In The Presence Of The Enemy (7 page)

A key turned the dead bolt of the front door as Helen was speaking. The door opened and shut. The bolt sounded again. Footsteps barked on the tiles and a man stood at the doorway to the sitting room, nearly six feet tall, narrow-shouldered, and spare. He moved his tea-coloured eyes from St. James to Helen, but he didn’t speak at fi rst. He looked tired and his hair the colour of old oak was disarranged boyishly, as if he’d ruffled it with his fingers in order to drive more blood to his head.

He finally spoke. “Hullo. Where’s Eve?”

“Upstairs,” St. James replied. “Fetching a photograph.”

“A photograph?” He looked at Helen, then back to St. James. He appeared to read something in their expressions because his tone altered from friendly indifference to instant wariness. “What’s going on?” He asked the question with an edge of aggression in his voice, which suggested that he was a man used to being answered at once and with deference.

Even Government ministers, it seemed, did not entertain guests at nearly midnight without grave cause. He called sharply towards the stairs, “Eve?” And then to St. James, “Has something happened to someone? Is Eve all right? Has the Prime Minister—”

“Alex.” Eve Bowen spoke, beyond St.

James’s line of vision. He heard her come quickly down the stairs.

Alex said to her, “What’s going on?”

She avoided the question by introducing Helen and St. James, saying, “My husband.

Alexander Stone.”

St. James couldn’t remember ever reading that the Junior Minister was married, but when Eve Bowen introduced her husband, he realised that he must have done and fi led the information somewhere in the dustier part of his memory since it was unlikely he would have entirely forgotten that Alexander Stone was the Junior Minister’s husband. Stone was one of the country’s leading entrepreneurs.

His particular interest was in restaurants, and he owned at least a half dozen upscale establishments from Hammersmith to Holburn.

He was a master chef, a Newcastle boy who’d managed to shed his Geordie accent sometime during the admirable journey he’d made from pastry maker at Brown’s Hotel to fl ourishing restaurateur. Indeed, Stone was the personifi -

cation of the Conservative Party’s ideal: With no social or educational advantages—and certainly no drawing upon government assistance—he’d made a success of himself. He was possibility incarnate and private ownership nonpareil. He was, in short, the perfect husband for a Tory MP.

“Something’s happened,” Eve Bowen explained to him. She put a gentling hand on his arm. “Alex, I’m afraid it’s not very pleasant.”

Again, Stone looked from St. James to Helen. St. James was trying to digest the information that Eve Bowen had not yet made her husband aware of her daughter’s abduction.

Helen, he could see, was doing the same. Both of their faces gave great scope for study, and Alexander Stone took a moment to study them while his own face blanched. “Dad,” he said.

“Is he gone? His heart?”

“It’s not your father. Alex, Charlotte’s gone missing.”

He fixed his eyes on his wife. “Charlotte,”

he repeated blankly. “Charlotte. Charlie.

What?
”

“She’s been kidnapped.”

He looked dazed. “What? When? What’s going—”

“This afternoon. After her music lesson.”

His right hand went to the disheveled hair, dishevelling it further. “Fuck, Eve. What the
hell?
Why didn’t you phone? I’ve been at Couscous since two. You know that. Why haven’t you phoned me?”

“I didn’t know till seven. And things happened too quickly.”

He said to St. James, “You’re the police.”

“No police,” his wife said.

He swung round to her. “Are you out of your mind? What the
hell—
”

“Alex.” The MP’s voice was low and insistent.

“Will you wait in the kitchen? Will you make us some dinner? I’ll be in in a moment to explain.”

“Explain what?” he demanded. “What the fuck is going on? Who are these people? I want some answers, Eve.”

“And you’ll get them.” She touched his arm again. “Please. Let me finish here. Please.”

“Don’t you bloody dismiss me like one of your underlings.”

“Alex, believe me. I’m not. Let me fi nish here.”

Stone pulled away from her. “Bloody
hell
,”

he snarled. He stalked through the sitting room, through the dining room beyond it, through a swinging door that apparently led to the kitchen.

Eve Bowen contemplated the path he’d taken. Behind the swinging door, cupboards opened and slammed shut. Pots cracked against work tops. Water ran. She handed the photograph to St. James. “This is Charlotte.”

“I’ll need her weekly schedule. A list of her friends. Addresses of the places she goes.”

She nodded, although it was clear that her mind was in the kitchen with her husband.

“Of course,” she said. She returned to her chair where she took up a pen and a notebook, her hair falling forward to hide her face.

Helen was the one who asked the question.

“Why didn’t you phone your husband, Ms.

Bowen? When you knew Charlotte was missing, why didn’t you phone?”

Eve Bowen raised her head. She looked quite composed, as if she’d taken the time of crossing the room to wrest control over any emotions that might have betrayed her. “I didn’t want him to be one of Dennis Luxford’s

victims,” she said. “It seemed to me there are enough of them already.”

Alexander Stone worked in a fury. He whisked red wine into the mixture of olive oil, chopped tomatoes, onions, parsley, and garlic.

He lowered the heat beneath the pan and strode from his prized state-of-the-culinary-art cooker to the chopping board where he sent his knife flashing through the caps of a dozen mushrooms. He swept them into a bowl and took them to the cooker. There, a large pot of water was beginning to boil. It was sending steam towards the ceiling in translu-cent plumes, which made him suddenly think of Charlie, with no defence. Ghostbird feathers, she would have called them, dragging her footstool to the cooker and chattering while he worked.

Sweet Jesus, he thought.

He clenched a fist and pounded it hard against his thigh. He felt his eyes burning and he told himself that his contact lenses were reacting to the heat from the cooker and the pungency of the simmering onions and garlic.

Then he called himself a spineless liar and stopped what he was doing and lowered his head. He was breathing like a distance runner, and he tried to be calm. He brought himself face-to-face with the truth: He didn’t yet have the facts, and until he had them, he was pouring precious energy into rage. Which would serve him ill. Which would serve Charlie ill.

Right, he thought. Yes. Good. Let’s be about our business. Let’s wait. Let’s see.

He pushed himself away from the cooker.

He pulled from the freezer a packet of fettuccine. He had it completely unwrapped and ready to drop into the boiling water before he realised that he couldn’t feel its cold on his palm. The realisation made him release the pasta so quickly into the pot that a geyser shot up and spat against his skin. That he could feel, and he took an instinctive leap away from the cooker like a novice in the kitchen.

“God damn,” he whispered. “Fuck it. God damn.”

He walked to the calendar that hung on the wall next to the telephone. He wanted to make sure. There was always a chance that he hadn’t written down his week’s schedule for once, that he hadn’t left the name of the restaurant whose chefs and waiters he’d be overseeing that day, that he hadn’t made sure his whereabouts were available to Mrs. Maguire, to Charlie, to his wife, that he had failed to allow for the odd emergency when his presence would be a desperate necessity…. But there it was in the square marked for Wednesday.

Couscous
. Just as the day before had
Sceptre
written across it. Just as tomorrow had
Demoi-selle
. Which meant that there was no excuse at all. Which meant that he had the facts. Which meant that his rage could rage at will, fi sts crashing through cupboards, glasses and dishes smashing to the floor, cutlery hurled against walls, refrigerator dumped and its contents mashed beneath his feet….

“They’ve left.”

He swung around. Eve had come to the doorway. She removed her glasses and polished them wearily on the black silk lining of her jacket.

“You didn’t have to make anything fresh,” she said with a nod at the cooker. “Mrs. Maguire probably left us something. She would have done. She always does for—” She stopped herself by returning her glasses to her nose.

For Charlotte
. She wouldn’t say the two words because she wouldn’t say her daughter’s name. Saying her daughter’s name would give him an opening before she was ready. And she was a bloody politician who bloody well knew how to keep the upper hand.

As if a meal were not in the midst of cooking in that very room, she went to the refrigerator. Alex watched her bring out the two covered plates that he’d already inspected, carrying them to the work top and unwrapping Mrs. Maguire’s Wednesday night offering of macaroni cheese, mixed veg, and boiled new potatoes dressed with a daring dash of paprika.

“God,” she said, staring down at the lumps of cheddar that pockmarked the agglutinant gobbet of macaroni.

He said, “I leave her something for Charlie every day. All she has to do is warm it, but she won’t. ‘Fancy names for muck’ is what she calls it.”

“And this isn’t muck?” Eve dumped the contents of both plates into the sink. She flipped the switch and let the disposer eat its fill. The water ran and ran and Alex watched her watching it, knowing that she was using the time to prepare herself for the coming conversation. Her head was bowed and her shoulders drooped. Her neck was exposed. It was white and vulnerable and it begged for his pity. But he wasn’t moved.

He crossed to her, switched off the disposer, and turned off the tap. He took her arm to swing her to him. She was rigid to the touch.

He dropped his hand.

“What happened?” he demanded.

“Just what I told you. She disappeared on the way home from her music lesson.”

“Maguire wasn’t with her?”

“Apparently not.”

“God
damn
it, Eve. We’ve been through this before. If she can’t be relied on to—”

“She thought Charlotte was with friends.”

“She thought. She bloody fucking
thought
.”

Again he felt the need to strike. Had the housekeeper been there, he would have gone for her throat. “Why?” he asked sharply. “Just tell me why.”

She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. She turned. She cupped each elbow with her hands. It was a choice of position that cut her off from him more effectively than had she moved to the other side of the room. “Alex, I had to think what to do.”

He felt gratitude for the fact that she at least didn’t try to expound on her previous lie of things happening too quickly, of there being no time.

But it was a meagre gratitude, like a seed that fell onto barren soil. “What exactly is there to think about?” he asked with a deliberate, polite calm.

“It seems a simple four-step problem to me.” He used his thumb and three fingers to tick off each step. “Charlie’s been snatched. You phone me at the restaurant. I fetch you from your offi ce. We go to the police.”

“It’s not as simple as that.”

“You seem to be quagmired somewhere on step one. Is that right?” Her face didn’t change.

It still wore its expression of complete sangfroid, so essential in her line of work, a tranquillity that was quickly obliterating his own.

“God damn it. Is that
right
, Eve?”

“Do you want me to explain?”

“I want you to tell me who the fuck those people were in the sitting room. I want you to tell me why the fuck you haven’t called the police. I want you to explain—and let’s go for ten words or less, Eve—why you didn’t seem to think it important to let me know my own daughter—”

“Stepdaughter, Alex.”

“Jesus Christ. So if I was her father—obviously defined by you as provider of a sodding sperm—I’d have merited a call to let me know that my child had gone missing. Am I getting it right?”

“Not quite. Charlotte’s father already knows. He’s the one who phoned me to tell me she’d been taken. I believe he’s arranged to have her taken himself.”

The pasta water chose this moment to boil over, gushing in a frothing wave down the sides of the pot and onto the burner beneath it. Feeling as if he were slogging hip-deep through porridge, Alex went to the cooker and carried through the motions of stirring, lowering the heat, lifting the pot, setting a dif-fuser into position, while all the time he heard
Charlotte’s father, Charlotte’s father, Charlotte’s
father
roaring round the room. He set his stirring fork on its holder carefully before he turned back to his wife. She was naturally fair-skinned, but in the light of the kitchen she looked deadly pale.

“Charlie’s father,” he said.

“He claims to have received a kidnapping note. I received one as well.” Alex saw her fi ngers tighten on her elbows. The gesture looked to him like a girding of mental or emotional loins. The worst, he realised, was yet to come.

“Keep going,” he said evenly.

“Don’t you want to see to your pasta?”

“I haven’t much of an appetite. Have you?”

She shook her head. But she left him for a moment and returned to the sitting room, during which time he numbly stood stirring his sauce and his pasta and wondering when he’d feel like eating again. She returned with an opened bottle of wine and two glasses. She poured at the bar that extended from the cooker. She slid one of the glasses in his direction.

He realised that she wasn’t going to say it unless he forced her. She would tell him everything else—what had apparently happened to Charlie, at what time of day, and exactly how and with what words she had come to learn about it. But she wouldn’t speak the name unless he insisted. In the seven years he’d known her, in the six years of their marriage, the identity of Charlotte’s father was the one secret she hadn’t revealed. And it hadn’t seemed fair to Alex to press her. Charlie’s father, whoever he was, was part of Eve’s past.