In The Presence Of The Enemy (39 page)

Beyond the dining table, french doors opened into the back garden. This had been designed as a courtyard, with terra-cotta pav-ing stones on the ground, wide, well-kept fl owerbeds edging them, and a small fountain trickling water at their centre. At a green iron table set off to the left of the french doors, Eve Bowen was sitting in the growing shadows with a three-ring notebook opened in front of her and a glass to one side, half fi lled with ruby-coloured wine. Five more notebooks were stacked on another chair next to her.

The constable said, “Minister Bowen, New Scotland Yard,” and that was the extent of her introductions. When Eve Bowen looked up, the constable backed off and returned to the house.

“I’ve spoken to Mr. St. James,” Lynley said after identifying himself and DC Nkata.

“We’re going to need to talk to you frankly.

It may be painful, but there’s no other way.”

“So he’s told you everything.” Eve Bowen didn’t look either at Lynley or at Nkata, who slipped his leather notebook from his pocket and made a preparatory adjustment to the length of lead in his pencil. Rather, she looked at the papers in front of her, loosened from the notebook. The light was fading too quickly for her to be able to read any longer, and she made no pretence of doing so. She merely fi ngered the edge of one of the papers as she waited for Lynley’s response.

“He has,” Lynley said.

“And how much have you shared with the press so far?”

“It’s not generally my habit to speak to the media, if that’s your concern.”

“Not even when the media guarantee anonymity?”

“Ms. Bowen, I’m not interested in revealing your secrets to the press. Under any circumstances. In fact, I’m not interested in your secrets at all.”

“Not even for money, Inspector?”

“That’s correct.”

“Not even when they offer you more than you make as a policeman in the fi rst place?

Wouldn’t a nice size bribe—three or four months’ salary, for instance—be a tempting circumstance under which you might find yourself suddenly possessed of an insatiable interest in every one of my secrets?”

Lynley felt rather than saw Nkata look his way. He knew what the DC was waiting for: DI Lynley’s verbal umbrage at the insult to his integrity, not to mention Lord Asherton’s umbrage at the more serious insult to his bank account. He said, “I’m interested in what happened to your daughter. If your past relates to that, it’s going to become public knowledge eventually. You may as well prepare yourself for that. I dare say it isn’t going to be as painful as what’s happened already. May we talk about it?”

She favoured him with an evaluative gaze in which he read nothing from her, no ripple on the surface and no emotion in the eyes behind her spectacles. But apparently she’d reached a decision of some sort, because she dipped her chin fractionally in what went for a nod and said, “I phoned the Wiltshire police. We went out directly to identify her last night.”

“We?”

“My husband and I.”

“Where is Mr. Stone?”

Her eyelids lowered. She reached for her wineglass but she didn’t drink from it. She said, “Alex is upstairs. Sedated. Seeing Charlotte last night…Frankly, I think all the way out to Wiltshire he was hoping it wouldn’t be her. I think he’d even managed to convince himself of that. So when he finally saw her body, he reacted badly.” She drew her wineglass closer, not picking it up but sliding it across the glass that served as top to the table.

“As a culture, we expect too much of men, I think, and not enough of women.”

“None of us know how we’ll react to a death,” Lynley said. “Until it happens.”

“I suppose that’s true.” She gave the glass a quarter turn and examined how the movement affected its contents. She said, “They knew she had drowned, the police in Wiltshire. But they wouldn’t tell us anything else.

Not where, not when, not how. Especially that last, which I fi nd rather curious.”

“They have to wait for the results of the autopsy,” Lynley told her.

“Dennis phoned here first. He claimed to have seen the story on the news.”

“Luxford?”

“Dennis Luxford.”

“Mr. St. James told me that you suspected him of being involved.”

“Suspect,” she corrected him. She removed her hand from the wineglass and began to straighten the papers on the table, evening out the corners and the sides in a movement much like a sleepwalker’s. Lynley wondered if she had been sedated as well, her exercise of straightening them was so slow. She said, “As I understand it, Inspector, there’s currently no evidence that Charlotte was murdered. Is that correct?”

Lynley was reluctant to put his suspicions into words despite his viewing of the photographs. He said, “Only the autopsy can tell us exactly what happened.”

“Yes. Of course. The official police line. I understand. But I saw the body. I—” The tips of her fingers whitened where she pressed them against the tabletop. It was a moment before she went on, and during that moment they could all clearly hear the muffl ed babble of voices from the reporters not far away on Marylebone High Street. “I saw the entire body, not just the face. There was no mark on it. Anywhere. No significant mark. She hadn’t been tied. She hadn’t been weighted down in some way. She hadn’t struggled against someone holding her underneath water. What does that suggest to you, Inspector? It suggests an accident to me.”

Lynley didn’t openly disagree with her. He was more curious to see where she was heading with her thinking than he was eager to correct her misconceptions about accidental drownings.

She said, “I think his plan went awry. He intended to have her held until I surrendered to his demands for public notice. And then he would have released her unharmed.”

“Mr. Luxford?”

“He wouldn’t have killed her or ordered her killed. He needed her alive to assure my cooperation. But somehow it all went wrong. And she died. She didn’t know what was going on.

She may have been frightened. So perhaps she escaped. It would have been like Charlotte to do that, to escape. Perhaps she was running. It was dark. She was in the country. She wouldn’t have been familiar with the land. She wouldn’t even have known the canal was there because she’d never been to Wiltshire before.”

“Was she a swimmer?”

“Yes. But if she was running…If she ran, fell, hit her head…You see what could have happened to her, I expect.”

“We aren’t ruling out anything, Ms.

Bowen.”

“So you’re considering Dennis?”

“Along with everyone else.”

She moved her gaze to her papers and to the ordering of them. “There isn’t anyone else.”

“We can’t draw that conclusion,” Lynley said, “without a full examination of the facts.”

He pulled out one of the three other chairs that sat round the table. He nodded at Nkata to do the same. He said, “I see you’ve brought work home.”

“Is that the fi rst fact to be examined, then?

Why is the Junior Minister calmly sitting in her garden with her work spread round her while her husband—who’s not even the father of her child—is upstairs completely prostrate with grief?”

“I expect your responsibilities are enormous.”

“No. You expect I’m heartless. That’s the most logical conclusion for you to reach, isn’t it? You have to observe my behaviour. It’s part of your job. You have to ask yourself what sort of mother I am. You’re looking for whoever abducted my daughter and for all you know, I may have arranged it myself. Why else would I be capable of sitting here looking through papers as if nothing had happened? I don’t seem to be the sort who’d be desperate for something to stare at, something to play at working upon, to keep myself from tearing my hair out with grief. Do I?”

Lynley leaned towards her, placing his hand near where she’d placed hers, on top of one of the stacks of papers. He said, “Understand me. Not every remark I make to you is going to be a judgement, Ms. Bowen.”

He could hear her swallow. “In my world, it is.”

“It’s your world we need to talk about.”

On the papers, her fingers began to curl, the way they would had she decided to crumple the documents. It seemed to take an effort for her to relax them again. She said, “I haven’t cried. She was my daughter. I haven’t cried.

He looks at me. He waits for the tears because he’ll be able to comfort me if I give him tears and until I do, he’s completely lost. There’s no centre for him. There’s not even a handhold.

Because I can’t cry.”

“You’re still in shock.”

“I’m not. That’s the worst of it. Not to be in shock when everyone expects it. Doctors, family, colleagues. All of them waiting for me to show them an acceptable and appropriately overt indication of maternal torment so that they’ll know what to do next.”

Lynley knew there was little point in delineating for the MP any one of the endless responses to sudden death he’d seen over the years. It was true that her reaction to her daughter’s death wasn’t what he would have expected from a mother whose ten-year-old has been abducted, held, and then found dead, but he knew that her lack of emotion didn’t make her response any less genuine. He also knew that Nkata was noting it for the record, since the DC had begun writing almost as soon as Eve Bowen had started to speak.

“We’ll have someone checking into Mr.

Luxford,” he told her. “But I don’t want to investigate him to the exclusion of other possible suspects. If your daughter’s abduction was the first step to remove you from political power—”

“Then we need to consider who other than Dennis would be interested in that end,” she finished for him. “Is that right?”

“Yes. We’ve got to consider that. As well as the passions that would motivate someone to remove you from power. Jealousy, greed, political ambition, revenge. Have you thwarted someone in the Opposition?”

Her lips moved in a brief, ironic smile.

“One’s enemies in Parliament don’t sit opposite the object of their antipathy, Inspector.

They sit behind her with the rest of her party.”

“The better to backstab,” Nkata remarked.

“Quite. Yes.”

“Your rise to power has been relatively swift, hasn’t it?” Lynley asked the MP.

“Six years,” she said.

“Since your first election?” When she nodded, he continued. “That’s a brief apprentice-ship. Others have been sitting on the back benches for years, haven’t they? Others who might have been attempting to work themselves into the Government ahead of you?”

“I’m not the first case of a younger MP

leaping past those with more seniority. It’s a matter of talent as well as ambition.”

“Accepted,” Lynley said. “But someone equally ambitious who sees himself as equally talented may have developed a bad taste in his mouth when you leap-frogged over him to get your post in the Government. That bad taste may have grown into a strong desire to see you brought down. Through Charlotte’s paternity.

If that’s the case, we’re looking for someone who would also have been in Blackpool at that Tory conference where your daughter was conceived.”

Eve Bowen cocked her head, examined him closely, and said with some surprise, “He did tell you ever ything, didn’t he? Mr. St.

James?”

“I did say I’d spoken to him.”

“Somehow I thought he might have spared you the seamier details.”

“I can’t have hoped to proceed without knowing you and Mr. Luxford were lovers in Blackpool.”

She raised a finger. “Sexual partners, Inspector. Whatever else we may have been, Dennis Luxford and I were never lovers.”

“Whatever you’d like to call it, someone knows what went on between you. Someone’s done his maths—”

“Or hers,” Nkata pointed out.

“Or hers,” Lynley agreed. “Someone knows that Charlotte was the result. Whoever that person is, he’s someone who was in Blackpool all those years ago, someone with a probable axe to grind with you, someone who very likely wants to take your place.”

She seemed to withdraw into herself as she reflected on his description of the potential kidnapper. She said, “Joel would be fi rst to want to take my place. He runs most of my affairs as it is. But it’s unlikely he—”

“Joel?” Nkata said, pencil to paper. “Surname, Ms. Bowen?”

“Woodward, but he would have been too young. He’s only twenty-nine now. He wouldn’t have been at the Blackpool conference. Unless, of course, his father was there.

He may have gone with his father.”

“Who’s that?”

“Julian. Colonel Woodward. He’s chairman of my constituency association. He’s been a party worker for decades. I don’t know if he was there in Blackpool, but he may have been. So may have Joel.” She lifted her wineglass but didn’t drink, holding it instead in both her hands and speaking to it. “Joel’s my assistant. He has political ambitions. We clash at times. Still…” She shook her head in apparent dismissal of the consideration. “I don’t think it’s Joel. He knows my schedule better than anyone. He knows Alex’s and Charlotte’s as well. He has to. It’s part of his job. But to do this…How could he have done?

He’s been in London. At work. All through this.”

“The weekend long?” Lynley asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The body was found in Wiltshire, but that doesn’t mean Charlotte was held in Wiltshire from Wednesday on. She could have been anywhere, even here in London. She could have been transported to Wiltshire sometime during the weekend.”

“You mean after she was dead,” Eve Bowen said.

“Not necessarily. If she was being held in the city and the site got too hot for some reason, she may have been moved.”

“Then whoever moved her would have to know Wiltshire. If she was hidden there before…before what happened.”

“Yes. Add that to the equation as well.

Someone from the Blackpool time. Someone who envies you your position. Someone with an axe to grind. Someone who knows Wiltshire. Does Joel? Does his father?”

She was looking at her papers, then suddenly looking through them. She said to herself, “Joel mentioned to me…Thursday evening…

he said…”

“This Woodward bloke has a connection to Wiltshire?” Nkata clarified before adding to his notes.

“No. It’s not Joel.” She sifted through the papers. She rejected them and shoved them into their notebook. She pulled another from the stack on the chair next to her. She said,