In the Presence of the Enemy

by Elizabeth George

  It did. Jack’s face showed umbrage. “I never been rousted before,” he declared. “Not there. Not nowhere. Never once.”

  “You go there regularly?”

  “’Course I do. It’s part o’ me regular route, that spot. I don’t make no noise. I keep the rubbish neat. I never bother no one. I take my bags and when I find something I c’n flog somewheres—”

  Lynley cut in. The tramp’s daily economic machinations were not of interest to him. The events of that particular Wednesday were. He produced Charlotte’s photograph, saying, “This is the girl who was abducted. Did you see her on Wednesday last, Jack?”

  Jack squinted at the picture. He took it from Lynley and held it at arm’s length. He studied it for a good thirty seconds, all the time puffing at his defiltered cigarette. “Don’t recall ’er,” he said. And now that he realised he was off the hook of the police’s interest, he became more expansive. “Don’t ever get much out of the bins in that spot. Just the odd bit now and again. Bent fork. Broke spoon. Old vase with a crack’n it. Little statue or something. Sort o’ rubbish gen’rally needs fixing before I c’n flog it. But I always go coz I like to keep my rounds reg’lar, just like the postman and I never bother no one and don’t never look like I mean anyone harm. I never had no trouble there before.”

  “Just this one Wednesday?”

  “Tha’s it. Tha’s right. It was like…” Jack fingered his nose as he sought the appropriate metaphor. He removed a flake of tobacco from his tongue, examined it on the end of his fingernail, and shoved it up onto his gums. He said, “It was like someone wanted me out o’ there, mister. Like someone called the cops to roust me just to make sure I was dead gone before something pecul’ar went down.”

  Lynley and Nkata watched the constable shut the door on the panda car and whisk Jack Beard away, back to his interrupted morning meal in Bayswater where, the vagrant told them, he was expected to “help with the washing up as a payback for the chuff, see.”

  Nkata said, “He’s not our man, then. You didn’t want his dabs, just to make sure?”

  “We don’t need his fingerprints,” Lynley replied. “He’s done time. They’re on file. If he was a match for the prints we’ve lifted, we’d have already been told.”

  Lynley thought about what the old man had told them. If someone had phoned the police to have him removed from Cross Keys Close prior to Charlotte Bowen’s abduction, then it had to be someone who’d been watching the area, who’d been loitering in the area, or who lived in the area. He realised which possibility was most likely, and he recalled what St. James had told him on the previous night about Charlotte’s nickname and who had used it. He said, “Winston, what do we hear from Belfast? Have the RUC reported back yet?”

  “Not yet. Think I should shake their tree?”

  “I do,” Lynley said. “But shake it from in the car. We need to pay a visit to Marylebone.”

  The location of Baverstock School for Boys didn’t turn out to be the linchpin of the investigation, as Barbara had hoped it might. It was in the vicinity, true. But its land didn’t border on the windmill’s land, contrary to her speculations. Instead, it stood just outside Wootton Cross, on a vast acreage that had once been the estate of a wheat baron.

  Robin had informed her as much on their way back to Wootton Cross late the previous night. They were going to pass right by the Baverstock gates, he’d told her, and he pointed them out—immense wrought iron structures that hung open between two falcon-topped brick pillars—as they spun by. He’d said, “Where does Baverstock fit into the picture?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighed and lit a cigarette. “I had a thought…. One of our London suspects is an old boy from Baverstock. Luxford. The newsman.”

  “He’s a real toff, then,” Robin had said. “You don’t get into Baverstock unless you’ve got a scholarship or your blood type’s right.”

  He sounded the way she usually felt about such places. She said, “Your blood wasn’t, I take it?”

  “I went to primary school in the village. Then to the comprehensive in Marlborough.”

  “No old Baverstock boys on your family tree?”

  He glanced her way. He said simply, “There’s no one at all on my tree, Barbara. If you know what I mean.”

  She did indeed. She couldn’t have lived in England all her life without knowing what he meant. Her own relations were about as socially consequential as dust motes, although not quite so numerous. She said, “My family go back to the Magna Carta and beyond, but not in any way you’d want to shout about. No one could pull himself up by his bootstraps because no one had boots till the turn of the century.”

  Robin chuckled and gave her another glance. It was hard to ignore that this one was admiring. “You sound like being no one is nothing to you.”

  “To my way of looking at it, you’re no one only if you think you’re no one.”

  They’d gone their separate ways at Lark’s Haven, Robin into the sitting room, where his mother was waiting up for him despite the hour, Barbara up the stairs to collapse into bed. But not before she heard Corrine saying, “Robbie, Celia was only here tonight because—” and Robin interrupting with, “There’ll be no discussion about Celia. Keep your mind on Sam Corey and off of me.” Corrine countered with a trembly, “But little chappie,” to which Robin curtly responded, “That’s Sam, Mum, isn’t it?”

  Barbara fell asleep wondering how much Robin must bless the deliverance that Sam Corey’s engagement to his mother promised him. She was still thinking this the next morning when she concluded her call to Lynley and found the three of them—Sam Corey, Corrine, and Robin—in the dining room.

  Corrine and Sam had their heads together over a tabloid. Corrine was saying, “Just imagine it, Sammy. My goodness. My goodness,” in her wheezy voice. Sam was holding one of her hands and rubbing her back as if to assist with her breathing, and all the time he shook his head somberly at what the tabloid was revealing. It was The Source, Barbara saw. Sam and Corrine were reading the story that Dennis Luxford had written to save his son.

  Robin was stacking breakfast dishes onto a tray. When he carried the tray into the kitchen, Barbara followed. Better to eat at the sink, if necessary, than to swallow down breakfast in the presence of lovebirds who’d probably prefer to be left on their own.

  Robin stood at the cooker where he was heating a pan, presumably for her eggs. His face, Barbara noted, was shuttered and withdrawn, not at all the face he’d worn when they’d exchanged their confidences on the previous night. His words seemed to explain the change in him. “He’s run the story, then. That bloke Luxford in London. D’you think that’ll be enough to free the boy?”

  “Don’t know,” Barbara admitted.

  He knifed up a wedge of butter and flopped it into the pan. Barbara had intended to have only a bowl of cereal—she was nearly two hours behind schedule because of her lie-in—but it was rather pleasant to watch Robin making breakfast for her, so she changed her plans and vowed to make up for the time loss by chewing allegro.

  Robin increased the heat and watched the butter melting. “Do we keep looking for the boy?” he asked. “Or do we hold off and see what happens next?”

  “I want to have a look round that windmill in daylight.”

  “D’you want company? I mean, you know where the mill is now, but I could always…” He gestured with the egg turner to complete his sentence. Barbara wondered what that sentence might have been. I could always show you round? I could always hang about? I could always be there if you need me? She didn’t need him though. She had done a fairly nice job of not needing anyone for years. And she told herself that she very much wanted to keep things that way. He seemed to read this on her face, because he graciously gave her an opening to continue avoiding indefinitely, saying, “Or I could start checking on the narrow-boat rentals. If he took the girl from the windmill to Allington via the canal, he’s going to have needed a boat.”

  “It’s something that should
be dealt with,” Barbara said.

  “I’ll see to it, then.” He broke two eggs into the pan and wielded salt and pepper over them. He turned down the heat and popped two pieces of bread into the toaster. He seemed, Barbara thought, unaffected by her unspoken desire to see to her day’s work alone, and she found herself feeling a small but insidious spider of disappointment attempting to spin a web against her skin. She brushed it off. There was work to be done. One child was dead and another was missing. Her fancies were secondary to that.

  She left him doing the washing up. He’d asked her if she needed a refresher on the route to the windmill, but she was certain she could find it without written directions. She took a minor curiosity-inspired detour on the way, however, and turned in through the gates at Baverstock School for Boys. Baverstock, she realised as she drove under the great canopy of beeches that framed the drive, was probably the main source of employment for the village of Wootton Cross. The school was enormous, and it would require an equally enormous staff to run it. Not only teachers, but groundsmen, caretakers, cooks, launderers, matrons, and the lot. As Barbara took in the pleasing arrangement of buildings, playing fields, shrubbery, and gardens, she felt once again the stubborn nudging of an instinct that told her that this school was somehow involved in what had happened to Charlotte Bowen and to Leo Luxford. It was too coincidental that Baverstock—Dennis Luxford’s own school—should be so beguilingly close to the site where his daughter had been held.

  She decided a modified prowl was in order. She parked near a lofty-roofed structure of random rubble that she took for the chapel. Across a swept gravel walk from this, a small neatly painted wooden sign pointed the way to the headmaster’s office. That’ll do, Barbara thought.

  Classes were obviously in progress, since there were no boys to be seen other than one lone black-robed young man who came out the door to the headmaster’s office as Barbara went in it. He clutched schoolbooks under his arm, said, “Pardon,” politely, and hurried towards a low doorway across the quad out of which Barbara could hear a group of less-than-enthusiastic voices chanting the multiples of nine.

  The headmaster couldn’t see the detective sergeant from London, Barbara was told by his secretary. The headmaster, in fact, wasn’t on the school grounds. He wouldn’t be in for most of the day, so if the detective sergeant from London wished to make an appointment for later in the week…The secretary poised a pencil over the headmaster’s engagement diary and waited for Barbara to respond.

  Barbara wasn’t exactly sure how to respond since she wasn’t exactly sure what had brought her to Baverstock in the first place other than the vague and unsettling feeling that the school was somehow involved. For the first time since coming to Wiltshire, she fleetingly wished that Inspector Lynley were with her. He never seemed to have any vague or unsettling feelings about anything—other than Helen Clyde, that is, and about her he appeared to have nothing but vague and unsettling feelings—and faced with the headmaster’s secretary, Barbara realised that she could have done with a good Inspector-Sergeant confab before sauntering into this office without an idea in the world as to what she’d do once she got here.

  She chose as her opening gambit, “I’m investigating the murder of Charlotte Bowen, the girl who was found in the canal on Sunday,” and she was pleased to see that she had the secretary’s full regard at once: The pencil lowered to the engagement diary and the secretary—whose name plate identified her merely as Portly, an inaccuracy if there ever was one since she was skeletally thin, not to mention at least seventy years old—became all attention.

  “This girl was the daughter of one of your old boys,” Barbara went on. “A bloke called Dennis Luxford.”

  “Dennis?” Portly put heavy emphasis on the first syllable. Barbara took this as indication that the name had rung a bell.

  “He must have been here some thirty years ago,” Barbara prompted.

  “Thirty years ago, nonsense,” Portly said. “He was here last month.”

  When he heard footsteps coming up the stairs, St. James raised his head from a set of crime scene photographs, which he was examining to refresh his memory prior to an appearance at the Old Bailey. He heard Helen’s voice. She was saying to Cotter, “I could do with a coffee. And bless you a thousand times for asking. I slept right through breakfast, so anything that’ll see me at least partway to lunch…” Cotter’s voice from below said that coffee would be on its way to her forthwith.

  Helen came into the lab. Curiously, St. James glanced at the wall clock. She said, “I know. You were expecting me ages ago. I’m sorry.”

  “Rough night?”

  “No night. I couldn’t sleep, so I didn’t set the alarm. I thought I hardly needed it since I wasn’t doing much more than staring at the ceiling.” She dropped her shoulder bag onto the worktable and immediately took off her shoes. She padded over to join him. “Except that’s not quite true, is it? I did set the alarm, originally. But when I still wasn’t sleeping by three in the morning, I simply unset it. For psychological reasons. What are we working on?”

  “The Pancord case.”

  “That terrible creature who killed his grandmother?”

  “Allegedly, Helen. We’re on the defence’s side.”

  “That poor socially deprived and fatherless child who is wrongly accused of tapping a hammer against an eighty-year-old woman’s skull?”

  “The Pancord case, yes.” St. James went back to the pictures, using his magnifying glass. He said, “What psychological reasons?”

  “Hmmm?” Helen had begun going through a stack of reports and correspondence, preparatory to organising the former and answering the latter. “For unsetting the alarm, you mean? It was supposed to set my mind free of the anxiety of knowing I had to fall asleep within a certain period of time in order to get enough rest before the alarm went off. Since anxiety keeps one awake in the first place, I thought that if I relieved myself of at least one source of anxiety, I could fall asleep. I did, of course. Only I didn’t wake up.”

  “So the method has dubious merits.”

  “Darling Simon, it has no merits at all. I still didn’t fall asleep before five. And then, of course, it was asking altogether too much of my body to waken itself by half past seven.”

  St. James set the magnifying glass next to a copy of the DNA study done on semen from the scene of the crime. Things did not look good for Mr. Pancord. He said, “What other sources have you?”

  “What?” Helen looked up from the correspondence. Her smooth hair swung back from her shoulders with the movement, and St. James could see how the skin beneath her eyes looked puffy.

  He said, “Turning off the alarm was supposed to relieve one source of anxiety. But you’ve others?”

  “Oh, just the usual psychic neuritis and neuralgia.” She made the comment airily enough, but he hadn’t known her more than fifteen years for nothing.

  He said, “Tommy was here last night, Helen.”

  “Was he.” She said it as a statement. She attended to a letter written on vellum. She read through it before looking up and saying with reference to its contents, “A symposium in Prague, Simon. Will you accept? It’s not till December, but the timeline’s short if you want to prepare a paper to deliver.”

  “Tommy made his apologies,” St. James said steadily, as if she hadn’t been trying to divert him. “To me, that is. He would have spoken to Deborah as well, but I thought it best to deliver the message.”

  “Where is Deborah, by the way?”

  “St. Botolph’s Church. She’s doing more pictures.” He watched as Helen walked to the computer, switched it on, and accessed a file. He said, “The Luxford boy’s been taken, Helen. With the same message received from the kidnapper. So that’s been thrown onto Tommy’s plate as well. He’s walking an awfully fine line at the moment. While I realise that doesn’t go far to explain—”

  “How can you always—always—forgive him so easily?” Helen demanded. “Has Tommy never done anything
that’s made you believe it’s time to draw the line on your friendship?” Hands in her lap, she spoke the words to the computer screen rather than to him.

  St. James thought about her questions. They were certainly reasonable enough, given his spotted history with Lynley. One disastrous automobile accident and one previous relationship with St. James’s own wife were on the account books of their friendship. But he’d long ago accepted his own part in both of those situations. And while he was happy about neither of them, he also knew that a continual pawing through his mental and emotional state with regard to the past was largely counterproductive. What had happened, had happened. And that was the end of it.

  He said, “He has a rotten job, Helen. It tries the soul more than anything we can imagine. If you spend enough time examining the underbelly of life, you go in one of two directions: Either you become callous—just another nasty murder to look into—or you become angry. Callous works best because it keeps you functioning. Anger you can’t let get in the way. So you push it aside for as long as you can. But eventually, something comes up and you blow. You say things you don’t mean. You do things you wouldn’t otherwise do.”

  She lowered her head. Her thumb smoothed the skin that capped the knuckles of her folded hand. She said, “That’s it. The anger. His anger. It’s always there, just beneath the surface. It’s in everything he does. It has been for years.”

  “The anger comes from his work. It’s nothing to do with you.”

  “I know that. What I don’t know is whether I can bear to live with it. There it will always be—Tommy’s anger—like an unexpected dinner guest when one hasn’t any food.”

  “Do you love him, Helen?”

  She gave a short, miserable, unhappy laugh. “Loving him and being able to spend my life with him are two entirely different things. I’m sure about one, but not the other. And every time I think I’ve put my doubts to rest, something happens and they all begin rumbling again.”