In the Presence of the Enemy

by Elizabeth George

  Luxford handed back the identification. Lynley returned it to his pocket. Nkata had strolled to the wall next to the conference table. On it hung framed front pages. Lynley read the headlines: One dealt with a Tory MP with four mistresses, a second with speculation over the love life of the Princess of Wales, a third with television stars from a salutary, family-oriented, postwar drama who had been discovered living in a ménage à trois. Wholesome reading to accompany one’s equally wholesome breakfast cereal, Lynley thought.

  “What’s this line of talk all about, Inspector?” Luxford asked. “You can see that I’m busy. Can we get to the point?”

  “Charlotte Bowen is the point.”

  Luxford flicked his eyes from Lynley to Nkata. No fool, he wasn’t about to give them one scrap of information until he knew what they had.

  “We know you’re the girl’s father,” Lynley said. “Ms. Bowen confirmed that last night.”

  “How is she?” Luxford picked up one of the graphs, but he didn’t look at it. Instead, he looked at Lynley. “I’ve phoned her. She won’t return my calls. I haven’t spoken to her since Sunday night.”

  “I expect she’s dealing with the shock,” Lynley said. “She didn’t think things would turn out as they have.”

  “I’ve the story written,” Luxford told them. “I would have run it had she given me the go-ahead.”

  “Doubtless,” Lynley said.

  At the dryness of his tone, Luxford looked at him shrewdly. “Why have you come?”

  “To talk about Baverstock.”

  “Baverstock? What in God’s name…?” Luxford looked to Nkata as if expecting the constable to answer. Nkata merely pulled out a chair and sat. He reached in his pocket and produced notebook and pencil. He made both of them ready to record Luxford’s words.

  “You entered Baverstock School for Boys as an eleven-year-old,” Lynley said. “You were there until you were seventeen. You boarded.”

  “What of it? What’s that got to do with Charlotte? You told me you’d come to talk about Charlotte.”

  “During those years you belonged to a group called the Beaker Explorers, an amateur archaeological society. Is that correct?”

  “I liked to grub round in the dirt. Most boys do. I don’t see what importance this has in your investigation.”

  “This society—the Beaker Explorers—ranged far and wide, didn’t they? Studying barrows, earthworks, stone circles, and the like? Becoming familiar with the lay of the land?”

  “What if we did? I fail to see what this has to do with anything.”

  “And you were the society’s president during your last two years at Baverstock, weren’t you?”

  “I was also editor of the Bavernian Biannual and the Oracle. And to complete your budding picture of my schooldays, Inspector, I failed utterly at every attempt to make the cricket first eleven. Now, tell me if you will. Have I left anything out?”

  “Only one detail,” Lynley said. “The school’s location.”

  Luxford’s eyebrows drew together for a moment. His look was speculative.

  “Wiltshire,” Lynley said. “Baverstock School is in Wiltshire, Mr. Luxford.”

  “There are a great many things in Wiltshire,” Luxford said. “And most of them are far more notable than Baverstock.”

  “I wouldn’t disagree. But they don’t have the advantage of Baverstock, do they?”

  “What advantage is that?”

  “The advantage of being less than seven miles from the site where Charlotte Bowen’s body was found.”

  Slowly, Luxford replaced the graph he’d been holding, laying it among the others on the table. He greeted Lynley’s disclosure in absolute silence. Outside the building, eleven floors below them, an ambulance howled its two-note warning to clear traffic in the street.

  “Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?” Lynley asked him.

  “That’s all it is and you know it, Inspector.”

  “I’m reluctant to take your word for that.”

  “You can’t possibly believe I had anything to do with what happened to Charlotte. The idea’s mad.”

  “Which end of the idea? Your being involved in Charlotte’s kidnapping or your being involved in her death?”

  “In either. What do you think I am?”

  “A man with concerns about his newspaper’s circulation. And consequently a man looking for a story that no one else has.”

  Despite his protests and despite whatever he might have been trying to hide from Lynley, Luxford’s attention fell briefly upon the graphs and charts on the table, the lifeblood of his newspaper and his job. That single dropping of his glance contained more information than anything he might have said.

  “At some point,” Lynley continued, “Charlotte would have had to be transported out of London in a vehicle.”

  “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Nonetheless, I’d like to have a look at your car. Is it parked nearby?”

  “I want a solicitor.”

  “Certainly.”

  Luxford crossed the room to his desk. He shuffled through some papers and unearthed a leatherbound telephone directory, which he opened with one hand as he grabbed the phone with the other. He had punched in two numbers before Lynley spoke again.

  “Constable Nkata and I will have to wait for him, of course. Which might take some time. So if you’ve concerns about how the newsroom is interpreting our visit, you might want to consider how they’ll construe our cooling our heels outside your office door while we wait for the arrival of your solicitor.”

  The editor punched in four more numbers. His hand hovered over the phone before he reached the seventh. Lynley waited for him to make the decision. He saw a vein throbbing in the other man’s temple.

  Luxford crashed the telephone receiver into its cradle. “All right,” he said. “I’ll take you to the car.”

  The car was a Porsche. It sat in a parking garage redolent of urine and petrol, not five minutes away from The Source building. They walked there in silence, Luxford several steps ahead of them. He’d stopped only to put on his jacket and to tell Miss Wallace that he’d be out for quarter of an hour. He’d looked neither right nor left as he led them to the lift, and when a bearded man in a safari jacket had called out, “Den, could I have a word please?” from the door of an office at the far side of the newsroom, Luxford had ignored him. He’d ignored everyone else as well.

  The car was on the fifth level of the garage, dwarfed between a dirty Range Rover and a white van with GOURMET ON THE GO written on its side. As they approached it, Luxford removed a small remote control unit from his pocket. This he used to deactivate the Porsche’s alarm system. The beep echoed in the concrete structure like a hiccupping bird.

  Constable Nkata didn’t wait for an invitation. He put on a pair of gloves, opened the car’s passenger door, and slid inside. He explored the contents of the glove box and the contents of the console between the seats. He lifted the floor mats of both passenger’s side and driver’s side. He dug his hands into the recessed compartments in the doors. He got out of the car and moved the seats forward to give himself access to the space in the back.

  Luxford watched all of this wordlessly. Brisk footsteps sounded somewhere nearby, but he didn’t look to see if Nkata’s search was being observed. His face was impassive. It was impossible to tell what was going on beneath the surface of his stolid exterior.

  Nkata’s feet scrambled against the concrete as he worked his lanky frame farther inside the car. He gave a grunt, to which Luxford responded.

  “You can’t possibly hope to find anything remotely related to your investigation in my car. If I were going to transport a ten-year-old child out of town, I’d hardly use my own vehicle, would I? I’m not a fool. And the idea of secreting Charlotte in a Porsche is absurd. A Porsche, for the love of God. There’s not even enough room inside of it to—”

  “’Spector,” Nkata interrupted. “Got something here. ’Neath the seat.”
>
  He backed out of the car. He was grasping an object in his closed fist.

  “It can’t be anything to do with Charlotte,” Luxford said.

  But he was wrong. Nkata straightened up and showed Lynley what he’d found. It was a pair of spectacles. Round in shape and framed in tortoiseshell, they were nearly identical to the spectacles that Eve Bowen wore. The only difference was that this pair had been made for a child.

  “What in God’s name…?” Luxford sounded astonished. “Whose are those? How did they get in my car?”

  Nkata rested the spectacles in a handkerchief that Lynley extended to him, spread across his palm. “I dare say we’ll discover these belonged to Charlotte Bowen,” Lynley said. He nodded at Nkata and added, “Constable. If you will.”

  Nkata recited the caution. Unlike Havers, who always enjoyed the drama created by ceremoniously reading it from the back of her notebook, Nkata merely repeated it from memory and without inflection. Still, Luxford’s face transformed. His jaw loosened. His eyes widened. He swallowed, and when Nkata had finished, he began to speak.

  “Are you completely mad?” he demanded. “You know I had nothing to do with this.”

  “You might want to phone your solicitor now,” Lynley said. “He can meet us at the Yard.”

  “Someone put those glasses in the car,” Luxford insisted. “You know that’s what happened. Someone who wants it to look as if I—”

  “Make arrangements to have the car impounded,” Lynley told Nkata. “Phone the lab and tell them to be ready to go over it.”

  “Right,” Nkata said. He headed off to take care of it, the leather soles of his shoes sounding tympanically as they came down smartly against the concrete, the noise rebounding off the ceiling and the walls.

  Luxford said to Lynley, “You’re falling into his hands, whoever he is. He put those glasses in the car. He’s been waiting for the moment when you’d stumble on them. He knew you’d get to me eventually, and you have. Don’t you see? You’re playing the game his way.”

  “The car was locked,” Lynley pointed out. “It was armed as well. You deactivated the alarm yourself.”

  “It isn’t locked all the time, for God’s sake.”

  Lynley moved to the passenger door and shut it.

  “The car isn’t locked all the time,” Luxford repeated in some agitation. “It isn’t armed either. Those glasses could have been put inside anytime.”

  “When specifically?”

  The editor was momentarily taken aback. Clearly, he had not expected his argument to carry water with such speed.

  “When isn’t the car locked and armed?” Lynley said. “That shouldn’t be too difficult a question to answer. It’s an expensive vehicle. It’s not a heap you might leave unlocked on the street. Or in a parking garage. Or a car park somewhere. So when isn’t it locked and armed, Mr. Luxford?”

  Luxford’s mouth moved round the words, but he didn’t say them. He had seen the trap an instant before it was sprung upon him, but he obviously knew it was too late to retreat from its jaws.

  “Where?” Lynley asked.

  “At my home,” Luxford finally said.

  “Are you certain of that?”

  Luxford nodded numbly.

  “I see. Then I believe we need to have a talk with your wife.”

  The drive to Highgate was endless. It was a straight shot northwest through Holburn and Bloomsbury, but the route took them through the worst traffic in the city, compounded this night by a car fire just north of Russell Square. Lynley navigated through the congestion, all the time wondering how Sergeant Havers could stand to make the commute every day to Westminster from her digs in Chalk Farm, which was one of the neighbourhoods they passed through some forty minutes into their journey.

  Luxford said little. He asked to phone his wife and make her aware of his arrival in the company of a DI from Scotland Yard, but Lynley refused him. When the newspaperman said, “I need to prepare her. She doesn’t know about any of this. About Eve. About Charlotte. I need to prepare her,” Lynley replied by telling him that his wife might well know far more than he thought, which is why they were going to see her in the first place.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Luxford asserted. “If you mean to suggest that Fiona is any way involved in what’s happened to Charlotte, you’re mad.”

  “Tell me,” Lynley said in return. “Were you married to Fiona at the time of the Blackpool Tory conference?”

  “I was not.”

  “Were you involved with her?”

  Luxford was silent for a moment. When he did reply, he said only, “Fiona and I weren’t married then,” as if that fact alone had given him licence to pursue Eve Bowen.

  “But Fiona knew that you were in Blackpool?” Lynley asked. Luxford said nothing. Lynley glanced his way, saw the whiteness round his mouth. “Mr. Luxford, did your wife—”

  “Yes. All right. She knew I was in Blackpool. But that’s all she knew, all she ever knew. She doesn’t follow politics. She’s never followed politics.” He raked his hand through his hair in agitation.

  “As far as you know, she’s never followed politics.”

  “She was a model, for God’s sake. Her life and her world were her body, her face. She’d never even bothered to vote before I knew her.” Luxford rested his head wearily against the seat. He said, “Brilliant. Now I’ve made her sound like a twit,” and he rolled his head to the left and gazed dully through the window. They were passing Camden Lock Market, where a juggler stood at the edge of the pavement, plying his trade with antique pewter platters. They winked fitfully in the day’s late light.

  Luxford said nothing more until they reached Highgate. His home was on Millfield Lane, a villa that stood directly opposite two of the ponds that formed the east boundary of Hampstead Heath. When Lynley made the turn between the two brick pillars that marked the driveway to The Source editor’s home, Luxford said, “At least let me go inside first and have a word with Fiona.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “Can’t you have some bloody decency?” Luxford demanded. “My son’s at home. He’s eight years old. He’s completely innocent. You can’t expect me to include him in this exhibition you’re planning.”

  “I’ll watch what I say while he’s present. You can take him to his room.”

  “I hardly think—”

  “That’s the extent of the compromise, Mr. Luxford.”

  Lynley parked behind a late-model Mercedes-Benz that was itself parked beneath a portico. The portico overlooked the villa’s front garden, which appeared to be more a wildlife refuge than a traditional display of carefully manicured lawn and burgeoning herbaceous borders. When Luxford got out of the Bentley, he went to the edge of this garden, where a flagstone path disappeared into the shrubs. He said, “They’re usually watching the birds feed at this time of day.” He called his wife’s name. Then he called to his son.

  When no answering cry came from beneath the trees, he turned back to the house. The front door was closed, but not locked. It opened into a marble-floored foyer at the centre of which a flight of stairs rose to the first floor of the house.

  “Fiona?” Luxford called. His voice was distorted by the stone floor and plaster walls of the foyer. Again no one responded.

  Lynley shut the door behind them. Luxford went through an archway to their left. Here a drawing room was banked by bay windows that gave an unobstructed view of the ponds on the heath. He continued to call his wife’s name.

  The house was utterly hushed. Luxford went from one room to another throughout the sprawling villa, but as he did, it became evident to Lynley that this trip to Highgate had been in vain. Fortuitously or not, it was clear that Fiona Luxford was not there to answer his questions. When her husband came down the stairs, Lynley said to him, “You’ll want to phone your solicitor, Mr. Luxford. He can meet us at the Yard.”

  “They should be here.” Brow furrowed, Luxford looked from the drawing room where Lyn
ley had waited for him to the entry and the heavy front door. “Fiona wouldn’t go out without locking the front door. They should be here, Inspector.”

  “Perhaps she thought she’d locked it.”

  “She wouldn’t think. She’d know. It locks with a key.” Luxford went back to the door and pulled it open. He called his wife’s name, more a shout this time. He called his son’s name. He strode back down the slope of the driveway towards the lane where, just inside the walls of his property, a low white building stood. It comprised three garages, and as Lynley watched, Luxford entered the building through a green wooden door, an unlocked green wooden door, Lynley noted. So perhaps there was mild support for Luxford’s claim as to how Charlotte’s glasses came to be in his car.

  Lynley stood in the portico. He let his gaze sweep over the garden. He was thinking about insisting that Luxford lock up the house and climb back into the Bentley for the drive to Scotland Yard, when his eyes fell upon the Mercedes in front of him. He decided to test the newspaperman’s assertions about where and when his own car was locked. He tried the driver’s door. It opened. He slid inside.

  His knee nudged a pendent object near the steering column. A muted metallic jangling sounded. The car’s keys, he saw, hung from the ignition on a large brass ring.

  On the floor of the passenger’s side of the car a woman’s shoulder bag lay. Lynley reached for this. He opened it, rustled past a compact, several lipstick tubes, a brush, a pair of sunglasses, and a chequebook, and pulled out a leather purse. It contained fifty-five pounds, a Visa card, and a driving licence with Fiona Howard Luxford printed on it.

  A sense of disquiet rose in him, like insects buzzing too close to his ears. He was getting out of the car, the shoulder bag looped over his hand, when Luxford hastened back up the driveway.

  “They sometimes take their bikes onto the heath in the afternoon,” he said. “Fiona likes the ride to Kenwood House and Leo loves to look at the paintings. I thought they might have gone there, but their bikes are—” He caught sight of the shoulder bag.