In The Presence Of The Enemy (58 page)

He said, “Fiona, I made a woman pregnant at a political conference eleven years ago.

That child—a girl called Charlotte Bowen—

was kidnapped last Wednesday. The kidnapper wanted me to admit to having fathered her and to admit it on the front page of the newspaper. I didn’t. She was found dead on Sunday night. That same man—whoever took Charlotte—has Leo now. He wants the story in the paper. So I’m running it tomorrow.”

Fiona parted her lips to speak but said nothing. Then slowly her eyes closed and she turned her head away.

He said, “Fi, it’s something that just happened between me and the woman. We weren’t in love, it didn’t really mean anything, but there was a spark between us and we didn’t turn away from it.”

“Please,” she said.

“You and I weren’t married,” he said, anxious to make everything clear to her. “We knew each other, but we weren’t involved.

You’d said you weren’t ready for that. Do you remember?”

She brought her hand up and balled it between her breasts.

“It was sex, Fiona. That’s all it was between us. It was simply sex. Mindless. Without affection. Something that happened and then was forgotten by both of us.” He was saying too much, but he couldn’t seem to stop. He needed to find the right words so that when hearing them, she would be compelled to answer and to give him a sign that she understood or at least forgave. He said, “We were nothing to each other. We were bodies in a bed. We were…I don’t know. We just
were
.”

She brought her face back to his in a torpid movement. She searched his features as if reading them for the truth. She said in a toneless voice, “Did you know about the child?

Did this woman tell you? Have you known all along?”

He thought about lying. He couldn’t bring himself to do so. “She told me.”

“When?”

“I’ve known about Charlotte from the fi rst.”

“From the first.” She whispered the phrase as if mulling it over. She said it once more.

Then she reached above her head, where a thick green towel hung from a rail. She pulled the towel down and stuffed it into a ball in her arms. She began to weep.

Wretchedly, Luxford reached out to hold her. She shrank away. He said, “I’m sorry.”

“This has all been a lie.”

“What has?”

“Our life. Who we are to each other.”

“That’s not true.”

“I’ve held nothing back from you. But that hasn’t meant anything because all the time you…Who you really were…I want my son,”

she cried. “Now. I want Leo. I want my son.”

“I’ll have him here tomorrow. I swear it to you, Fi. On my life, I
swear
it.”

“You can’t,” she wept. “You haven’t the power. He’s going to do what he did to the other.”

“He isn’t. Leo will be all right. I’m doing what he’s asked. I didn’t do that for Charlotte, but I’m doing it now.”

“But she’s dead. She’s
dead
. He’s a murderer now as well as a kidnapper. So how can you think that with murder hanging over his head, he’ll actually let Leo—”

He grabbed her arms. “Listen to me. Whoever’s got Leo has no reason to harm him because he has no quarrel with me. What’s happened has happened because someone wanted to destroy Charlotte’s mother and discovered a way to do it. She’s in the Government. She’s a Junior Minister. Someone’s looked into her background and found out about me. The scandal—who I am, who she is, what occurred between us, how she’s mis-represented it all these years—the scandal will finish her. And that’s what this has been all about: finishing off Eve Bowen. She was willing to risk maintaining her silence when Charlotte went missing. She convinced me to do the same. But I’m not willing to do it now that someone’s got Leo. So the situation’s different. And Leo will not be harmed.”

She had the towel at her mouth. She watched him over it. Huge eyes, frightened. She looked like a trapped animal, facing its death.

He said, “Fiona, trust me. I’ll die before anyone hurts my own child.”

He heard what he’d said before the silence even had a chance to sweep in after his words.

He could see from her face that she’d heard it as well. He dropped his grip on her arms. He felt his own statement—and its implicit damnation of his behaviour—crush him.

He said what he knew his wife was thinking. Better for him to put it into words than to have to hear it from her. “She was my child as well. I did nothing. And she was my child.”

Sudden anguish welled up in him. It was the same anguish he’d held in check since seeing the news and fearing the worst on Sunday night. But it was amplified now by the guilt of having abdicated his responsibility towards a life he’d been a party to creating, and it was deepened by the knowledge that his inaction over the past six days had now provoked the abduction of his son. He turned away from his wife, unable to face her expression any longer.

“God forgive me,” he said. “What have I done?”

They sat in the darkness together. They were inches from each other but they did not touch, one of them not daring, the other not willing. Luxford knew what his wife was thinking: Flesh of his f lesh, Charlotte had been his child as much as Leo was, and he had not rushed—mindless of the consequences—

to save her. What he didn’t know was the conclusion she’d reached about what his inaction said of him as a man to whom she was tied by ten years of marriage. He wanted to weep, but he’d long ago lost the ability to depurate himself through the means of emotion. One couldn’t walk the path he’d chosen so many years ago upon coming to London and still remain a sentient creature. If he hadn’t known that before, he knew now that it was an impos-sibility. He’d never been so lost.

“I can’t say it’s not your fault,” Fiona whispered. “I want to, Dennis, but I can’t.”

“I don’t expect it. I could have done something. I let myself be led. It was easier because if everything worked out, you and Leo would have never learned the truth. Which is what I wanted.”

“Leo.” Fiona said his name haltingly. “Leo would have liked to have a big sister. Very much, I think. And I…I could have forgiven you anything.”

“Except the lie.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I can’t think about it now. I can think only of Leo. What he’s going through, how frightened he must be, how alone and worried. I can think only of that. And of the fact that it may already be too late.”

“I’m going to get Leo back,” Luxford said.

“He isn’t going to harm him. He won’t get

what he wants if he does. And he’s getting what he wants tomorrow morning.”

Fiona went on as if her husband hadn’t spoken. “What I’ve been wondering is how it could have happened at all. The school’s not far, not even a mile from here. All the way, the streets are safe. There’s nowhere to hide. If someone grabbed him off the pavement, someone else had to see it. Even if someone lured him into the cemetery, someone else would have noticed. And if we can find that person—”

“The police are looking.”

“—then we’ll also find Leo. But if no one saw…” She stumbled on the word.

“Don’t do this,” Luxford said.

She went on regardless. “If no one saw anything out of the ordinary, then don’t you see what it has to mean?”

“What?”

“It means that whoever took Leo was someone Leo knows. He wouldn’t willingly walk off with a stranger, Dennis.”

Rodney Aronson gave an indifferent wave to Mitch Corsico as he came into the winebar in Holborn Street. The reporter nodded in acknowledgement, paused to have a word with two competitors from the
Globe
, and strode through the haze of cigarette smoke with the confidence of a man who knows he’s onto the story of his life. His cowboy boots fairly sang against the roughhewn floor. His face glowed.

He looked, in fact, as if he could levitate altogether. Fool that he was.

“Thanks for meeting me, Rod.” Corsico removed his hat and swung a chair back from the table. He lifted one leg across the seat cowboy fashion.

Rodney nodded. He speared another hoop of calamari and he washed it down with a swill of Chianti. He was hoping to get a decent buzz from the plonk, but so far it had settled sloshily into his stomach without doing a thing to tingle his head.

Corsico perused the menu and fl ipped it aside. He tossed a trendy “double cap, no cinnamon, chocolate biscotti” to a passing waiter and dug out his notebook. He gave a caution-ary glance towards the
Globe
reporters he’d spoken to on the way in, and he followed it with another glance round at the closer tables to scope out potential eavesdroppers. Three overweight women with the sort of unattractive haircuts Rodney always associated with radical feminists and aggressive bull dykes were at the table closest to theirs, and from what they were saying about “the fooking movement” and “those cock-sucking pigs,”

Rodney felt total confidence in the fact that they wouldn’t be the least interested in whatever information Corsico had insisted upon laying out for him at a safe but neutral location. But he allowed the young reporter his moment of intrigue and said nothing as Corsico hunched forward over both notebook and table, protecting his information by curving his shoulders round it.

“Shit, Rod,” he said. Rodney noticed that he spoke from the side of his mouth: Alec Guinness in surreptitious public conversation with a valuable spook. “I’ve got it, and it’s hot.

You aren’t going to believe it.”

Rodney forked up another calamari hoop.

He added some red pepper flakes to heat up the already spicy sauce. The wine wasn’t getting to his head as he wished, so perhaps the pepper would at least get to his sinuses. “What is it?”

“I started out with that Tory conference, the one in Blackpool. Okay?”

“I follow.”

“I dug into the
Telegraph
stories about it.

The ones she filed before, the ones during, the ones after. Okay?”

“Haven’t we trodden this ground before, Mitch?” After what he’d discovered in the past two hours, the thought that Corsico would be insisting upon a clandestine meeting for nothing more important than a rehash of what he already knew was more than discomposing to Rodney. It was head-bashing. He chewed with vigour.

“Wait,” Corsico said. “I compared those stories to the conference itself. And then to what was happening in the lives of the story subjects before, during, and after the conference.”

“And?”

Corsico snatched his notes from the table as the waiter appeared with his double cappuccino and his chocolate biscotti. The drink was served in a cup the approximate size of a wash basin. The waiter said, “Cheers,” and Corsico sank what looked like a tongue depressor covered in knobs of plastic into the liquid.

“Sugar,” he explained to Rodney’s querying look. He dunked the stick up and down like a toilet plunger. “It melts off in the espresso.”

“Super,” Rodney said.

Corsico used both hands to raise the cappuccino to his mouth. He gave himself a froth moustache, which he wiped off on the sleeve of his plaid shirt. He was a noisy drinker, Rodney noted with a shudder. There was nothing more unappetising than listening to someone slurp while one was attempting to eat.

“She filed stories from that conference like she was covering the scoop of the century,”

Corsico continued. “It was like she was afraid that someone was going to pull her off her expense account if she couldn’t justify the whoop-de-do she was having in Blackpool.

She did one to three pieces each day. Shit.

Can you believe that? And some real boring stuff it was. It took me an age to read them then to compare them to anything that looked interesting in the lives of the major players.

But I managed it.” He flipped open his notebook and then inserted the chocolate biscotti cigar-like between his molars. He chomped.

Crumbs spewed forth.

Rodney brushed one from the side of his bowl. He said, “And?”

“The Prime Minister,” Corsico said. “Of course he wasn’t PM then, but that makes the situation even seamier, doesn’t it? It gives him something rather significant to hide in the here-and-now.”

“How did you put this together?” Rodney asked curiously, always intrigued by the intricate workings of the human imagination.

“With some heavy legwork, let me tell you.”

Corsico slurped more cappuccino and referred to his notes. “Two weeks after that conference in Blackpool, the PM and his wife separated.”

“They did?”

Corsico grinned. A piece of chocolate was wedged between two of his teeth. “Didn’t know that, I expect, did you? That separation lasted nine months and, as we know, didn’t end in divorce. But I thought the nine months was an interesting time frame—all things considered—wouldn’t you agree?”

“Nine months rings all sorts of bells for me,” Rodney said. He finished off his calamari and poured himself a final glass of wine.

“Perhaps you’d like to tell me what the bell-ringing heralds.”

“Just wait till you hear.” Corsico settled his buttocks happily into his chair. “I spoke to fi ve different maids who worked at the hotel where the conference was held. Three of them still work there. Two of those three confi rmed that the PM had a woman with him—just for the evenings, mind you, it was nothing offi cial—

and the woman wasn’t his wife. Now, what I propose to do tomorrow is to take some pictures of Bowen up to Blackpool and see if I can get confirmation from one of the maids that she was the PM’s dollybird. If either of them will confi rm—”

“What did you offer them?”

Corsico looked blank for a moment and chewed noisily as he thought about the question.

“Are we paying them for the story or just giving them their fifteen minutes somewhere inside
The Source?
”

“Hey, Rod,” Corsico protested. “If they’re going to go on record, they’re going to want to be recompensed for the stress. That’s how we’ve always played it. Right?”

Rodney sighed. “Wrong.” He blotted his mouth with his napkin and crumpled it on the table. As Corsico watched in confusion—

clearly incapable of comprehending this sudden change in the publishing philosophy of his own newspaper—Rodney reached into one of the capacious pockets of his khaki jacket and produced tomorrow’s paper with its redesigned front page, which had come to his attention due to a phone call from one of the news editors, a man whose loyalty Rodney had managed to cull through years of keeping silent about his wee-hours life in one of the seedier fleshpits of Soho. He tossed it in front of the reporter and said, “You might want to have a look at that. It’s hot, as they say, off the bloody presses.”