In the Presence of the Enemy

by Elizabeth George

  Corrine said, “My goodness,” with her hand at her chest. “My goodness…I need…Oh goodness…just a breath…”

  Celia’s expression altered. She got to her feet. Corrine gasped, “All of a sudden, dear…Where’ve I put…Where’s my magic air? Has Sammy…Has he moved it?”

  Celia quickly managed to find the inhaler next to the television. She hurried it to Corrine and put a steadying hand on her shoulder as the older woman pumped it vigorously into her mouth. Celia looked repentant for catamite, the obvious cause of Corrine’s distress.

  Interesting, Barbara thought. This is how their relationship would probably be played out over the next thirty or so years. She wondered if Celia had twigged to that fact.

  Barbara heard the kitchen door open and then slam shut as Celia returned to her seat at the table. Rapid footsteps came on and Robin’s voice called urgently, “Mum? Are you here? Is Barbara about?”

  It wasn’t the right question from what Barbara could tell from Corrine’s expression. But it was also a question that didn’t need answering, since Robin came through to the sitting room and stopped in the doorway. He was grubby from face to feet; there were cobwebs in his hair. But he grinned at Barbara and said, “There you are. Wait till you hear. Stanley’s going to brick it when he finds out.”

  “Robbie, darling?” Corrine’s voice—winded and weary—diverted her son’s attention from Barbara to the card table. Celia rose.

  She said, “Hullo, Rob.”

  He said, “Celia.” He looked from his intended to Barbara in some confusion.

  Barbara said, “I was just heading upstairs. If you’ll excuse—”

  “You can’t!” Robin gave her a supplicatory glance. Then he said to Celia, “I’m in the middle of something. Sorry, but I can’t just drop it.” And his expression telegraphed the unspoken message that he hoped someone would rescue him from the awkwardness of the situation.

  Clearly, Corrine didn’t intend to and Celia didn’t want to. And while Barbara might have complied with his desire for deliverance out of sheer friendship, she didn’t know how to accomplish it. That sort of conversational legerdemain was the bailiwick of women like Helen Clyde.

  Corrine said, “Celia’s been waiting for you since half past eight, Robbie. We’ve had ourselves the loveliest visit. I told her that it’s been far too long since we last had her at Lark’s Haven and I know you mean to rectify that now you’re working with CID. Any day now, I said to her, Robbie’s going to slip something special onto your finger. Just you wait and see.”

  Robin looked agonised. Celia looked mortified. Barbara felt the back of her neck begin to sweat. She said, “Yes. Right,” in a hearty fashion, and made a determined turn towards the stairs. “I’ll just say goodnight, then. Robin, you and I can—”

  “No!” He followed her.

  Corrine called out, “Robbie!”

  Celia cried, “Rob!”

  But Robin was hot on Barbara’s heels. She heard him behind her, saying her name urgently. He caught her up at the door to her room and grabbed her arm, which he quickly released when she turned to face him.

  “Look,” she said. “This is becoming something of a mess, Robin. I can stay in Amesford just as easily as here, and after tonight, I think that’s best.”

  “After tonight?” He looked towards the stairs. “Why? That? You mean Celia? Mum? All that? Forget about it. It isn’t important.”

  “I don’t think you’d get Celia or your mum to agree with you.”

  “Bugger them both. They’re not important. Not now. Not tonight.” He wiped his arm across his forehead. In its wake, he left a deposit of grime. “I’ve found it, Barbara. I’ve been out there all day. I’ve been crawling through every odd hole I could think of. And I’ve bloody well found it.”

  “What?” she asked.

  His dirty face looked triumphant. “The place where Charlotte Bowen was held.”

  Alexander Stone watched as his wife placed the telephone receiver into the cradle. Her expression was impossible to decipher.

  He’d heard only her end of the conversation. This had consisted of, “Do not phone me. Don’t you ever phone me. What do you want?” And then her words sounded as if they were caught somewhere in her throat. “He’s what?…When?…You rotten little…Don’t you dare try to make me believe…You bastard. You filthy bastard.” The last word rose towards a shriek. She clenched her fist at her mouth to contain it. He could hear a man’s voice continuing to talk earnestly as Eve put down the phone. She was rigid but quivering, as if electricity were hurtling through her body and holding her in place.

  “What is it?” Alex asked her.

  They’d gone to bed. Eve had insisted upon it. She’d said he looked exhausted and she herself was worn down and both of them needed to get some rest if they were to make it through the coming days of funeral obligations. But their ascent to their bedroom hadn’t been so much for sleep, he’d realised, as it had been a means by which they could circumvent conversation. In darkness, one of them or both of them could lie motionless, breathe deeply, feign sleep, and avoid. But they hadn’t yet turned off the light when the phone rang.

  Eve rose from the bed. She slipped into her dressing gown and belted it. But the belting was a savage yanking on the rope of satin, and that savage yanking gave her away.

  “What’s happened?” Alex repeated.

  She walked to the bank of clothes cupboards against the wall. She opened the doors. She tossed a black coatdress onto the bed, turned back to the cupboard, and dropped a pair of shoes onto the floor.

  Alex got out of bed himself. He took her by the shoulder. She jerked away.

  “God damn it, Eve. I asked—”

  “He’s running the story.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. That shabby little cockroach is running the story. Front page. Tomorrow. He thought”—and here her features puckered with bitterness—“he thought I’d like to know in advance. To prepare myself for the other journalists.”

  Alex looked at the phone. “That was Luxford, then?”

  “And who else?” She went to the chest and pulled on a drawer. It stuck and she wrenched it, giving a grunt. She rooted up underclothes, a slip, stockings. She threw them onto the bed alongside the coatdress. “He’s played me for a fool from the very beginning. And tonight he thinks he’s finished me off. But I’m not dead yet. Not by a long shot. As he shall see.”

  Alex tried to fit the pieces together, but one of them was clearly missing. “The story?” he repeated. “About the two of you? Blackpool?”

  “For God’s sake, what other story is there, Alex?” She began tugging underclothes onto her body.

  “But Charlie’s—”

  “This isn’t about Charlotte. This was never about Charlotte. Why can’t you see that? Now he claims his miserable son’s been kidnapped and the kidnapper’s making the same demand. Isn’t that convenient.” She stalked to the bed. She shoved her arms into the coatdress, jerked its padded shoulders into position, and fumbled with its gold buttons.

  Alex watched her, dazed. “Luxford’s son? Kidnapped? When? Where?”

  “What does it matter? Luxford’s squirrelled him off somewhere and now he’s using him exactly the way he planned to use Charlotte.”

  “What are you doing, then?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m heading him off.”

  “How?”

  She shoved her feet into her shoes and faced him squarely. “I didn’t cave in when he snatched Charlotte. He intends to make the most of that now. He’s going to use the whole story to make me look barbaric: Charlotte’s disappearance, the demand for the story, my refusal to cooperate in the face of Luxford’s desperate and heartfelt pleas that I do so. And in contrast to my barbarism, we have Luxford’s sanctity: To save his son, he’s going to do what I wouldn’t do to save my daughter. Do you see it now, or do I have to spell it out more clearly? He’s going to look like St. Christopher with the Christ Ch
ild on his shoulders and I’m going to look like Medea. If I don’t do something to stop him. Now.”

  “We must phone Scotland Yard.” Alex made a move to do so. “We must see if his story checks out. If the boy’s really been kidnapped—”

  “He hasn’t been kidnapped! And it won’t gain us anything to phone the police, because you can be sure Luxford’s thought of every detail this time. He’s hidden the little monster somewhere remote. He’s phoned the police and played out the drama. And even as you and I waste time having a little chat about what he’s up to and why, he’s written the story and it’s flying off the presses and within seven hours it’ll be on the streets. Unless I do something. Which is what I fully intend to do. All right? Do you get it?”

  Alex got it. He saw it in the hard line of her jaw, the rigid carriage of her body in the shoulders and backbone, the stony look of her eyes. He got it completely. What he didn’t understand—about himself, about her—was what had kept him from getting it before.

  He felt cast adrift. The vastness of space seemed to envelop him. From a great distance he heard himself say, “Where are you going, Eve? What are you doing?”

  “I’m pulling in chits.” She went into the bathroom, where he could see her rapidly applying a patina of makeup to her face. She didn’t use her typical precision for the activity. She merely flogged her cheeks with blusher, swatted her eyelashes with mascara, and whipped a lipstick across her lips. That done, she ran a brush through her hair and took up her spectacles from the shelf above the basin where she always laid them at night.

  She returned to the bedroom. “He’s made one mistake, aside from what happened to Charlotte,” she said. “He’s assumed I’m powerless. He’s assumed I won’t know where to turn and when. He’s wrong about that, as he’ll see within hours. If it goes my way—and believe me, it will—I’ll have an injunction so tight that he won’t be able to print a word of that story—or any other story—for the next fifty years. And that will finish him as he deserves to be finished.”

  “I see,” Alex said, and although the question felt pointless, an obdurate need to hear her speak at least a form of the truth compelled him to ask it. “And what about Charlie?”

  “What about Charlotte? She’s dead. She’s a victim of this mess. And the only way to give her death meaning is to make certain it wasn’t in vain. Which is what it will be if I don’t stop her father and stop him now.”

  “For yourself,” Alex said. “For your career. For your future. But not really for Charlie.”

  “Yes. All right. Of course. For my future. Or did you expect that I’d crawl into a hole—doing what Luxford wants me to do—because she’s been killed? Is that what you wanted?”

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t want that. Just, I thought, a period of mourning.”

  She took a threatening step towards him. “Don’t start on me. Don’t tell me what I feel and what I don’t. Don’t tell me who I am.”

  He raised his own hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wouldn’t do that. Not now.”

  She went to the bedside table where she took up her shoulder bag. She said, “We’ll talk later.” She left the room.

  Alex heard her footsteps on the stairs. He heard the bolts to the front door being drawn. A moment later he heard her car start. The journalists had decamped for the night, so she would have no trouble getting out of the mews. Wherever she was going, there was no one to follow her.

  He lowered himself to the edge of the bed. Head in his hands, he stared at the carpet, at the sight of his feet—so white and so useless—resting on that carpet. His heart was as empty of his wife’s presence as was the room and the house itself. He felt the immensity of the vacuum within him and wondered how he could have deluded himself for so long.

  He’d made excuses for every warning sign she’d given him. In a few years, he’d thought, she would trust enough to open her heart. She was merely wary and this wariness was the logical outcome of the career she’d chosen, but in time she’d slough off her fears and hesitations and allow her spirit to rise to meet his. When that happened, they’d build upon the meeting of their spirits. And the building would be a family, a future, and love. He only needed patience, he’d told himself. He only needed to prove to her how deeply rooted and unswerving was his devotion. When he was able to do that, their lives would take on a newer and richer order, one that was defined by children—brothers and sisters to Charlie—for whom he and Eve would be a steady presence, enriching their lives.

  It was all a lie. It was the fairytale that he told himself when he didn’t want to see the reality being played out in front of him. People didn’t really change. They merely dropped their personae when they considered it safe to do so, or when trying circumstances forced their exterior shells to shatter like childhood’s most cherished beliefs. The Eve he loved was, in reality, no different to Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, the Bogey Man, or the Grim Reaper. Alex was a fantast. And, playing the role he’d designed for her, she’d been as fantastic as he’d wanted her to be. So the lie was his. As was its consequence.

  Heavily, he pushed himself to his feet. Like his wife, he went to the clothes cupboard and began to dress.

  Robin Payne drove. He headed west on the Burbage Road at a furious clip. He talked quickly, recounting his movements in the county that day. It was the bricks and the maypole, he told Barbara. Hearing about them had given him an idea, but there were so many possibilities that he wanted to check out each one of them before positing any as a site where Charlotte Bowen may have been held. This was farmland, after all, he said in dubious clarification of the point he was attempting to make. Wheat was its primary crop.

  “What has wheat to do with Charlotte Bowen?” Barbara asked. “Nothing in the autopsy—”

  Wait, Robin told her. Clearly, this was his moment of glory. He wanted to savour it in his own way.

  He’d been everywhere, he explained. As far west as Freshford, as far south as Shaftsbury, but since he had a decent idea of what they were looking for because of those bricks and that maypole referred to by the girl—not to mention because of the wheat—the search covered an enormous expanse of territory but not an equally enormous number of individual locations. Still and all, he’d had dozens to crawl through, which is why he looked like such a grub.

  “Where’re we going?” Barbara asked. They hurtled through the darkness, the road unlit, trees growing thickly right up to the verge.

  “Not far,” was all he would reply.

  As they passed through a village of brick and thatch, she told him what had occurred in London, giving him all the details that Lynley had earlier given to her. When she was finished covering everything from the fingerprint match to the search for the vagrant, she concluded with the disappearance of Leo Luxford.

  Robin Payne clutched the steering wheel tightly. “Another?” he demanded. “A little boy this time? What the hell’s going on?”

  “He may be in Wiltshire, like Charlotte.”

  “What time’d he go missing?”

  “After four this afternoon.” She saw him frown as he worked a thought over. “What?” she asked.

  “I was only thinking…” Robin changed down gears as they made a left turn, heading north this time on a narrower road that was posted Great Bedwyn. “The timing’s not right, but if he—what’s his name again?”

  “Leo.”

  “If Leo was snatched round four, I was thinking he could be stashed out here as well. Where Charlotte was stashed. Except the snatcher would have already moved him to the county, wouldn’t he, long before I even got to the spot? And I would have found him myself—out there—” He gestured through the windscreen into the darkness. “Only I didn’t find him.” He blew out a breath. “Damn. So maybe this isn’t the right place after all and I’ve brought you out on a midnight wild-goose chase.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first wild-goose chase of my day,” Barbara said. “But at least the company’s decent this time round, so let’
s play it to the end.”

  The road began to narrow into a lane. The headlamps illuminated just the roadway, the ivy-draped trees that lined it, and the edge of the farmland that began beyond the trees. The fields were fully planted here, just as they were planted near Allington. But unlike Allington, here the hay was replaced by wheat.

  As they approached another village, the lane narrowed further. The verges became inclines on which scattered houses were built at the very edge of the road. The houses multiplied into another brick and thatch village where mallards slumbered on the banks of a pond and a pub called The Swan was closing for the night. The last of its lights were extinguished as Robin and Barbara spun past, still heading north.

  Robin slowed his Escort perhaps a half mile beyond this village. When he made a right turn, it was into a lane so narrow and overgrown that Barbara knew she would not have been able to distinguish it from the rest of the night-shrouded landscape had she been alone. This lane began to rise quickly towards the east, bound on one side by the glitter of wire fencing, bound on the other by a line of silver birches. The roadway was potted by craters. And the field beyond the fencing was knotted by weeds.

  They came to a break in the birches, and Robin turned into it, onto a track that jostled them over boulders and through ruts. The trees were thick here but shaped by generations of wind; they loomed over the track like sailors bending into a storm.

  The track ended at a fence of wire and posts. To their right, an old rail gate hung at an angle like a listing boat, and it was to this gate that Robin led Barbara, after rooting through the Escort’s boot and bringing out a torch, which he handed over to her. He himself took out a camping lantern, slinging it over his arm and saying, “It’s just this way.”