In The Presence Of The Enemy (43 page)

She could picture him caught up in a verbal brawl with a dozen reporters hurling questions at him, each one more incendiary than the last. She could picture his temper fl aring, his self-control snapping, and the story they wanted pouring out as a result. “I’ll tell you why we didn’t phone the fucking police,” he would snarl. And then, instead of employing subterfuge, he would resort to the truth. He wouldn’t intend to. He would start out with something like, “We didn’t phone the police because of bastards like you, all right?” Which would lead them to ask what he meant. “Your slobbering need for a bleeding story. God spare us all when you want your damn story.”

Were you trying to spare Ms. Bowen from a story, then? Why? What story? Has she got something to hide? “No! No!” And on they would go from there, each question a noose getting tighter, encircling and closing in on the facts. He wouldn’t give them everything.

But he would give them enough. So it was essential—it was critical—that he never talk to the press.

He needed another sedative, Eve decided.

Two more, probably, so that he could sleep through the night. Sleep was as essential as silence. Without it, one ran the risk of losing control. She made a move to get up, raising herself on one elbow. She took his hand, pressed it briefl y against her cheek, and laid it on the bed.

“Where—”

“I’m going to get those pills the doctor gave us.”

“Not yet,” he said.

“Exhaustion doesn’t help us.”

“But the pills just postpone. You must know that.”

She was immediately wary. She tried to read his face for a meaning, but the darkness that had protected her did the same for him.

He sat up. He spent a moment staring at his long legs, a time he seemed to use to gather his thoughts. Finally, he urged her up next to him. He put his arm round her and spoke against her head.

“Eve, listen to me. You’re safe here. All right?

You’re completely and utterly safe with me.”

Safe, she thought.

“Here, in this room, you can let go. I don’t feel what you feel—I can’t, I’m not her mother, I wouldn’t presume to understand what a mother feels at a time like this—but I loved her, Eve. I—” He stopped. She could hear him swallow as he tried to maintain mastery over his sorrow. “If you keep taking the pills, you’ll just be postponing having to go through the grieving. That’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? And you’ve been doing it because I fell apart. Because of what I said the other night about your not really living here, and not really knowing Charlie at all. God, I’m sorry for that. I just lost it for a moment. But I want you to know that I’m here now, for you. This is a place where you can let go.”

And then he waited. She knew what she was supposed to do: turn to him, beg to be comforted, and produce a believable manifestation of grief. In short, she was to cease pulling her hat upon her brow and to give sorrow actions, at least, if she could not give it words.

“Feel what you need to feel,” he murmured.

“I’ll be here for you.”

Her brain worked feverishly to come up with a solution. When she had it, she lowered her chin and forced the tension from her body.

“I can’t—” She took an audible breath.

“There’s too much inside of me, Alex.”

“That’s no surprise. You can let it out a little at a time. We’ve all night.”

“Will you hold me?”

“What sort of question is that?”

She was in his arms. She slipped her own arms round him. She said into his shoulder,

“I’ve been thinking that I should have been the one. Not Charlotte. Me.”

“That’s normal. You’re her mother.”

He rocked her. She turned her head towards his. She said, “I feel dead inside. What difference would it make if the rest of me died?”

“I know how it feels. I understand.”

He smoothed her hair. He rested his hand on the back of her neck. She lifted her head.

“Alex, hold me. Keep me from falling apart.”

“I will.”

“Stay here.”

“Always. You know that.”

“Please.”

“Yes.”

“Be with me.”

“I will.”

When their mouths met, it seemed the logical conclusion to the conversation they’d been having. And the rest was easy.

“So they’ve divided the county into quad-rants,” Havers was saying on her end of the phone. “The DS down here—a bloke called Stanley—has had DCs checking out every farm. But Payne thinks—”

“Payne?” Lynley asked.

“DC Payne. He met me at the Wootton Cross station. He’s with Amesford CID.”

“Ah. Payne.”

“He thinks farm machinery’s too narrow a scope. He says the grease under her nails could have come from other sources. The locks along the canal, a sawmill, a corn mill, a caravan, a wharf. Which makes sense to me.”

Lynley thoughtfully picked up the tape recorder that lay on the top of his desk amidst three additional photographs of Charlotte Bowen handed over by her mother, the contents of the envelope St. James had given him earlier in Chelsea, the photographs and reports that had been collected by Hillier, and his own scrawled compendium of everything St. James had related in his basement kitchen. It was ten forty-seven and he’d been finishing off a cup of tepid coffee when Havers phoned from her lodgings in Wiltshire with the terse announcement, “I’m dossing at a local B and B. Lark’s Haven, sir,” and an equally terse recitation of its phone number before she went into the facts she’d gathered. He’d taken notes from her report. He’d jotted down the axle grease, the flea, and the approximate time the body had been in the water, and he’d been listing place names from Wootton Cross to Devizes when her caveat regarding the restricted nature of Sergeant Stanley’s investigation nudged against something he’d already heard that evening.

He said, “Hang on a minute, Sergeant,”

and he pressed the play button on the tape recorder to listen once again to Charlotte Bowen’s voice.

“Cito,”
the child said. “_This man here says_
you c’n get me out. He says you’re s’posed to tell
everyone a story. He says—
”

“That’s the girl?” Havers said from her end of the line.

“Wait,” Lynley said. He pushed fast forward. The voice turned to a chipmunk chit-tering for a moment. He slowed the speed.

The voice went on.
“…I haven’t got a loo. But
there’s bricks. A maypole.”

Lynley pressed stop. “Did you hear it?” he asked. “She seems to be talking about where she’s being held.”

“She said bricks and a maypole? Yeah. Got it.

Whatever it means.” A man spoke in the background. Lynley heard Havers muffl e the phone.

Then she came back on the line and said in an altered voice, “Sir? Robin thinks the bricks and maypole give us a direction to go in.”

“Robin?”

“Robin Payne. The DC here in Wiltshire.

It’s his mum’s B and B I’m staying in. Lark’s Haven. Like I said. His mum runs it.”

“Ah.”

“There’s no hotel in the village, and with Amesford eighteen miles away and the body site here, I thought—”

“Sergeant, your logic is impeccable.”

She said, “Okay. Yes. Right,” and went on to delineate her plan for the next day. Body site fi rst, autopsy second, a meeting with Sergeant Stanley third.

“Do some scouting round Salisbury as well,” Lynley said. He told her about Alistair Harvie, his antagonism towards Eve Bowen, his presence in Blackpool eleven years past, and his opposition to the prison site in his constituency. “Harvie’s our first direct link between the Tory conference and Wiltshire,”

Lynley concluded. “He may be too convenient a link, but he needs to be checked out.”

“Got it,” Havers said. She muttered, “Harvie…Salisbury,” and Lynley could picture her scribbling into her notebook. Unlike Nkata’s, it would be cardboard-covered, its edges sprouting dog-earred blooms. Sometimes, he thought, the woman seemed to be living in another century.

“You do have your mobile phone with you, Sergeant?” he verifi ed pleasantly.

“Sod them,” she said with equal affability.

“I hate the bloody things. How did it go with Simon?”

Lynley deflected the question with a recitation of all the facts from his compendium, ending with, “He found a fingerprint on the tape recorder. In the battery compartment, which makes him think it’s genuine and not a plant. SO4’s running it, but if they come up with a name and we find we’ve got a member of the Old Lags Brigade behind the kidnapping, I’ve no doubt someone hired him to do the job.”

“Which may lead us back to Harvie.”

“Or to any number of people. The music teacher. The Woodwards. Stone. Luxford.

Bowen. Nkata’s checking everyone out.”

“As to Simon?” Havers asked. “Things okay there, Inspector?”

“They’re fine,” Lynley said. “Perfectly fi ne.”

He rang off on the lie. He downed the rest of the coffee—room temperature now—and tossed the empty cup into the rubbish. He spent ten minutes avoiding the thought of his encounter with St. James, Helen, and Deborah, and during this time he read through the police report from Wiltshire once again. After that he added a few lines to his notes. Then he organised the case material into separate and neat folders. Then he admitted he could no longer avoid the thought of what had passed between himself and his friends in Chelsea.

So he left the offi ce. He told himself he was done for the day. He was tired. He needed to clear his mind. He wanted a whisky. He had a new Deutsche-Grammophon CD that he hadn’t yet heard and a stack of business mail from his family home in Cornwall that he hadn’t yet opened. He needed to get home.

But the closer he got to Eaton Terrace, the more he knew he should be driving to Onslow Square. He resisted the inclination by telling himself all over again that he had been in the right from the first. But it was as if the car had a will of its own because despite his determination to go home, throw a whisky down his throat, and soothe his savage breast with a few bars of Moussorgsky, he found himself in South Kensington instead of Belgravia, sliding into a vacant parking space a few doors to the south of Helen’s fl at.

She was in the bedroom. But she wasn’t in bed, in spite of the hour. Instead, she had the wardrobe doors open and the drawers of the chest pulled out onto the f loor, and she appeared to be in the middle of either a spate of late-spring housecleaning or a sartorial purge. A large cardboard box was sitting between the chest of drawers and the wardrobe. Into this box she was placing a carefully folded trapezoid of plum-coloured silk that he recognised as one of her nightgowns. In the box already were other garments, also precisely folded.

He said her name. She didn’t look up.

Beyond her, on the bed, he saw that she’d left a newspaper spread open, and when she spoke, it was in apparent reference to this.

“Rwanda,” she said. “The Sudan, Ethiopia.

I trifle away my life in London—in circumstances helpfully fi nanced by my father—while all those people starve to death or die from dysentery or cholera.” She glanced his way.

Her eyes were very bright, but not with happi-ness. “Fate’s ugly, isn’t it? I’m here, with all this. They’re there, with nothing. I can’t justify it, so how do I fi nd a balance?”

She went to the wardrobe and pulled out the plum dressing gown that matched the nightgown. She laid it carefully on the bed, tied its belt in a bow, and began to fold it.

He said, “What are you doing, Helen? You can’t possibly be thinking of—” When she looked up, her bleak expression stopped his words.

“Going to Africa?” she said. “Offering someone my help? Me? Helen Clyde? How completely absurd.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Good Lord, if I did that, I might ruin my manicure.” She placed the dressing gown with the other clothes, returned to the wardrobe, f licked past five hangers, and pulled out a coral sundress. She said, “And anyway, it would be wildly out of character, wouldn’t it?

Making myself useful at the expense of my nails?”

She folded the sundress next. The care she took each time she gathered up another piece of the linen told him how much needed to be said between them. He started to speak.

She cut him off, saying, “So I thought at least I could send them some clothes. I could at least do that. And please don’t tell me how ridiculous I’m being.”

“I hadn’t thought that.”

“Because I know what it looks like: Marie Antoinette offering cake to the peasants. What on earth is some poor African woman going to do with a silk dressing gown when what she needs is food, medicine, and shelter, not to mention hope?”

She finished the sundress. She put it in the box. She returned to the wardrobe and whisked through more of the hangers. She chose a wool suit next. She took it to the bed.

She used a lint brush against it, checked all of the buttons, found one loose, and went to the chest where she rummaged through one of its drawers on the floor and produced a small straw basket. She took a needle and a reel of cotton from it. She tried twice and failed to thread the needle.

Lynley went to her. He took the needle from her. He said, “Don’t do this to yourself because of me. You were in the right. I was set off by the fact that you’d lied to me, not by the girl’s death. I’m sorry for everything.”

She lowered her head. The light from a lamp on the chest of drawers caught itself in her hair. When she moved, a colour like brandy shimmered through the strands.

He said, “I want to believe that what you saw this evening is the worst that I am. When it comes to you, something feral takes over. It subverts whatever sense of breeding I have.

What you saw is the result. And it’s nothing I’m proud of. Forgive me for it. Please.”

She made no reply. Lynley found that he wanted to take her into his arms. But he didn’t make a move to touch her because he was suddenly afraid, for the very first time, what it would mean if she repulsed him now. So he waited, his heart rather than his hat in his hand, for her to respond.

When she did, her voice was low. Her head was bent and her gaze was fixed on the box of clothing. She said, “Righteous indignation carried me through the first hour. How dare he, I thought. What sort of godhead does he think he is?”