In The Presence Of The Enemy (41 page)

When the worst of the kinks were loosened from her body, she approached the police station and squinted through the dusty glass of its locked back door.

This door gave onto a corridor that led to the front of the building. Doors stood open on either side of this corridor, but no squares of light fell from them onto the fl oor.

Surely they would have left a note, Barbara thought. And she scouted round the rectangle of concrete that served as the back step to make certain nothing had blown away. Finding only a crushed Pepsi can and three used condoms—safe sex was great, but she couldn’t understand why its proponents never quite made the leap from coital protection to post-coital clean-up—she took herself to the front of the building. This stood at the junction of three separate roads, which ran into Wootton Cross and met one another in the village square at whose centre stood a statue of some obscure king looking mightily unhappy about being memorialised in an even more obscure country location. He faced the police station dolefully, sword in one hand, shield in the other, with his crown and his shoulders liberally freckled with pigeon poop. Behind him and across the street, the King Alfred Arms identified him for those capable of putting two and two together. This pub was doing a good night’s business, if the music blaring from its open windows and the shifting bodies behind the glass were anything to go by. Barbara noted it as the next logical place to seek her police companions if the front of the station yielded her nothing.

Which was very nearly the case. A neatly printed sign on the door informed those seeking police assistance after hours that they were to telephone the constabulary in Amesford.

Barbara gave a half-hearted knock on the door anyway, just in case the CID team purportedly awaiting her had decided to take a snooze.

When no lights blinked on in response, she knew there was nothing for it but to brave the crowd and the music—which sounded remotely like “In the Mood” being played enthusias-tically if not quite accurately by a band of septuagenarians with diminishing lung capacity—of the King Alfred Arms.

She hated skulking into pubs alone. She was always unnerved by that moment when all eyes shifted to the newcomer for a quick evaluation. But she was going to have to get used to evaluations, wasn’t she, if she was to take charge of the Wiltshire end of this investigation. So the King Alfred Arms was as good a place as any to start.

She began to head across the street, automatically reaching back for her shoulder bag and her cigarettes to bolster herself with some nicotine courage. She reached in vain. She stopped herself cold. Her bag…?

It was in the car, she realised, and upon mentally retracing her steps thus far as Supreme Poobah Head of the Wiltshire Team, she congratulated herself on being so hot to establish her credentials and throw her weight around that, as she recalled, she’d left her car door open, her shoulder bag inside, and her keys—helpfully—still in the ignition.

“Bloody hell,” she muttered.

She did a quick about-turn and strode hastily back the way she’d come. She rounded the side of the police station, hurried up the drive, dodged a rubbish dumpster, and entered the tiny car park. Which is when she blessed her silent little trainer-shod feet.

Because a darkly garbed man was bent into the Mini and from what she could see he was in the process of industriously pawing through her bag.

BARBARA HURLED HERSELF
at him. He was big, but she had the advantage of surprise and fury. She gave a howl worthy of the highest-ranking expert in the martial arts as she grabbed the bag-snatcher round the waist, wrenched him from her car, and fl ung him against it.

She snarled, “Police, yobbo! And don’t you move a bloody eyelash.”

He was off balance, so he did more than move an eyelash. He fell face first to the ground. He writhed for an instant as if he’d landed on a stone, and he appeared to be reaching for his right trouser pocket. Barbara stomped on his hand.

“I said don’t move!”

He said, voice muffled by his position, “My ID…pocket.”

“Oh right,” she said caustically. “What sort of ID? Pickpocket? Bag-snatcher? Car thief?

What?”

“Police,” he said.

“Police?”

“Right. Can I get up? Or at least turn over?”

She thought, Great shit. What a way to begin. And then said suspiciously, “What were you doing going through my things?”

“Trying to see who the car belonged to. Can I get up?”

“Stay where you are. Turn over, but stay on the ground.”

“Right.” He didn’t move.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“You’re still on my hand.”

She hastily removed her high-top from his palm. She said, “No sudden movements.”

He replied, “Got it.” With a grunt, he worked his way onto his side, then onto his back. From the ground, he observed her.

“I’m DC Robin Payne,” he said. “Something tells me you must be Scotland Yard.”

He looked like a young Errol Flynn with a bigger commitment to the moustache. And he wasn’t in black as Barbara had fi rst thought.

Rather, he wore charcoal trousers and a navy sweater, a V-neck with a white shirt beneath it. The collar of this was currently smudged with grime—as were the sweater and the trousers—courtesy of his fall to the ground. And his left cheek was oozing blood, a possible explanation for his writhing once she put him there.

“It’s nothing,” he said when Barbara grimaced at the sight of him. “I would have done the same.”

They were in the police station, just. Constable Payne had unlocked the back door and gone to what seemed to be an old laundry room, where he turned the taps on and let water run into a stained concrete tub. A dirt-encrusted green bar of soap lay in a rusty metal holder near the taps, and before he used it, Payne took a pocket knife from his trousers and pared off the soap’s deep incisions of grime. While the water was heating up, he pulled his sweater off and handed it to Barbara with a “Hold on to this for a second, won’t you?” Then he washed his face.

Barbara looked about for a towel. A limp piece of terry cloth hanging from a hook behind the door seemed the only thing suitable. But it was filthy and it smelled of mildew.

She couldn’t imagine handing it to anyone with the expectation of its actually being used.

She thought, Bloody hell. She wasn’t the sort of woman who carried scented linen handkerchiefs for tender moments such as these, and she didn’t think the ball of crumpled tissues wadded into the pocket of her jacket would be the thing to offer him to complete his ablutions. She was considering a half-open ream of typing paper for its absorbency potential—it was currently being used as a doorstop—when he lifted his head from the sink, ran his wet hands through his hair, and solved the problem for her. He pulled his shirt out of his trousers and used the tails of it for a towel.

“Sorry,” Barbara said as he dried his face.

She got a glimpse of his chest. Nice, she noted, just hirsute enough to be attractive without encouraging one to think of possible simian forebears. “I saw you in my car and I reacted without a thought.”

“That’s decent training,” he said, dropping his shirttails and tucking them in all round.

“It shows your experience.” He gave a rueful grin. “And my lack of it. Which explains why you’re Scotland Yard and I’m not. How old are you, anyway? I was expecting someone round fifty, my sergeant’s age.”

“Thirty-three.”

“Whoa. You must be hot.”

Considering her chequered career with New Scotland Yard,
hot
wasn’t the word Barbara would have used to describe herself. It was only during the past thirty months of working with Lynley that she’d begun to regard herself as even lukewarm.

Payne took his sweater from her and gave it a brisk few shakes to rid it of the car park dirt.

He pulled it over his head, ran his hands through his hair another time, and said,

“Right. Now for the first aid kit, which must be somewhere…” He rooted on a cluttered shelf beneath the room’s only window. A bris-tle-split toothbrush fell to the f loor. Payne said, “Ah. Here,” and brought forth a dust-covered blue tin from which he took a plaster that he applied to the cut on his face. He flashed Barbara a smile.

“How long’ve you been there?” he asked.

“Where?”

“New Scotland Yard.”

“Six years.”

He gave a silent whistle. “Impressive. You said you’re thirty-three?”

“Right.”

“When did you become a DC?”

“When I was twenty-four.”

His eyebrows rose. He slapped his hands against the dust on his trousers. “I just made it three weeks ago myself. That’s when I finished the course. But I suppose you can tell, can’t you? That I’m green, I mean. Because of out there and what happened with your car.” He straightened his sweater against his shoulders. They too, Barbara noted, were nice. He said, “Twenty-four,” to himself with some admiration and then to her, “I’m twenty-nine. D’you think that’s too late?”

“For what exactly?”

“To be heading where you are. Scotland Yard. That’s what I’m shooting for, eventually.” He toed a piece of loose lino boyishly. “I mean, when I’m good enough, which I obviously am not at the moment.”

Barbara didn’t know quite what to tell him about the lack of glory that generally went with her work. So she said, “You said you’ve been a DC three weeks? Is this your first case?” and had her answer when his toe dug more deeply into the loose lino.

He said, “Sergeant Stanley’s a bit put out that someone from London’s been assigned to head things up. He waited here with me till half past eight, then he cleared off. Said to tell you that you could find him at home if you decide you need him for something tonight.”

“I got caught in traffi c,” Barbara said.

“I waited till quarter past nine, then fi gured you might have been heading for Amesford, to our CID office. So I was going to set off there myself. Which is when you arrived. I saw you creeping round the building and thought you were someone trying to break in.”

“Where were you? Inside?”

He rubbed the back of his neck and laughed, lowering his head with embarrassment. “Truth to tell, I was taking a pee,” he said. “Out behind that shed beyond the car park. I’d got outside all ready to leave for Amesford and decided it was easier to have a pee in the weeds than to unlock and relock the place all over again. I didn’t even hear your car. What a twit, huh? Come on. It’s this way.”

He went towards the front of the building, into an office that was sparsely furnished with a desk, filing cabinets, and ordnance survey maps hanging on the walls. A dusty-leafed philodendron stood in one corner, its pot sprouting a hand-lettered sign that read
No
coffee- or cigarette-dumping. I’m real
.

Doubtless, Barbara thought sardonically.

The plant looked sadly like most of her own attempts at indoor gardening.

She said, “Why’ve we met here and not in Amesford?”

“Sergeant Stanley,” Robin explained. “He thought you might want to see the crime scene fi rst. In the morning, I mean. To orient yourself. It’s just a fi fteen-minute drive from here.

Amesford’s another eighteen miles to the south.”

Barbara knew what another eighteen miles on a country road meant: a good thirty minutes more of driving. She would have saluted Sergeant Stanley’s perspicacity had she not wondered about his intentions. She said with more determination than she felt, considering how little she actually looked forward to the event, “I’m going to want to stand in on the autopsy as well. When’s that scheduled?”

“Tomorrow morning.” Payne took from under his arm a small stack of manila folders that he’d brought in from his car. “So we’ll have to be up with the birds to do the crime scene first. We’ve some preliminary stuff, by the way.” He handed her the folders.

Barbara looked through the material. It comprised a second set of photographs of the crime scene, another copy of the police report taken from the couple who had discovered the body, detailed photographs shot in the morgue, a meticulous description of the corpse—

height, weight, natural marks upon the body, scars, etc.—and a set of X-rays. The report also indicated that blood had been drawn for the toxicologist.

“Our man would have gone on with the autopsy,” Payne said, “but the Home Offi ce told him to hold off till you were in place.”

“No clothing with the body?” Barbara asked. “I assume CID made a thorough check of the area.”

“Not a stitch,” he said. “On Sunday night the mother gave us a decent description of what the girl was wearing the last time anyone saw her. We’ve put the word out, but nothing’s turned up yet. The mother said—” Here, he came to her side and fl ipped through several pages of the report, resting his bum on the edge of the desk. “The mother said that when she was snatched she’d have had specs on and schoolbooks with her, with a school emblem—

St. Bernadette’s—printed inside. She’d have had a flute with her as well. That information’s gone out, along with the rest, to the other forces. And we’ve come up with this.” He flipped a few more pages to find what he wanted. “We know the body was in the water twelve hours. And we know that prior to her death she was somewhere near heavy machinery.”

“How’s that?”

Payne explained. The fi rst conclusion had been arrived at by the presence of a lifeless fl ea caught up in the child’s hair: Combed out and placed under a watch-glass, the fl ea had taken an hour and a quarter to recover from its immersion in the water of the Kennet and Avon Canal, which was very close to the exact time required for the insect to revive after twelve hours’ exposure to a hostile and liquid environment. The second conclusion had been reached by the presence of a foreign substance underneath the child’s fi ngernails.

“What was it?” Barbara asked.

It was a compound based on petroleum: a naphthenic distillate containing stearic acid and lithium hydroxide, among other multi-syllabic ingredients. “It’s the goop that’s used to lubricate heavy machinery,” he told her.

“Under Charlotte Bowen’s fi ngernails?”

“Right,” he said. It was used on tractors, combine harvesters, that sort of thing, he explained. He indicated the patched-up ordnance survey maps on the wall, continuing with, “We’ve hundreds of farms in the county—dozens in the immediate area—but we’ve gridded everything off and with some help from the forces in Salisbury, Marlborough, and Swindon, we’ll be canvassing all of them, looking for some evidence that the kid was there. Sergeant Stanley’s set that up. The teams began yesterday, and if they have any luck…Well, who knows what they could turn up? Although it’s probably going to take forever.”