In the Presence of the Enemy

by Elizabeth George

  Up ahead, Robin turned left off the main road into a lane, his headlamps illuminating his twisting progress through the farmland. A left turn meant he was heading into the north section of the Vale of Wootton. When Barbara reached the lane, she risked flashing her own lights for an instant to see exactly where he was going. She read the sign for Fyfield, Lockeridge, and West Overton. And next to it, with an arrow indicating the direction, the universally understood image for a site worthy of historical note: the keep of a castle, rendered brown on white metal, with clear crenellation so that no one could mistake it for anything else. Bingo, Barbara thought. Windmill first. Castle next. Robin Payne, as he had said himself, had long known all the best places in Wiltshire to get into mischief.

  Perhaps he’d even been there with Celia. Perhaps that was specifically why he’d chosen it. But if this was all about Celia Matheson and her illicit liaison with Dennis Luxford, when had it occurred and how? Charlotte Bowen had been ten years old at her death. If she wasn’t Luxford’s firstborn child, then whoever was, obviously, was older. And even if the child was older by only a few months, that would put Celia Matheson’s involvement with Dennis Luxford into her teenage years. How old was Celia anyway? Twenty-four? At the most twenty-five? For her to have had a fling with Luxford, for her to have produced a child older than Charlotte Bowen as a result of that fling, she would have been boffing Luxford when she was only fourteen. That wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility since children had babies all the time. But although Luxford seemed a thoroughly unsavoury character—if his newspaper was anything to go by—nothing Barbara had heard about him had made her conclude he was attracted to teenagers. And when one considered Portly’s description of Luxford while he was a pupil at Baverstock, especially when one considered the contrast Portly had painted between Luxford and the other boys, one had to conclude—

  Wait, Barbara thought. Bloody flaming hell. She increased her grip on the steering wheel. She could see Robin’s car twisting along the road, tunneling beneath some trees, curving upward on a slight acclivity. She followed along, eyes alternately on his car and on the lane she was driving, and she summoned out of her memory the salient details from what Portly had said. A group of boys from Baverstock—upper-sixth boys, Dennis Luxford’s own age—had regularly met one of the village girls for sex in the old ice house on the grounds of the school. They’d paid her two pounds each for her favours. She’d come up pregnant. There’d been a ruckus afterwards, expulsions and all the trimmings. Right? So if that local girl had carried her pregnancy to full term, if she had delivered a healthy living baby who was living still, then the child of that ice-house coupling between the village girl and the rank of randy boys would be today—Barbara did her maths—twenty-nine years old.

  Holy flipping shit, Barbara thought. Robin Payne didn’t know about Luxford’s child. Robin Payne thought he was Luxford’s child. How he’d come to that conclusion Barbara couldn’t have guessed. But she knew it for the truth just as she knew he was leading her to the child he believed was his half-brother. She could even hear what he’d said to her the night they drove past Baverstock School. There’s no one at all on my family tree. She’d thought he meant no one of significance. Now she understood that he’d meant exactly what he’d said. No one at all, at least not legitimately.

  Getting himself assigned to the case had been a masterstroke, really. No one would have a second thought when the eager young DC asked to take part. And when he offered his own home to the Scotland Yard sergeant—so close to the scene of the body dump, no decent hotel in the village, his own mummy in residence to keep everything on the up and up, the house a bonafide B and B—what better way to keep his fingers on the pulse of the case? He’d known how far they were getting every time he spoke to Barbara or heard her talk to Lynley. And when she fed him the line about the bricks and the maypole from Charlotte’s tape recording, he’d been in heaven. She’d handed him the “clue” he needed in order to be the one to find the windmill. Where, no doubt, he had made certain to snag Charlotte’s uniform on those crates before he folded it up and packed it into one of the vicar’s rag bags on a visit to the Mathesons. Of course the Mathesons wouldn’t have thought of Robin as a stranger come to creep round the church. He was their daughter’s intended, their daughter’s true love. That he was also a killer had escaped their notice.

  Barbara’s attention locked onto Robin’s Escort. He was turning again, this time south. His car began to climb the rise of a hill. Barbara had the distinct feeling they were nearing their target.

  She made the turn after him, slowing now. There was nothing out here—they’d passed the last farm at least three miles back—so she had little thought of losing him. She could see his headlamps bobbing in the distance. She crept along at an even stretch behind him.

  The lane narrowed to a deeply rutted track. To its left a hill climbed, thickly grown with trees. To its right a vast field fell away into the darkness, fenced off from the lane with wire and posts. The track began to curve round the side of the hill, and Barbara slowed even more. Then some hundred yards ahead of her, Robin’s car halted in front of a split-rail gate. This blocked off the road, and as Barbara watched, Robin got out of his car and shoved the gate open. He drove in, closed the gate behind him, and continued on his way. The moonlight illuminated his destination. Perhaps another hundred yards beyond the gate stood the ruins of a castle. She could see the crumbling wall that surrounded it and the frothlike scalloping of moonlit shrubs and trees just inside. And within the wall’s confines rose what little remained of the castle itself. She could make out two round, crenellated towers at either end of a collapsing wall and some twenty yards from one of the towers the roof of a building: perhaps a kitchen, a bakehouse, a solar, or a hall.

  Barbara manoeuvred her Mini to the edge of the track just outside the closed gate. She switched off the ignition and clambered out, keeping well to the left side of the track where the hillside rose, overgrown with trees and with shrubs. A sign on the gate identified the structure as Silbury Huish Castle. A secondary sign indicated that it was open to the public only on the first Saturday of every month. Robin had chosen his location well. The road was bad enough to deter most tourists from wandering in, and even if they ventured this far on an off-day, they’d be unlikely to risk trespass for the opportunity of gazing upon what appeared to be little more than a ruin. There were plenty of other ruins in the countryside, and those far easier to get to than this one.

  Ahead, Robin’s Escort stopped near the castle’s outer wall. His headlamps made bright arcs against the stones for a moment. Then they were extinguished. As Barbara crept forward to the split-rail gate, she saw his shadowy form get out of his car. He went to the boot and rustled round in it. He removed one object that he set on the ground with a clink against stone. A second object he held, and from it a bright cone of light shot forth. A torch. He used it to light his way along the castle wall. It was only a moment before he was out of sight.

  Barbara hurried to the boot of her own car. She couldn’t risk a torch—one glance over his shoulder to see he was being followed and Robin Payne would make her dead meat. But she wasn’t about to venture into and among those ruins without a weapon of some sort. So she threw onto the ground the contents of the Mini’s boot, cursing herself for having used it for so long as a receptacle for anything she had a mind to stow. Buried beneath blankets, a pair of Wellingtons, assorted magazines, and a bathing suit at least ten years old, she found the tyre jack and its accompanying iron. She grabbed this latter. She tested its weight in her hand. She smacked the curved end of it sharply into her palm. It would have to do.

  She set off after Robin. In his car he’d followed the track to the castle. On foot, following the track wasn’t necessary. She cut across a stretch of open land. This was a vista that long ago would have given the castle’s inhabitants visual warning of a coming attack, and Barbara kept this fact in mind as she dashed across it. She moved in a crouch, knowing that the
moonlight that made her progress less difficult also made her visible—if as a shadow only—to anyone who happened to look her way.

  She was making quick, easy, unimpeded progress when nature got in her way. She stumbled against a low shrub—it felt like a juniper—and unsettled a nest of birds. They shot up in front of her. Their chack, chack, chack bounced and echoed, it seemed, round every stone in the castle walls.

  Barbara froze where she was. She waited, heart pounding. She made herself count to sixty, twice. When nothing stirred from the direction Robin had taken, Barbara set off again.

  She reached his car without incident. She looked inside for the keys, praying to see them dangling from the ignition. They were gone. Well, it had been too much to hope for.

  She followed the curve of the castle wall as he had done, picking up the pace now. She’d lost the time she’d intended to gain by avoiding the track. She needed to make up that time through any means. But stealth and silence were crucial. Aside from the tyre iron, the only other weapon she had was surprise.

  Round the curve of the wall she came to the remains of the gatehouse. There was no longer a door attached to the old stones, merely an archway above which she could dimly see a worn coat of arms. She paused in an alcove created by the half-tumbled gatehouse wall, and she strained to listen. The birds had fallen silent. A night breeze susurrated the leaves on the trees that grew within the castle walls. But there was no sound of voice, footfall, or rustling clothes. And there was nothing to see except the two craggy towers raised towards the dark sky.

  These contained the small oblong slits which would have shed sunlight on the spiral stone stairways within the towers. From these slits some defence of the castle could have been made as men-of-arms raced upward to the crenellated roof. From these slits also, dim light would have shone had Robin Payne chosen either of the towers in which to hold Leo Luxford hostage. But no light filtered from them. So Robin had to be somewhere in the building whose roof Barbara had noted some twenty yards from the farthest of the towers.

  She could see this building as a shadowy form in the dim light. Between the gable-roofed structure and the archway where she stood in what felt like a teacup of darkness, there was little enough to hide her. Once she ventured out of the gatehouse and beyond the trees and shrubs at the wall, there would be only the random heaps of foundation stones that marked the sites where once the living quarters of the castle had stood. Barbara studied these heaps of stones. It appeared to be ten yards to the first group where a right angle of rubble would give her protection.

  She listened for movement and sound. There was nothing beyond the wind. She dashed for the stones.

  Ten yards closer to the castle’s remaining structure allowed her to see what it was. She could make out the arch of the Gothic lancet windows and she could see a finial at the apex of the roof sketched against the dusky sky. This was a cross. The building was a chapel.

  Barbara glued her gaze to the lancet windows. She waited for a flicker of light from within. He had a torch. He couldn’t be operating in total darkness. Surely in a moment he’d give himself away. But she saw nothing.

  Her hand felt slick where it held the tyre iron. She rubbed it against her trousers. She studied the next stretch of open ground and made a second dash to a second heap of foundation stones.

  Here she saw that a wall lower than the castle’s outer walls had been built round the chapel. A small roofed gatehouse whose shape mirrored the chapel itself acted as shelter for the dark oblong of a wooden door. This door was closed. Another fifteen yards gaped between her position and the chapel’s gatehouse, fifteen yards in which the only shelter was a bench from which tourists could admire what little remained of the mediaeval fortification. Barbara hurtled herself towards this bench. And from the bench she dashed to the chapel’s outer wall.

  She slithered along this wall, tyre iron gripped fiercely, scarcely allowing herself to breathe. Hugged to the stones, she gained the chapel’s gatehouse. She stood, her back pressed to the wall, and listened. First, the wind. Then the sound of a jet far above. Then another sound. And closer. The scrape of metal on stone. Barbara’s body quivered in reply.

  She eased her way to the gate. She pressed her palm against it. It gave an inch, then another. She peered inside.

  Directly in front of her, the chapel door was closed. And the lancet windows above it were as black and as sightless as before. But a stone path led round the side of the church and as Barbara slid within the gate, she saw the first glimmer of light coming from this direction. And that sound again. Metal on stone.

  An unattended herbaceous border grew profusely along the outer wall that bounded the chapel’s environs, overspreading the stone path with tendrils, with branches, with leaves, and with flowers. Here and there this overgrown border had been trampled, and observing this, Barbara was willing to bet that the trampling hadn’t been done by some first-Saturday-of-the-month visitor who had risked his car’s suspension by venturing out to this remote location.

  She glided across the path to the chapel itself. She sidled along the rough stones of its external wall till she gained the corner. There, she paused. She listened. First she heard the wind again, a swelling and receding that rustled through the trees on the hillside nearby. Then the metal on stone, more sharply now. Then the voice.

  “You’ll drink when I say to drink.” It was Robin, but not a Robin she had heard before. This wasn’t the uncertain and untried detective constable she’d been speaking to for the last few days. This was the voice of a thug and a killer. “Have we got that straight?”

  And then the child’s voice, reedy and frightened. “But it doesn’t taste right. It tastes—”

  “I don’t care how it tastes. You’ll drink it up like I tell you and be happy to have it or I’ll force it down your throat. You understand? Did you like having it forced down your throat last time?”

  The child said nothing. Barbara inched forward. She ventured a look round the corner of the chapel and saw that the path led to a set of stone steps. These steps curved downward through an arch in the chapel wall. They appeared to lead to a vault. Light fingered its way up these stairs. Too much light for a torch, Barbara realised. He must have taken his lantern as well. He’d had it with him when they’d gone to the windmill. That must have been what he’d removed from the boot of his car.

  She flexed her fingers round the tyre iron. She pressed forward slowly along the chapel wall.

  Robin was saying, “Drink, God damn it.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you want. Now, take this—”

  “That hurts! My arm!” The boy cried out.

  A scuffling followed. A blow fell. Robin grunted. And then his voice snarled, “You little turd. When I tell you to drink…” And the sound of flesh hitting flesh, striking hard.

  Leo shrieked. Another blow fell. Robin meant to kill him. Either he’d force the drug into him and wait the few minutes for him to drop off and drown him then as he’d done to Charlotte, or he’d kill him with violence. But either way, Leo was going to die.

  Barbara raced the length of the path towards the light. She had surprise on her side, she told herself. She had the tyre iron. She had surprise.

  She rushed down the steps with a howl and flung herself into the vault. She crashed the wooden door fully back against the stones. Robin had a tow-haired boy’s head caught in the crook of his arm and his hand was forcing a plastic cup to his lips.

  She saw in an instant how he meant to do it this time. The vault was an ancient burial chamber. Six lead coffins spanned a trench in the floor. In this trench lay a pool of algae-slimed water that gave off an odour of rot, human filth, and disease. That’s the water that would be in Leo’s body. Not tap water this time, but something infinitely more challenging for the pathologist to play about with.

  “Let him go!” Barbara shouted. “I said bloody let him go!”

  Robin did so. He shoved the boy to
the floor. But he didn’t back away and cower at having been caught out as a killer. Instead, he came at her.

  Barbara swung the tyre iron. It connected with his shoulder. He blinked but came on. She swung it again. His hand shot up and grabbed it. He wrenched it from her grasp and flung it to one side. It slid across the stone floor. It clanked against a coffin and fell into the trench with a splash. Robin smiled at the sound. He advanced.

  Barbara yelled, “Leo! Run!” but the child seemed mesmerised. He crouched near the coffin that the tyre iron had struck. He watched them from between his fingers. He cried, “No! Don’t!”

  Robin was fast. He had her against the wall before she knew what was happening. He drove his fists into her, one to the stomach to shove her into the stones and then, jerked forward, another to the kidneys. She felt heat sear through her, and she grabbed his hair in her fingers. She twisted hard and pulled his head backwards. She sought his eyes with her thumbs. He jerked back instinctively. She lost her grip. He powered his fist into her face.

  She heard her nose break. She felt the pain of it spread across her face like a shovel on fire. She fell to one side, but she grabbed on to him. She took him down with her. They hit the stones.

  She scrambled on top of him. Blood gushed from her nose and onto his face. She gripped his head between her hands. She lifted it. She pounded it onto the stone floor. She drove her fists into his Adam’s apple, then against his ears, his cheeks, his eyes.

  She shouted, “Leo! Get out of here!”

  Robin’s hands grabbed for her throat. He thrashed beneath her. Through a mist in her eyes she saw Leo move. But he was backing away. He wasn’t running for the door. He was crawling between the coffins as if to hide.

  She screamed, “Leo! Get out!”

  With a grunt, Robin threw her off him. She kicked out savagely as she hit the ground. She felt her foot hit his shin and as he sank back, she jumped to her feet.