxford.

Thus, constables were assigned to Highgate Cemetery, where they were looking for clues to the boy’s disappearance. Other constables were walking the routes Leo might have taken once he left his junior school on Chester Road.

The media had been given photographs of the boy to broadcast with the nightly news for potential sightings of him. Wiretaps were in the works, to trace all incoming calls to Luxford.

“We’ve taken the nails from the tyres as well,” Lynley finished. “And dusted the Mercedes for prints, for what little good that activity’s probably going to do us.”

“What about the Porsche?”

“The glasses were Charlotte’s. Eve Bowen confi rmed.”

“Does she know where you found them?”

“I didn’t tell her.”

“She may have been right all along. About Luxford. His involvement. His motivations.”

“She may have been. But if she is, we’re dealing with an ability to dissemble that’s roughly on a par with people like Blunt.” Lynley swirled the brandy in his glass before he shot the liquor back. He set the glass on the coffee table and leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. He said, “SO4’s given us a match on the fingerprints. Whoever put his thumb on the inside of that tape recorder also left his print in the squat on George Street.

Once on the edge of the bathroom mirror, a second time on the windowsill. That was good work, Simon. I don’t know when—or even if—we would have got to the squat if you hadn’t brought it to our attention.”

“Thank Helen and Deborah. They ran across it last week. Both of them insisted that I give it a look.”

At this, Lynley studied his hands. Behind him, night’s darkness pressed against the windows, splintered by a streetlamp a few doors away from St. James’s house. Inside the house, the silence between the two men was broken by the sound of music, fl oating down from the top floor where Deborah was working in her darkroom. St. James recognised the song with a slight stirring of discomfort: Eric Clapton’s ode to the son he had lost. He immediately regretted having mentioned Deborah at all.

Lynley raised his head. “What have I done?

Helen told me I dealt her a death blow.”

St. James felt the unintended irony of the words like a subtle bruise on his psyche. But he knew he couldn’t betray his wife’s trust. He said, “She’s sensitive when it comes to children. She still wants them. And the adoption process moves forward roughly like fl ies crossing fl ypaper.”

“She connected what I said about killing children to the difficulty she’s had with her pregnancies, then.”

Lynley’s astute remark was an indication of how well he actually knew Deborah. It was also too close to the truth for St. James’s liking. He spoke past a raw soreness from which he thought he’d recovered at least twelve months in the past. “It’s not as simple as that.”

“I didn’t intend to hurt her. She must know that. I flew off without thinking. But it was because of Helen, not Deborah. May I apologise to her?”

“I’ll tell her what you’ve said.”

Lynley looked as if he would argue the point. But there were lines in their friendship that he wouldn’t cross. This was one of them; both of them knew it. He rose, saying, “My temper got the better of me last evening, Simon. Havers warned me off coming, but I wouldn’t listen. I regret the whole scene.”

“I haven’t been gone from the Met so long that I’ve forgotten what the pressure’s like,”

St. James said. He walked with Lynley to the front door and followed him out into the cool night. The air felt damp against his skin, as if a mist were rising from the Thames a short distance away.

“Hillier’s handling the media,” Lynley said.

“At least that’s not on my back.”

“But who’s handling Hillier?”

They chuckled companionably. Lynley took his car keys from his pocket. “He wanted to go to the media with a suspect this afternoon, a mechanic Havers dug up in Wiltshire who had Charlotte Bowen’s school uniform in his garage. He had nothing else, though, as far as we know.” Contemplatively, he examined the keys in his hand. “It’s too spread out, Simon. From London to Wiltshire and God knows how many points in between. I’d like to settle on Luxford, on Harvie, on someone, but I’m beginning to think more than one person’s behind what’s happened.”

“That was Eve Bowen’s thought.”

“She might well be right, although not the way she assumed.” He told St. James what MP

Alistair Harvie had claimed about Bowen, the IRA, and its potential splinter groups. He ended with, “It’s never been the IRA’s way of working: kidnapping children and taking their lives. I want to reject the idea out of hand. But I can’t, I’m afraid. So we’re checking into backgrounds to see what’s there.”

“The housekeeper’s Irish,” St. James offered. “Damien Chambers as well. The music teacher.”

“The last one to see Charlotte,” Lynley noted.

“He has a Belfast accent, for what it’s worth.

He has more potential than the housekeeper, I think.”

“Why?”

“He had someone with him the night Helen and I went to see him, someone upstairs. He claimed it was a woman and attributed his nerves to first-night trauma: The scene is set for seduction and strangers arrive to question him about the disappearance of one of his music pupils.”

“Not an unreasonable reaction.”

“Quite. But there’s another connection between Chambers and what happened to Charlotte Bowen. I hadn’t really thought about it till you mentioned the IRA.”

“What’s that?”

“The name. In the note Bowen received, Charlotte is referred to as Lottie. But out of all the people I spoke to about the girl, only Damien Chambers and her schoolmates called her Lottie. So I’d check into Chambers if I were you.”

“One more possibility,” Lynley agreed.

He said goodnight and walked to his car.

St. James watched him drive off before he turned and went back into the house.

He found Deborah still in the darkroom on the top f loor, her music now switched off.

She’d completed her developing and the door was open, but he saw that she wasn’t fi nished working despite the hour. She was bent over the work top, studying something with a magnifying glass. One of her old proof sheets, he suspected. It was her habit to gauge her creative growth by constantly comparing where she was at the moment with where she had come from.

Caught up in her study, she didn’t hear him say her name. He entered the darkroom, where he saw over her shoulder why she was so absorbed, and he instantly knew that he couldn’t tell her a second child had been abducted. She wasn’t looking at one of her proof sheets. Rather, she was using the magnifying glass to scrutinise the photograph of Charlotte Bowen’s body that Lynley had dropped in front of her in anger on the previous afternoon.

St. James reached for the magnifying glass.

She started with a cry and dropped the glass on top of the picture.

“You frightened me!”

“Tommy’s come and gone.”

Her eyelids lowered. She restlessly fi ngered the edges of the picture.

“He’s apologised for what he said to you, Deborah. It was the heat of the moment. He didn’t mean it. He would have come up here to talk to you himself, but I thought it was best that I bring you the message. Would you have preferred to see him?”

“What Tommy meant isn’t important. What he said was the truth. I kill children, Simon.

You and I know it. What Tommy doesn’t know is that Charlotte Bowen just wasn’t the fi rst.”

St. James felt the cold weight of his spirit sinking. His mind cried out, Not now, not again. He wanted to disappear from the room and to wait for Deborah to come out of her funk, but because he loved her, he forced himself to call upon patience and reason. “It’s been a long time. How many years will it take for you to forgive yourself?”

“I can’t adhere to a timeline you’ve established for me,” she replied. “Feelings aren’t like scientific formulae. You don’t add remorse to understanding and come out with peace of mind. At least I don’t. What goes on inside people—or at least inside me—isn’t like mixing molecules, Simon.”

“I’m not suggesting that it is.”

“You are. You look at me, you think, Well, it’s been a good number of years since she had the abortion, which according to my calcula-tions should be more than enough time to put it behind her. And you conveniently forget what I’ve been through since then. How many times you and I have tried…have tried and have failed because of me.”

“We’ve had this discussion before, Deborah. It never gets us anywhere. I don’t blame you. I never have done. So why do you insist upon blaming yourself?”

“Because it’s
my
body. Because it’s
my
failure. I own it. It’s mine.”

“And if it were mine?”

“What?” She sounded suddenly wary.

“Would you want me to torture myself with recriminations? Would you want me to see every error I made—every decision gone wrong—as yet another result of my body’s inability to reproduce? Is that even rational thinking?”

He could feel her distance herself from the discussion. Her features grew remote as she shut herself down. She said politely, “There you have the source of our conflict. You want me to think rationally.”

“That’s hardly unreasonable.”

“You don’t want me to feel.”

“What I want,” he said, “is for you to think about what you’re feeling. And you’re avoiding what I asked. So answer the question.”

“Which one?”

“Would you want me to torture myself ?

Because of something that my body can’t do?

Something I myself may have caused but also something that now is completely beyond my control? Would you have me torture myself over that?”

She was silent. Her head lowered and she sighed unevenly. “Of course not. How can I argue with that? Oh, of course not, of course not, Simon. Forgive me.”

“Can we put this at rest, then?”

“We can try. I can try. But this—” She touched the curve of Charlotte’s head in the picture. She drew a deep breath. “Here’s what it is: I asked you to become involved. You wouldn’t have. You didn’t want to. But I asked you and you did it for me.”

He reached past her and took the photograph. He put his arm round her shoulders and drew her out of the darkroom and into the laboratory beyond it. He laid the picture of Charlotte Bowen facedown on the nearest worktable, and when he spoke, it was against Deborah’s hair. “Listen to me, my love. You have complete power over my heart. I’ll never argue with you about that. But I have control over my mind and my will. You may have asked me to look into Charlotte Bowen’s disappearance, but asking alone doesn’t make you responsible. Not when the fi nal decision was mine. Are we clear on that now?”

She turned so that she was easily in his arms. “It’s because of who and what you are,”

she whispered in answer to the question he hadn’t asked. “I want so badly to make a child with you because of who and what you are. If you were a lesser man, I don’t think it would even bother me to fail.”

He tightened his hold on her. He let his heart open and damned all the consequences,

which was the way of love. “Deborah, believe me,” he said in reply. “Making a child is the easiest part of it.”

Dennis Luxford found his wife in the bathroom. The female police constable in the kitchen had said only that Fiona had asked to be left alone before she’d gone upstairs, so the first place Luxford looked for her when he returned from
The Source
office was Leo’s bedroom. But the room was empty. He turned woodenly from the sight of the art book open on Leo’s desk, from the sight of an unfi nished sketch of Giotto’s Virgin cradling the body of her Son. His chest felt as if blood clots were constricting it, and he found he needed to stop in the doorway until he was able to breathe without diffi culty again.

He checked all the other rooms as he came upon them. He called his wife’s name softly because softness seemed to be required, and even if it hadn’t been, that’s all he could manage. He went through the study and the sew-ing room, through the spare rooms and their bedroom. When he found her, she was sitting in the dark on the bathroom fl oor, forehead on her knees and arms covering her head.

Moonlight, laced by the tree leaves outside the bathroom window, created a penumbra on the marble. In this lay the crushed cellophane from a large packet of jam mallows and, on its side, an empty carton for milk. Luxford could smell the rank odour of vomit that was released into the air each time his wife exhaled.

He picked up the empty jam mallows packet and placed it in the rubbish basket along with the milk carton. He saw the still unopened fig rolls at Fiona’s side, and he eased them up from the f loor and placed them in the rubbish, where he covered them with the cellophane from the other biscuits in the hope that she wouldn’t find them later.

He squatted in front of his wife. When she lifted her head, even in the subdued lighting, he could see the sweat on her face.

“Don’t start doing this to yourself again,”

Luxford said to her. “He’ll be home tomorrow. I promise you that.”

Her eyes looked dull. She reached lethargi-cally for the fi g rolls and found them missing.

She said, “I want to know. And I want to know now.”

He’d left without telling her anything. To her agonised cries of What’s happening, where is he, what are you doing, where are you going, he’d shouted only that she needed to control herself, that she needed to calm down, that she needed to let him get back to the newspaper where he could run the story that would bring their son home.

She’d cried, What story? What’s happening?

Where’s Leo? What’s Leo got to do with a story? And she’d grabbed on to him to keep him from leaving her. But he’d wrested himself away and left her anyway, tearing back to Holborn by taxi and cursing the police who’d robbed him of his Porsche which would have made shorter work of the journey than did the lumbering Austin and its cigarette-smoking driver.

He lowered himself to the floor. He searched for a way to tell her about everything that had happened in the past six days as well as about the events of nearly eleven years ago that served as these past six days’ history. He realised that he should just have brought
The
Source
story home for her to read. It would have been simpler than uselessly looking for a way to begin that would soften the impact of what he had to tell her about the lie he’d been living for more than a decade.