In The Presence Of The Enemy (8 page)

Alex had wanted only to be part of her present and her future.

“Why’s he taken her?”

She answered emotionlessly, a recital of conclusions she’d already reached. “Because he wants the public to know who her father is.

Because he wants to embarrass the Tories further. Because if the Government continues to be faced with sexual scandals that erode the public’s faith in their elected officials, the Prime Minister is going to be forced to call a general election and the Tories are going to lose it. Which is what he wants.”

Alex homed in on the words that chilled him most and told him most about what she’d kept hidden for so many years. “Sexual scandals?”

Her lips curved mirthlessly. “Sexual scandals.”

“Who is it, Eve?”

“Dennis Luxford.”

The name meant nothing to him. Years of dreading, years of wondering, years of speculating, years of calculating, and the name meant absolutely sod bloody all. He could tell that she saw he was making no connection.

She gave a sardonic and self-directed chuckle and walked to the small kitchen table that sat in a bay window overlooking the back garden.

There was a rattan magazine holder next to one of the chairs. It was where Mrs. Maguire kept her lowbrow reading material that entertained her through her daily elevenses. From this rattan holder Eve took a tabloid. She carried it to the bar and laid it before Alex.

Its masthead was a blaze of red into which garish yellow letters spelled out
The Source!

Beneath this masthead three inches of headline screamed
Love-Cheat MP
. The headline was accompanied by two colour photographs, one of Sinclair Larnsey, MP for East Norfolk, looking grim-faced as he emerged from a building in the company of a cane-wielding elderly gentleman who had
Constituency Association Chairman
incised all over him, the other of a magenta Citroën, under which ran the caption: “Sinclair Larnsey’s mobile love nest.” The rest of the front page was devoted to Win A Dream Holiday (Chapter 1), Breakfast With Your Favourite Star (Chapter 1), and Cricket Murder Trial Coming (Chapter 2).

He frowned at the tabloid. It was tawdry and noisome, as it no doubt intended to be. It howled for attention, and he could imagine it being scooped up by the thousands as commuters sought something diverting to read on their way to work. But surely its very shoddi-ness declared the level of impact it might have on public opinion. Who read this sort of shit, anyway, aside from people like Mrs. Maguire who could not exactly be described as a major intellectual force in the country.

Eve was walking back to the rattan holder.

She rooted out three more copies of the tabloid and laid them carefully on the bar before him.
PM’s Latest Skeleton: Top Aide on the Take!

took up one entire front page.
Tory MP Mistress X4!
decorated another.
Royal Flush: Who’s
Keeping the Princess Warm at Night?
leapt from the third.

“I don’t get it,” Alex said. “Your case is different to these. What are the newspapers going to crucify you about? You made a mistake.

You got pregnant. You had a baby. You’ve raised her, cared for her, and gone on with your life. It’s a non-story.”

“You don’t understand.”

“What’s there to understand?”

“Dennis Luxford. This is his newspaper, Alex. Charlotte’s father edits this newspaper and he was editing another one just about this disgusting when we had our little—” She blinked rapidly and for a moment he thought she would actually lose her composure.

“That’s what he was doing—editing a tabloid, digging up the most salacious gossip he could find, smearing whomever he wished to humiliate—when we had our little fling in Blackpool.”

He tore his eyes from her and looked back at the papers. He told himself that if he hadn’t heard her correctly, he wouldn’t have to believe. She made a movement, and he looked to see that she had taken up her wineglass and held it in a toast, which she did not make.

Instead, she said, “There was Eve Bowen, future Tory MP, future Junior Minister, future Premier, the ultra-conservative, God-is-my-bedrock, morally righteous little reporter making the two-backed beast with the King of Sleaze. My God, what a field day the papers will have with that story. And this one will lead the pack.”

Alex searched for something to say, which was difficult because all he was able to feel at the moment was the coating of ice that seemed to be growing rapidly round his heart. Even his words felt deadened. “You weren’t a Member of Parliament then.”

“A fine point that the public will be more than willing to overlook, I assure you. The public will take great tickling pleasure imagining the two of us slinking round the hotel in Blackpool, hotly setting up our assignations, I spread-legged on a hotel room bed, panting for Luxford to plumb my depths with his mighty organ. And then the next morning rearranging myself to look like Miss Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt for my colleagues. And living with the secret for all these years. Acting as if I found morally reprehensible everything the man stands for.”

Alex stared at her. He looked at the features he’d been looking at for the past seven years: that unruffled hair, those clear hazel eyes, the chin too sharp, the upper lip too thin. He thought, This is my wife. This is the woman I love. Who I am with her is not who I am with anyone else. Do I even know her? He said numbly, “And don’t you? Didn’t you?”

Her eyes seemed to darken. When she responded, her voice sounded oddly removed.

“How can you even ask me that, Alex?”

“Because I want to know. I have a right to know.”

“To know what?”

“Who the hell you are.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she met his gaze for the longest time before she took the pot from the cooker and carried it to the sink, where she dumped the fettuccine into a colan-der. She used a fork to lift a strand of it. She said quietly, “You’ve overcooked your pasta, Alex. Not the kind of mistake I’d expect you to make.”

“Answer me,” he said.

“I believe I just did.”

“The mistake was the pregnancy,” he persisted, “not the choice of partners. You knew what he was when you slept with him. You had to have known.”

“Yes. I knew. Do you want me to tell you that it didn’t matter?”

“I want you to tell me the truth.”

“All right. It didn’t matter. I wanted sex with him.”

“Why?”

“He engaged my mind. Which is the one thing most men don’t bother to try when it comes to seducing women.”

Alex grasped onto the word because he needed to grasp it. “He seduced you.”

“The first time. After that, no. It was mutual after that.”

“So you fucked him more than once.”

She didn’t flinch from the word as he would have liked her to do. “I fucked him for the length of the conference. Every night. And most of the mornings as well.”

“Brilliant.” He gathered the tabloids together. He replaced them in the rattan holder. He went to the cooker and grabbed the pan of sauce. He dumped it into the sink and watched it burble into the disposer. She was still standing next to the draining board. He could feel her proximity, but he couldn’t face her. He felt as if his mind had received some sort of death blow. All he could manage was, “So he’s taken Charlie. Luxford.”

“He’s arranged it. And if he publicly acknowledges the fact that he’s her father—on the front page of his paper—then she’ll be returned.”

“Why not phone the police?”

“Because I intend to call his bluff.”

“Using Charlie to do it?”

“Using Charlotte? What do you mean?”

This he could feel at last; and he revelled in the sensation. “Where’s he got her, Eve? Does she know what’s going on? Is she hungry? Is she cold? Is she mad with terror? She was snatched off the street by a total stranger. So are you concerned with anything besides saving your reputation and winning the game and calling this bastard Luxford’s bluff?”

“Don’t make this a referendum on mother-hood,” she said quietly. “I made a mistake in my life. I’ve paid for that. I’m still paying for it. I’ll pay till I die.”

“This is a child we’re talking about, not an error in judgement. A ten-year-old child.”

“And I intend to find her. But I’ll do it my way. I’ll rot in hell before I do it his. Just look at his newspaper if you can’t decipher what he wants from me, Alex. And before you condemn me for my gross self-interest, try asking yourself what allowing a fine sex scandal into the papers would do to Charlotte.”

He knew, of course. One of the greatest nightmares in political life was the sudden appearance of a skeleton that one had believed long and safely buried. Once that skeleton dusted off its creaking bones and made its debut in the public eye, it turned suspect every action, remark, and intention of its owner. Its presence—even if it did no more than hug the periphery of the owner’s current life—begged that motivations be examined, comments be placed beneath a microscope, footsteps be dogged, letters be analysed, speeches be dissected, and everything else be nosed as intimately as possible to try to detect the scent of hypocrisy. And this scrutiny didn’t end with the skeleton’s owner. It tainted every member of the family whose names and whose lives were also dragged through the mud of the public’s God-given right to be kept informed.

Parnell had known this. Profumo likewise.

Yeo and Ashby had both felt the scalpel of scrutiny incise the flesh of what they had considered their private lives. Since neither her predecessors in Parliament nor the Monarchy itself was exempt from public exposure and ridicule, Eve knew that she would not be an exception, and certainly not in the eyes of a man like Luxford who was driven by the mutual demons of his circulation fi gures and his personal loathing of the Conservative Party.

Alex felt weighted by burdens. His body demanded action. His mind demanded under standing. His heart demanded flight. He was caught between aversion and compassion, and he felt tattered by the battle of their antagonism within him. He fought his way to compassion, if only for the moment.

He said with a tilt of his chin in the direction of the sitting room, “So who were they?

That man and woman.”

He could tell by her face that she believed she had prevailed. She said, “He once worked for Scotland Yard. She’s…I don’t know. She assists him in some way.”

“You’re confident they can handle this?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Why?”

“Because when he asked me to make a schedule of Charlotte’s activities, he had me do it twice. Once in writing. Once in printing.”

“I don’t get it.”

“He has both kidnapping notes, Alex. The one I received. The one Dennis received. He wants to look at my writing. He wants to compare it to the writing in the notes. He thinks I may be involved. He doesn’t trust anyone.

Which means, I believe, that we can trust him.”

“AROUND FIVE PAST FIVE
,” Damien Chambers said. He spoke with the unmistakable broad vowels of the Belfast native. “She sometimes stays longer. She knows I don’t give another lesson till seven, so she sometimes hangs about for a while. She likes me to play the whistle for her while she plays the spoons.

But today she wanted to be off at once. So she was. Round fi ve past five.” With three long fingers he shoved wispy filaments of his apricot hair back into the long ponytail that he’d banded into place at the base of his neck. He waited for St. James’s next question.

They’d got Charlotte’s music teacher out of bed, but he hadn’t complained at the intru sion. He’d merely said, “Missing? Lottie Bowen’s gone missing? Hell!” and excused himself for a moment to dash up the stairs. Water began to roar energetically into a bathtub. A door opened then closed. A minute passed.

The door opened and closed again. The water shut off. He’d clattered back to join them. He wore a long dressing gown of red plaid and nothing beneath it. His ankles were exposed.

These, like the rest of him, were as white as bleached bones. He had tattered leather slip-pers on his feet.

Damien Chambers lived in one of the mole-sized houses of Cross Keys Close, a rabbit war-ren of cobbled passageways with antique streetlamps and a dubious atmosphere that encouraged looking over one’s shoulder and hurrying along. St. James and Helen hadn’t been able to drive into the area—the MG

wouldn’t fit, and even if it had done, there would have been no way to turn it around—so they’d left it in Bulstrode Place, just off the high street, and they’d worked their way through the maze of passages to find Number 12, where Charlotte Bowen’s music teacher lived.

They now sat with him in his sitting room, which was not much larger than a compartment on an old-fashioned railway carriage. A spinet piano shared the limited fl oor space with an electric keyboard, a cello, two violins, a harp, a trombone, a mandolin, a dulcimer, two lopsided music stands, and a half dozen dustballs the approximate size of sewer rats.

St. James and Helen used the piano bench for their sitting. Damien Chambers perched on the edge of a metal chair. He tucked his hands deeply into his armpits, a posture that made him look more diminutive than his fi ve feet and fi ve inches.

“She wanted to learn the tuba,” he said.

“She liked its shape. She said tubas look like gold elephant ears. Of course, they would have been brass, not gold, but Lottie isn’t much of a one for details. I could have taught her the tuba—I can teach almost anything—but her mother wouldn’t have it. She said violin at first, which we tried for six weeks, till Lottie drove her parents round the bend with the screeching. She said piano after that, but she didn’t have space in the house for a piano and Lottie refused to practise on the piano at her school. So we’ve moved to the fl ute. Small, portable, and without much noise. We’ve been going at it for nearly a year now. She’s not much good because she won’t practise. And her best mate—a little girl called Breta—hates to listen and always wants her to play. Play with her, I mean. Not play the fl ute.”

St. James reached into his jacket pocket for the list Eve Bowen had assembled for him. He ran his gaze down it. “Breta,” he said. The name wasn’t listed. Nor, he noted with some surprise, was any name other than those adults Charlotte met with who were listed by profession: dancing teacher, psychotherapist, choir director, music teacher. He frowned at this.