In The Presence Of The Enemy (46 page)

That’s a real stretch, and I won’t buy it.”

“It
is
possible,” Rodney said. He went on meaningfully with, “Snouts’re everywhere, Mitch. As—and may I be sure of this?—you well know.”

The fact that Corsico had received Rodney’s message was implicit in his answer. He said,

“Okay. Okay. So I was burning when I left here yesterday. So I went out and got pissed.”

“Instead of working to confirm your story.

As, I believe, you were directed to do.” Rodney tut-tutted. “We don’t want that sort of thing to happen again. I don’t. Mr. Luxford doesn’t. The chairman doesn’t. Am I being clear?”

Corsico shovelled his left hand into the back pocket of his jeans. He brought forth his notebook. “All right, but it’s not as bad as it seems.

We’re already getting tips, just like I said we would.”

Rodney recognised the moment to relent.

He said pleasantly, “That’s excellent. I can—

and will—pass that news upward. It’ll be sure to please. What’ve you got?”

“Part obvious observation, part crackpot bullshit, part possibility.” Corsico licked his lips and then his fingers. He used them to riffle through the pages of his notes. “The obvious first: Do we know the child was illegitimate, do we know that Bowen never named the father, do we know the kid went to a convent school. The bullshit next: This is a religious plot and the next kid will be kidnapped within twenty-four hours; a satanic cult that sacrifi c-es children is on the prowl; white slavery is involved; child pornography is at the root of everything. Plus the usual loonies phoning in with sightings of the kidnapper, declarations of guilt, and revelations of paternity.”

“Aren’t people despicable,” Rodney murmured.

“Too right.” Corsico’s eyes were on his notes. He used the nail of his index fi nger to flick one of the pages of his notebook back and forth. It was a nervous gesture that Rodney didn’t miss.

He said, “And the part that’s a possibility, Mitch? We still need our story.”

“It’s nascent. Not ready for print.”

“Understood. Go on.”

“Right. I was in early this morning, which is why I didn’t see that.” He acknowledged the
Globe
with a dip of his head. “I had the kid’s birth certificate—the copy from St. Catherine’s—you remember?”

“I’d hardly be likely to forget. Have you learned something, then?”

Corsico took a pencil from his shirt pocket.

He made a mark in his notebook, then drove the pencil beneath his Stetson and raised its brim. “I did the maths.”

“Maths?”

“On Bowen’s pregnancy. If the birth wasn’t premature, then nine months before it was the thirteenth of October. For a lark, I had a look through the microfilms to see what was going on then. I did two weeks on either side of the thirteenth.” He read from his notebook. “A blizzard in Lancashire. A pub bombing in St.

Albans. A serial killer. Genetic fi ngerprinting under scrutiny. Test tube babies in—”

“Mitchell, I’ve taken off the gloves, if you hadn’t noticed,” Rodney said. “So there’s no need to regale me with the minutiae of your research. Is there a point you’re reaching?”

Corsico raised his head from his notes.

“The Tory conference.”

“What about it?”

“The October Tory conference in Blackpool. That’s what was going on nine months to the day of the Bowen kid’s birth. We already know that Bowen was the political correspondent for the
Telegraph
then. She would have been covering the conference. She did cover it, in fact. I got that from the
Telegraph’s
morgue fifteen minutes ago.” Corsico fl ipped his notebook closed. “So I wasn’t far off yesterday, was I? Every bigwig in the party probably made an appearance in Blackpool during that conference. And she was bonking one of them.”

Rodney had to admire the young man’s tenacity. He was in full possession of the strength, determination, and resiliency of youth. He filed the information about the conference into his brain for future reference and said, “But where do you go with this, Mitch?

It’s one thing to speculate on the father’s identity. It’s another to find it. How many Tories in Blackpool are we talking about? Two thousand party members and two hundred MPs?

Where do you propose to start looking?”

“I want to have a look at what kind of stories Bowen was filing from the conference. I’ll check to see if she was following the work of any particular parliamentary committee. She may have interviewed someone and got hooked up that way. I’ll talk to the lobby correspondents and see if they have anything as well.”

“That’s a start,” Rodney acknowledged.

“But as to having a story for tomorrow’s paper…”

“Right. Right. We can’t go with this stuff.

Not yet, at least. But I’ll phone my snouts right now. I’ll see what they can give me.”

Rodney nodded. He raised a benedictory hand. It communicated to Corsico that their interview was at a conclusion.

At the door to the office, Corsico turned back. He said, “Rod, you don’t actually believe I gave that story to the
Globe
. Do you?”

Rodney directed his facial muscles to arrange themselves into an expression of earnest rectitude. “Mitchell,” he said, “believe me now if never again. I know you didn’t give that story to the
Globe
.”

He waited until the door had closed on the reporter. He removed the rest of the wrapper from his Aero bar. He wrote
Blackpool
and
October
on the back of it, folded it into a square, and put it into his pocket. He popped the last piece of chocolate into his mouth. He chuckled and reached for his Filofax and his phone.

The pictures hadn’t been difficult to fi nd.

Evelyn was, after all, in an exposed position.

As a public servant in the process of establishing a brilliant career, she had been the focus of more than one newspaper article in the past six years. And long knowing the importance of a politician’s image, she had generally posed for photographs with her family.

Dennis Luxford had three of them spread on his desk. While the staff of
The Source
went about the business of the day just outside his office, he examined the photographs of his daughter.

In one of them, she sat on a plump hassock in front of Evelyn and her husband, who were themselves seated on a sofa. In another, she gripped the mane of a horse while Eve, in jodh-purs, led her round a ring. In the third, she sat at a table ostensibly doing schoolwork, a stub of a pencil clutched in her hand, her mother bending over her and pointing to something on the paper on which the child was writing.

Luxford slid open one of the drawers of his desk and shifted items until he found the magnifying glass he used to read fi ne print. He used the glass against the pictures. He studied Charlotte’s face.

Now that he actually saw her for the very first time—instead of looking at and dismissing her photograph along with her mother’s as so much political fodder for the masses—he could see that his family was etched in her.

She had her mother’s hair and her mother’s eyes, but the rest of her marked her immuta-bly as a Luxford. The same chin as his sister’s, the same wide brow as his own, the same nose and mouth as Leo’s. She was stamped as his daughter every bit as indelibly as if she’d been branded with his name, instead of denied it.

And he knew nothing about her. Her favourite colour, the size of her shoes, the stories she had liked to read before bed. He had no idea what her aspirations had been, what stag-es she’d gone through, what dreams she’d dreamed. Such knowledge was the hostage of responsibility. When he’d dismissed one, he’d forfeited the other. Oh, he’d tipped his hat to paternity with a monthly visit to Barclay’s, wearing the ceremonial chains of fatherhood for quarter of an hour as he made out deposit slips in the cause of self-absolution. But that was the extent of his involvement with his daughter, a non-involvement whose superfi -

cial purpose was to see to Charlotte’s future beyond his own death but whose real purpose was to act as continual balm to his conscience during his life.

It had seemed so much the right thing to do. Evelyn had made her wishes clear. Since, with what he liked to believe was an atypical display of masculine egocentricity, he had designated her the injured party, he told himself that he could only see that her wishes were fulfilled. And they were so easy to comply with. She’d stated them in fi ve simple words,

“Stay away from us, Dennis.” He’d been happy to do so.

Luxford laid the pictures side by side on his desk. He examined each under the magnifying glass a second, third, then a fourth time.

And he found himself wondering if the child he was studying through the lens liked music, if she hated broccoli, refused to eat mushrooms, walked pigeon-toed, read the Narnia books, rode a bicycle, had ever broken a bone.

Her features marked her as his, but his ignorance about her forced him to acknowledge that she had never been his. That fact was as clear today as it had been four months before her birth.

Stay away from us, Dennis.

Very well, he’d thought.

So his daughter was dead. Precisely because he’d stayed away, as instructed. Had he refused to play along, Charlotte would never have been kidnapped in the first place. There would have been no demands to acknowledge her paternity because that information would have been available to everyone, including Charlotte.

Luxford touched her head in the photograph and wondered what her hair had felt like. He couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t honestly imagine a single thing about her.

The immensity of his ignorance burned in him. As did the testimony that the ignorance made to his true worth as a man.

Luxford set the magnifying glass on top of one of the pictures. He pressed his thumb and index finger to the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes behind them. All of his life he’d played the game of power. At this moment he sought only prayer. Somewhere, there had to exist the words that could assuage the—

“I’d like a word, Dennis.”

He jerked his head up. In a refl ex movement, he dropped his arm to his desk and obscured the pictures. Standing in the doorway to his office was the only person who would have dared to open the door without knocking or without asking Miss Wallace to ring through and advise the editor of his arrival:
The Source
chairman, Peter Ogilvie. He said, “May I…?” and flicked his soulless grey eyes in the direction of the conference table. It was a pro forma request. Ogilvie clearly intended to enter the office whether he was invited to do so or not.

Luxford rose from his desk. Ogilvie advanced. He led, as always, with his signature eyebrows, so long gone untrimmed that they resembled feather boas snaking across his forehead. The two men met in the centre of the room. Luxford offered his hand. The chairman slapped a folded tabloid into it.

“Two hundred and twenty thousand copies,” Ogilvie said. “That is, of course, two hundred and twenty thousand above their daily circulation, Dennis. But that’s only part of my concern.”

Ogilvie had always been a hands-off chairman of the newspaper. He had more important concerns than the daily running of
The
Source
, and he generally addressed himself to them from his massive office in his Hertfordshire home. He was a bottom-line man whose interest was fixed almost solely upon profi t and loss.

Aside from receiving reports of a drastic alteration in the newspaper’s profi ts, only one other event would bring Ogilvie into the London offices of
The Source
. Being scooped was a fact of life in the newspaper business, and Ogilvie—who’d been in the business, it sometimes seemed, since the time of Charles Dickens—would have been first to admit this. But being scooped on a story that had the potential of tarring the Tories was completely unacceptable to him.

So Luxford knew what Ogilvie had delivered into his hand. It was this morning’s edition of his erstwhile paper, the
Globe
, with its headline about MP Bowen’s failure to contact the police in the wake of her daughter’s abduction.

“Last week we were ahead of every paper in the nation on Larnsey and the rent boy,” Ogilvie said. “Are we slipping this week?”

“No. We had the story. I killed it.”

Ogilvie’s only reaction was in his eyes. For an instant they narrowed fractionally. The movement looked like a muscle twitching.

“Is this a loyalty issue, Dennis? Are you still tied to the
Globe
for some reason?”

“Would you like a coffee?”

“A believable explanation will do.”

Luxford went to the conference table and sat. He nodded for Ogilvie to do the same. He hadn’t come to work for Ogilvie without learning that to show any sign of weakness in the chairman’s presence was to trigger his predilection for bug squashing.

Ogilvie eyebrowed his way to the table and pulled out a chair. “Tell me.”

Luxford did so. When he was fi nished taking the chairman through his interview with Corsico and his reasons for killing the story, Ogilvie homed in on the most cogent point with typical journalistic acumen.

“You’ve run stories before now without multiple confirmations. What stopped you this time?”

“Bowen’s position at the Home Offi ce. It seemed reasonable to conclude that she would have by-passed her local police and gone directly to Scotland Yard. I didn’t want to run a story indicting her for inaction only to end up with egg on my face when some high rider at the Yard jumped to her defence, waving his appointment diary, and claiming she’d been there within ten minutes of learning the girl had been snatched.”

“Something which hasn’t happened,” Ogilvie pointed out, “in the wake of the
Globe
’s story.”

“I can only assume the
Globe
got confi rmation from someone at the Yard. I told my man to do the same. If he’d had it for me before ten last night, I’d have run the story. He hadn’t. I didn’t. There’s nothing more to tell.”

“There’s one thing more,” Ogilvie said in disagreement.

Luxford grew wary, but he used his chair to demonstrate his composure to the chairman, leaning back in it and lacing his fi ngers across his stomach. He didn’t ask Ogilvie to elucidate upon his “one thing more.” He merely waited for the other man to continue.