In The Presence Of The Enemy (74 page)

His lips parted as he took a breath. He looked at her but not with anything that resembled recognition. It was as if he’d retreated to another world in which the inhabitants were altogether different from the woman who shared the office with him at this moment.

“Listen to yourself,” he said in an exhausted murmur. “Fuck it, Eve. Just listen for once.”

“To what?”

“To who you are.”

His tone wasn’t cold and it wasn’t defeated.

But it was resigned in a way she’d never heard before. He was speaking like a man who’d drawn a conclusion, but whether she comprehended that conclusion appeared to be a matter of indifference to him. She crossed her arms and cradled her elbows. She pressed her fingernails into her skin. She said, “I know damn well who I am. I’m the current fodder for every paper in this country. I’m the object of universal derision. I’m yet another victim of a journalistic frenzy to mould public opinion and effect a change in the Government. But I’m also your wife, and as your wife I want some straight answers.

After six years of marriage, you owe me something more than psychospeak, Alex.

‘Just listen to who you are’ isn’t exactly suffi -

cient grounds for anything other than an escalating row. Which is what this is going to turn into if you don’t explain yourself. Am I being clear?”

“You’ve always been clear,” her husband replied. “I was the one in a fugue. I didn’t see what was in front of my face because I didn’t want to see it.”

“You’re talking absolute nonsense.”

“To you, yes. I can see that it would be.

Before this last week, I would have thought it nonsense myself. Rubbish. Rot. Complete bullshit. Whatever you will. But then Charlie disappeared, and I had to look at our life straight on. And the more I looked at it, the more offensive our life became.”

Eve stiffened. The distance between them seemed comprised not only of space but of ice.

She said, “And what exactly did you expect our life to be like with Charlotte kidnapped?

With Charlotte murdered? With her birth and her death made a source of titillation across the country?”

“I expected you to be different. I expected too much.”

“Oh, did you? And what is it that you expected of me, Alex? A hairshirt? Ashes smeared on my face? My clothing ripped? My hair hacked off? Some sort of ritual expression of grief that you could approve of? Is that what you wanted?”

He shook his head. “I wanted you to be a mother,” he said. “But I saw that all you ever really were was someone who’d mistakenly given birth to a child.”

She felt anger grasp her in its hot, violent fist. She said, “How
dare
you suggest—”

“What happened to Charlie—” He stopped.

The rims of his eyes became red. He cleared his throat roughly. “What happened to Charlie was really all about you from the fi rst. Even now, with her dead, it’s all about you. Luxford’s running that story in the paper was all about you as well. And this—me, my decision, what I’ve done—that’s nothing more than something about you, another dent in your political aspirations, something to explain away to the press. You live in a world where how things look has always taken precedence over how things are. I was simply too stupid to realise that until Charlie was murdered.” He reached for the doorknob.

She said, “Alex, if you walk out on me now…” But she didn’t know how to complete the threat.

He turned back to her. “I’m sure there’s a euphemism—perhaps even a metaphor—that you can give the press to explain what’s happened between us. Call it what you will. It makes no difference to me. Just so long as you call it over.”

He swung the door open. The sounds from the restaurant’s kitchen rose round him. He began to leave the offi ce, then hesitated, looking back at her. She thought he was going to say something about their history, their life together, their now abortive future as husband and wife. But instead he said, “I think the worst was wanting you to be capable of love, and through that wanting, believing you were.”

“Are you going to talk to the press?” she asked him.

His answering smile was wintry. “My God, Eve,” he said. “Jesus. My God.”

LUXFORD FOUND HER
in Leo’s bedroom. She was sorting through his drawings and placing them into neat piles by topic. Here were his meticulous copies of Giotto’s angels, Madonnas, and saints. There were quick line sketches of frail ballerinas and top-hatted dancers. Next to them sat a small stack of animals, mostly squirrels and dormice. And all by itself in the centre of the desk lay a drawing of a small boy sitting dejectedly on a three-legged stool, behind the bars of a prison cell.

This last looked like an illustration from a children’s book. Luxford wondered if his son had copied it from Dickens.

Fiona appeared to be studying this last picture. She was holding the top of a pair of Leo’s plaid pyjamas to her cheek. She rocked gently in the chair, a barely perceptible movement with her face pressed against the worn fl annel.

Luxford couldn’t conceive how she would be able to endure the newest blow he’d come to deal her. He’d wrestled with his past and with his conscience all the way from Westminster to Highgate. But he’d managed to fi nd no easy way to tell her what the kidnapper was requiring of him now. Because the full horror was that he didn’t have the information that was being demanded of him. And he hadn’t been able to create a single way to tell his wife that their son’s life sat in the pan of a balance into whose other pan Luxford could place nothing.

“There were calls,” Fiona said quietly. She didn’t look away from the drawing.

Luxford felt a surge in his guts. “Did he—”

“Not from the kidnapper.” She sounded empty, as if every emotion had been wrung out of her. “Peter Ogilvie first. He wanted to know why you held back the story on Leo.”

“Good God,” Luxford whispered. “Who’s he been talking to?”

“He said you’re to phone him at once. He said you’re forgetting your obligations to the paper. He said you’re the key to the biggest story of the year, and if you’re holding back on your own newspaper, he wants to know why.”

“Oh God, Fi. I’m sorry.”

“Rodney phoned as well. He wants to know what you want on tomorrow’s front page. And Miss Wallace wants to know if she should allow Rodney to continue using your offi ce for the news meetings. I didn’t know what to tell any of them. I said you’d phone when you could.”

“Sod them.”

She rocked gently, as if she’d managed to divorce herself from what was going on. Luxford bent to her. He touched his mouth to the honey-coloured hair at her crown. She said,

“I’m so afraid for him. I imagine him alone.

Cold. Hungry. Trying to be brave and all the time wondering what’s happened and why. I remember reading once about a kidnapping where the victim was put in a coffi n and buried alive, with an air supply. And there was only so much time to find her before she suffocated. And I’m so frightened that Leo’s been…that someone may have hurt him.”

“Don’t,” Luxford said.

“He won’t understand what’s happened.

And I want to do something to help him understand. I feel so useless. Sitting here, waiting. Not being able to do a thing while all the time someone out there holds my whole world hostage. I can’t bear thinking of his terror. And I can’t think of anything else.”

Luxford knelt by her chair. He couldn’t bring himself to say what he’d been saying to her for more than twenty-four hours: We’re going to get him back, Fiona. Because for the very first time, he wasn’t sure: of Leo’s safety or of anything else. He felt he was walking on ice so brittle that one precipitate step would destroy them all.

Fiona stirred, turned in her chair to face him. She touched the side of his head and dropped her hand to his shoulder. “I know you’re suffering as well. I’ve known that from the first, but I didn’t want to see it because I was looking for someone to blame. And you were there.”

“I deserve the blame. If it hadn’t been for me, none of this would have happened.”

“You did something unwise eleven years ago, Dennis. But you aren’t to blame for what’s happened now. You’re a victim as much as Leo is. As much as Charlotte and her mother were victims. I know that.”

The generosity of her forgiveness felt like a claw tightening round his heart. Guts roiling, he said, “I must tell you something.”

Fiona’s grave eyes watched him. “What was missing from the story in this morning’s paper,” she concluded. “Eve Bowen knew. Tell me. It’s all right.”

It wasn’t all right. It could never be all right.

She’d spoken about looking for someone to blame and until this afternoon he’d been doing the same thing. Only in his case he’d been blaming Evelyn, using her paranoia, her odium, and her gross stupidity as reasons why Charlotte was dead and Leo was hostage. But now he knew where true responsibility lay.

And sharing that knowledge with his wife was going to shatter her.

She said, “Dennis, tell me.”

He did. He began with what little Eve Bowen had been able to contribute to the story in the newspaper, he continued with Inspector Lynley’s interpretation of the phrase
your
fi rstborn child
, and he concluded with a verbal-isation of what he’d been contemplating ever since leaving New Scotland Yard. “Fiona, I don’t know this third child. I never knew of its existence before now. As God is my witness, I don’t know who it is.”

She looked dazed. “But how can you possibly not know…?” As she realised what his ignorance implied, she turned away from him.

“Were there so many of them, Dennis?”

Luxford sought a way to explain who he had been in the years before they’d met, what had driven him, what demons had trailed him. He said, “Before I knew you, Fiona, sex was something I just did.”

“Like brushing your teeth?”

“It was something I needed, something I used to prove to myself…” He gestured aimlessly. “I don’t really know what.”

“You don’t? You don’t really know? Or you don’t want to say?”

“All right,” he said. “Manhood. An attraction to women. Because I was always afraid if I didn’t keep proving to myself how deadly attractive I was to women…” He looked back, as she did, to Leo’s desk, to the drawings, their delicacy, their sensitivity, their heart.

They represented the fear he’d lived his life in avoidance of facing. Finally, it was his wife who gave it voice.

“You’d have to deal with having been so deadly attractive to men.”

“Yes,” he said. “That. I thought there must be something wrong with me. I thought I was somehow giving off something: an aura, a scent, an unspoken invitation….”

“Like Leo.”

“Like Leo.”

She reached forward then for the picture of the little boy that their son had drawn. She held it up so that the light caught it directly.

She said, “This is how Leo feels.”

“We’ll get him back. I’ll write the story. I’ll confess. I’ll say anything. I’ll name every woman I’ve known and beg each one to step forward if—”

“Not how he feels right now, Dennis. I mean this is how Leo feels all the time.”

Luxford took the picture. Holding it closer, he could see the boy was meant to be Leo.

The white hair identified him, as did the too-long legs and the fragile ankles, exposed because the trousers were outgrown and the socks were rucked. And he’d seen that defeated posture before, only last week in the restaurant in Pond Square. A closer inspection of the sketch showed him that another fi gure had been in it initially. Erased now, the faint outline remained, enough to see the paisley braces, the crisp shirt, and the etching of a scar across the chin. This figure was overly large—

inhumanly large—and it loomed over the child like a manifestation of his future doom.

Luxford crumpled the picture. He felt beat-en down. “God forgive me. Have I been that hard on him?”

“As hard as you’ve been on yourself.”

He thought of his son: how watchful he was in his father’s presence, how careful not to make a mistake. He recalled the times the boy tried to accommodate his father by toughening his walk, roughing up his voice, avoiding the words that might brand him a sissy. But the real Leo always bled through the persona he worked so hard to produce: sensitive, easily given to tears, open-hearted, eager to create and to love.

For the first time since, as a schoolboy, he’d accepted the importance of masking emotion and soldiering on, Luxford felt anguish ballooning dangerously in his chest. But he shed

no tears. “I wanted him to be a man,” he said.

“I know that, Dennis,” Fiona replied. “But how could he be? He can’t be a man until he’s allowed to be a little boy.”

Barbara Havers felt deflated when she saw that Robin’s car wasn’t in the drive of Lark’s Haven upon her return from Stanton St. Bernard. She hadn’t consciously thought about seeing him since her odd conversation with Celia—Celia’s conclusion about the nature of their relationship being too stupid to dignify by considering it—but when she saw the vacant spot where he usually left his Escort, she breathed out, “Oh hell,” and realised that she’d been counting on talking the case through with a colleague, much in the way she talked through cases with Inspector Lynley.

She’d been back to the rectory in Stanton St. Bernard where she’d shown the photograph of Dennis Luxford to Mr. Matheson and his wife. They’d stood with it under the light in their kitchen—each holding a side of it—and one saying to the other, “What do you think, pet? Is he someone familiar?” and the other answering, “Oh my dear, my memory’s a useless old thing,” and both of them tentatively concluding that this was a face they hadn’t seen. Mrs. Matheson said she would have probably remembered the hair, noting with a sheepish little smile that she always

“did like a young man with a lovely head of hair.” Mr. Matheson, whose hair was rather sparse, said that unless he’d engaged in some sort of liturgical, personal, or religious dialogue with an individual, he never did much remember faces. But still, if this one had been at the church, in the graveyard, or at the fête, his face would have looked at least somewhat familiar. As it was…They were sorry but they couldn’t remember him.