In The Presence Of The Enemy (82 page)

“Christ!” he cried. He shouted to Nkata as Sergeant Havers sagged against the door.

She held a child’s body in her arms. Her eyes were swollen, and her face was welts, bruises, and blood. More blood soaked the front of her dingy pullover. It stained her trousers from her hips to her knees. She squinted at Lynley from her ruined face. “Bloody hell,”

she said through mushrooming lips. One of her teeth was broken. “You took your time.”

Nkata charged into the room. He brought himself up short at the sight of Havers, whispering, “Holy Jesus.”

Lynley said to him over his shoulder, “Get an ambulance,” and to Havers, “The boy?”

“Asleep.”

“He looks like hell. You both look like hell.”

She smiled, then winced. “He went swimming in a trench to look for my tyre iron. He clobbered Payne a good one. Four good ones, in fact. Tough little bloke. Though he’ll probably need a tetanus shot after jumping in that water. It was filthy. A breeding ground for every disease ever known to man. It was in a burial vault. There were coffins, see. It was a castle. I know I was supposed to wait, but when he took off and no one followed, I thought it best to—”

“Havers.” Lynley stopped her. “Well done.”

He went to her, took the child from her arms. Leo stirred but didn’t wake. Havers was right. The boy was streaked with everything from grime to algae. His ears looked as if they were growing moss. The palms of his hands were black. His fair hair appeared green. But he was alive. Lynley handed him to Nkata.

“Phone his parents,” he said. “Give them the word.”

Nkata left the room.

Lynley turned back to Havers. She hadn’t moved from the door. Gently, he drew her away from it, away from the light and into the dining room where it was still dark. He sat her down.

“He broke my nose,” she whispered. “And I don’t know what else. My chest hurts bad. I think it’s some ribs.”

“I’m sorry,” Lynley said. “Christ, Barbara.

I’m sorry.”

“Leo got him,” she said. “He bashed him proper.”

Lynley squatted in front of her. He took out his handkerchief and used it tenderly against her face. He blotted away the blood. But more blood oozed out. Where the hell, he wondered, was the blasted ambulance?

“ ’Course I knew he didn’t really care for me,” she said. “But I went along with it. It seemed the right thing to do.”

“It was,” Lynley said. “It was right. You were right.”

“And I gave him a dose of his own in the end.”

“How?” Lynley asked.

She chuckled and grimaced with pain. “I locked him in the crypt. I thought I’d see how he’d like the dark for once. The bastard.”

“Yes,” Lynley said. “That’s what he is.”

She wouldn’t go off to hospital until she made certain they knew where to fi nd him.

She wouldn’t even allow the paramedics to attend to her until she had drawn Lynley a map. She hunched over the table and bled onto the Laura Ashley cloth that covered it.

And she drew her map with a pencil that she had to guide with both of her hands.

She coughed once and blood burbled from her mouth. Lynley took the pencil from her and said, “I see. I’ll fetch him. You need a hospital now.”

She said irrationally, “But I want to be there to see things through.”

“You have done,” he said.

“Then what now?”

“Now you take a holiday.” He squeezed her shoulder. “You damn well deser ve one.”

She surprised him completely by looking stricken. “But what’ll you—” she began but cut her own words off as if she was afraid she would cry should she say them.

He wondered what she meant. What would he what? Then he understood as he heard movement behind him and Winston Nkata returned to join them. “Got the parents,” he told them. “They’re on their way. How’re you doing, Sarge?”

Havers’ eyes were fixed on the tall DC.

Lynley said to her, “Barbara, nothing’s changed. You go to the hospital.”

“But if a case comes up—”

“Someone else will handle it. Helen and I are getting married at the weekend. I’ll be away from the Yard as well.”

She smiled. “Married?”

“Finally. At last.”

“Bloody hell,” she said. “We ought to drink to that.”

“We will,” he said. “But not tonight.”

Lynley found Robin Payne where Sergeant Havers had said she’d left him: in the macabre vault that lay below the chapel on the grounds of Silbury Huish Castle. He was crouched in a corner as far as possible from the grisly lead coffins, his hands covering his head. When Constable Nkata shone the beam of his torch upon the other policeman, Payne raised his face into the light and Lynley felt a brief and atavistic satisfaction at the sight of his injuries.

Havers and Leo had given almost as good as they’d got. Payne’s cheeks and forehead were deeply bruised, scratched, and scored. Blood matted his hair. One eye was swollen shut.

Lynley said to him, “Payne?”

The detective constable responded by rising with a wince, drawing the back of his fist across his mouth, and saying, “Get me out of here, will you? I’ve been locked in by some yobbos. They flagged me down on the road below and—”

“I’m Sergeant Havers’ partner,” Lynley cut in.

That silenced the young man. The putative yobbos—convenient to whatever story he’d been cooking up since Havers had abandoned him here—seemed to dissipate from his thoughts. He moved closer to the wall of the vault, and after a moment he said in a remarkably assured tone of voice considering his circumstances, “Where’s my mum, then? I must talk to her.”

Lynley told Nkata to read Payne the caution. He told one of the other DCs from Amesford CID to radio ahead for a doctor to meet them at the station. As Nkata obliged and the other officer went off to make arrangements for medical assistance, Lynley observed the detective constable who’d brought death, ruin, and despair into the lives of a group of people he’d never met.

Despite Payne’s injuries, Lynley could still see the youthful—and spurious—innocence of his face. It was a superfi cial innocence that, in conjunction with a disguise that no thinking observer might have thought a disguise, would have served him well. Dressed in the uniform he’d worn as a constable prior to joining Amesford CID, he would have rousted Jack Beard from Cross Keys Close in Marylebone, and no one looking upon him and upon his rousting would have cause to think he was anything other than what he appeared to be: not a kidnapper clearing the scene before luring his victim to her abduction but instead a policeman on the beat. Dressed in that same uniform with that innocent face shining resplendently with his good intentions, he would have talked Charlotte Bowen—and later Leo Luxford—

into accompanying him. He would have known that children are warned from their mothers’

breasts not to talk to strangers. But he would have also known that children are told they can trust the police. And Robin Payne had a face that was designed for trust. Lynley could see that beneath its injuries.

It was an intelligent face as well, and a sur-feit of intelligence had been necessary to plan and to carry out the crimes that Payne had committed. Intelligence would have told him to use the George Street squat while he was in London so that he could come and go with ease while tracking his victims—whether dressed as a uniformed constable or dressed as a civilian—without taking the chance that a hotel’s receptionist might note him and later connect him, even remotely, to the abduction of two children and the murder of one of them.

And that same intelligence in combination with his professional experience would have led him to plant evidence that would direct the police towards Dennis Luxford. Because one way or another, he’d meant to bring Dennis Luxford to some form of justice. Clearly, the man he believed to be his father was at the centre of everything Payne had done.

The horror lay buried in the fact that in striking out against Luxford, he’d been striking at a phantasm birthed from a lie. And it was this knowledge that scratched against the door of Lynley’s intentions at this moment of confrontation with the killer.

Kidnapper. Homicide. On the drive to the castle, Lynley had planned out this fi rst meeting between them: how he’d yank Robin Payne to his feet, how he’d bark out the order for the caution to be read, how he’d slap on the hand-cuffs and shove him out into the night. Murderers of children were less than pond scum.

They richly deserved to be treated as such.

And Robin Payne’s tone when requesting to talk to his mother—so completely assured, so absent of remorse—seemed nothing more than an illustration of his real malevolence.

But observing the younger man and casting that observation into the light of what he’d learned about his background, Lynley felt only a tremendous sense of defeat.

The chasm between the truth and what Robin Payne believed to be the truth was simply too wide for Lynley’s anger and outrage to bridge, no matter the assurance of the detective constable’s request. Lynley heard Corrine Payne’s words echoing inside his skull as Nkata drew the other DC’s hands behind him and locked his wrists together: “You won’t hurt him. Please. He’s my little boy.” And hearing these words, Lynley realised that there was little enough point to hurting Robin Payne. His mother had already done damage enough.

Still, he needed one final bit of information that would allow him to close the case with at least a modicum of peace of mind. And he was going to have to jockey for position carefully in order to get that bit of information. Payne was clever enough to know that all he needed to do was to keep silent and Lynley would never secure the last piece to the puzzle of what had happened. But in his request to talk to his mother, Lynley saw how he could mete out a meagre form of justice at the same time as he obtained from the constable the last fact he needed to connect him irrefutably both to Charlotte Bowen and to her father. The only

way to get to the truth was going to be to speak the truth. But it wouldn’t be for him to do the talking.

“Fetch Mrs. Payne,” he told one of the Amesford DCs. “Bring her to the station.”

The DC’s expression of surprise told Lynley that he’d assumed Payne’s request to talk to his mother was being granted. He said uneasily, “Bit irregular, that is, sir.”

“Right,” Lynley replied. “All of life is irregular. Fetch Mrs. Payne.”

They made the drive to Amesford in silence, the nighttime landscape flying by in a darkness only occasionally split by the lights of a passing car. Before them and behind them rolled an escort of police vehicles, their radios doubtless crackling as the report went out that Payne had been apprehended and was being brought to the station. But inside the Bentley there was no sound. From the moment he’d asked to speak to his mother, the detective constable had not said another word.

It wasn’t until they finally reached the Amesford police station that Payne spoke. He saw a single reporter with notebook in hand and a single photographer with camera at the ready, both of them waiting at the station door, and he said, “It’s not about me, all this. The story’ll come out. People will know. And I’m glad of it. I’m that bloody glad. Is Mum here yet?”

They had the answer to that question when they got inside. Corrine Payne approached them, her elbow in the hand of a plump, balding man who wore a pyjama top tucked into his grey and beltless herringbone trousers.

“Robbie? My Robbie?” Corrine reached out to her son, her lips quivering round his name.

Her eyes filled. “What’ve these dreadful men
done
to you?” And then to Lynley, “I told you
not
to hurt him. Is he badly injured? What’s happened to him? Oh, Sam.
Sam
.”

Her companion quickly slid his arm round her waist. He murmured, “Sweet pear. Be easy now.”

“Put her in an interview room,” Lynley said. “Alone. We’ll be along directly.”

A uniformed constable took Corrine Payne’s arm. She said, “But what about Sam?
Sam!
”

He said, “I’ll be right here, sweet pear.”

“You won’t go away?”

“I won’t leave you, love.” He kissed the tips of her fi ngers.

Robin Payne turned away. He said to Lynley, “Can we get on with things, then?”

Corrine was led off to the interview room.

Lynley took her son to meet with the doctor, who was waiting for them with a medical bag opened, instruments displayed, and gauze and disinfectant neatly arranged. He made quick work of examining his patient, speaking in a low voice of the possibility of concussion and the need to keep watch over the injured man for the next few hours. He applied plasters where necessary and used sutures to bind together a nasty wound on Payne’s head. “No aspirin,” he said as he completed his work,

“and don’t let him sleep.”

Lynley explained that sleep was not in Robin Payne’s immediate future. He took him along the corridor—where he noted that Payne’s colleagues averted their eyes as they passed—and brought him into his mother’s presence.

Corrine was sitting away from the interview room’s single table. Her feet were flat on the floor. She held her bag on her lap with both hands curved round its handle in the attitude of a woman about to depart.

Nkata was with her. He lounged against the far wall with a cup in his hand. He sipped from this. Steam rose round his face. The scent of chicken broth tinctured the air.

Corrine’s hands tightened on her bag when she saw her son. But she didn’t move from her chair. “These men have told me something dreadful, Robbie. Something about you.

They’ve said you’ve done some terrible things, and I’ve told them they’re wrong.”

Lynley shut the door. He drew out a chair from the table and used his hand on Payne’s shoulder to indicate that he was to sit. Payne cooperated, but said nothing.

Corrine went on, stirring in her chair but still not making a move to go to her son.

“They’ve said you killed a little girl, Robbie, but I told them that was out of the question. I told them how much you’ve always loved children, and how you and Celia mean to have a packet of them just as soon as you marry. So we’ll get all this silliness straightened out directly, won’t we, dear? I expect it’s all a terrible mistake. Someone’s got himself into a muddle over something, but that someone’s certainly not you, is it?” She tried a hopeful smile, but her lips couldn’t manage it. And, despite her words, her eyes betrayed her fear.