“Marriage isn’t a place for people who want peace of mind,” St. James said.
“Isn’t it?” she asked. “Hasn’t it been? For you?”
“For me? Not at all. It’s been a prolonged exposure to a field of battle.”
“How can you endure it?”
“I hate being bored.”
Helen laughed wearily. Cotter’s heavy footsteps sounded against the stairs. In a moment, he appeared in the doorway, a tray in his hands. “Coffee all round,” he said. “I’ve brought you some biscuits as well, Lady Helen. You look like you could do with a decent bite o’ chocolate digestive.”
“I could do,” Helen said. She left the computer and met Cotter at the worktable nearest the door. He slid the tray onto its surface, dislodging a photograph that fluttered to the floor.
Helen bent for it. She turned it right side up in her hands as Cotter poured their coffee. She sighed and said, “Oh God. There’s no escaping.” She sounded defeated.
St. James saw what she was holding. It was the photograph of Charlotte Bowen’s drowned body that he’d taken from Deborah the night before, the same photograph that Lynley had thrown down like a gauntlet in the kitchen two days earlier. He should have tossed it away last night, St. James realised. That blasted picture had done quite enough damage.
He said, “Let me have that, Helen.”
She held it, still. “Perhaps he was right,” she said. “Perhaps we are responsible. Oh, not in the way he meant. But in a larger way. Because we thought we could make a difference when the truth is that no one makes a difference, anywhere.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” St. James told her. “Give me the picture.”
Cotter took up one of the coffee cups. He disengaged the photograph from Helen’s fingers and handed it over to St. James. St. James placed it face down among the pictures he’d been studying earlier. He accepted his own coffee from Cotter and said nothing more until the other man had left them.
Then he said, “Helen, I think you need to decide about Tommy once and for all. But I also think you can’t use Charlotte Bowen as an excuse to avoid what you fear.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“We’re all afraid. But trying to elude the fear that we might make a mistake…” His words died as his thoughts dried up. He’d been in the act of setting his coffee cup on the worktable as he spoke and his eyes had fallen on the photograph he’d just placed there.
Helen said, “What is it? Simon, what’s wrong?” as he felt blindly for his magnifying glass.
By God, he realised, he’d had the knowledge all along. He’d had this photograph in his house for more than twenty-four hours, and thus for more than twenty-four hours the truth had been available to him. He saw this quickly and with dawning horror. But he also saw that he’d failed to recognise the truth because he’d been aware only of Tommy’s offences against them. Had he been less concerned with keeping his reactions under icy control, he might have exploded himself, exhausted his own anger and, anger spent, returned to normal. And then he would have known. He would have seen. He had to believe that because he had to believe that under normal circumstances he would have noticed what was before his eyes right now.
He used the magnifying glass. He studied the shapes. He studied the forms. He told himself again that under different circumstances he would have recognised—he swore it, he believed it, he knew it absolutely—what he should have seen on the picture from the first.
25
WHEN ALL WAS SAID AND DONE and she was driving back to the Burbage Road, Barbara Havers decided that giving the inspiration of the moment full sway had been…definitely inspired. Over a cup of tea, which she had produced from a samovar that would have done justice to Irina Prozorov’s twentieth birthday, Portly had thoroughly indulged herself in a soul-cleansing gossip that, guided by Barbara’s incisive questions, ultimately touched upon the subject at hand: Dennis Luxford.
Since Portly had held her position at Baverstock School from the dawn of man onwards—or so it seemed by the number of pupils she recalled—Barbara was regaled with countless of the secretary’s favourite tales. Some of the tales were general: everything from a prank involving dried mustard and toilet tissue that was played upon the Board of Governors on Speech Day forty years ago, to the ceremonious dunking of the headmaster into the newly dedicated swimming pool this last Michaelmas term. Some of the tales were specific: from Dickie Wintersby—now fifty years old and a prominent London banker—who had been gated for making indecent advances towards a terrified third-former, to Charlie O’Donnell—aged forty-two, now a QC and a member of the Board of Governors—who’d been caught on the school farm by his housemaster, making even more indecent advances towards a sheep. It didn’t take long for Barbara to discover that Portly’s specific memories tended to home in on the lubricious. She could report on which boy had been called on the carpet for solo masturbation, mutual masturbation, buggery, bestiality, fellatio, and coitus (interruptus or otherwise), and she did so with gusto. Where she got a bit vague was in instances when the boy in question had apparently kept his almond in the shell.
Such was the case with Dennis Luxford, although Portly held forth for a good five minutes on sixteen other boys from Dennis Luxford’s same year who were gated for a full term after being revealed as making regular nookie with a village girl charging two pounds a pop. No snogging this, Portly declared, but the real thing, out in the old icehouse, with the girl coming up preggers as a result, and if the sergeant would like to see where the historic bonking occurred…
Barbara guided her back to the chosen subject, saying, “As to Mr. Luxford…? And actually, I’m more interested in his recent visit, although this other material is really quite interesting and if I only had more time…You know how it is. Duty and everything.”
Portly looked disappointed that her tales of randy teenagers running rampant had failed to please. But she said that duty was her watchword—when it wasn’t salacity—and she pursed her lips as her mind contended with Dennis Luxford’s recent visit to Baverstock.
It was about his son, she finally reported. He’d come to see the headmaster about getting his son enrolled for Michaelmas term. The boy was an only child—a rather wilful only child, if Portly wasn’t mistaken—and Mr. Luxford had thought he would benefit enormously from an exposure to the rigours and the joys of Baverstock life. So he’d met with the headmaster, and after their meeting the two men had done a tour of the school so that Mr. Luxford could see how it had changed in the years since he had been a pupil.
“A tour?” Barbara felt her fingertips tingle with the implications. A good prowl round the grounds, ostensibly in the cause of inspecting the school prior to committing his son to it, might well have been how Luxford had refamiliarised himself with the local environment. “What sort of tour?”
He’d seen the classrooms, the dormitories, the dining hall, the gymnasium…. He’d seen everything as far as Portly could recall.
Had he seen the grounds? Barbara wanted to know. The playing fields, the school farm, and beyond?
It seemed to Portly that he had. But she wasn’t certain, and to assist her memory, she took Barbara into the headmaster’s office where an artistically rendered map of Baverstock School for Boys hung on the wall. It was surrounded by dozens of photographs of Bavernians through the decades, and as Portly studied the map as a visual aid to her memory, Barbara studied the pictures. They featured Bavernians in every conceivable situation: in classrooms, in the chapel, serving meals in the dining hall, marching in black academic gowns, giving speeches, swimming, canoeing, biking, rock climbing, sailing, playing sports. Barbara was skimming over them and wondering how much lolly a family had to lay out to get their little nob into a place like Baverstock when her attention fell on a photo of a small group of hikers, haversacks on their backs and walking sticks in hand. The hikers didn’t interest Barbara as much as where they were posing for their picture. They stood assembled in front
of a windmill. And Barbara was willing to lay money on the fact that it was the same windmill in which Charlotte Bowen had been held captive only last week.
She said, “Is this windmill on Baverstock land?” and indicated the picture.
Goodness no, Portly said. That was the old mill near Great Bedwyn. The archaeological society hiked there every year.
Hearing the words archaeological society, Barbara flipped through the pages of her notebook, looking for the scribblings she’d made during her telephone conversation with Inspector Lynley. She found them, read through them, and located the information she needed at the bottom of the page: Dennis Luxford’s schooldays as faithfully and meticulously reported by Winston Nkata. As she had suspected, The Source editor had been a member of the archaeological society. It was called the Beaker Explorers.
Barbara made her farewells as quickly as possible and shot out to her car. Things were looking up.
She remembered the route to the windmill, and she followed it without further detours. Crime scene tape marked off the track leading into the mill, and she parked just beyond this tape on a verge thickly grown with drooping wildflowers of purple and white. She ducked under the yellow tape and walked towards the mill. She noted the fact that because of the birches that grew along the road as well as those growing along the path she now walked, the mill was at least partially hidden. And even if that hadn’t been the case, there wasn’t a soul nearby. It was the perfect spot for a kidnapper with a child in tow or for a killer removing that same child’s body.
The mill had been sealed up the previous night, but Barbara did not need to enter it. She’d remained while the evidence was being collected, marked, and bagged, and the crime scene team’s thoroughness had left her with no doubts about their competence. But darkness had prevented her from observing the windmill as part of a larger landscape, and it was to see this landscape now that Barbara had returned.
She shoved open the old gate and strode out from beneath the birches. Inside the paddock, she realised why the mill had been built on this particular spot. Last night had been calm, but today the breeze was a brisk one. In it, the arms of the old mill creaked. Had the structure still been operational, its sails would have been spinning and its stones grinding wheat.
Daylight exposed the surrounding fields. They fell away from the mill, planted with hay, with maize, and with corn. Aside from the ruined miller’s cottage, the closest habitation was some half mile away. And the closest living creatures were sheep who grazed just to the east of the mill behind a wire fence. In the distance, a farmer rumbled his tractor along the edge of a field and a crop duster banked to skim along the green tops of whatever was growing beneath him. But if there had been any witness who could offer testimony to what had happened where Barbara stood—at the windmill—that witness bleated among the sheep.
Barbara walked to their paddock. They munched, indifferent to her presence. She said to them, “Come on, you lot. Cough it up, now. You saw him, right?” But they continued to munch.
One of the sheep disengaged from the others and came in Barbara’s direction. For a moment she thought absurdly that the animal had actually paid heed to her words and was approaching with communication in mind, until she saw that its destination wasn’t her but rather a low trough near the fence, at which it lapped up water.
Water? She went to investigate. Within a small three-sided shelter of bricks at the far end of the trough, a tap rose out of the ground. It was pitted from the weather, but when Barbara put on a glove and tried to turn it, there was no resistance from rust or corrosion. The water flowed out, clear and sweet.
She remembered Robin’s words though. This far from the nearest village, it would likely be well-water. She needed to be sure.
She drove back to the village. The Swan was open for its lunchtime customers and Barbara pulled her Mini to a stop between a mud-encrusted tractor and an enormous antique Humber. When she entered, she was greeted by the usual momentary silence that a stranger encounters when coming into a country pub. But when she nodded at the locals and stopped to pat a Shetland sheepdog on the head, conversation resumed. She approached the bar.
She ordered a lemonade, a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, and a slice of the day’s special: leek and broccoli pie. And when the publican presented her with her meal, she offered her police identification along with the £3.75.
Was he familiar, she asked the publican, with the recent discovery of a child’s body in the Kennet and Avon Canal?
But local gossip had apparently made prefatory remarks unnecessary. The publican replied, “So that’s what all the ruckus was about up on the hill last night.”
He hadn’t actually seen the ruckus himself, he confessed, but old George Tomley—the bloke who owned the farm south of the windmill—had been up with his sciatica tormenting him till long past midnight. George’d seen all the lights and—sciatica be damned—he’d gone to investigate. He could tell it was police business of some kind, but he’d assumed it was kids again, up to no good.
Hearing this, Barbara knew that there was obviously no need to obfuscate, circumvent, or prevaricate. She told the publican that the mill was the site where the girl had been held before she’d been drowned. And she’d been drowned in tap water. There was a tap on the property. So what Barbara wanted to know was if the water from that tap came from a well.
The publican declared that he hadn’t the first clue about where the mill water came from, but old George Tomley—the same old George Tomley—knew nearly everything about property hereabouts and if the sergeant wanted to talk to him, old George was sitting right by the dart board.
Barbara took her pie, crisps, and lemonade over to George straightaway. He was massaging his bad hip with the knuckles of his right hand while with his left he thumbed through a copy of Playboy. In front of him lay the remains of his lunch. He too had ordered the day’s special.
Water? he wanted to know. Whose water?
Barbara explained. George listened. His fingers massaged and his glance drifted down to the magazine and back up to Barbara as if they were making an unfavourable comparison.
But he was forthcoming with the information. Wasn’t no well on any property hereabouts, the old man told her when she’d concluded her explanation. It was all main water, pumped up from the village and stored in a tank that was buried in the field next to the windmill. Highest point of land, that field, he told her, so that water flows out by force of gravity.
“But it’s tap water?” Barbara pressed him.
As ever was, he told her.
Brilliant, Barbara thought. Pieces were clicking into place. She had Luxford in the vicinity recently. She had Luxford at the windmill in his youth. Now she needed to put Charlotte’s school uniform into his hands. And she had a fairly good idea how to do that.
To Lynley, Cross Keys Close looked like a haunt of Bill Sikes. Twisting into a canyon of buildings off Marylebone Lane, its narrow alleys were completely devoid of human life and virtually untouched by the day’s sunlight. As Lynley and Nkata entered the area, having left the Bentley parked in Bulstrode Place, Lynley wondered what had ever possessed Eve Bowen to allow her daughter to wander round this vicinity alone. Had she never been here herself? he wondered.
“Place gives me the jumps.” Nkata echoed Lynley’s thoughts with his words. “Why’s a little bird like Charlotte coming round this place?”
“That’s the question of the hour,” Lynley admitted.
“Hell, in winter she’d be walking through here in the dark.” Nkata sounded disgusted. “And that’s practic’ly an invitation to…” His footsteps faltered, then stopped altogether. He looked at Lynley, who paused three paces ahead of him. “An invitation to trouble,” he concluded thoughtfully. And then went on with, “You think Bowen knew about Chambers, ’Spector? She could’ve done her own digging right there at the Home Office and come up with the same dirt we got on the bloke. She could’ve sent the bird to him for her lessons and planned ev
erything out herself, knowing we’d twig to his background eventually. And when we did—which we’ve just done—we’d set our sights on him and forget about her.”
“The scenario plays well,” Lynley said, “but let’s not run before our horse to market, Winston.”
Shakespearean allusions, no matter how apt, were lost on Nkata. He said, “Do what to who?”
“Let’s talk to Chambers. St. James thought he was hiding something on Wednesday night, and St. James’s instincts are generally sound. So let’s see what it was.”
They hadn’t given Damien Chambers the benefit of knowing they were coming. Nonetheless, he was at home. They could hear the music of an electric keyboard filtering out of his tiny house, and this music ceased abruptly midbar when Lynley rapped with the brass treble-clef door knocker.
A limp curtain at the window flicked as someone within the house checked out the visitors. A moment later, the door opened the wary width of a young man’s pale face. This was thin and framed by wispy chest-length hair.
Lynley showed his identification, saying, “Mr. Chambers?”
Chambers seemed to make an effort not to look at Lynley’s warrant card. “Yeah.”
“Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. Scotland Yard CID.” Lynley introduced Nkata. “May we have a word, please?”
He didn’t look happy to do it, but Chambers stepped away from the aperture and swung the door open. “I was working.”
A tape recorder was playing and the mellifluous and undoubtedly RADA voice of an actor was intoning, “The storm continued unabated into the night. And as she lay in her bed and thought of what they’d once been to each other, she realised that she could no more forget him than could she—”
Chambers silenced the machine. He said in explanation, “Abridged talking books. I’m doing the music bits in between the scenes,” and he rubbed his hands down the sides of his jeans as if with the intention of wiping sweat from them. He began removing sheet music from the chairs, and he pushed two music stands out of the way. He said, “You can sit if you like,” and he went through a doorway into the kitchen and ran water there. He returned with a glassful. In it, a slice of lemon floated. He set this glass on the edge of his electric keyboard and seated himself behind it as if with the intention of continuing his work. He played a single chord but then dropped his hands to his lap.
In the Presence of the Enemy Page 51