In The Presence Of The Enemy (67 page)

“Look, Inspector, you came here to talk about Lottie Bowen. I’ve told you what I know. She was here for her lesson. After it, we chatted.

Then she left.”

“And no one saw her.”

“I can’t help that. I’m not responsible for that. If I’d known she was going to get snatched, I would have walked her all the way home. But I had no reason to believe there was any danger round here. No one’s house gets burgled. No one gets mugged. No drug deals go down. So I let her go off on her own and something happened and I feel like hell about it but I’m not involved.”

“I’m afraid you’ll need corroboration for that.”

“Where am I supposed to get it?”

“I expect you can get it from whoever was upstairs when Mr. St. James was here on Wednesday. If someone—other than Charlotte Bowen, that is—was actually here in the house with you. May we have her name and address, please?”

Chambers’ chin dimpled as he sucked nervously against the inside of his lower lip. His eyes looked distant, as if he were examining something no one else could see. It was the look of a man who had something worth hiding.

Lynley said, “Mr. Chambers, I don’t need to tell you how serious a situation you’re in.

You’ve a background that touches marginally upon the IRA; we’ve the daughter of an MP—

with a history of unconcealed hostility towards the IRA—first missing then murdered; you’re associated with that daughter; you’re the last person known to have seen her. If there’s someone out there who can assure us you had nothing to do with Charlotte Bowen’s disappearance, then I’d suggest you produce her straightaway.”

Again Chambers touched the black keys on the electric keyboard. Sharps and fl ats issued forth in no particular order. He breathed out a word that Lynley didn’t catch and then fi nally said in a low voice and without looking at either of the other men, “All right. I’ll tell you.

But it can’t get out. If the tabloids catch hold of the story, it’ll smash things to bits. I couldn’t cope with that.”

Lynley thought that unless the musician was having a clandestine affair with a member of the Royal Family or the Prime Minister’s wife, he was hardly likely to be of interest to the tabloids. But what he said was, “I don’t speak to journalists, tabloid or otherwise. That’s generally handled by the police press bureau.”

This was, apparently, enough reassurance, although Chambers required another shot of John Jameson before he spoke again.

It wasn’t a woman he was with on Wednesday night, he told them, keeping his eyes averted. It was a man. His name was Russell Majewski, although the Inspector might better recognise him by his professional name: Russell Mane.

Nkata said to Lynley, “A telly bloke. He plays a cop.”

He played, Chambers said, an oversexed police detective whose patch was the eponymous West Farley Street, a gritty drama about crime, detection, and punishment set in South London. It was currently a smash hit on ITV, and his part had launched Russell Mane—if not into the entertainment stratosphere—then at least into heightened public awareness. This is what every actor wanted: recognition for his talent. But with recognition came certain expectations that the actor in question actually
be
in real life at least somewhat like the character he played. Only in this instance Russell wasn’t at all like his character. He’d never even
been
with a woman other than on screen. Which is why they—Russell and Damien—went to such pains to keep their relationship a secret.

“We’ve been together three years, nearly four.” He looked everywhere but at either Nkata or Lynley. “We’re careful because people are phobic, aren’t they? And it’s shortsight-ed to think they’re anything else.”

Russ lived here, Chambers concluded. He was filming at the moment and he wouldn’t be back till nine or ten that night. But if the police needed to talk to him…

Lynley handed over his card. He said, “Tell Mr. Mane to phone.”

Back in the alley with the door shut behind them and the music once more emanating from within, Nkata said, “Think he knows our Special Branch blokes have him under the daily microscope?”

“If he doesn’t,” Lynley said, “he’ll be thinking of it now.”

They walked in the direction of Marylebone Lane. Lynley sorted through what they knew so far. They were amassing an appreciable amount of information and evidence: from fingerprints to a prescription drug, from a school uniform recovered in Wiltshire to a pair of spectacles found in a car in London.

There had to be a logical way in which everything they were amassing was connected. All they needed was the clarity of vision that would enable them to see a pattern. Ultimately, everything they had and everything they knew had to be tied to one person. And that was the person who possessed the knowledge about Charlotte Bowen’s paternity, the inge-nuity to carry off two successful abductions, and the audacity to operate in the full light of day.

So what sort of person was it? Lynley wondered. There seemed to be only one reasonable answer: Their perpetrator had to be someone who, if even seen with the children, knew being seen did not necessarily mean being caught.

Piranhas, Eve Bowen thought. She’d thought jackals earlier, but jackals were by their nature carrion eaters, while piranhas went after living—and preferably bleeding—

flesh. The reporters had been gathering all day: outside her constituency office and the Home Office as well as in front of One Parliament Square. They were accompanied by their cohorts—the
paparazzi
and the press photographers—and together this group milled about on the pavement, where they drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, ate jam doughnuts and packets of crisps, and surged round anyone who might give them a titbit of information as to the fate, the state of mind, or the reaction of Eve Bowen to the disclosures made by Dennis Luxford in today’s
Source
. As the reporters surged, they fi red off questions and shot off pictures. And woe betide the victim of their attention who attempted to shield a face or parry an enquiry with a sharp retort.

Eve thought last night had been hell. But each time the front door to the constituency office opened to the babble of voices and the flashing of camera lights, she knew the hours between Dennis Luxford’s phone call and her final realisation that she could do nothing to stop his story had only been Purgatory.

She’d done her best. She’d pulled in every debt and every chit, sitting with the phone pressed to her ear hour after hour as she contacted judges, QCs, and every political ally she’d ever established. Each phone call was to the same purpose: to quash
The Source
story that Luxford had claimed would save his son.

Each phone call produced the same result: the conclusion that such quashing was not going to be possible.

Throughout the night she heard every variation on why a court injunction was out of her reach, despite her power in the Government: Did the story in question—she would not reveal the exact details to any recipient of her phone calls—actually constitute libel? No?

He’s writing the truth? Then, my dear, I’m afraid that you haven’t a case. Yes, I do realise that details from our pasts might sometimes prove embarrassing to our presents and our futures, but if those details comprise the truth…Well, one can only keep a stiff upper lip and hold one’s head high and let one’s current actions speak for who one is, can’t one?

This isn’t exactly a Tory newspaper, is it, Eve? I mean, one could ask the PM to phone and rattle a cage or two if the editor of the
Sunday Times
or the
Daily Mail
or even, perhaps, the
Telegraph
had been planning to run a story seriously detrimental to a Junior Minister. But
The Source
was a Labour sympathiser.

And one couldn’t reasonably expect a little bout of verbal thumb-squeezing to produce an agreement not to print an anti-Tory story in a Labour tabloid. As a matter of fact, should someone even attempt to thumb-squeeze a man like Dennis Luxford, there’s little doubt that an editorial would expose that fact the very same day the story ran. And how would that look? How would that make the Prime Minister look?

That final question was a thinly veiled prod to action. What it really asked was how
The
Source
’s story was ultimately going to refl ect on the PM, who had personally raised Eve Bowen to her current position of political power. What it really suggested was a course of action should that same story be likely to put more egg on the already yolk-smeared face of the man who’d had to endure the humilia-tion of one of his party colleagues cavorting in a parked automobile with a rent boy just twelve days ago. The Prime Minister’s Recommitment to Basic British Values had already taken some serious body blows, Eve was being told.

If Ms. Bowen—not only an MP but also, unlike Sinclair Larnsey, a Government Minister—believed that there was the slightest possibility of
The Source’s
article causing the Premier any more embarrassment…well, certainly Ms. Bowen knew what course she ought to take.

Of course she knew. She was to fall upon her sword. But she didn’t intend to plunge earthward without putting up a desperate fi ght.

She’d met with the Home Secretary that morning. She’d arrived in Westminster in darkness, long before
The Source
hit the street and hours before her normal arrival, so she eluded the press. Sir Richard Hepton met her in his office. He’d apparently dressed in what came immediately to hand upon receiving Eve’s phone call at quarter to four. He wore a rumpled white shirt and the trousers to a suit. He had put on neither jacket nor tie, merely a cardigan. He had not shaved. Eve knew that it was his way of telling her that their meeting would perforce be a brief one. Obviously, he would have to return home in good time to shower, to change, and to prepare himself for the day.

It was fairly clear that he thought her call was the result of two days spent grieving her daughter’s death. He thought she was there to demand stronger action on the part of the police, and he had come to mollify her in whatever way he could. He had no idea what lay behind Charlotte’s disappearance. Despite experience in the Government which might have taught him contrary, he assumed that things, at least with his Junior Ministers, were what they seemed.

He said, “Nancy and I received the message about the funeral, Eve. Of course we’ll be there. How are you coping?” His expression was watchful as he asked the question, adding, “These next few days aren’t going to be easy. Are you getting enough rest?”

Like most politicians, Sir Richard Hepton asked questions that were really references to another topic entirely. What he wanted to know was why she had phoned him in the middle of the night, why she had insisted they meet at once, and above all why she was displaying a disturbing potential to act like an hysterical woman, which was the least desirable characteristic in a member of the Government. He wished to give her leeway because she’d suffered a monstrous loss, but he didn’t want the immensity of that loss to undermine her ability to cope.

She said, “_The Source_ is going to run a story tomorrow—this morning, rather—that I want to advise you about in advance.”

“_The Source? _” Hepton observed her without a change in expression. He played political poker better than anyone Eve knew. “What sort of story, Eve?”

“A story about me, about my daughter. A story, I should guess, about what led to her death.”

“I see.” He shifted his elbow to the arm of his chair. The leather creaked, which emphasised the stillness of the entire Home Offi ce as well as the silence of the streets outside. “Were there—” He paused thoughtfully, and his face looked pensive. He seemed to be making a selection from among several conclusions.

“Eve, were there problems between you and your daughter?”

“Problems?”

“You said the story would be about what led to her death.”

“This isn’t a child abuse story, if that’s what you mean,” Eve clarified. “Charlotte wasn’t abused. And what led to her death had nothing to do with me. At least, not in that way.”

“Then perhaps you’d better tell me in what way you’re involved.”

She began by saying, “I wanted you to know because so often in the past when the tabloids launch into someone in politics, the Government’s taken completely by surprise. I didn’t want that to happen in this case. I’m making a clean breast of it, so we can think what to do next.”

“Advance knowledge is a useful weapon,”

Hepton acknowledged. “Acquiring it has always allowed me to see with a much clearer vision.”

Eve didn’t miss how he’d changed the pronoun to singular. She also didn’t miss the absence of any word or even guttural sound that she could take for reassurance. Sir Richard Hepton knew that something nasty was in the wind. And when an odour pervaded his well-kept house, he was a man who knew how to open windows.

She began to talk. There was no real way to colour the story in an appealing hue. Hepton listened with his hands clasped on top of his desk and his face the same noncommittal mask that she’d seen him wear at so many meetings in the past. When she’d covered every relevant detail of her week-long Blackpool fling with Dennis Luxford—as well as every detail relating to Charlotte’s disappearance and subsequent murder—she realised how rigid her body had become. She could feel the nervous tension in the spasmodic tightening of muscles from her neck to the base of her spine. She tried to make her body relax, but she could not trick it into believing that her political fate wasn’t hanging in the balance of this one man’s interpretation of her behaviour eleven years ago.

When she was finished speaking, Hepton rolled his leather chair away from the desk and slowly swung it to one side. He raised his head and seemed to be scrutinising the portraits of three monarchs and two prime ministers on the opposite wall. He rubbed his thumb along his jaw; his silence was so profound that Eve could hear the sandpaper sound of his whiskers as his thumb rubbed against their grain.

She said, “I dare say Luxford’s operating with two motivations: newspaper circulation and political damage. He means to outsell the
Globe
. He means to wound the Government.