In the Presence of the Enemy

by Elizabeth George

  He went to the doorway. He saw that she was curled into a corner of the sofa, a pillow at her stomach, holding it for comfort. The desire for combat faded more completely at the sight of her. It dissolved altogether when she spoke, saying without turning her head to him, “I don’t want him to go. Don’t do this to him, darling. It isn’t right.”

  Beyond her on the screen, Luxford saw that the nightly news was playing. The newsreader’s face faded to an aerial view of the countryside somewhere. The screen showed the snaking of a river bisected by bridges, a patchwork of fields, cars bumping along a narrow lane.

  Luxford said to his wife, “Boys are resilient.” He went to the sofa and stood behind it. He touched her shoulder. “It’s natural to want to hold on to him, Fi. What’s not natural is giving in to the impulse when it’s best to let him have a new experience.”

  “He’s too young for new experiences.”

  “He’ll do fine.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Why don’t we just take things as they come?”

  “I’m afraid for him.”

  “That’s why you’re his mother.” Luxford changed his position, going to sit next to her, removing the pillow, drawing her into his arms. He kissed the cinnamon taste of her mouth. “Can’t we present a united front in this? At least until we see how it works out?”

  “Sometimes I think you’re intent upon destroying everything in him that’s special.”

  “If it’s special and it’s real, it can’t be destroyed.”

  She twisted her head to look up at him. “Do you believe that?”

  “Everything I always was is alive in me,” he said, indifferent to whether he spoke the truth or a lie, merely wanting an end to their enmity. “Everything that’s special will stay alive in Leo. If it’s strong and real.”

  “Eight-year-old boys shouldn’t have to endure an ordeal by fire.”

  “Their mettle can be tested. Whatever’s strong will endure.”

  “And that’s why you want him to have this experience?” she asked. “To test his determination to be who he is?”

  He looked her squarely in the eye and lied without a twinge of conscience. “That’s why.”

  He settled her against him and gave his attention to the television screen. The picture was of a reporter this time, speaking into a microphone, a tranquil expanse of water behind her that had appeared from the air to be a river but instead was, she said, “…the Kennet and Avon Canal, where late this afternoon the body of an unidentified girl—perhaps six to ten years old—was discovered by Mr. and Mrs. Esteban Marquedas, two honeymooners sailing a narrow-boat from Reading to Bath. Although the death is being investigated as a suspicious circumstance, no decision has been made yet as to whether it should be classified a murder, a suicide, or an accident. Police sources tell us that the local CID have been at the scene and at the moment the Police National Computer is being used to attempt to establish the child’s identity. Anyone with information that might assist the police is being asked to telephone the constabulary in Amesford.” She went on to give the telephone number which was printed across the bottom of the screen. She concluded by giving her name, her station’s call letters, after which she turned and gazed at the canal water with an expression of solemnity which she no doubt felt appropriate to the occasion.

  Fiona was saying something to him, but Luxford didn’t register her words. Instead, he was hearing a man’s voice saying I’ll kill her Luxford if you don’t run that story overlapping Eve’s voice saying I’ll die before I cave in to you which itself was overlapping his own interior voice repeating the facts he’d just heard on the news.

  He got abruptly to his feet. Fiona said his name. He shook his head and tried to manufacture an explanation. All he could come up with was “Damn. I’ve forgotten to give Rodney the word about tomorrow’s news meeting.”

  He went in search of a telephone as far from Fiona’s sitting room as possible.

  14

  IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK on the following afternoon when Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley received word of the canal death. He had just returned to New Scotland Yard, having completed yet another interview with the Crown prosecutors. He never much cared for having to investigate high-profile murders, and the case that the prosecutors were preparing for trial—which involved the asphyxiation of a member of the England cricket team—had placed him into the spotlight more than he liked. But the media’s interest was waning as the case began to wend its way into the judicial system. That interest was unlikely to be stirred up again until the trial itself. So he was feeling as if he’d shed a millstone he’d been forced to carry round for weeks.

  He’d gone to his office to put it into some kind of order. During the last investigation, its chaos had assumed gargantuan proportions. In addition to the reports, the notes, the transcripts of interviews, the crime scene documentation, and the collection of newspapers that had become part of the manner in which he’d handled the case, the incidents room had been disassembled shortly after the perpetrator’s arrest, and its collection of charts, graphs, timetables, computer printouts, telephone records, files, and other data had been delivered to him for sorting, for filing, and for sending onward. He’d been working through the material for the better part of the morning when he’d left to keep his appointment with the prosecutors. He was determined to wade through it to the end before he left for the day.

  Upon reaching his office, however, he found that someone had decided to assist in his Augean endeavours. His detective sergeant, Barbara Havers, was sitting cross-legged in the midst of a stack of folders, a cigarette dangling from her lips as she squinted through the smoke at a stapled report that lay open on her lap. Without looking up, she said, “How were you going about this, sir? I’ve been working for an hour, and whatever your method is, it doesn’t make any sense to me. This is my first fag, by the way. I had to do something to settle my nerves. So clue me in. What’s your method? Are there piles to be kept and piles to be sent on and piles to be tossed out? What?”

  “Just piles so far,” Lynley said. He removed his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. “I thought you were going home. Isn’t this one of your Greenford evenings?”

  “Yes, but I’ll get there when I get there. There’s not exactly a hurry. You know.”

  He did. The sergeant’s mother was ensconced in Greenford, a paying resident in a private home whose owner cared for the aged, the infirm, and—in the case of Havers’ mother—the mentally disintegrating. Havers made the pilgrimage to see her as often as her irregular work schedule would allow, but from what Lynley had been able to gather from six months of the sergeant’s laconic remarks about her visits, it was always a toss-up as to whether her mother would recognise her.

  She took a deep drag from her cigarette before, in deference to his unspoken wishes, she crushed it out against the side of the metal wastepaper basket and sent it to join the rubbish. She crawled across a scattering of folders and reached for her shapeless canvas shoulder bag. She dug round in it and brought out a wad of belongings from which she extracted a smashed packet of Juicy Fruit. She unwrapped two sticks and crammed them into her mouth.

  “How’d you let it get this bad?” She made an expansive gesture to take in the office and leaned against the wall. She balanced her left heel upon the toes of her right foot, admiring her shoes. She was wearing high-top red trainers. They made quite a fashion statement with her navy trousers.

  “‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,’” Lynley said in answer to her question.

  “More like loosed upon this office,” she replied.

  “I suppose things got out of hand,” he continued, and added with a smile, “but at least they didn’t fall apart altogether. Which means, I should guess, that the centre will hold.”

  Her face drew in on itself—eyebrows meeting, mouth pursing, chin lifting towards nose—as she rooted through his words for a meaning. She said, “Who what where, sir?”


  He said, “Poetry.” He went to his desk and gloomily surveyed the mound of manila folders, books, maps, and documents that heaped across it. He said, “‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ It’s part of a poem.”

  “Oh. A poem. Lovely. Have I ever mentioned how much I appreciate your efforts to elevate my cultural consciousness? Shakespeare, was it?”

  “Yeats.”

  “Even better. I like my literary allusions obscure. Back to the subject at hand. What’re we going to do with all this?”

  “Pray for a fire,” he said.

  The genteel clearing of a throat drew their attention to the door of Lynley’s office. A vision of hot pink double-breasted suit stood there, with a cream silk jabot frothing copiously from her throat. At the jabot’s centre an antique cameo nested. All their superintendent’s secretary needed to complete the ensemble was a broad-brimmed hat, and she’d be one of the royals, decked out for Ascot.

  “This is a sad state of affairs, Detective Inspector Lynley.” Dorothea Harriman gave a melancholy shake of her head at the condition of his office. “You must be angling for a promotion. Only Superintendent Webberly could make a bigger mess. Although he could manage it with far less material.”

  “Care to lend a hand, Dee?” Havers said from the floor.

  Harriman held hers up, the nails perfectly manicured. She said, “Sorry. Other duties call, Detective Sergeant. For you as well. Sir David wants to see you. Both of you, in fact.”

  Havers thudded her head against the wall. “Shoot us now,” she groaned.

  “You’ve had worse ideas,” Lynley said. Sir David Hillier had just been promoted to Assistant Commissioner. Lynley’s last two run-ins with Hillier had walked a tightrope between insubordination and all-out warfare. Whatever Hillier wished to see them about now, it probably wouldn’t be pleasant.

  “Superintendent Webberly’s with him,” Harriman offered helpfully, perhaps in encouragement. “And I have it on the very best authority that they’ve spent the last hour behind closed doors with the VIP-est of VIPs: Sir Richard Hepton. He came on foot and he left on foot. What d’you think of that?”

  “Since the Home Office is a five-minute walk from here, I don’t think anything,” Lynley said. “Should I?”

  “The Home Secretary? Coming to New Scotland Yard? Locking himself up with Sir David for an hour?”

  “He must be a masochist,” was Havers’ assessment.

  “About halfway through, they sent for Superintendent Webberly and nattered with him for another thirty minutes. Then Sir Richard left. Then Sir David and Superintendent Webberly sent for you two. They’re waiting now. Above.”

  Above meant in Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier’s new office, which he had moved into with lightning speed once his promotion had become official. It had an uninteresting view of Victoria Street, and its walls were as yet undecorated with Hillier’s plethora of career-enhancing photographs, although these were already laid upon the floor as if someone had been deciding upon the most flattering arrangement. Central to them was an enlargement of Sir David receiving his knighthood. He knelt with hands clasped before him and head bowed. He hadn’t looked so humble in years.

  The man himself was in grey this afternoon, a bespoke suit that exactly matched his great wealth of hair. He was sitting behind his football field of a desk, his hands folded upon a leather-bound blotter in such a way that his signet ring winked in the overhead lights. Lying at a precise right angle to the blotter’s edge was a yellow pad covered with Hillier’s flowing, self-confident cursive.

  Superintendent Webberly—Lynley’s immediate supervisor—was perched uncomfortably at the edge of a sling-back chair of the ultra-modern design that Hillier favoured. He was holding a wrapped cigar and rolling it thoughtfully back and forth along his thumb. He looked bearlike in his cuff-frayed tweeds.

  Hillier said to Lynley without preamble, “A child’s body was found in Wiltshire last night. Ten years old. She’s the daughter of the Home Office Undersecretary. The Prime Minister wants the Yard to handle the investigation. The Home Secretary wants the same. I suggested you.”

  Lynley’s suspicions were immediately aroused. Hillier never suggested him for a case unless he had something unsavoury up his sleeve. Havers, he saw, was experiencing misgivings as well, because she glanced towards him quickly as if gauging his reaction. Hillier apparently recognised their doubts because he went on curtly. “I know there’s been bad blood between us for eighteen months, Inspector. But we’ve both been at fault.”

  Lynley looked up, ready to question Hillier’s use of the word both. Hillier seemed to realise this, because he went on to say, “My fault may be the larger. We all follow orders when we must. I’m no different to you when it comes to that. I’d like to let bygones be bygones. Can you do the same?”

  “If you’re assigning me to a case, I’ll cooperate,” Lynley said and added, “Sir.”

  “You’re going to have to do more than cooperate, Inspector. You’re going to have to meet with me when requested so that I can have ready reports for the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. Which means you won’t be able to play at holding back information as you’ve done in the past.”

  “David,” Webberly said carefully. Off on the wrong foot, his tone implied.

  “I think I’ve been forthright with the facts as I’ve known them,” Lynley said evenly to Hillier.

  “You’ve been forthright enough when I squeezed you,” Hillier said. “But I don’t want to have to squeeze you this time round. The investigation’s going to be under everyone’s microscope, from the Prime Minister’s down to Tory backbenchers’. We can’t afford to fail to work as a team. Someone’s head is going to roll if we do.”

  “I can see what’s at stake, sir,” Lynley said. What was at stake was virtually everything, since the Home Office was responsible for the workings of New Scotland Yard in the first place.

  “Good. I’m glad of it. Know this, then. Not an hour ago the Home Secretary ordered me to throw the best I’ve got onto the case. I chose you.” It was the closest Hillier had ever come to offering a compliment, and he added, “Do I make myself clear?” in case Lynley didn’t understand the oblique homage that the Assistant Commissioner was paying to his underling’s talents.

  “Quite,” Lynley said.

  Hillier nodded and began to recite the details: The daughter of Eve Bowen, Junior Minister at the Home Office, had been abducted the previous Wednesday, allegedly snatched en route between her music lesson and her home in Marylebone. Within hours, kidnapping notes had been delivered. Demands had been made. An audiotape of the child had been recorded.

  “Ransom?” Lynley asked in reference to the demands.

  Hillier shook his head. The kidnapper, he told them, wanted the child’s natural father to identify himself in the press. The child’s father wouldn’t do it because the mother didn’t want him to. Four days after the initial demand, the child was found drowned.

  “Murdered?”

  “No direct evidence of that yet,” Webberly said. “But it’s probable.”

  Hillier slid open one of the drawers of his desk and brought out a file, which he handed over. It contained, along with the police report, the official police photographs of the body. Lynley examined them slowly, noting the name of the child, Charlotte Bowen, and a case number printed on the back of each. There was, he saw, no significant mark of violence on the body. Superficially, its appearance was consistent with accidental drowning. Except for one thing. “No froth from the nostrils,” he said.

  “According to the local CID, the pathologist got it from the lungs. But only under pressure on the chest,” Webberly said.

  “That’s an interesting twist.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Here’s what we want.” Hillier intervened impatiently. It was no particular secret to the others that his interest had never lain in crime scene evidence, in the statements of witnesses, in
the corroboration of alibis, in the gathering and piecing together of facts. His main fascination was in the politics of policing, and this particular case promised an exposure to those politics in unheralded degree. “Here’s what we want,” he repeated. “Someone from the Yard at every level of the investigation, in every location, and at every juncture.”

  “That’s a hot potato,” Havers noted.

  “The Home Secretary doesn’t care whose tender feelings get trampled in what police district, Sergeant. He wants us involved in every area of the investigation, so that’s what we’re going to be. We’ll have someone in Wiltshire heading up that end of the case, someone heading up the London end, and someone liaising with the Home Office and Downing Street. If an officer along the line has a problem with the set-up, he can be replaced with someone who hasn’t.”

  Lynley handed the photographs to his sergeant, asking Hillier, “What have the Marylebone police given us so far?”

  “Nothing.”

  Lynley looked from Hillier to Webberly and made note of the fact that Webberly had suddenly fixed his eyes to the floor. He said, “Nothing? But who’s our liaison at the local station?”

  “There isn’t one. The local police haven’t been involved.”

  “But you said the girl went missing last Wednesday.”

  “I did. The family didn’t phone the police.”

  Lynley tried to digest this. Five days had passed since the girl’s disappearance. According to Hillier and Webberly, phone calls had been received by one parent. A tape had been recorded. Letters had been penned. Demands had been made. The child in question was only ten years old. And now she was dead. He said, “Are they mad? What sort of people are we dealing with? Their child goes missing and they do nothing to—”