In The Presence Of The Enemy (6 page)

St. James was nonplussed. “I beg your pardon?”

“Luxford’s behind this, of course. But I can see by your expression that he hasn’t yet made you aware of that fact. How wise of him.” She took the seat she had apparently been sitting in prior to their arrival and directed them to a sofa and chairs that resembled enormous umber pillows sewn together. She rested her wineglass in her lap, using both hands to hold it against the trim, matchstick skirt of her suit.

This was black, pin-striped. Seeing it, St.

James recalled reading an interview with the Junior Minister shortly after she’d been tapped by the Government to serve in her current position as Undersecretary of State for the Home Offi ce. No one would find her drawing attention to herself in the manner of her female colleagues in the Commons, she had asserted.

She saw no need to plume herself in scarlet in the hope of distinguishing herself from the men. She’d let her brain do that for her.

“Dennis Luxford is a man without conscience,” she said abruptly. Her words were brittle, her tone cut from glass. “He’s the maestro conducting this particular orchestra. Oh, not directly, of course. I dare say snatching ten-year-olds off the street is probably beyond even his willingness to stoop to skulduggery.

But make no mistake, he’s playing you for a fool, and he’s trying to do the same to me. I won’t have it.”

“W hat gives you the impression he’s involved?” St. James lowered himself to the sofa, finding it surprisingly comfortable despite its amorphous nature. He adjusted his bad leg to an easier position. Helen stayed where she was, standing at the fireplace near a collection of trophies displayed in a niche, the better to observe Ms. Bowen from a spot in the room where she wouldn’t be conspicuously doing so.

“Because there are only two people on earth who know the identity of my daughter’s father.

I’m one of them. Dennis Luxford is the other.”

“Your daughter herself doesn’t know?”

“Of course not. Never. And it’s impossible that she could have found out on her own.”

“Your parents? Your family?”

“No one, Mr. St. James, save Dennis and me.” She took a measured sip of her wine. “It’s his tabloid’s objective to bring down the Government. At the moment, he finds himself with the right set of circumstances to crush the Conservative Party once and for all. He’s attempting to do so.”

“I don’t follow your logic.”

“It’s all rather convenient, wouldn’t you say?

My daughter’s disappearance. A putative kidnapping note in Luxford’s possession. A demand for publicity in that note. And all of it falling directly on the heels of Sinclair Larnsey’s shenanigans with an underage boy in Paddington.”

“Mr. Luxford wasn’t acting like a man in the midst of orchestrating a kidnapping for the tabloids to exploit,” St. James noted.

“Not for the tabloids in the plural,” she replied. “For the tabloid in the excessively singular. He’s hardly going to let the competition scoop his own best story.”

“He seemed as intent as you are upon keeping this quiet.”

“Are you a student of human behaviour, Mr.

St. James? Along with your other talents?”

“I think it’s wise to make an assessment of the people who ask me for help. Before I agree to help them.”

“How perspicacious. When we have more time, perhaps I’ll ask for your assessment of me.” She set her wineglass beside her briefcase. She removed her circular tortoiseshell spectacles and rubbed their lenses against the arm of the chair as if to polish them and to study St. James simultaneously. The tortoiseshell frames were largely the same shade as Eve Bowen’s unruff led pageboy hair, and when she replaced the spectacles on her nose, they touched the tips of the fringe she wore overlong to cover her eyebrows. “Let me ask you this. Don’t you find anything out of order in the fact that Mr. Luxford received this kidnapping note by post?”

“Obviously,” St. James said. “It was postmarked yesterday. And possibly posted the day before that.”

“While my daughter was quite safe at home.

So if we examine the facts, we can agree that we have a kidnapper fairly sure of a successful outcome to his kidnapping when he posts his letter.”

“Or,” St. James said, “we have a kidnapper who knows it won’t matter if he fails because if he fails, the letter will have no effect upon its recipient. If the kidnapper and the recipient of the letter are one and the same person. Or if the kidnapper has been hired by the letter’s recipient.”

“So you see.”

“I hadn’t overlooked the postmark, Ms.

Bowen. And I don’t take what’s said to me only on face value. I’m willing to agree that Dennis Luxford may be behind this in some way. I’m equally willing to suspect that you are.”

Her mouth curved briefly. She gave a sharp nod. “Well, well,” she said. “You’re not as much Luxford’s lackey as he supposes, are you? I think you’ll do.”

She got up from her chair and went to a trapezoidal bronze sculpture that stood on a pedestal between the two front windows. She tilted the sculpture and from beneath it she took an envelope which she carried to St.

James before returning to her chair. “This was delivered sometime during the day. Possibly between one and three o’clock this afternoon.

My housekeeper—Mrs. Maguire, she’s left for the day—found it when she returned from her weekly visit to her turf accountant. She put it with the rest of the post—you can see it has my name on it—and didn’t think about it until I phoned her at seven o’clock, asking about Charlotte, after Dennis Luxford phoned me.”

St. James examined the envelope Eve Bowen had given him. It was white, inexpensive, the sort of envelope one could buy almost anywhere, from Boots to the local newsagent’s.

He donned latex gloves and slid the envelope’s contents out. He unfolded the single sheet of paper and placed it within another plastic jacket that he’d brought from his home. He removed the gloves and read the brief message.

Eve Bowen—

If you want to know what’s happened
to Lottie, phone her father
.

“Lottie,” St. James noted.

“That’s what she calls herself.”

“What does Luxford call her?”

Eve Bowen didn’t falter in her belief in Luxford’s involvement. She said, “The name wouldn’t be impossible to discover, Mr. St.

James. Someone’s obviously discovered it.”

“Or has already known it.” St. James showed the letter to Helen. She read it before speaking.

“You said you phoned Mrs. Maguire at seven this evening, Ms. Bowen. Surely your daughter had been missing a number of hours by then. Mrs. Maguire didn’t notice?”

“She noticed.”

“But she didn’t alert you?”

The Junior Minister made a minute alteration in her position in the chair. Her breath eased out in what could have passed for a sigh.

“Several times in the past year—since I’ve been at the Home Offi ce—Charlotte has misbehaved. Mrs. Maguire knows I expect her to handle Charlotte’s mischief on her own without disturbing me at work. She thought this was an instance of misbehaviour.”

“Why?”

“Because Wednesday afternoon is her music lesson, an event Charlotte doesn’t particularly like. She drags herself to it each week and most Wednesday afternoons she threatens to throw herself or her flute down a street drain. When she didn’t turn up here immediately after her lesson today, Mrs. Maguire assumed she was up to her usual tricks. It wasn’t until six that she began phoning round to see if Charlotte had gone home with one of her schoolmates instead of going to her lesson.”

“She goes to the lesson alone, then?” Helen clarifi ed.

The MP apparently heard the unspoken but inevitable secondary question behind Helen’s words: Was a ten-year-old girl running about unsupervised on the streets of London? She said, “Children travel in packs these days, in case you haven’t noticed. Charlotte would hardly have been alone. And when she is, Mrs.

Maguire attempts to accompany her.”

“Attempts.” The word wasn’t lost on Helen.

“Charlotte doesn’t much like being trailed by an overweight Irishwoman given to wearing baggy leggings and a moth-eaten pullover. A nd are we here to discuss my child-minding practices or the whereabouts of my child?”

St. James felt rather than saw Helen’s reaction to the words. The air seemed to thicken with a mixture of one woman’s aggravation and the other’s disbelief. Neither emotion would bring them any closer to locating the child, however. He shifted gears.

“Once she found that Charlotte hadn’t gone home with a schoolmate, Mrs. Maguire still didn’t phone you?”

“I’d made rather a point about her responsibility to my daughter after an incident last month.”

“What sort of incident?”

“A typical display of pigheadedness.” The MP took another sip of her wine. “Charlotte had been hiding in the boiler room at St. Bernadette’s—that’s her school, on Blandford Street—because she didn’t want to keep an appointment with her psychotherapist. It’s a weekly appointment, she knows she has to go, but every month or so she makes up her mind not to cooperate. This was one of those times.

Mrs. Maguire phoned me in a panic when Charlotte failed to appear in time to be taken to her appointment. I had to leave my offi ce to hunt her down. It was after that that Mrs.

Maguire and I sat down and became quite clear on what her responsibilities towards my daughter were going to be. And through what hours those responsibilities would extend.”

Helen looked increasingly perplexed by the Junior Minister’s approach to child-minding.

She seemed to be ready to question the other woman further. St. James headed her off.

There was no point to putting the Junior Minister any more on the defensive, at least not at the moment.

“Where exactly was the music lesson?”

She told him the lesson took place not far from St. Bernadette’s School, in a mews area called Cross Keys Close near Marylebone High Street. Charlotte walked there every Wednesday directly after school. Her teacher was a man called Damien Chambers.

“Did your daughter show up for her lesson today?”

She had shown up. Mrs. Maguire had phoned Mr. Chambers first when she started her search for Charlotte at six o’clock. According to him, the girl had been there and gone at her regular time.

“We’ll have to speak to this man,” St. James pointed out. “And he’ll probably want to know why we’re asking him questions. Have you considered that and where it could lead?”

Eve Bowen had apparently already accepted the fact that even a private investigation into her daughter’s disappearance could not be made without questioning those who had seen her last. And those who had last seen her would no doubt wonder why a crippled man and his female companion were nosing about, dogging the child’s movements. It couldn’t be helped. The curiosity of those questioned might lead them to drop an intriguing suggestion to one of the tabloids, but that was a risk Charlotte’s mother was apparently willing to take.

“The way we’re going about it, the story is nothing but speculation,” she said. “It’s only with the police involved that things become defi nite.”

“Speculation can fan itself into a fi restorm,”

St. James said. “You need to bring in the police, Ms. Bowen. If not the local authorities, then Scotland Yard. You’ve the pull for that, I assume, because of the Home Offi ce.”

“I have the pull. And I want no police. It’s out of the question.”

The expression on her face was adaman-tine. He and Helen could argue the point with her for another quarter of an hour, but St.

James could tell that their efforts would be futile. Finding the child—finding her quickly—was the real point. He asked for a description of the little girl as she’d appeared that morning, for a photograph as well. Eve Bowen told them that she hadn’t seen her daughter that morning, she never saw Charlotte in the morning because she was always gone from the house before Charlotte awakened. But she’d been wearing her school uniform, naturally. Upstairs somewhere there was a picture of her wearing it. She left the room to fetch the photograph. They heard her climbing the stairs.

“This is more than odd, Simon,” Helen said in a low voice once they were alone. “From the way she’s acting, one could almost think—”

She hesitated. She tucked her arms round herself. “Don’t you find her reaction to what’s happened to Charlotte rather unnatural?”

St. James got to his feet and went to examine the trophies. They bore Eve Bowen’s name and had been awarded for dressage. It seemed fitting that she would have won her dozen or more first places for such an activity. He wondered if her political staff responded to her signals as well as her horse had apparently done.

He said, “She thinks Luxford’s behind this, Helen. It wouldn’t be his intention to harm the child, just to rattle the mother. She apparently doesn’t intend to be rattled.”

“Still, one would expect to encounter a fi ssure or two here in private.”

“She’s a politician. She’s going to play her cards close to the chest.”

“But this is her daughter we’re talking about. Why is she out on the streets alone?

And what’s her mother been doing from seven o’clock till now?” Helen gestured at the table, the briefcase, the documents that the briefcase disgorged. “I’d hardly expect the parent of a kidnapped child—no matter who kidnapped her—to be able to keep her mind on her work.

It isn’t natural, is it? None of this is natural.”

“I agree entirely. But she knows quite well how things are going to appear to us. She hasn’t got where she is in the brief time it’s taken her to get there without knowing in advance how things will look.” St. James examined a gallery of photographs that stood in haphazard ranks among three houseplants on a narrow chrome and glass table. He noted a picture of Eve Bowen and the Prime Minister, another of Eve Bowen and the Home Secretary, a third of Eve Bowen in a receiving line along which the Princess Royal appeared to be offering greetings to a rather scant gathering of minority police constables.

“Things,” Helen said with delicate irony on the word St. James had chosen, “are looking rather remarkably detached, if you ask me.”