In The Presence Of The Enemy (72 page)

Robin had looked at it and said, “Luxford?”

“Luxford,” Barbara replied. “Our strongest candidate for Public Enemy Number One.”

Robin had studied the picture for a moment before he said, “Right then. I’ll see if anyone recognises him round the boats. What about you?”

She told him she was still on the trail of Charlotte Bowen’s school uniform. “If Dennis Luxford slipped that uniform in among the jumble in Stanton St. Bernard, someone had to have seen him. And that’s what I’m after.”

She’d left Robin fortifying himself with a cup of tea. She’d clambered back into the Mini and headed north. Now she swung round the statue of King Alfred that stood at the cross-roads in Wootton Cross, and she drove past the diminutive police station where she’d fi rst met Robin—thinking, as she drove, Was it only two nights ago? She found Barclay’s Bank in the high street, between Bull in a China Shop (firsts and seconds) and Mr. Parsloe’s Exceedingly Good Cakes (baked fresh daily).

Barclay’s was experiencing a quiet afternoon. The place was noiseless, more like a church than a bank. At the far end, a railing marked the area reserved for the operational bigwigs. In this section, cubicles were set up in front of a row of offi ces. When Barbara asked for “Miss Matheson in New Accounts,”

a red-headed man with unfortunate teeth directed her towards the cubicle nearest to an office marked Manager. Perhaps, Barbara thought, it was her proximity to this greatness from which the parents of “the young Miss Matheson” derived such pride in their offspring’s employment.

Miss Matheson was seated at her desk, her back to Barbara and her face to a computer.

She was rapidly inputting data from a sheaf of papers, using one hand to flip from sheet to sheet and the other to fl y competently among the keys. She had, Barbara noted, an ergodynamically appropriate chair and her posture was a credit to her erstwhile typing instructor.

This wasn’t a woman who was going to suffer from carpal tunnel, wry neck, or curvature of the spine. Looking at her, Barbara straightened her own slouch to a rodlike position that she felt fairly confident of being able to hold for at least thirty seconds.

She said, “Miss Matheson? Scotland Yard CID. Could I have a word?”

As she was speaking, the other woman swiv-elled round in her chair. Barbara’s “Could I have a word?” faded to a mumble, and her admirable posture crumbled like a breeze-hit house of cards. She and “the young Miss Matheson” stared at each other. The latter said, “Barbara?” while Barbara said, “Celia?”

and wondered what it meant that following the trail of Charlotte Bowen’s uniform had taken her in the direction of Robin Payne’s intended bride.

Once they recovered from the confusion of seeing each other in an unexpected place, Celia took Barbara upstairs to the employees’

lounge, saying, “It’s time for my break anyway. I don’t expect you’ve come to open an account, have you?”

The lounge was at the top of a flight of stairs carpeted in a soil-hiding brown. It shared space with a storage room and a unisex lavatory, and it contained two tables and the sort of ergodynamically inappropriate plastic chairs that, in quarter of an hour’s break, probably could undo whatever good might be accomplished by sitting in their antitheses the rest of the day. An electric kettle stood on an orange Formica work top, surrounded by cups and boxes of tea. Celia plugged in the kettle and said over her shoulder, “Typhoo?”

Barbara saw the box of tea before she made a fool of herself and said
Gesundheit
. “Fine,”

she replied.

When the tea was ready, Celia brought two mugs to the table. She used a packet of artifi -

cial sweetener; Barbara went straight for the real poison. They were stirring and sipping in the fashion of two wary wrestlers come to the mat when Barbara divulged the reason for her visit.

She brought Celia up to snuff on the discovery of Charlotte Bowen’s school uniform—

where it had been found, by whom, and among what—and she noted that the young woman’s expression went from guarded to surprised.

She removed the picture of Dennis Luxford from her shoulder bag as she concluded, saying, “So what we’re wondering is whether this bloke looks familiar to you. Do you recognise him as someone you saw at the fête? Or near the church sometime prior to the fête?”

She handed the photo over. Celia set her tea mug on the table and smoothed the picture flat, holding her hands on either side of it. She looked at it closely and shook her head, saying, “Is that a scar on his chin, then?”

Barbara herself hadn’t noticed, but now she looked again. Celia was right. “I’d say so.”

“I would have remembered the scar,” Celia said. “I’m fairly good with faces. It helps with the customers round here if one can call them by name. I generally use a mnemonic device to help me along, and I would have used that scar.”

Barbara didn’t want to know what Celia had used in her own case. But she thought it was best to run her through a memory test. She pulled out a picture of Howard Short that she’d snagged while in the CID offi ce. She asked Celia if she recognised him.

This time the response was positive and immediate. “He came to the jumble stall,” she said, and she added in an appealing show of honesty that no doubt would have pleased her parents, “but I would have known him anyway. It’s Howard Short. His gran comes to our church.” She took a sip of her tea. Barbara noted that she was a silent sipper despite the tea’s heat. Good breeding will out.

“He’s an awfully sweet boy,” Celia noted, and passed the picture back to Barbara. “I hope he hasn’t got himself into trouble.”

Barbara thought that Celia couldn’t be much older than Howard Short, so designat-ing him “an awfully sweet boy” seemed a little condescending. Nonetheless, she said, “He seems clean at the moment although he’s the one who had the Bowen girl’s uniform.”

“Howard?” Celia sounded incredulous.

“Oh, he can’t have anything to do with her death.”

“That’s what he claims. He says the uniform was just mixed up with the rags in a bag he bought from your stall.”

Celia confirmed Howard’s story about having bought the rags from her, but she also confirmed her mother’s story about how the rags came to be rags in the first place. She went on to describe the jumble stall itself: One portion held racks of hanger-hung clothing, another held tables of folded goods, another held a display of shoes—“We never do sell many of those,” she admitted—and the plastic rag bags were in a large box in the stall’s far corner. They didn’t need to be under anyone’s watchful eye because they were, after all, just bags of rags. There was no great monetary loss to the church if one was pinched, although it was distressing to think that someone had used a well-meaning event like the yearly Stanton St. Bernard fête to dispose of something linked to a murder.

“So someone could have placed the uniform in a bag without being noticed by someone else at the till?” Barbara asked.

Celia had to admit that it was possible.

Unlikely but possible. The jumble stall was, after all, a popular feature of the yearly fête.

Mrs. Ashley Havercombe of Wyman Hall near Bradford-on-Avon generally donated heavily of her personal garments, and there was always a frenzy to get to those in the earliest hours of the day, so during that time…Yes, it was possible.

“But you didn’t see this man? You’re certain?”

Celia was certain. But she hadn’t manned the jumble stall all day, so Barbara would do well to show her mother that picture. “She’s not as good with faces as I am,” Celia said,

“but she likes to chat with people, so if he was there, she may have had a few words with him.”

Barbara doubted that Luxford would have been so simple-minded as to cache his daughter’s uniform among the rags and then underscore his presence by having a chat with the vicar’s wife. Nonetheless, she said, “I’m heading back to Stanton St. Bernard from here.”

“Not going to Lark’s Haven, then?” Celia offered the question in a casual manner as she used her well-shaped thumbnail to trace a decoration on her mug. Barbara looked at the mug and observed the decoration: a fat pink heart with
Happy Valentine’s Day
written above it. Idly, she wondered if it had been a gift.

She said, “At the moment? No. Too much work left to do,” and she pushed her chair back from the table and made a movement to return the pictures to her bag.

Celia said, “I wondered about everything at first—none of this is really like him, actually—but I worked it all out last night.”

Barbara said, “Pardon?” and sat there dumbly with one hand suspended and the pictures dangling from them like an offering gone rejected.

Celia made an unnecessarily scrupulous study of the centre of the table where a dog-eared stack of newsletters bore the title
Barclay’s Beat
in fuchsia lettering. She took a deep breath and said with a faint smile, “When he came back from the course this last week, I couldn’t understand what had happened to change things between us. Six weeks ago we were everything to each other. Then all of a sudden we were nothing.”

Barbara tried to make the cognitive leap into comprehension.
He
would be Robin.

Things
would be their relationship.
The course
would be Robin’s time in a CID Detectives Course. She got that much, but Celia’s prefatory statement about working it all out left her in the dark. So she said, “Hey, listen. CID’s a tough go. This is Robin’s first case, so he’s bound to be a little preoccupied because he wants to make a success of the investigation.

You shouldn’t take it to heart if he seems a little distant. That goes with the job.”

But Celia maintained her own line of thought. “At first I thought it was because of Corrine’s engagement to Sam. I thought, He’s uneasy because he’s worried that his mother hasn’t known Sam as long as she ought to know a man before agreeing to marry him.

Robbie’s conservative that way. And he’s awfully attached to his mother. They’ve always lived together. But even that didn’t seem enough of a reason to make him unwilling to…well, to
be
with me. If you know what I mean.” She gave Barbara her attention then.

She watched her steadily. She seemed to be waiting for some sort of answer to an unspoken question.

Barbara felt entirely unequipped to make a response. The toll paid for their choice of careers by her CID colleagues at the Yard was a heavy one, and she didn’t think it would much soothe the other woman to learn of the trail of broken marriages and aborted relationships that her fellow officers left behind them.

So she said, “He has to get comfortable in the job. He has to find his sea legs, if you know what I mean.”

“Sea legs aren’t what he’s found. I saw that when I saw you together last night at Lark’s Haven. He didn’t expect to find me waiting for him. And when he saw me, I didn’t even register on his brain. That just about says it, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Says what?”

“He met you at that course, Barbara. The detective course. And that’s where things started.”

“Things? Started?” Barbara felt incredulity spreading through her. It pricked at her brain as she finally understood what Celia was suggesting. “You’ve been thinking that Robin and
I…
” The idea was so ludicrous that she couldn’t even complete the sentence. She stumbled on with, “The two of us? Him? With me? Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I know.”

Barbara fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes. She felt a little dazed. It was hard to believe that this young woman with her fashionable haircut and her fashionable clothes and her slightly plump but undeniably
pretty
face could look upon her as competition. Her, Barbara Havers, with her unplucked eyebrows, her rat’s nest of hair, her baggy brown trousers and overlarge pullover both worn to camouflage a body so dumpy that the last man who’d looked on her with desire had done so in another decade and under the infl uence of so much alcohol that—Bloody hell, Barbara thought. Sodding wonders will never cease.

She said, “Celia, put your mind at rest.

There’s nothing going on between me and Robin. I just met him two nights ago. As a matter of fact, I tossed him to the ground and stamped on his hand in the bargain.” She grinned. “You know, what you see as desire is probably only Robin considering how best to take revenge when he gets the chance.”

Celia didn’t join her in the jollity. She stood and took her cup to the work top where she ran water into it and placed it carefully among the others stacked helter-skelter into a dish drainer. She said, “That doesn’t change anything.”

“What doesn’t change anything?”

“When you met him. Or how. Or even why.

I know Robin, you see. I can read his face.

Things are over between us, and you’re the reason.” She wiped her fingers on a kitchen towel, then brushed her hands together as if to rid them of dust, of Barbara, and most par-

ticularly of this encounter. She offered Barbara a formal smile. “Is there anything else you need to speak with me about?” she asked in a voice that she doubtless used with bank-ing customers whom she completely loathed.

Barbara stood as well. “I don’t think so,”

she said. And she added as Celia moved towards the door, “You aren’t right, you know.

Really. There’s nothing going on.”

“Not yet, perhaps,” Celia said and descended the stairs.

The black officer with the hybrid accent wasn’t available to drive her home, so Lynley arranged for an unmarked police car to fetch Eve Bowen from the underground car park and whip her up the ramp onto Broadway. Eve had thought that the change in vehicles—from the ostentatious silver Bentley to this unas-suming and less-than-spotless beige Golf—

would put the news-hounds off her scent. But she was wrong. Her driver made some evasive manoeuvres round Tothill, Dartmouth, and Old Queen Streets, but he was dealing with experts in the field of pursuit. While he shook off two cars whose drivers made the mistake of assuming his destination was the Home Office, a third car picked them up fl ying north along St. James’s Park. This driver was speaking into a car phone, which did much to guarantee there would be others on Eve Bowen’s tail before she got anywhere near Marylebone.