In The Presence Of The Enemy (11 page)

“No one’ll hear you if you shout.”

“Then why’d you stop me?”

“Because I don’t like little-girl noises.” He used his toe to push the bowl in her direction.

“Got to go to the loo.”

“After. Eat that.”

“Is it poison?”

“Right. I need you dead like I need a bullet in my foot. Eat.”

She looked about. “I haven’t got a spoon.”

“You didn’t need a spoon a moment ago, did you? Now eat it.”

He moved farther out of the light. Lottie heard a
svit
and saw the flaring of a match. He was hunched over it and when he turned back to her, she saw the fi refly tip of his cigarette.

“Where’s my mum?” She lifted the bowl as she asked the question. The soup was vegetable, like Mrs. Maguire made. She was hungrier than she’d ever remembered being, and she drank it down and used her fi ngers to help the vegetables into her mouth. “Where’s my mum?” she asked again.

“Eat.”

She watched him as she raised the bowl. He was just a shadow and without her specs he was a very blurry shadow as well.

“What’re you gawping at, then? Can’t you look somewhere else?”

She lowered her eyes. It was no use, really, trying to see him. All she could manage was his outline. A head, two shoulders, two arms, two legs. He was careful to keep out of the light.

It came to her then that she had been kidnapped. A shiver went over her, so strong a shiver that she slopped vegetable soup out of the bowl. It dribbled across her hand and onto the skirt of her uniform’s pinafore dress. What happened when people were kidnapped? she wondered. She tried to remember. It was all about money, wasn’t it? And being hidden somewhere until someone paid money. Except Mummy didn’t have very much money. But Cito did.

“D’you want money from my dad?” she asked.

He snorted. “What I want from your dad’s got nothing to do with money.”

“But you’ve kidnapped me, haven’t you?

Because I don’t think this is a safe house at all and I don’t think my mummy’s anywhere in it. And if this isn’t a safe house and Mummy isn’t here, then you’ve snatched me cause you want money. Haven’t you? Why else…” She remembered. Sister Agnetis was hobbling back and forth across the front of the classroom, telling the story of St. Maria Goretti who died because she wanted to stay pure.

Had St. Maria Goretti been snatched as well?

Isn’t that how the dreadful story had begun?

With someone taking her, someone eager to defile her Precious Temple of the Holy Spirit?

Carefully, Lottie set her bowl on the fl oor. Her hands felt sticky where she’d spilled soup on them and she rubbed them against the skirt of her pinafore dress. She wasn’t exactly sure how one’s Precious Temple of the Holy Spirit was defiled, but if it had to do with drinking vegetable soup given to one by a stranger, then she knew she had to refuse to drink it. “I’ve had enough,” she said and remembered to add, “Thank you very much indeed.”

“Eat it all.”

“I don’t want any more.”

“I said eat it. Every scrap. You hear?” He came forward and poured the rest of the Thermos into the bowl. Little beads of yellow dotted the broth. They moved towards each other and formed a circle like a fairy’s necklace.

“You need me to help you do the job?”

Lottie didn’t much like his voice. She knew what he meant. He’d shove her face into the soup again. He’d keep her face there till she drowned or she ate. She didn’t think she would much like to drown, so she picked up the bowl.

God would forgive her if she ate the soup, wouldn’t He?

When she was finished, she placed the bowl on the floor. She said, “I got to use the loo.”

He clanked something into the circle of light. Yet another bowl, but this one deep and thick, with a ring of daisies painted on it and a curving lip round its rim like an octopus mouth. She stared at it, confused. She said, “I don’t want more soup. I ate what you gave me.

I got to go to the loo.”

“Go,” he said. “Don’t you know what that is?”

She saw that he meant her to go in the bowl, that he also meant her to do it in front of him.

He meant her to lower her knickers and squat and pee and he’d be watching and listening all the time. Just like Mrs. Maguire did at home, standing on the other side of the door, calling,

“Are you having a movement this morning, dearie?”

She said, “I can’t. Not in front of you.”

He said, “Then don’t,” and took the bowl away. Quick as a gnat’s blink he snatched up the Thermos, the soup bowl, and the lantern.

The light went out. Lottie felt a
whoosh
as something plopped onto the floor right next to her. She gave a cry and shrank away. A stream of cold air passed over her like the fl ight of ghosts coming out of a graveyard. Then a
clunk
sounded, followed by a
swetch
, and she knew she was alone.

She patted her hand on the floor where the
whoosh
had sounded. He’d thrown down a blanket. It was smelly and rough to the touch, but she picked it up and hugged it to her stomach and tried not to think what being given a blanket meant about her stay in this dark place.

She whimpered, “But I got to go to the loo.”

And she felt the lump in her throat and the tightness in her chest all over again. No, no, she thought. Mustn’t mustn’t. “I got to go to the loo.”

She sank to the floor. Her lips were trembling and her eyes were welling. She pressed one hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes closed. She swallowed and tried to make the lump in her throat go back to her stomach.

“Think happy thoughts,” her mother would say.

So she thought about Breta. She even said her name. She whispered it. “Breta. Best best friend, Breta.”

Because Breta was the happiest thought to think. Being with Breta. Telling tales. Playing pranks.

She made herself consider what Breta would do if she found herself here. Here in the dark, what would Breta do?

Pee first, Lottie thought. Breta would pee.

She’d say, You have me stowed in this dark hole, mister, but you can’t make me do what you say. So I’m going to pee. Right here and right now. Not into some bowl but right on the fl oor.

The floor. She should have known it wasn’t a coffin, Lottie thought, because it had a fl oor.

A hard floor like rocks. Only…

Lottie felt the same floor he’d dragged her across, the very same floor she’d cut her knee on. This, of course, would have been the fi rst thing that Breta would have done had she awakened in the dark. Breta’d have tried to suss out where she was. She’d never have just lain there and whimpered like a baby.

Lottie snuffled and let her fingers feel round the floor. It was slightly ridged, which is how she must have cut her knee. She traced the ridging in the shape of a rectangle. Then another rectangle next to the first. Then another.

“Bricks,” she whispered. Breta would be proud.

Lottie thought about a floor made of bricks and what a fl oor made of bricks might tell her about where she was. She realised that if she moved about much, she was liable to get hurt.

She might stumble. She might fall. She might plunge headlong into a well. She might—

A well in the dark? Breta would have asked.

I don’t think so, Lottie.

So on hands and knees Lottie continued to feel along the floor until her fingers finally nudged into wood. It was rough-surfaced and splintery, with tiny cool heads of nails driven into it. She felt edges and corners. She felt up the sides. A crate, she decided. More than one. A group of them that she inched along.

She hit a different kind of surface rising up from the floor. It was smooth and curved, and when she gave it an enquiring prod with her knuckles, it moved with an uneven and splut-tery sound. A familiar sound, reminding her of saltwater and sand, of playing happily at the edge of the sea.

“Plastic bucket,” she said, proud of herself.

Breta couldn’t have named it as fast as that.

She heard a slosh from inside and lowered her face to sniff. There was no scent. She dipped her fingers into the liquid and put them to her tongue. “Water,” she said. “A bucket of water.”

She knew at once what Breta would do.

She’d say, Well, I got to pee, Lot, and she’d use the bucket.

Which is what Lottie did. She tipped the water out of the bucket, lowered her knickers, and squatted over it. The hot gush of pee surged out of her. She balanced on the bucket’s edge and rested her head against her knees.

One knee was throbbing where the brick had cut into it. She licked at the throb and tasted blood. She felt suddenly weary. She felt very alone. All thoughts of Breta vanished just like popped bubbles.

“I want Mummy,” Lottie whispered.

And even to that, she knew exactly what Breta would say.

Did you ever think Mummy might not want you?

ST. JAMES LEFT
both Helen and Deborah on Marylebone High Street, in front of a shop called Pumpkin’s Grocery, where an elderly woman with an impatient fox terrier on a lead was picking through punnets of strawberries. Supplied with the photograph of Charlotte Bowen, Helen and Deborah would walk the areas surrounding St. Bernadette’s Convent School on Blandford Street, Damien Chambers’ tiny house in Cross Keys Close, and Devonshire Place Mews near the top of the high street. Their purpose was twofold.

They would look for anyone who might have seen Charlotte on the previous afternoon.

They would map out every possible route the girl could have taken from the school to Chambers’ house and from Chambers’ house to her own. Their assignment was Charlotte.

St. James’s assignment was Charlotte’s friend, Breta.

Long after he had dropped Helen at her fl at, long after Deborah had gone to bed, St. James had roamed restlessly round the house. He started in the study, where he drew books from the shelves in haphazard fashion while he drank two brandies and pretended to read.

He went from there to the kitchen, where he brewed himself a cup of Ovaltine—which he didn’t drink—and spent ten minutes tossing a tennis ball from the stairway to the back door for Peach’s canine entertainment. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom and watched his wife sleep. He finally took himself up to his lab.

Deborah’s photographs were still spread on the worktable where she had laid them out earlier in the evening, and in the overhead light he studied the picture of the West Indian girl with the Union Jack in her hands. She couldn’t, he decided, be much more than ten years old. Charlotte Bowen’s age.

St. James returned the photographs to Deborah’s darkroom and fetched the plastic jackets into which he had placed the notes that Eve Bowen and Dennis Luxford had received.

Next to these notes he laid the printed list that Eve Bowen had assembled. He switched on three high-intensity lamps and took up a magnifying glass. He studied the two notes and the list.

He concentrated on the commonalities.

Since they shared no common words, he had to depend upon common letters.
F
, double
t
, the lone
w
beginning
will
in one note and
want
in the other, and the most reliable letter for analysis and code-breaking, the letter
e
.

The crosspiece of the
f
in Luxford’s note matched exactly the crosspiece of the
f
in Bowen’s: In both cases the crosspiece was used to form part of the letter that followed the
f
. The same style of crossing had been used in the double
t
in
Charlotte
and the double
t
in
Lottie
. The
w
in both letters stood entirely alone, rounded at the bottom with no point of connection to the letters that followed it. On the other hand, the downsweep of the
e
always connected to the letter following it while the initial curve of the letter stood alone and was never joined to what preceded it. The overall style of both notes was something between printing and cursive, resembling an intermediate step between the two. Even to the unschooled eye engaged in a cursory examination, it was clear that both notes had been composed by the same hand.

He picked up Eve Bowen’s list and looked for the kind of subtle similarities that even one attempting to disguise his writing generally failed to obscure. How a letter is formed is so unconscious an activity that without giving purposeful attention to each stroke of the pen or the pencil, someone attempting to disguise his handwriting is bound to make an uninten-tional mistake. Such a mistake was what he was looking for: the distinct loop of an
l
, the starting point of an
a
or an
o
, the curve of an
r
and where that curve began, a similarity in spacing between words, a uniformity in the manner in which the pen or the pencil was lifted at the end of a word before beginning another.

St. James went over individual letters with the magnifying glass. He examined each word.

He measured the space between words and the width and the height of the letters. He did this to both of the kidnapping notes and to Eve Bowen’s list. The result was the same.

The notes had been composed by the same hand, but that hand did not belong to Eve Bowen.

St. James sat back on his stool and considered in what logical direction this sort of analysis of writing samples would inevitably lead him. If Eve Bowen had been telling the truth—

that Dennis Luxford was the only other person who knew the identity of Charlotte’s natural father—then the most reasonable next step would be to gather a sample of Luxford’s printing to study. Yet carrying this journey through the labyrinth of chirography to that end seemed a profligate expenditure of his time. Because if Dennis Luxford was indeed behind Charlotte’s disappearance—with his background in journalism and his attendant knowledge of the workings of the police—he would hardly have been foolish enough to pen the notes announcing her kidnapping.

And that was what St. James found so unusual. That was what was causing his disquiet: that someone had penned the notes in the first place. They hadn’t been typed, they hadn’t been composed of letters cut from magazines or newspapers. This fact suggested one of two possibilities: The kidnapper was someone who didn’t expect to be caught. Or the kidnapper was someone who didn’t expect to be punished once the complete truth of the kidnapping was brought to light.