In The Presence Of The Enemy (65 page)

James could see how the skin beneath her eyes looked puffy.

He said, “Turning off the alarm was supposed to relieve one source of anxiety. But you’ve others?”

“Oh, just the usual psychic neuritis and neuralgia.” She made the comment airily enough, but he hadn’t known her more than fifteen years for nothing.

He said, “Tommy was here last night, Helen.”

“Was he.” She said it as a statement. She attended to a letter written on vellum. She read through it before looking up and saying with reference to its contents, “A sym-posium in Prague, Simon. Will you accept?

It’s not till December, but the timeline’s short if you want to prepare a paper to deliver.”

“Tommy made his apologies,” St. James said steadily, as if she hadn’t been trying to divert him. “To me, that is. He would have spoken to Deborah as well, but I thought it best to deliver the message.”

“Where is Deborah, by the way?”

“St. Botolph’s Church. She’s doing more pictures.” He watched as Helen walked to the computer, switched it on, and accessed a fi le.

He said, “The Luxford boy’s been taken, Helen. With the same message received from the kidnapper. So that’s been thrown onto Tommy’s plate as well. He’s walking an awfully fine line at the moment. While I realise that doesn’t go far to explain—”

“How can you always—
always—
forgive him so easily?” Helen demanded. “Has Tommy never done anything that’s made you believe it’s time to draw the line on your friendship?”

Hands in her lap, she spoke the words to the computer screen rather than to him.

St. James thought about her questions. They were certainly reasonable enough, given his spotted history with Lynley. One disastrous automobile accident and one previous relationship with St. James’s own wife were on the account books of their friendship. But he’d long ago accepted his own part in both of those situations. And while he was happy about neither of them, he also knew that a continual pawing through his mental and emotional state with regard to the past was largely counterproductive. What had happened, had happened. And that was the end of it.

He said, “He has a rotten job, Helen. It tries the soul more than anything we can imagine.

If you spend enough time examining the underbelly of life, you go in one of two directions: Either you become callous—just another nasty murder to look into—or you become angry. Callous works best because it keeps you functioning. Anger you can’t let get in the way. So you push it aside for as long as you can. But eventually, something comes up and you blow. You say things you don’t mean. You do things you wouldn’t otherwise do.”

She lowered her head. Her thumb smoothed the skin that capped the knuckles of her folded hand. She said, “That’s it. The anger. His anger. It’s always there, just beneath the surface. It’s in everything he does. It has been for years.”

“The anger comes from his work. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“I know that. What I don’t know is whether I can bear to live with it. There it will always be—Tommy’s anger—like an unexpected dinner guest when one hasn’t any food.”

“Do you love him, Helen?”

She gave a short, miserable, unhappy laugh.

“Loving him and being able to spend my life with him are two entirely different things. I’m sure about one, but not the other. And every time I think I’ve put my doubts to rest, something happens and they all begin rumbling again.”

“Marriage isn’t a place for people who want peace of mind,” St. James said.

“Isn’t it?” she asked. “Hasn’t it been? For you?”

“For me? Not at all. It’s been a prolonged exposure to a field of battle.”

“How can you endure it?”

“I hate being bored.”

Helen laughed wearily. Cotter’s heavy footsteps sounded against the stairs. In a moment, he appeared in the doorway, a tray in his hands. “Coffee all round,” he said. “I’ve brought you some biscuits as well, Lady Helen.

You look like you could do with a decent bite o’ chocolate digestive.”

“I could do,” Helen said. She left the computer and met Cotter at the worktable nearest the door. He slid the tray onto its surface, dislodging a photograph that f luttered to the fl oor.

Helen bent for it. She turned it right side up in her hands as Cotter poured their coffee.

She sighed and said, “Oh God. There’s no escaping.” She sounded defeated.

St. James saw what she was holding. It was the photograph of Charlotte Bowen’s drowned body that he’d taken from Deborah the night before, the same photograph that Lynley had thrown down like a gauntlet in the kitchen two days earlier. He should have tossed it away last night, St. James realised. That blasted picture had done quite enough damage.

He said, “Let me have that, Helen.”

She held it, still. “Perhaps he was right,” she said. “Perhaps we
are
responsible. Oh, not in the way he meant. But in a larger way. Because we thought we could make a difference when the truth is that no one makes a difference, anywhere.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do,”

St. James told her. “Give me the picture.”

Cotter took up one of the coffee cups. He disengaged the photograph from Helen’s fi ngers and handed it over to St. James. St. James placed it face down among the pictures he’d been studying earlier. He accepted his own coffee from Cotter and said nothing more until the other man had left them.

Then he said, “Helen, I think you need to decide about Tommy once and for all. But I also think you can’t use Charlotte Bowen as an excuse to avoid what you fear.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“We’re all afraid. But trying to elude the fear that we might make a mistake…” His words died as his thoughts dried up. He’d been in the act of setting his coffee cup on the worktable as he spoke and his eyes had fallen on the photograph he’d just placed there.

Helen said, “What is it? Simon, what’s wrong?” as he felt blindly for his magnifying glass.

By God, he realised, he’d had the knowledge all along. He’d had this photograph in his house for more than twenty-four hours, and thus for more than twenty-four hours the truth had been available to him. He saw this quickly and with dawning horror. But he also saw that he’d failed to recognise the truth because he’d been aware only of Tommy’s offences against them. Had he been less concerned with keeping his reactions under icy control, he might have exploded himself, exhausted his own anger and, anger spent, returned to normal. And then he would have known. He would have seen. He had to believe that because he had to believe that under normal circumstances he would have noticed what was before his eyes right now.

He used the magnifying glass. He studied the shapes. He studied the forms. He told himself again that under different circumstances he would have recognised—he swore it, he believed it, he knew it absolutely—what he should have seen on the picture from the fi rst.

WHEN ALL WAS SAID AND DONE
and she was driving back to the Burbage Road, Barbara Havers decided that giving the inspiration of the moment full sway had been…defi nitely inspired. Over a cup of tea, which she had produced from a samovar that would have done justice to Irina Prozorov’s twentieth birthday, Portly had thoroughly indulged herself in a soul-cleansing gossip that, guided by Barbara’s incisive questions, ultimately touched upon the subject at hand: Dennis Luxford.

Since Portly had held her position at Baverstock School from the dawn of man onwards—or so it seemed by the number of pupils she recalled—Barbara was regaled with countless of the secretary’s favourite tales. Some of the tales were general: everything from a prank involving dried mustard and toilet tissue that was played upon the Board of Governors on Speech Day forty years ago, to the ceremonious dunking of the headmaster into the newly dedicated swimming pool this last Michaelmas term. Some of the tales were specifi c: from Dickie Win-tersby—now fifty years old and a prominent London banker—who had been gated for making indecent advances towards a terrified third-former, to Charlie O’Donnell—

aged forty-two, now a QC
and
a member of the Board of Governors—who’d been caught on the school farm by his housemaster, making even more indecent advances towards a sheep. It didn’t take long for Barbara to discover that Portly’s specific memories tended to home in on the lubricious. She could report on which boy had been called on the carpet for solo masturbation, mutual masturbation, buggery, bestiality, fellatio, and coitus (interruptus or otherwise), and she did so with gusto. Where she got a bit vague was in instances when the boy in question had apparently kept his almond in the shell.

Such was the case with Dennis Luxford, although Portly held forth for a good fi ve minutes on sixteen other boys from Dennis Luxford’s same year who were gated for a full term after being revealed as making regular nookie with a village girl charging two pounds a pop.

No snogging this, Portly declared, but the real thing, out in the old icehouse, with the girl coming up preggers as a result, and if the sergeant would like to see
where
the historic bonking occurred…

Barbara guided her back to the chosen subject, saying, “As to Mr. Luxford…? And actually, I’m more interested in his recent visit, although this other material is really quite interesting and if I only had more time…You know how it is. Duty and everything.”

Portly looked disappointed that her tales of randy teenagers running rampant had failed to please. But she said that
duty
was her watchword—when it wasn’t
salacity—
and she pursed her lips as her mind contended with Dennis Luxford’s recent visit to Baverstock.

It was about his son, she fi nally reported.

He’d come to see the headmaster about getting his son enrolled for Michaelmas term.

The boy was an only child—a rather wilful only child, if Portly wasn’t mistaken—and Mr.

Luxford had thought he would benefi t enormously from an exposure to the rigours and the joys of Baverstock life. So he’d met with the headmaster, and after their meeting the two men had done a tour of the school so that Mr. Luxford could see how it had changed in the years since he had been a pupil.

“A tour?” Barbara felt her fi ngertips tingle with the implications. A good prowl round the grounds, ostensibly in the cause of inspecting the school prior to committing his son to it, might well have been how Luxford had refa-miliarised himself with the local environment.

“What sort of tour?”

He’d seen the classrooms, the dormitories, the dining hall, the gymnasium…. He’d seen everything as far as Portly could recall.

Had he seen the grounds? Barbara wanted to know. The playing fields, the school farm, and beyond?

It seemed to Portly that he had. But she wasn’t certain, and to assist her memory, she took Barbara into the headmaster’s office where an artistically rendered map of Baverstock School for Boys hung on the wall. It was surrounded by dozens of photographs of Bavernians through the decades, and as Portly studied the map as a visual aid to her memory, Barbara studied the pictures. They featured Bavernians in every conceivable situation: in classrooms, in the chapel, serving meals in the dining hall, marching in black academic gowns, giving speeches, swimming, canoeing, biking, rock climbing, sailing, playing sports.

Barbara was skimming over them and wondering how much lolly a family had to lay out to get their little nob into a place like Baverstock when her attention fell on a photo of a small group of hikers, haversacks on their backs and walking sticks in hand. The hikers didn’t interest Barbara as much as where they were posing for their picture. They stood assembled in front of a windmill. And Barbara was willing to lay money on the fact that it was the same windmill in which Charlotte Bowen had been held captive only last week.

She said, “Is this windmill on Baverstock land?” and indicated the picture.

Goodness no, Portly said. That was the old mill near Great Bedwyn. The archaeological society hiked there every year.

Hearing the words
archaeological society
, Barbara flipped through the pages of her notebook, looking for the scribblings she’d made during her telephone conversation with Inspector Lynley. She found them, read through them, and located the information she needed at the bottom of the page: Dennis Luxford’s schooldays as faithfully and meticulously reported by Winston Nkata. As she had suspected,
The Source
editor had been a member of the archaeological society. It was called the Beaker Explorers.

Barbara made her farewells as quickly as possible and shot out to her car. Things were looking up.

She remembered the route to the windmill, and she followed it without further detours.

Crime scene tape marked off the track leading into the mill, and she parked just beyond this tape on a verge thickly grown with drooping wildflowers of purple and white. She ducked under the yellow tape and walked towards the mill. She noted the fact that because of the birches that grew along the road as well as those growing along the path she now walked, the mill was at least partially hidden. And even if that hadn’t been the case, there wasn’t a soul nearby. It was the perfect spot for a kidnapper with a child in tow or for a killer removing that same child’s body.

The mill had been sealed up the previous night, but Barbara did not need to enter it.

She’d remained while the evidence was being collected, marked, and bagged, and the crime scene team’s thoroughness had left her with no doubts about their competence. But darkness had prevented her from observing the windmill as part of a larger landscape, and it was to see this landscape now that Barbara had returned.

She shoved open the old gate and strode out from beneath the birches. Inside the paddock, she realised why the mill had been built on this particular spot. Last night had been calm, but today the breeze was a brisk one. In it, the arms of the old mill creaked. Had the structure still been operational, its sails would have been spinning and its stones grinding wheat.

Daylight exposed the surrounding fi elds.

They fell away from the mill, planted with hay, with maize, and with corn. Aside from the ruined miller’s cottage, the closest habita-tion was some half mile away. And the closest living creatures were sheep who grazed just to the east of the mill behind a wire fence. In the distance, a farmer rumbled his tractor along the edge of a field and a crop duster banked to skim along the green tops of whatever was growing beneath him. But if there had been any witness who could offer testimony to what had happened where Barbara stood—at the windmill—that witness bleated among the sheep.