In the Presence of the Enemy

by Elizabeth George

  “This was in the car,” Lynley told him. “Have a look. Are these her keys?”

  Luxford’s expression gave Lynley the answer. Once the man saw the keys, he rested both hands against the bonnet of the car, looked out over the garden, and said, “Something’s happened.”

  Lynley walked round the Mercedes to the other side. The front tyre was flat. He squatted to have a closer look. He ran his fingers along the treads and followed his fingers’ progress with his eyes. He found the first nail a quarter of the way up the tyre. Then a second and a third nail together, some six inches above the first.

  He said, “Is your wife generally home at this time of day?”

  Luxford said, “Always. She likes to spend time with Leo after school.”

  “What time does his school day end?”

  Luxford raised his head. His look was stricken. “Half past three.”

  Lynley looked at his pocket watch. It was after six. His disquiet heightened, but he said the reasonable thing. “They may have both gone out.”

  “She wouldn’t leave her bag. She wouldn’t leave the keys in the car. And the front door unlocked. She wouldn’t do that. Something’s happened to them.”

  “There’s no doubt a simple explanation,” Lynley said. Which was usually the case. Someone seemed to be missing who was all the while engaged in the most logical of activities, activities that the panicked spouse would have recalled had the panicked spouse not panicked in the first place. Lynley considered what Fiona Luxford’s activities might be, looking for cool reason in the face of Luxford’s growing apprehension. “The front tyre’s gone flat,” he told Luxford. “She’s picked up three nails.”

  “Three?”

  “So she may have taken the boy somewhere on foot.”

  “Someone’s flattened it,” Luxford said. “Someone’s flattened the tyre. Listen to me, won’t you? Someone’s flattened that tyre.”

  “Not necessarily. If she was heading out to pick him up from school and found the tyre flat, she—”

  “She wouldn’t.” Luxford pressed his fingers to his eyelids. “She wouldn’t, all right? I won’t allow her to fetch him.”

  “What?”

  “I make him walk. I make him walk to school. It’s good for him. I’ve told her it’s good for him. It’ll toughen him up. Oh God. Where are they?”

  “Mr. Luxford, let’s go inside and see if she’s left a note somewhere.”

  They went back to the house. Maintaining his calm, Lynley instructed Luxford to check every possible spot where his wife might have left him a message. He followed him from the basement gym to a desk in a second floor aerie. There was nothing. Anywhere.

  “Your son had no appointments today?” Lynley asked. They were descending the stairs. Luxford’s face wore a fine sheen of perspiration. “Your wife had no appointments? Doctor’s? Dentist’s? A place they may have gone together by taxi or underground? By bus?”

  “Without her bag? Without her money? Leaving her keys in the car? For God’s sake, have some sense.”

  “Let’s rule out all the possibilities, Mr. Luxford.”

  “And while we’re ruling out all the bloody possibilities, she’s out there somewhere…Leo’s out there somewhere…God damn!” Luxford hit his fist on the stair rail.

  “Do her parents live nearby? Do yours?”

  “There’s no one nearby. There’s nothing. Nothing.”

  “Any friends she might have taken the boy to see? Any colleagues? If she’s discovered the truth about you and Eve Bowen, she may well have decided that she and your son—”

  “She hasn’t discovered the truth! There is no possible way that she could have discovered the truth. She should be here in the house or out in the garden or riding her bicycle and Leo should be with her.”

  “Has she a diary that we might—”

  The front door swung open. Both of them spun towards it as someone outside pushed at it forcefully. It flew to the wall and slammed against it. A woman stumbled into the house. Tall, with tumbling hair the shade of honey and dirt streaking her wine-coloured leggings, she was breathing raggedly and she clutched her chest as if her heart were in seizure.

  Luxford cried, “Fiona!” and pounded down the rest of the stairs. “What in the name of heaven…?”

  Her head flew up. Lynley saw she was ashen. She cried out her husband’s name, and he caught her in his arms.

  “Leo,” she said. Her voice was wild. “Dennis, it’s Leo. It’s Leo. Leo!”

  And she raised her clenched hands to the level of his face. She opened them. A small boy’s school cap fell to the floor.

  Her story came out in tatters, torn from her uneven breathing. She’d expected Leo no later than four. When he hadn’t arrived by five, she was irritated enough with his thoughtlessness to set out after him and give him a thorough talking-to when she found him. He knew, after all, that he was always to come directly home after school. But when she tried to take the Mercedes down the driveway, she’d found a tyre was flat, so she set off on foot.

  “I walked every route he might have taken,” she said, and she listed them for her husband as if to prove her point. She sat on the very edge of a sofa in the drawing room, her hands trembling badly as they curved round a tumbler of whisky that Luxford had poured for her. He squatted in front of her, steadying her grip and occasionally reaching forward to push the hair from her face. “And after I’d walked them all—every route—I came home along the cemetery. And the cap…Leo’s cap…” She raised the whisky glass to her mouth. It clattered unsteadily against her teeth.

  Luxford seemed to know what she was unwilling to put into words. “In the cemetery?” he asked. “You found Leo’s cap? In the cemetery?”

  Tears spilled from her eyes.

  “But Leo knows not to go into Highgate Cemetery alone.” Luxford sounded puzzled. “I’ve told him, Fiona. I’ve told him time and again.”

  “Of course he knows, but he’s a boy. A little boy. He’s curious. And the cemetery…You know how it is. Overgrown, wild. A place for adventure. He passes right by it every day. And he’d have thought—”

  “My God, has he talked to you about going in there?”

  “Talked to…? Dennis, he’s grown up with that cemetery practically in his back garden. He’s seen it. He’s been interested in the tombs and catacombs. He’s read about the statues and—”

  Luxford rose to his feet. He drove his hands into his pockets and turned away from her.

  “What?” she asked. Her voice arced with more panic. “What? What?”

  He swung round on her. “Did you encourage him?”

  “To what?”

  “To visit the tombs. The catacombs. To have adventures in that bloody cemetery. Did you encourage him, Fiona? Is that why he went?”

  “No! I answered him. I answered his questions.”

  “Which piqued his curiosity. Which stimulated his imagination.”

  “What was I supposed to do when my son asked questions?”

  “Which led him to jump the wall.”

  “Are you making me responsible? You, who insisted he walk to school, who downright demanded that I never baby him by—”

  “Which no doubt led him straight to some pervert who decided he needed an afternoon’s switch from Brompton Cemetery to Highgate.”

  “Dennis!”

  Lynley intervened quickly. “You’re ahead of yourself, Mr. Luxford. There may be a simple explanation.”

  “Bugger your simple explanations.”

  “We need to phone the boy’s friends,” Lynley went on. “We need to talk to Leo’s headmaster as well as his teacher. It’s just two hours past the time he was due home, and chances are you’re falling into panic for nothing.”

  As if in support of Lynley’s words, the telephone rang. Luxford sprang across the room and snatched up the receiver. He barked a hello. Someone on the other end spoke. His left hand grabbed the mouthpiece and cupped it.

  “Leo!” he said. His wife surged
to her feet. “Where the hell are you? Do you have any idea of the state you’ve put us into?”

  “Where is he? Dennis, let me speak to him.”

  Luxford held his hand up to stop his wife. He listened in silence for less than ten seconds. Then he said, “Who? Leo, who? God damn it. Tell me where…Leo! Leo!”

  Fiona grabbed the phone. She cried her son’s name into the mouthpiece. She listened, but obviously listened in vain. The phone clattered from her hand to the floor.

  “Where is he?” she said to her husband. “Dennis, what’s happened? Where’s Leo?”

  Luxford turned his face to Lynley. It looked carved from chalk.

  “He’s been taken,” he said. “Someone’s kidnapped my son.”

  22

  “THE MESSAGE WAS VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL to the one Luxford received about Charlotte,” Lynley said to St. James. “The difference was that this time the child delivered it personally.”

  “ ‘Acknowledge your firstborn child on page one?’ ” St. James asked.

  “A slight variation of that. According to Luxford, Leo said, ‘You’re to run the story on page one, Daddy. Then he’ll let me go.’ And that’s all.”

  “According to Luxford,” St. James repeated. He saw that Lynley followed his thinking.

  “When Luxford’s wife grabbed the phone, the line had gone dead. So the answer is yes: He was the only one of us to speak to the boy.” Lynley reached for the balloon glass that St. James had placed for him on the coffee table in his Cheyne Row study. He meditated upon its contents as if he would find the answer he was looking for floating on the surface. He looked fairly done in, St. James noted. Permanent exhaustion went hand-in-glove with his line of work.

  “It’s not a pretty thought, Tommy.”

  “Even less pretty when one considers that the story our putative kidnapper wants to see on page one will actually run in Luxford’s paper tomorrow. There was quite enough time to alter the front page and go to press with it once we’d heard from Leo. That’s rather convenient, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “What have you done?”

  He’d done what was called for by the situation, Lynley explained, despite his unease and his growing suspicions about Dennis Luxford. Thus, constables were assigned to Highgate Cemetery, where they were looking for clues to the boy’s disappearance. Other constables were walking the routes Leo might have taken once he left his junior school on Chester Road. The media had been given photographs of the boy to broadcast with the nightly news for potential sightings of him. Wiretaps were in the works, to trace all incoming calls to Luxford.

  “We’ve taken the nails from the tyres as well,” Lynley finished. “And dusted the Mercedes for prints, for what little good that activity’s probably going to do us.”

  “What about the Porsche?”

  “The glasses were Charlotte’s. Eve Bowen confirmed.”

  “Does she know where you found them?”

  “I didn’t tell her.”

  “She may have been right all along. About Luxford. His involvement. His motivations.”

  “She may have been. But if she is, we’re dealing with an ability to dissemble that’s roughly on a par with people like Blunt.” Lynley swirled the brandy in his glass before he shot the liquor back. He set the glass on the coffee table and leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. He said, “SO4’s given us a match on the fingerprints. Whoever put his thumb on the inside of that tape recorder also left his print in the squat on George Street. Once on the edge of the bathroom mirror, a second time on the windowsill. That was good work, Simon. I don’t know when—or even if—we would have got to the squat if you hadn’t brought it to our attention.”

  “Thank Helen and Deborah. They ran across it last week. Both of them insisted that I give it a look.”

  At this, Lynley studied his hands. Behind him, night’s darkness pressed against the windows, splintered by a streetlamp a few doors away from St. James’s house. Inside the house, the silence between the two men was broken by the sound of music, floating down from the top floor where Deborah was working in her darkroom. St. James recognised the song with a slight stirring of discomfort: Eric Clapton’s ode to the son he had lost. He immediately regretted having mentioned Deborah at all.

  Lynley raised his head. “What have I done? Helen told me I dealt her a death blow.”

  St. James felt the unintended irony of the words like a subtle bruise on his psyche. But he knew he couldn’t betray his wife’s trust. He said, “She’s sensitive when it comes to children. She still wants them. And the adoption process moves forward roughly like flies crossing flypaper.”

  “She connected what I said about killing children to the difficulty she’s had with her pregnancies, then.”

  Lynley’s astute remark was an indication of how well he actually knew Deborah. It was also too close to the truth for St. James’s liking. He spoke past a raw soreness from which he thought he’d recovered at least twelve months in the past. “It’s not as simple as that.”

  “I didn’t intend to hurt her. She must know that. I flew off without thinking. But it was because of Helen, not Deborah. May I apologise to her?”

  “I’ll tell her what you’ve said.”

  Lynley looked as if he would argue the point. But there were lines in their friendship that he wouldn’t cross. This was one of them; both of them knew it. He rose, saying, “My temper got the better of me last evening, Simon. Havers warned me off coming, but I wouldn’t listen. I regret the whole scene.”

  “I haven’t been gone from the Met so long that I’ve forgotten what the pressure’s like,” St. James said. He walked with Lynley to the front door and followed him out into the cool night. The air felt damp against his skin, as if a mist were rising from the Thames a short distance away.

  “Hillier’s handling the media,” Lynley said. “At least that’s not on my back.”

  “But who’s handling Hillier?”

  They chuckled companionably. Lynley took his car keys from his pocket. “He wanted to go to the media with a suspect this afternoon, a mechanic Havers dug up in Wiltshire who had Charlotte Bowen’s school uniform in his garage. He had nothing else, though, as far as we know.” Contemplatively, he examined the keys in his hand. “It’s too spread out, Simon. From London to Wiltshire and God knows how many points in between. I’d like to settle on Luxford, on Harvie, on someone, but I’m beginning to think more than one person’s behind what’s happened.”

  “That was Eve Bowen’s thought.”

  “She might well be right, although not the way she assumed.” He told St. James what MP Alistair Harvie had claimed about Bowen, the IRA, and its potential splinter groups. He ended with, “It’s never been the IRA’s way of working: kidnapping children and taking their lives. I want to reject the idea out of hand. But I can’t, I’m afraid. So we’re checking into backgrounds to see what’s there.”

  “The housekeeper’s Irish,” St. James offered. “Damien Chambers as well. The music teacher.”

  “The last one to see Charlotte,” Lynley noted.

  “He has a Belfast accent, for what it’s worth. He has more potential than the housekeeper, I think.”

  “Why?”

  “He had someone with him the night Helen and I went to see him, someone upstairs. He claimed it was a woman and attributed his nerves to first-night trauma: The scene is set for seduction and strangers arrive to question him about the disappearance of one of his music pupils.”

  “Not an unreasonable reaction.”

  “Quite. But there’s another connection between Chambers and what happened to Charlotte Bowen. I hadn’t really thought about it till you mentioned the IRA.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The name. In the note Bowen received, Charlotte is referred to as Lottie. But out of all the people I spoke to about the girl, only Damien Chambers and her schoolmates called her Lottie. So I’d check into Chambers if I were you.”

  “One more possibility,�
� Lynley agreed.

  He said goodnight and walked to his car. St. James watched him drive off before he turned and went back into the house.

  He found Deborah still in the darkroom on the top floor, her music now switched off. She’d completed her developing and the door was open, but he saw that she wasn’t finished working despite the hour. She was bent over the work top, studying something with a magnifying glass. One of her old proof sheets, he suspected. It was her habit to gauge her creative growth by constantly comparing where she was at the moment with where she had come from.

  Caught up in her study, she didn’t hear him say her name. He entered the darkroom, where he saw over her shoulder why she was so absorbed, and he instantly knew that he couldn’t tell her a second child had been abducted. She wasn’t looking at one of her proof sheets. Rather, she was using the magnifying glass to scrutinise the photograph of Charlotte Bowen’s body that Lynley had dropped in front of her in anger on the previous afternoon.

  St. James reached for the magnifying glass. She started with a cry and dropped the glass on top of the picture.

  “You frightened me!”

  “Tommy’s come and gone.”

  Her eyelids lowered. She restlessly fingered the edges of the picture.

  “He’s apologised for what he said to you, Deborah. It was the heat of the moment. He didn’t mean it. He would have come up here to talk to you himself, but I thought it was best that I bring you the message. Would you have preferred to see him?”

  “What Tommy meant isn’t important. What he said was the truth. I kill children, Simon. You and I know it. What Tommy doesn’t know is that Charlotte Bowen just wasn’t the first.”

  St. James felt the cold weight of his spirit sinking. His mind cried out, Not now, not again. He wanted to disappear from the room and to wait for Deborah to come out of her funk, but because he loved her, he forced himself to call upon patience and reason. “It’s been a long time. How many years will it take for you to forgive yourself?”

  “I can’t adhere to a timeline you’ve established for me,” she replied. “Feelings aren’t like scientific formulae. You don’t add remorse to understanding and come out with peace of mind. At least I don’t. What goes on inside people—or at least inside me—isn’t like mixing molecules, Simon.”