Corsico shovelled his left hand into the back pocket of his jeans. He brought forth his notebook. “All right, but it’s not as bad as it seems. We’re already getting tips, just like I said we would.”
Rodney recognised the moment to relent. He said pleasantly, “That’s excellent. I can—and will—pass that news upward. It’ll be sure to please. What’ve you got?”
“Part obvious observation, part crackpot bullshit, part possibility.” Corsico licked his lips and then his fingers. He used them to riffle through the pages of his notes. “The obvious first: Do we know the child was illegitimate, do we know that Bowen never named the father, do we know the kid went to a convent school. The bullshit next: This is a religious plot and the next kid will be kidnapped within twenty-four hours; a satanic cult that sacrifices children is on the prowl; white slavery is involved; child pornography is at the root of everything. Plus the usual loonies phoning in with sightings of the kidnapper, declarations of guilt, and revelations of paternity.”
“Aren’t people despicable,” Rodney murmured.
“Too right.” Corsico’s eyes were on his notes. He used the nail of his index finger to flick one of the pages of his notebook back and forth. It was a nervous gesture that Rodney didn’t miss.
He said, “And the part that’s a possibility, Mitch? We still need our story.”
“It’s nascent. Not ready for print.”
“Understood. Go on.”
“Right. I was in early this morning, which is why I didn’t see that.” He acknowledged the Globe with a dip of his head. “I had the kid’s birth certificate—the copy from St. Catherine’s—you remember?”
“I’d hardly be likely to forget. Have you learned something, then?”
Corsico took a pencil from his shirt pocket. He made a mark in his notebook, then drove the pencil beneath his Stetson and raised its brim. “I did the maths.”
“Maths?”
“On Bowen’s pregnancy. If the birth wasn’t premature, then nine months before it was the thirteenth of October. For a lark, I had a look through the microfilms to see what was going on then. I did two weeks on either side of the thirteenth.” He read from his notebook. “A blizzard in Lancashire. A pub bombing in St. Albans. A serial killer. Genetic fingerprinting under scrutiny. Test tube babies in—”
“Mitchell, I’ve taken off the gloves, if you hadn’t noticed,” Rodney said. “So there’s no need to regale me with the minutiae of your research. Is there a point you’re reaching?”
Corsico raised his head from his notes. “The Tory conference.”
“What about it?”
“The October Tory conference in Blackpool. That’s what was going on nine months to the day of the Bowen kid’s birth. We already know that Bowen was the political correspondent for the Telegraph then. She would have been covering the conference. She did cover it, in fact. I got that from the Telegraph’s morgue fifteen minutes ago.” Corsico flipped his notebook closed. “So I wasn’t far off yesterday, was I? Every bigwig in the party probably made an appearance in Blackpool during that conference. And she was bonking one of them.”
Rodney had to admire the young man’s tenacity. He was in full possession of the strength, determination, and resiliency of youth. He filed the information about the conference into his brain for future reference and said, “But where do you go with this, Mitch? It’s one thing to speculate on the father’s identity. It’s another to find it. How many Tories in Blackpool are we talking about? Two thousand party members and two hundred MPs? Where do you propose to start looking?”
“I want to have a look at what kind of stories Bowen was filing from the conference. I’ll check to see if she was following the work of any particular parliamentary committee. She may have interviewed someone and got hooked up that way. I’ll talk to the lobby correspondents and see if they have anything as well.”
“That’s a start,” Rodney acknowledged. “But as to having a story for tomorrow’s paper…”
“Right. Right. We can’t go with this stuff. Not yet, at least. But I’ll phone my snouts right now. I’ll see what they can give me.”
Rodney nodded. He raised a benedictory hand. It communicated to Corsico that their interview was at a conclusion.
At the door to the office, Corsico turned back. He said, “Rod, you don’t actually believe I gave that story to the Globe. Do you?”
Rodney directed his facial muscles to arrange themselves into an expression of earnest rectitude. “Mitchell,” he said, “believe me now if never again. I know you didn’t give that story to the Globe.”
He waited until the door had closed on the reporter. He removed the rest of the wrapper from his Aero bar. He wrote Blackpool and 13 October on the back of it, folded it into a square, and put it into his pocket. He popped the last piece of chocolate into his mouth. He chuckled and reached for his Filofax and his phone.
The pictures hadn’t been difficult to find. Evelyn was, after all, in an exposed position. As a public servant in the process of establishing a brilliant career, she had been the focus of more than one newspaper article in the past six years. And long knowing the importance of a politician’s image, she had generally posed for photographs with her family.
Dennis Luxford had three of them spread on his desk. While the staff of The Source went about the business of the day just outside his office, he examined the photographs of his daughter.
In one of them, she sat on a plump hassock in front of Evelyn and her husband, who were themselves seated on a sofa. In another, she gripped the mane of a horse while Eve, in jodhpurs, led her round a ring. In the third, she sat at a table ostensibly doing schoolwork, a stub of a pencil clutched in her hand, her mother bending over her and pointing to something on the paper on which the child was writing.
Luxford slid open one of the drawers of his desk and shifted items until he found the magnifying glass he used to read fine print. He used the glass against the pictures. He studied Charlotte’s face.
Now that he actually saw her for the very first time—instead of looking at and dismissing her photograph along with her mother’s as so much political fodder for the masses—he could see that his family was etched in her. She had her mother’s hair and her mother’s eyes, but the rest of her marked her immutably as a Luxford. The same chin as his sister’s, the same wide brow as his own, the same nose and mouth as Leo’s. She was stamped as his daughter every bit as indelibly as if she’d been branded with his name, instead of denied it.
And he knew nothing about her. Her favourite colour, the size of her shoes, the stories she had liked to read before bed. He had no idea what her aspirations had been, what stages she’d gone through, what dreams she’d dreamed. Such knowledge was the hostage of responsibility. When he’d dismissed one, he’d forfeited the other. Oh, he’d tipped his hat to paternity with a monthly visit to Barclay’s, wearing the ceremonial chains of fatherhood for quarter of an hour as he made out deposit slips in the cause of self-absolution. But that was the extent of his involvement with his daughter, a non-involvement whose superficial purpose was to see to Charlotte’s future beyond his own death but whose real purpose was to act as continual balm to his conscience during his life.
It had seemed so much the right thing to do. Evelyn had made her wishes clear. Since, with what he liked to believe was an atypical display of masculine egocentricity, he had designated her the injured party, he told himself that he could only see that her wishes were fulfilled. And they were so easy to comply with. She’d stated them in five simple words, “Stay away from us, Dennis.” He’d been happy to do so.
Luxford laid the pictures side by side on his desk. He examined each under the magnifying glass a second, third, then a fourth time. And he found himself wondering if the child he was studying through the lens liked music, if she hated broccoli, refused to eat mushrooms, walked pigeon-toed, read the Narnia books, rode a bicycle, had ever broken a bone. Her features marked her as his, but his ignorance about her for
ced him to acknowledge that she had never been his. That fact was as clear today as it had been four months before her birth.
Stay away from us, Dennis.
Very well, he’d thought.
So his daughter was dead. Precisely because he’d stayed away, as instructed. Had he refused to play along, Charlotte would never have been kidnapped in the first place. There would have been no demands to acknowledge her paternity because that information would have been available to everyone, including Charlotte.
Luxford touched her head in the photograph and wondered what her hair had felt like. He couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t honestly imagine a single thing about her.
The immensity of his ignorance burned in him. As did the testimony that the ignorance made to his true worth as a man.
Luxford set the magnifying glass on top of one of the pictures. He pressed his thumb and index finger to the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes behind them. All of his life he’d played the game of power. At this moment he sought only prayer. Somewhere, there had to exist the words that could assuage the—
“I’d like a word, Dennis.”
He jerked his head up. In a reflex movement, he dropped his arm to his desk and obscured the pictures. Standing in the doorway to his office was the only person who would have dared to open the door without knocking or without asking Miss Wallace to ring through and advise the editor of his arrival: The Source chairman, Peter Ogilvie. He said, “May I…?” and flicked his soulless grey eyes in the direction of the conference table. It was a pro forma request. Ogilvie clearly intended to enter the office whether he was invited to do so or not.
Luxford rose from his desk. Ogilvie advanced. He led, as always, with his signature eyebrows, so long gone untrimmed that they resembled feather boas snaking across his forehead. The two men met in the centre of the room. Luxford offered his hand. The chairman slapped a folded tabloid into it.
“Two hundred and twenty thousand copies,” Ogilvie said. “That is, of course, two hundred and twenty thousand above their daily circulation, Dennis. But that’s only part of my concern.”
Ogilvie had always been a hands-off chairman of the newspaper. He had more important concerns than the daily running of The Source, and he generally addressed himself to them from his massive office in his Hertfordshire home. He was a bottom-line man whose interest was fixed almost solely upon profit and loss.
Aside from receiving reports of a drastic alteration in the newspaper’s profits, only one other event would bring Ogilvie into the London offices of The Source. Being scooped was a fact of life in the newspaper business, and Ogilvie—who’d been in the business, it sometimes seemed, since the time of Charles Dickens—would have been first to admit this. But being scooped on a story that had the potential of tarring the Tories was completely unacceptable to him.
So Luxford knew what Ogilvie had delivered into his hand. It was this morning’s edition of his erstwhile paper, the Globe, with its headline about MP Bowen’s failure to contact the police in the wake of her daughter’s abduction.
“Last week we were ahead of every paper in the nation on Larnsey and the rent boy,” Ogilvie said. “Are we slipping this week?”
“No. We had the story. I killed it.”
Ogilvie’s only reaction was in his eyes. For an instant they narrowed fractionally. The movement looked like a muscle twitching.
“Is this a loyalty issue, Dennis? Are you still tied to the Globe for some reason?”
“Would you like a coffee?”
“A believable explanation will do.”
Luxford went to the conference table and sat. He nodded for Ogilvie to do the same. He hadn’t come to work for Ogilvie without learning that to show any sign of weakness in the chairman’s presence was to trigger his predilection for bug squashing.
Ogilvie eyebrowed his way to the table and pulled out a chair. “Tell me.”
Luxford did so. When he was finished taking the chairman through his interview with Corsico and his reasons for killing the story, Ogilvie homed in on the most cogent point with typical journalistic acumen.
“You’ve run stories before now without multiple confirmations. What stopped you this time?”
“Bowen’s position at the Home Office. It seemed reasonable to conclude that she would have by-passed her local police and gone directly to Scotland Yard. I didn’t want to run a story indicting her for inaction only to end up with egg on my face when some high rider at the Yard jumped to her defence, waving his appointment diary, and claiming she’d been there within ten minutes of learning the girl had been snatched.”
“Something which hasn’t happened,” Ogilvie pointed out, “in the wake of the Globe’s story.”
“I can only assume the Globe got confirmation from someone at the Yard. I told my man to do the same. If he’d had it for me before ten last night, I’d have run the story. He hadn’t. I didn’t. There’s nothing more to tell.”
“There’s one thing more,” Ogilvie said in disagreement.
Luxford grew wary, but he used his chair to demonstrate his composure to the chairman, leaning back in it and lacing his fingers across his stomach. He didn’t ask Ogilvie to elucidate upon his “one thing more.” He merely waited for the other man to continue.
“We did a good job on Larnsey,” Ogilvie said. “And we did it without multiple confirmations. Am I correct?”
There was no point to lying, since a conversation with Sarah Happleshort or Rodney Aronson would be sufficient to uncover the truth. “You are.”
“Then tell me this. Set my mind at ease. Tell me that the next time we have these Tory louts by the balls, you’re going to know how to squeeze. You’re not going to let the Mirror, the Globe, the Sun, or the Mail apply the pressure for you. And you’re not going to back off by requesting confirmation from three, thirteen, or three dozen bloody sources.”
Ogilvie’s voice rose emphatically with the last four words. Luxford said, “Peter, you know as well as I that Larnsey’s situation was different to Bowen’s. Multiple confirmations weren’t necessary in his case. There was nothing open to doubt. He was caught in a car with his trousers unzipped and his dick in the mouth of a sixteen-year-old boy. In Bowen’s case, what we have is a single statement from the Home Office and everything else floating somewhere between innuendo, gossip, and downright fabrication. When I have some facts that I can be assured are facts, rely upon them being printed on our front page. Until then…” He lowered his chair to its original position and faced the chairman squarely. “If you’ve a problem with how I’m running the paper, then you need to think about getting yourself another editor.”
“Den? Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t realize…Mr. Ogilvie. Hello.”
Rodney Aronson had chosen his moment superbly. The deputy editor stood with one hand on the knob of Luxford’s door—which Ogilvie had left partially open, the better that his raised voice might drift out into the newsroom and shake up the troops—and his disembodied head poking into the aperture.
“What is it, Rodney?” Luxford demanded.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. The door was open and I didn’t know…Miss Wallace isn’t at her desk.”
“How intriguing. Thanks for informing us.”
Rodney’s mouth curved in a thin smile that was belied by the sudden angry stretching of his nostrils. Luxford saw that he wasn’t going to accept being embarrassed in front of the chairman without doing something to return the favour. He said affably, “Right. Sorry. Not thinking,” and then displayed his weapon of choice with, “I just thought you’d like to know what we’ve got brewing on the Bowen situation.”
He made the assumption that his remark gave him entrée to Luxford’s office. He took a chair directly opposite the chairman.
“You were right,” he said to Luxford. “The Home Secretary did make a call to Scotland Yard on behalf of Bowen. A personal call, in the flesh. A snout’s confirmed it.” He paused as if in homage to Luxford’s wisdom in holding back on the
story that the Globe was running. But Luxford knew that the last move Rodney would make was to risk attenuating the value of his own stock with Ogilvie by promoting Luxford’s. So he prepared himself for what was to come and began to line up his mental soldiers for a skirmish. “But here’s what’s interesting. The Home Secretary didn’t make this visit to the Yard until yesterday afternoon. Before that, the Yard hadn’t heard word one about the kid’s disappearance. So Mitch’s story was gold.”
“Rodney, we’re not in the business of wasting time in confirming other newspapers’ stories,” Ogilvie pointed out. He said to Luxford, “Although if you’ve managed to get confirmation today, I’d like to know why you couldn’t manage it yesterday.”
Rodney intervened. “Mitch was beating the bushes like hell, from yesterday afternoon till midnight. His sources were dry.”
“Then he needs new sources.”
“I couldn’t agree more. And when he saw the Globe’s front page this morning, he set about getting them. After I gave him some encouragement in my office.”
“May I conclude from your smile that you’ve come up with something more?” Ogilvie asked.
Luxford noted that Rodney did not deny himself a look of triumph cast in his direction. He veiled it, however, with a show of caution that did service as a stiletto inserted neatly between Luxford’s ribs. He said, “Please understand, Mr. Ogilvie. Den may not want to run with this new stuff, and I wouldn’t disagree with his decision, if that’s what it is. We’ve only just got it from our snout at the Yard, and he may be the only one willing to talk.”
“What is it?”
Rodney’s tongue flicked across his lips. “Apparently, there were kidnapping notes. Two of them. They were received the same day the kid went missing. So Bowen knew beyond a doubt that the kid had been snatched and still she did nothing to involve the police.”
Luxford heard Ogilvie draw in a breath. He spoke before the chairman could do so, saying evenly, “Perhaps she phoned someone else, Rod. Have you or Mitchell considered that angle?”
In the Presence of the Enemy Page 36