In The Presence Of The Enemy (66 page)

Barbara walked to their paddock. They munched, indifferent to her presence. She said to them, “Come on, you lot. Cough it up, now.

You saw him, right?” But they continued to munch.

One of the sheep disengaged from the others and came in Barbara’s direction. For a moment she thought absurdly that the animal had actually paid heed to her words and was approaching with communication in mind, until she saw that its destination wasn’t her but rather a low trough near the fence, at which it lapped up water.

Water? She went to investigate. Within a small three-sided shelter of bricks at the far end of the trough, a tap rose out of the ground.

It was pitted from the weather, but when Barbara put on a glove and tried to turn it, there was no resistance from rust or corrosion. The water flowed out, clear and sweet.

She remembered Robin’s words though.

This far from the nearest village, it would likely be well-water. She needed to be sure.

She drove back to the village. The Swan was open for its lunchtime customers and Barbara pulled her Mini to a stop between a mud-encrusted tractor and an enormous antique Humber. When she entered, she was greeted by the usual momentary silence that a stranger encounters when coming into a country pub. But when she nodded at the locals and stopped to pat a Shetland sheepdog on the head, conversation resumed. She approached the bar.

She ordered a lemonade, a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, and a slice of the day’s special: leek and broccoli pie. And when the publican presented her with her meal, she offered her police identification along with the £3.75.

Was he familiar, she asked the publican, with the recent discovery of a child’s body in the Kennet and Avon Canal?

But local gossip had apparently made prefatory remarks unnecessary. The publican replied, “So that’s what all the ruckus was about up on the hill last night.”

He hadn’t actually seen the ruckus himself, he confessed, but old George Tomley—the bloke who owned the farm south of the windmill—had been up with his sciatica torment-ing him till long past midnight. George’d seen all the lights and—sciatica be damned—he’d gone to investigate. He could tell it was police business of some kind, but he’d assumed it was kids again, up to no good.

Hearing this, Barbara knew that there was obviously no need to obfuscate, circumvent, or prevaricate. She told the publican that the mill was the site where the girl had been held before she’d been drowned. And she’d been drowned in tap water. There was a tap on the property. So what Barbara wanted to know was if the water from that tap came from a well.

The publican declared that he hadn’t the first clue about where the mill water came from, but old George Tomley—the same old George Tomley—knew nearly everything about property hereabouts and if the sergeant wanted to talk to him, old George was sitting right by the dart board.

Barbara took her pie, crisps, and lemonade over to George straightaway. He was massaging his bad hip with the knuckles of his right hand while with his left he thumbed through a copy of
Playboy
. In front of him lay the remains of his lunch. He too had ordered the day’s special.

Water? he wanted to know. Whose water?

Barbara explained. George listened. His fingers massaged and his glance drifted down to the magazine and back up to Barbara as if they were making an unfavourable comparison.

But he was forthcoming with the information. Wasn’t no well on any property hereabouts, the old man told her when she’d concluded her explanation. It was all main water, pumped up from the village and stored in a tank that was buried in the fi eld next to the windmill. Highest point of land, that fi eld, he told her, so that water flows out by force of gravity.

“But it’s tap water?” Barbara pressed him.

As ever was, he told her.

Brilliant, Barbara thought. Pieces were clicking into place. She had Luxford in the vicinity recently. She had Luxford at the windmill in his youth. Now she needed to put Charlotte’s school uniform into his hands.

And she had a fairly good idea how to do that.

To Lynley, Cross Keys Close looked like a haunt of Bill Sikes. Twisting into a canyon of buildings off Marylebone Lane, its narrow alleys were completely devoid of human life and virtually untouched by the day’s sunlight.

As Lynley and Nkata entered the area, having left the Bentley parked in Bulstrode Place, Lynley wondered what had ever possessed Eve Bowen to allow her daughter to wander round this vicinity alone. Had she never been here herself? he wondered.

“Place gives me the jumps.” Nkata echoed Lynley’s thoughts with his words. “Why’s a little bird like Charlotte coming round this place?”

“That’s the question of the hour,” Lynley admitted.

“Hell, in winter she’d be walking through here in the dark.” Nkata sounded disgusted.

“And that’s practic’ly an invitation to…” His footsteps faltered, then stopped altogether. He looked at Lynley, who paused three paces ahead of him. “An invitation to trouble,” he concluded thoughtfully. And then went on with, “You think Bowen knew about Chambers, ’Spector?

She could’ve done her own digging right there at the Home Office and come up with the same dirt we got on the bloke. She could’ve sent the bird to him for her lessons and planned everything out herself, knowing we’d twig to his background eventually. And when we did—

which we’ve just done—we’d set our sights on him and forget about her.”

“The scenario plays well,” Lynley said, “but let’s not run before our horse to market, Winston.”

Shakespearean allusions, no matter how apt, were lost on Nkata. He said, “Do what to who?”

“Let’s talk to Chambers. St. James thought he was hiding something on Wednesday night, and St. James’s instincts are generally sound.

So let’s see what it was.”

They hadn’t given Damien Chambers the benefit of knowing they were coming. Nonetheless, he was at home. They could hear the music of an electric keyboard filtering out of his tiny house, and this music ceased abruptly midbar when Lynley rapped with the brass treble-clef door knocker.

A limp curtain at the window f licked as someone within the house checked out the visitors. A moment later, the door opened the wary width of a young man’s pale face. This was thin and framed by wispy chest-length hair.

Lynley showed his identification, saying,

“Mr. Chambers?”

Chambers seemed to make an effort not to look at Lynley’s warrant card. “Yeah.”

“Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. Scotland Yard CID.” Lynley introduced Nkata.

“May we have a word, please?”

He didn’t look happy to do it, but Chambers stepped away from the aperture and swung the door open. “I was working.”

A tape recorder was playing and the mellif-luous and undoubtedly RADA voice of an actor was intoning, “The storm continued unabated into the night. And as she lay in her bed and thought of what they’d once been to each other, she realised that she could no more forget him than could she—”

Chambers silenced the machine. He said in explanation, “Abridged talking books. I’m doing the music bits in between the scenes,”

and he rubbed his hands down the sides of his jeans as if with the intention of wiping sweat from them. He began removing sheet music from the chairs, and he pushed two music stands out of the way. He said, “You can sit if you like,” and he went through a doorway into the kitchen and ran water there. He returned with a glassful. In it, a slice of lemon fl oated.

He set this glass on the edge of his electric keyboard and seated himself behind it as if with the intention of continuing his work. He played a single chord but then dropped his hands to his lap.

“You’re here about Lottie, aren’t you?” he said. “I’ve rather expected it. I didn’t think that bloke last week would be the only one to come round if she didn’t turn up.”

“Did you expect her to turn up?”

“I’d no reason not to. She always liked to make mischief. When they told me she was missing—”

“They?”

“That bloke who came here on Wednesday night. Last week. He had a woman with him.”

“Mr. St. James?”

“I don’t remember his name. They were working for Eve Bowen. They were looking for Lottie.” He took a sip of his water. “When I saw the story in the paper—what happened to Lottie, I mean—I thought someone would come round sooner or later. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” He asked the question casually.

But his expression was moderately anxious, as if he sought reassurance rather than information from them.

Without answering directly, Lynley said,

“What time did Charlotte Bowen leave here on Wednesday?”

“Time?” Chambers looked at his watch. It was fastened to his thin wrist with a strap made from twine. A braided leather bracelet accompanied it. “After five, I’d say. She stayed to chat—

she usually did that—but I sent her on her way not too long past the end of her lesson.”

“Was anyone in the alley when she left?”

“I didn’t see anyone hanging about, if that’s what you mean.”

“So consequently, no one was out there to see her leave.”

Slowly, the musician’s feet drew up under his chair. He said, “What are you getting at?”

“You’ve just said that there was no one in the alley who might have seen Charlotte leaving here at quarter past five. Am I correct?”

“That’s what I said.”

“So it follows that there was also no one in the alley to confirm—or to refute, for that matter—your claim that she ever left your home in the fi rst place.”

His tongue went out and passed over his lips, and when he next spoke, the Belfast in him bled through his words, spoken in haste and with rising concern: “What are you on about, then?”

“Have you met Charlotte’s mother?”

“Of course I’ve met her.”

“So you know she’s a Member of Parliament, don’t you? And a Junior Minister at the Home Office as well?”

“I suppose. But I don’t see what—”

“And with a little effort to discover her views—which wouldn’t be much of an effort at all since you’re one of her constituents—you might have come to understand where she stands on certain controversial issues.”

“I’m not political,” Chambers said in immediate response, but the very stillness of his body—every nerve held in check lest he somehow betray himself—acted to give the lie to his words.

Lynley recognised the fact that his presence alone in Chambers’ house was every Catholic Irishman’s nightmare. The spectres of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four crowded the small room, made already over-full by the ominous proximity of Lynley and Nkata, both English, both Protestant, both well over six feet tall, both in their prime, and one bearing the sort of facial scar that suggested violence had once been part of his life.

And both policemen. Lynley could sense the Irishman’s fear.

He said, “We’ve had a talk with the RUC, Mr. Chambers.”

Chambers said nothing. One of his feet rubbed against the other and his hands crawled up to hide in his armpits, but otherwise he maintained his calm. “That must have been a dead boring conversation.”

“They had you pegged as a lout. Not exactly an IRA chummy, but someone well worth watching. Where do you suppose they got that idea?”

“If you want to know if I’ve sympathised with Sinn Fein, I have,” Chambers said. “But so has half the population of Kilburn, so why don’t you drive round there and roust them out? There isn’t a law against taking a side, is there? And besides, what can it matter now?

Things’re cooled off.”

“Taking a side doesn’t matter. But taking a stand is different. And the RUC have you taking a stand, Mr. Chambers. From right round your tenth birthday onwards. Are you preparing to take more stands, I wonder? Unhappy with the peace process? Think Sinn Fein have sold out, perhaps?”

Chambers rose. Nkata got to his feet as if to intercept him. The black man towered over the musician by at least ten inches. He out-weighed him by a good seven stone. Confronted by him, Chambers said, “Hang on, all right? I only want a drink. Something stronger than water. The bottle’s in the kitchen.”

Nkata looked to Lynley for direction. Lynley indicated the kitchen with a nod. Nkata fetched a glass and a bottle of John Jameson.

Chambers poured himself a shot of the whisky. He drank it down and recapped the bottle. He stood for a moment with his fi ngers on the bottle’s cap, in a position that suggested he was considering his options. Finally, he shoved his long hair back from his face and returned to his seat. Nkata did likewise.

Chambers, apparently now fortifi ed for disclosure, said, “If you’ve talked to the RUC, then you know what I did: what any Catholic kid in Belfast was doing. I threw rocks at British soldiers. I threw bottles. I banged dustbin lids. I set fire to tyres. Yes, the police slapped my hands for that, and they did no different to my mates, all right? But I outgrew causing the soldiers aggro, and I went to university. I studied music. I have no IRA connections.”

“Why teach music here?”

“Why not teach it here?”

“It must seem at times a hostile environment.”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t get out much.”

“When was the last time you were in Belfast?”

“Three years ago. No, four. My sister’s wedding.” He dug a cardboard-framed photograph from a pile of magazines and sheet music that stood on a large stereo speaker. He handed it over.

It was a picture of a large family all gathered round a bride and groom. Lynley counted eight siblings and saw Chambers at their edge, looking ill at ease and slightly apart from the group who, aside from him, were standing arm in arm.

“Four years,” Lynley noted. “A fairly long time. None of your family are in London now?”

“No.”

“And you’ve not seen them?”

“No.”

“That’s curious.” Lynley returned the picture.

“Why? Because we’re Irish, d’you expect us to live in each other’s knickers?”

“Are you at odds with them?”

“I don’t practise the Faith any longer.”

“Why’s that?”

Chambers shoved his hair back behind his ears again. He pressed several keys on the electric keyboard. A dissonant chord sounded.