“Which things?”
Mrs. Maguire gave her attention to the polishing of the spoon. She ran a clipped thumbnail along its handle. “Miss Eve does her best,” she said. “She does the best she knows and always has done.”
“You’ve been with her long?”
“Since Charlie was six weeks old, I’ve been with her. And such a squaller that baby was, like God sent her to earth to try her mother’s patience. She never did settle into life proper until she learned to talk.”
“And your patience?”
“Raising five children on my own taught me patience. Charlie’s fussing was nothing new to me.”
“What about Charlotte’s father?” St. James slid the question in easily. “How did he deal with her?”
“Mr. Alex?”
“I’m talking about Charlotte’s natural father.”
“I don’t know the black heart. Has there ever been a word or a card or a phone call or a sign from him that he fathered this child? No. Not once. Which, Miss Eve says, is how she would have it. Even now. Even now. Just think of it. Blessed Jesus, how that monster hurt her.” Mrs. Maguire raised a bulky sleeve to her face. She pressed it first beneath one eye and then beneath the other, saying, “Sorry. I’m feeling that helpless, I am. Sitting here in this house and acting at everyday Thursday business. I know it’s for the best. I know it had to be done for Charlie’s sake. But it’s mad. Mad.”
St. James watched her lift a fork, doing her duty as Eve Bowen had instructed. But her heart appeared to be elsewhere, and her lips trembled as she rubbed the polish into the silver. The woman’s emotion seemed genuine enough, but St. James knew that his expertise lay in the study of evidence and not in the evaluation of witnesses and potential suspects. He directed her back to the morning walks to the school, asking her to recall anyone on the street, anyone who might have been watching Charlotte, anyone who appeared to be out of place.
She stared at the case of silver for a moment before replying. She hadn’t noticed anyone in particular, she finally told him. But they walked along the high street, didn’t they, and there were always people out and about there. Delivery men, professionals on their way to work, shopkeepers opening up for the day, joggers and cyclists, people hurrying to catch the bus or the tube. She didn’t notice. She didn’t think to notice. She kept her eyes on Charlie and she made certain the child took herself to school. She thought about the day’s work ahead and she planned Charlie’s dinner and…Dear God forgive her for not being aware, for not keeping an eye open for the devil’s work, for not watching over her Charlie like she was meant to watch, like she was paid to watch, like she was trusted to watch, like she was…
Mrs. Maguire dropped the silver and polish. She fished a handkerchief out of her sleeve. She blew her nose mightily on it and said, “Dear Lord, don’t let a hair of her head come to harm. We will try to see Your hand at work in this business. We will come to understand Your meaning in it all.”
St. James wondered how the child’s disappearance could have a greater meaning beyond the simple horror of her disappearance. Religion, he found, did not explain the mysteries, the gross cruelties, or the inconsistencies of life in any way. He said, “Prior to her disappearance, Charlotte was apparently in the company of another child. What can you tell me about a girl called Breta?”
“Little enough and not much of it good. She’s a wild one from a broken family. From Charlie’s chatter, I’ve taken the impression that her mum’s more interested in disco dancing than in putting her thumb on Breta’s comings and goings. She’s done Charlie no service, that child.”
“She’s wild in what way?”
“Up to mischief. Always wanting Charlie to be part of it.” Breta was an imp, Mrs. Maguire explained. She pinched sweets from the vendors on Baker Street. She sneaked past the ticket takers at Madame Tussaud’s. She wrote her initials in marking pen in the tube.
“Is she a schoolmate of Charlotte’s?”
She was indeed. Charlie’s days and nights were scripted so tightly by Miss Eve and Mr. Alex that the only opportunity she even had for making friends was at St. Bernadette’s. “When else would the child have time to be with her?” Mrs. Maguire asked. She herself, she went on in further answer to his questions, didn’t know the girl’s surname, and she had not yet met her, but she was willing to bet that the family were foreigners. “And on the dole,” she added. “Dancing all night, sleeping all day, and taking government assistance without a blush of shame.”
St. James considered the disturbing oddity of this new fact about Charlotte Bowen’s young life. His own family had known the names, the addresses, the telephone numbers, and probably the blood types of all his childhood companions and their parents. When he had chafed under their scrutiny of his acquaintances, his mother had informed him that such inspection and approval was part and parcel of their job as his guardians. So how did Eve Bowen and Alexander Stone do their jobs in Charlotte’s life? he wondered.
Mrs. Maguire seemed to read his mind, for she said, “Charlie’s kept busy, Mr. St. James. Miss Eve sees to that. The child’s got her dancing lessons after school on Monday, her psychologist on Tuesday, her music lesson on Wednesday, after-school games on Thursday. Friday she goes directly to Miss Eve at the constituency office for the afternoon. There isn’t time for friends anywhere but at school and that’s under the supervision of the good Sisters, so it’s safe. Or it ought to be.”
“So when does Charlotte play with this girl?”
“When she can snatch a moment. Game days at school. Before her appointments. Children can always make time for a friendship.”
“At the weekends?”
Charlie was with her parents at the weekends, Mrs. Maguire explained. Either with them both, or with Mr. Alex in one of his restaurants, or with Miss Eve at the office in Parliament Square. “Weekends are for the family,” she said, and her tone suggested the rigidity of this rule. She went on as if concluding what St. James was thinking. “They’re busy. They should know Charlie’s friends. They should know what she’s up to when she’s not with them. They don’t always and that’s the way of it. God forgive them, because I don’t see how they’ll forgive themselves.”
St. Bernadette’s Primary School stood on Blandford Street, a short distance to the west of the high street and perhaps a quarter of a mile from Devonshire Place Mews. Four storeys of brick with crosses acting as finials on its gables and a statue of the eponymous saint in a niche above the wide front porch, the school was run by the Sisters of the Holy Martyrs. The Sisters were a group of women whose mean age appeared to be seventy. They wore heavy black robes, large wooden rosary beads round their waists, white bibs, and wimples that somewhat resembled decapitated swans. They kept their school as spotless as a polished chalice. The windows sparkled, the immaculate walls looked like the interior of a good Christian’s soul, the grey linoleum floors glittered, and the air smelled of polish and disinfectant. If the atmosphere of cleanliness was anything to go by, the devil could not hope to have truck with this school’s inhabitants.
After a brief conversation with the head of the school, a nun called Sister Mary of the Passion who listened with hands folded piously beneath her bib and sharp black eyes riveted on St. James’s face, he was ushered up the stairs to the second floor where he followed Sister Mary of the Passion down a silent corridor behind whose closed doors the cause of serious scholarship was being furthered. At the second door from the end, Sister Mary of the Passion rapped once sharply before entering. The class—perhaps twenty-five young girls seated in orderly rows—leapt to their feet with a scraping of chairs. They held fountain pens and rulers in their hands. They chorused, “Good morning, Sister!” to which the nun nodded curtly. The girls dropped silently back into their chairs and went about their business. This seemed to be the meticulous diagramming of sentences, and their fingers and thumbs were crosshatched with ink from wielding pens and rulers as they drew the appropriate grammatical lines.
Sist
er Mary of the Passion had a brief, low-voiced conversation with a nun who walked to meet her at the front of the classroom with the hitched gait of a recipient of a recent hip replacement. She had a dried-apricot face and thick, rimless spectacles. After a terse exchange, the second nun nodded and came towards St. James. She joined him in the corridor and shut the door behind her while Sister Mary of the Passion did duty as substitute teacher.
“I’m Sister Agnetis,” she told him. “Sister Mary of the Passion has explained that you’ve come about Charlotte Bowen.”
“She’s gone missing.”
The nun pursed her lips. Her fingers reached for the beads that circled her waist and hung to her knees. “Little spit,” she said. “This doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why is that, Sister?”
“She’s after attention. In the classroom, in the dinner hall, at games, at prayers. This will doubtless be another one of her ploys to make herself the focus of everyone’s concern. It won’t be the first time.”
“Are you saying that Charlotte’s run off before?”
“She’s acted up before. Last week it was with her mother’s cosmetics, which she brought to school and painted herself up with in the lavatory during lunch. She looked like a clown when she came into the classroom, but that’s what she intended. Everyone who goes to a circus tends to watch the clowns. Am I correct?” Sister Agnetis paused to go spelunking into the cavernous depths of her pocket. She brought out a crumpled tissue which she pressed to either side of her mouth, daubing up spittle that had gathered as she spoke. “She won’t stay at her desk for twenty minutes at a time. She’s browsing through the books or poking at the hamster’s cage or shaking the collecting tins—”
“Collecting tins?”
“Money for the missions,” Sister Agnetis said, and reembarked the train of her thoughts. “She wanted to be form president, and when the girls cast their votes for another, she got quite hysterical and had to be removed for the remainder of the afternoon. She doesn’t see the need for neatness in her person or her work, she won’t follow rules that she doesn’t like, and when it comes to religious studies, she announces that as she isn’t Catholic, she shouldn’t be made to attend. Which is what comes, I dare say, of taking non-Catholics into the school. Not my decision, of course. We are here to serve the community.” She returned the tissue to her pocket and, like Sister Mary of the Passion, adopted a posture with hands folded beneath her bib. When St. James took a moment to assimilate her information and assess what it added to his knowledge of Charlotte, she added, “You no doubt think I’m being harsh in my judgement of the girl. But I feel quite confident that her mother would be happy to confirm the child’s difficult nature. She’s been here more than once for a conference.”
“Ms. Bowen?”
“I spoke to her only last Wednesday night about the affair of the cosmetics, and I can tell you that she punished the child severely—as she needed to be punished—for making off with her mother’s belongings without permission.”
“Punished her in what way?”
Sister Agnetis’s hands slid out from beneath her bib and made a gesture indicating they were empty of information. “However she punished her, it was sufficient to subdue the child for the remainder of the week. On Monday, of course, she was back to normal.”
“Difficult?”
“As I said, back to normal.”
“Perhaps Charlotte’s difficult periods are encouraged by her classmates,” St. James said.
Sister Agnetis received this as an affront. She said, “I am noted for my discipline, sir.”
St. James made noises of reassurance. “I was referring to a friend of Charlotte’s here at the school. There’s a very good chance that she knows where Charlotte is. Or, failing that, that she might have seen something on their way home from school that could give us an idea where she is. It’s this girl I’ve come to talk to. She’s called Breta.”
“Breta.” Sister Agnetis drew the snaggled remains of her eyebrows together. She stepped to the small window in the door of her classroom and gazed inside as if in search of the girl. She said, “There’s no one called Breta in my class.”
“I dare say it’s a nickname,” St. James suggested.
Back to the window. She gave the class another scrutiny and said, “Sanpaolo, perhaps. Brittany Sanpaolo.”
“May I speak with her?”
Sister Agnetis fetched the girl, a sullen-faced ten-year-old whose uniform stretched uneasily over a tubby frame. She wore her hair cut too short for her moonlike face, and when she spoke, her mouth glittered with a grillwork of braces.
She made her feelings quite clear. “Lottie Bowen?” she said in an incredulous voice. She went on with a hissing of sibilant s’s. “She’s not my friend. No way she’s my friend. She makes me want to puke.” She cast a hasty glance at Sister Agnetis and added, “Sorry, Sister.”
“As well you ought to be,” Sister Agnetis said. “You answer the man’s questions.”
What Brittany could tell St. James was little enough. And she told it as if she’d been waiting since the first term at school for just such an opportunity to unload about Charlotte. Lottie Bowen made fun of other students, Brittany confided. She made fun of their hair, she made fun of their faces, she made fun of the answers they gave in class, she made fun of their weight, she made fun of their voices. Particularly, it seemed to St. James, she made fun of Brittany Sanpaolo herself. He gave caustic mental thanks to Sister Agnetis for foisting the disagreeable child upon him and he was about to break into her litany of Charlotte Bowen’s sins—Lottie brags about her mother all the time, she brags about the holidays she goes on with her parents, she brags about the gifts her parents give her—when she commenced what was clearly the peroration of her remarks with the fact that no one liked Lottie, no one wanted to eat lunch with her, no one wanted her to be in the school, no one wanted to be her friend…except that thick Brigitta Walters and everyone knew why she hung about Lottie.
“Brigitta?” St. James said. Here was progress. If nothing else, Brigitta sounded closer to Breta, the way a child might mispronounce an older sibling’s name.
Brigitta was in Sister Vincent de Paul’s class, Brittany informed them. She and Charlotte sang in the school choir together.
Five minutes were all that were required to discover from Sister Vincent de Paul—easily eighty years old with indifferent hearing—that Brigitta Walters was not in school this day. No message from her parents as to the nature of her illness, but isn’t that what one came more and more to expect from parents these days? Too busy to phone, too busy to be involved in the lives of their children, too busy for courtesy, too busy for—
St. James thanked Sister Vincent de Paul hastily. With Brigitta Walters’ address and phone number in his possession, he made his escape.
It seemed as if they were getting somewhere.
6
“SO WHAT HAVE WE GOT on for tomorrow?” Dennis Luxford pointed a finger at Sarah Happleshort, his news editor. She tongued her chewing gum to the side of her mouth and picked up her notes.
Round the table in Luxford’s office, the rest of the news meeting waited for the conclusion to their daily conference. This was the gathering to determine the contents of tomorrow’s Source, to decide how stories would be spun, and to hear Luxford’s decision on what would run on the front page. Sports had been arguing for heightened coverage of the selection of the England cricket team, a suggestion that had been greeted with hoots of derision despite the recent death of England’s best batsman. In comparison to the Rent Boy Rumba, the asphyxiation of an eminent cricketer was minuscule potatoes no matter who had been arrested and charged with orchestrating said asphyxiation. Besides, that was old news and it didn’t carry the amusement value of the Tories’ attempts at damage control faced with Sinclair Larnsey, the rent boy he was caught with, and the steamy-windowed Citroën—“The slime-ball doesn’t even buy British,” Sarah Happleshort said, her dudgeon high—in which the pa
ir were purportedly “discussing the dangers of solicitation” when abruptly interrupted by the local police.
Sarah used a pencil to point to items on her list. “Larnsey’s met with his constituency committee. No precise word yet, but we’ve got a reliable source telling us he’s going to be asked to stand down. East Norfolk is willing to put up with the occasional dalliance, it seems. All pardonable in the light of let’s-practice-Christian-forgiveness and let-him-without-sin-proceed-with-the-stone-toss. But they appear to draw the line at human weaknesses involving married men, teenaged boys, closed automobiles, and an exchange of body fluids and cash. The crucial question among the committee appears to be whether they want to force a by-election while the PM’s popularity is on the wane. If they don’t, they look like they don’t care about the Recommitment to Basic British Values. If they do, they’re going to lose the seat to Labour and they know it.”
“Politics as usual,” the sports editor complained.
Rodney Aronson added, “The story’s getting tired.”
Luxford ignored them. The sports editor was going to go to the gallows for his cricket story, no matter the current change of events, and Rodney had his own axe to grind, one having nothing to do with dust settling on a story. He had been watching Luxford all day, like a scientist studying a dividing amoeba, and Luxford was becoming certain that the scrutiny had little to do with the contents of The Source’s next edition and much to do with speculation about why Luxford hadn’t eaten all day, why he had started more than once at the ringing of the telephone, why he had grabbed the first delivery of the day’s post and flipped through the letters with too much concentration.
In the Presence of the Enemy Page 10