When she was finished, she placed the bowl on the floor. She said, “I got to use the loo.”
He clanked something into the circle of light. Yet another bowl, but this one deep and thick, with a ring of daisies painted on it and a curving lip round its rim like an octopus mouth. She stared at it, confused. She said, “I don’t want more soup. I ate what you gave me. I got to go to the loo.”
“Go,” he said. “Don’t you know what that is?”
She saw that he meant her to go in the bowl, that he also meant her to do it in front of him. He meant her to lower her knickers and squat and pee and he’d be watching and listening all the time. Just like Mrs. Maguire did at home, standing on the other side of the door, calling, “Are you having a movement this morning, dearie?”
She said, “I can’t. Not in front of you.”
He said, “Then don’t,” and took the bowl away. Quick as a gnat’s blink he snatched up the Thermos, the soup bowl, and the lantern. The light went out. Lottie felt a whoosh as something plopped onto the floor right next to her. She gave a cry and shrank away. A stream of cold air passed over her like the flight of ghosts coming out of a graveyard. Then a clunk sounded, followed by a swetch, and she knew she was alone.
She patted her hand on the floor where the whoosh had sounded. He’d thrown down a blanket. It was smelly and rough to the touch, but she picked it up and hugged it to her stomach and tried not to think what being given a blanket meant about her stay in this dark place.
She whimpered, “But I got to go to the loo.” And she felt the lump in her throat and the tightness in her chest all over again. No, no, she thought. Mustn’t mustn’t. “I got to go to the loo.”
She sank to the floor. Her lips were trembling and her eyes were welling. She pressed one hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes closed. She swallowed and tried to make the lump in her throat go back to her stomach.
“Think happy thoughts,” her mother would say.
So she thought about Breta. She even said her name. She whispered it. “Breta. Best best friend, Breta.”
Because Breta was the happiest thought to think. Being with Breta. Telling tales. Playing pranks.
She made herself consider what Breta would do if she found herself here. Here in the dark, what would Breta do?
Pee first, Lottie thought. Breta would pee. She’d say, You have me stowed in this dark hole, mister, but you can’t make me do what you say. So I’m going to pee. Right here and right now. Not into some bowl but right on the floor.
The floor. She should have known it wasn’t a coffin, Lottie thought, because it had a floor. A hard floor like rocks. Only…
Lottie felt the same floor he’d dragged her across, the very same floor she’d cut her knee on. This, of course, would have been the first thing that Breta would have done had she awakened in the dark. Breta’d have tried to suss out where she was. She’d never have just lain there and whimpered like a baby.
Lottie snuffled and let her fingers feel round the floor. It was slightly ridged, which is how she must have cut her knee. She traced the ridging in the shape of a rectangle. Then another rectangle next to the first. Then another.
“Bricks,” she whispered. Breta would be proud.
Lottie thought about a floor made of bricks and what a floor made of bricks might tell her about where she was. She realised that if she moved about much, she was liable to get hurt. She might stumble. She might fall. She might plunge headlong into a well. She might—
A well in the dark? Breta would have asked. I don’t think so, Lottie.
So on hands and knees Lottie continued to feel along the floor until her fingers finally nudged into wood. It was rough-surfaced and splintery, with tiny cool heads of nails driven into it. She felt edges and corners. She felt up the sides. A crate, she decided. More than one. A group of them that she inched along.
She hit a different kind of surface rising up from the floor. It was smooth and curved, and when she gave it an enquiring prod with her knuckles, it moved with an uneven and spluttery sound. A familiar sound, reminding her of saltwater and sand, of playing happily at the edge of the sea.
“Plastic bucket,” she said, proud of herself. Breta couldn’t have named it as fast as that.
She heard a slosh from inside and lowered her face to sniff. There was no scent. She dipped her fingers into the liquid and put them to her tongue. “Water,” she said. “A bucket of water.”
She knew at once what Breta would do. She’d say, Well, I got to pee, Lot, and she’d use the bucket.
Which is what Lottie did. She tipped the water out of the bucket, lowered her knickers, and squatted over it. The hot gush of pee surged out of her. She balanced on the bucket’s edge and rested her head against her knees. One knee was throbbing where the brick had cut into it. She licked at the throb and tasted blood. She felt suddenly weary. She felt very alone. All thoughts of Breta vanished just like popped bubbles.
“I want Mummy,” Lottie whispered.
And even to that, she knew exactly what Breta would say.
Did you ever think Mummy might not want you?
5
ST. JAMES LEFT both Helen and Deborah on Marylebone High Street, in front of a shop called Pumpkin’s Grocery, where an elderly woman with an impatient fox terrier on a lead was picking through punnets of strawberries. Supplied with the photograph of Charlotte Bowen, Helen and Deborah would walk the areas surrounding St. Bernadette’s Convent School on Blandford Street, Damien Chambers’ tiny house in Cross Keys Close, and Devonshire Place Mews near the top of the high street. Their purpose was twofold. They would look for anyone who might have seen Charlotte on the previous afternoon. They would map out every possible route the girl could have taken from the school to Chambers’ house and from Chambers’ house to her own. Their assignment was Charlotte. St. James’s assignment was Charlotte’s friend, Breta.
Long after he had dropped Helen at her flat, long after Deborah had gone to bed, St. James had roamed restlessly round the house. He started in the study, where he drew books from the shelves in haphazard fashion while he drank two brandies and pretended to read. He went from there to the kitchen, where he brewed himself a cup of Ovaltine—which he didn’t drink—and spent ten minutes tossing a tennis ball from the stairway to the back door for Peach’s canine entertainment. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom and watched his wife sleep. He finally took himself up to his lab. Deborah’s photographs were still spread on the worktable where she had laid them out earlier in the evening, and in the overhead light he studied the picture of the West Indian girl with the Union Jack in her hands. She couldn’t, he decided, be much more than ten years old. Charlotte Bowen’s age.
St. James returned the photographs to Deborah’s darkroom and fetched the plastic jackets into which he had placed the notes that Eve Bowen and Dennis Luxford had received. Next to these notes he laid the printed list that Eve Bowen had assembled. He switched on three high-intensity lamps and took up a magnifying glass. He studied the two notes and the list.
He concentrated on the commonalities. Since they shared no common words, he had to depend upon common letters. F, double t, the lone w beginning will in one note and want in the other, and the most reliable letter for analysis and code-breaking, the letter e.
The crosspiece of the f in Luxford’s note matched exactly the crosspiece of the f in Bowen’s: In both cases the crosspiece was used to form part of the letter that followed the f. The same style of crossing had been used in the double t in Charlotte and the double t in Lottie. The w in both letters stood entirely alone, rounded at the bottom with no point of connection to the letters that followed it. On the other hand, the downsweep of the e always connected to the letter following it while the initial curve of the letter stood alone and was never joined to what preceded it. The overall style of both notes was something between printing and cursive, resembling an intermediate step between the two. Even to the unschooled eye engaged in a cursory examination, it was clear th
at both notes had been composed by the same hand.
He picked up Eve Bowen’s list and looked for the kind of subtle similarities that even one attempting to disguise his writing generally failed to obscure. How a letter is formed is so unconscious an activity that without giving purposeful attention to each stroke of the pen or the pencil, someone attempting to disguise his handwriting is bound to make an unintentional mistake. Such a mistake was what he was looking for: the distinct loop of an l, the starting point of an a or an o, the curve of an r and where that curve began, a similarity in spacing between words, a uniformity in the manner in which the pen or the pencil was lifted at the end of a word before beginning another.
St. James went over individual letters with the magnifying glass. He examined each word. He measured the space between words and the width and the height of the letters. He did this to both of the kidnapping notes and to Eve Bowen’s list. The result was the same. The notes had been composed by the same hand, but that hand did not belong to Eve Bowen.
St. James sat back on his stool and considered in what logical direction this sort of analysis of writing samples would inevitably lead him. If Eve Bowen had been telling the truth—that Dennis Luxford was the only other person who knew the identity of Charlotte’s natural father—then the most reasonable next step would be to gather a sample of Luxford’s printing to study. Yet carrying this journey through the labyrinth of chirography to that end seemed a profligate expenditure of his time. Because if Dennis Luxford was indeed behind Charlotte’s disappearance—with his background in journalism and his attendant knowledge of the workings of the police—he would hardly have been foolish enough to pen the notes announcing her kidnapping.
And that was what St. James found so unusual. That was what was causing his disquiet: that someone had penned the notes in the first place. They hadn’t been typed, they hadn’t been composed of letters cut from magazines or newspapers. This fact suggested one of two possibilities: The kidnapper was someone who didn’t expect to be caught. Or the kidnapper was someone who didn’t expect to be punished once the complete truth of the kidnapping was brought to light.
Whatever the case, whoever had taken Charlotte Bowen off the street had to be someone who either knew the child’s movements intimately or had spent some time studying them before her abduction. If the former was the case, a family member had to be involved, however remotely. If the latter was the case, it was a good possibility that Charlotte’s kidnapper had stalked her first. And a stalker attracts notice eventually. The likeliest person to have noticed a stalker was Charlotte herself. Or her companion, Breta. It was with Breta in mind that St. James drove north to Devonshire Place Mews after leaving his wife and Helen Clyde in Marylebone High Street.
A cappella singing was going on behind the closed door of Eve Bowen’s house. When he rang the bell, St. James could hear the kind of steady male chant one expects to encounter in a monastery or a cathedral. In response to his thumb on the bell, the singing stopped abruptly. A moment later, the bolts were drawn on the other side of the door and it opened.
He’d expected to see either Eve Bowen or her husband. But standing before him was a red-faced woman shaped much like a pear. She wore a bulky orange sweater over crimson leggings, which bagged at the knees.
She said briskly, “I want no subscriptions, no witnessings of Jehovah, and no readings from the Book of Mormon, thank you,” in a brogue that sounded as if she’d arrived from the Irish countryside only last week.
St. James decided that based upon the MP’s description of her, this would have to be Mrs. Maguire the housekeeper. Before she could close the door, he identified himself and asked for Eve Bowen.
Mrs. Maguire’s tone immediately altered from dismissiveness to quiet intensity. “You’re the gentleman who’s seeing about Charlie?”
St. James said yes. The housekeeper quickly stepped back from the door. She led him into the sitting room, where a sombre Sanctus was issuing from a tape player at a much subdued volume. The player stood next to a coffee table on which a make-shift altar had been assembled. Two lit candles flickered on either side of a crucifix, themselves flanked by a slender statue of the Virgin with her chipped hands extended and another of a bearded saint with a green shawl thrown over saffron robes. At the sight of this altar, St. James turned back to Mrs. Maguire and noticed that her right hand was closed round a string of rosary beads.
“I’m doing all the mysteries this morning,” Mrs. Maguire said obscurely with a nod of her head in the direction of the altar. “Joyful, sorrowful, and glorious, all three of them. And I won’t be getting up off my knees till I’ve done my part to bring Charlie home, small part though it be. I’m praying to St. Jude and the Blessed Mother. One of them will take care of this business.”
She seemed oblivious of the fact that she was off the same knees which she had just declared she would remain on. She moved to the tape player and punched a button. The chanting ceased. “If I can’t be in a church, I can make my own. The Lord understands.” She kissed the crucifix at the end of the rosary and laid the beads lovingly at the sandal-shod feet of St. Jude. She took a moment to arrange them so that no bead touched another and the crucifix lay carefully corpus-side up.
“She’s not here,” she said to St. James.
“Ms. Bowen’s not at home?”
“Nor Mr. Alex.”
“Are they out looking for Charlotte?”
Mrs. Maguire touched her blunt fingers to the rosary’s crucifix again. She looked like a woman who was sifting through a dozen possible responses for the most favourable one. She apparently gave up the search because she finally said, “No.”
“Then where—”
“He’s gone in to one of his restaurants. She’s at the Commons. He would have stayed home, but she’s wanting to have things appear as normal as possible. Which is why I’m here and not kneeling in St. Luke’s as I’d like to be, saying my rosaries in front of the Blessed Sacrament.” She seemed to sense and expect St. James’s surprise at this business-as-usual reaction to Charlotte’s disappearance because she continued quickly. “’Tisn’t near as harsh as it seems, young man. Miss Eve phoned me at quarter past one this morning. Not that I was asleep—not that she had even tried to sleep, God protect her—as I didn’t as much as close an eyelid from dark to dawn. She told me you’d be looking into this terrible business with Charlie and while you were doing that, the rest of us—Mr. Alex, herself, and me—would need to keep ourselves calm and busy and as close to normal as ever we could. For Charlie’s sake. So here I am. And there she is, God love her, going off to work and trying to pretend that the only concern she has in the world is passing another piece of legislation on the IRA.”
St. James’s interest quickened at this bit of news. “Ms. Bowen’s been involved in IRA legislation?”
“Has been from the first. No sooner was she at the Home Office two years back but she was up to her knickers in anti-terrorism this, anti-possession of Semtex that, and this bill and that bill on increasing prison terms for the IRA. Not that there wasn’t a simpler solution to the problem all along than nattering about it in the House of Commons.”
Here was something to gnaw upon mentally, St. James realised: IRA legislation. A high-profile MP would not be able to keep her political position on the troubles a secret, nor, probably, would she be interested in doing so. This—in addition to the Irish involved however peripherally in her daily life and in the life of her child—was something to consider should Breta not be able to give them the assistance they needed in finding Charlotte.
Mrs. Maguire gestured in the direction Alex Stone had taken upon leaving the sitting room on the previous night. “If you want to talk, then it’s best I go about my business while we do it. Perhaps acting normal will help me feel it,” and she led him through the dining room and into a high-tech kitchen. On one of the work tops a mahogany case containing silver cutlery gaped open. Next to it stood a squat jar of polish and a handful of blackened rags.
“Normal Thursday,” Mrs. Maguire said. “I can’t think how Miss Eve holds herself together, but if she can do it, then so can I.” She uncapped the jar of polish and set its lid on the granite work top. Her lips curved downward. She scooped up a green wedge of polish on a rag. She said in a lower voice, “Just a babe. Dear Lord, help us. She’s only a babe.”
St. James took a seat at the bar that extended from the cooktop. He watched Mrs. Maguire fiercely apply the silver polish to a large serving spoon. He said, “When did you last see Charlotte?”
“Yesterday morning. I walked her to St. Bernadette’s like I always do.”
“Every morning?”
“Such mornings as Mr. Alex doesn’t take her. But it isn’t exactly walking with the girl that I do in the morning. It’s walking after her. Just to make sure she gets to school proper and doesn’t end up where she oughtn’t be.”
“Has she played truant in the past?”
“Early on. She doesn’t like St. Bernadette’s. She’d prefer a state school, but Miss Eve’s not having any of that.”
“Ms. Bowen’s Catholic?”
“Miss Eve’s always done her proper service to the Lord, but she’s not Catholic. She does a Sunday regular at St. Marylebone’s.”
“Odd that she would choose a convent school for her daughter, then.”
“She thinks Charlie needs discipline. And if a child needs discipline, a Catholic school is where to find it.”
“What do you think?”
Mrs. Maguire squinted at the spoon. She applied her thumb to the bowl of it. “Think?”
“Does Charlotte need discipline?”
“A child brought up with a firm hand doesn’t need discipline, Mr. St. James. Wasn’t that the case with my own five? Wasn’t that the case with my brothers and sisters? Eighteen of us there were, sleeping in three rooms in County Kerry, and never a slap on the bum was needed to keep us walking the straight and narrow. But times have changed, and I’m not one to cast stones at the mothering done by an upstanding fine woman who gave in to a moment of human weakness. The Lord forgives our sins, and He’s long since forgiven hers. Besides, some things come natural to a woman. Other things don’t.”
In the Presence of the Enemy Page 9