And this was about his newspaper, at the bottom of it all. This was about circulation wars and political positioning and advertising revenues and editorial reputation. She had merely become a pawn in whatever rise to or maintenance of power Dennis Luxford was orchestrating. His only mistake was in assuming she would allow herself to be moved on the chessboard to a position of his liking.
He was a swine. He had always been a swine.
Eve stood and gathered up her briefcase. She headed for the restaurant exit. Dennis was long since gone, so she had no fear that anyone might connect her presence in Harrods to his. A pity for him, she thought. Not everything in his life was going to work out as he had it planned.
Rodney Aronson saw but did not quite believe. He’d been skulking round the racks of clothes and the displays of black headgear ever since Luxford had gone into the restaurant. He’d missed the arrival of the woman—jockeyed from his viewing position for thirty seconds by a sweating stock boy wheeling in a rack of double-breasted black blazers with silver buttons the size of Frisbees. And while he’d tried to get a decent glimpse of her once Mr. Sweat had fussily rearranged two racks of trousers to his liking, all he’d managed to see was a slim back in a well-tailored jacket and a smooth fall of autumn-beech-leaf hair. He’d tried to see more, but he failed. He couldn’t risk attracting Luxford’s attention.
It had been one thing to watch Luxford’s body tighten at the telephone call, to watch his chair swivel round to hide his face, to be dismissed with a summary “See to the editorial on the rent boy, Rodney,” to play the waiting cat and see Luxford the mouse slip out and snag a taxi in Ludgate Circus, to follow him in a taxi of one’s own just like the detective in a low-budget film noir. That was all excusable activity, conveniently falling under the heading Keeping the Newspaper’s Interests at Heart. But this…This was dicey. The intensity of the conversation between The Source editor and Beech-Leaf Hair suggested more than a professional meeting which might be interpreted to The Source chairman as a betrayal of the newspaper’s concerns. That was what Rodney was looking for, of course. A chance to bring down Luxford and assume his own rightful place at the head of the news meeting each day. But this encounter that he was witnessing—and damn the excruciating distance he had to maintain—had all the earmarks of an amorous assignation: the heads bending towards each other, the shoulders hunching to guard breathless conversation, Luxford twisting his chair towards hers, that tender little moment of physical contact—hand-on-arm in place of hand-up-skirt. And the most indisputable earmark of them all: arriving separately and leaving the same way. There was no doubt about it. Old Den was doing some knicker-trolling on the side.
The dipshit must be out of his mind, Rodney thought. He followed the woman at a distance and evaluated her. She had good legs and a terrific little arse and the rest of her was probably decent as well if the severe tailoring of her suit was anything to go by. But let’s not forget that unlike Rodney, who had Butterball Betsy waiting at home for his nightly ministrations, Dennis Luxford had Fiona decorating his hearth. Fabulous Fiona. Fiona of the gods. She who had been simply dubbed the Cheeks in reference to the most famous facial bones ever to grace the cover of a fashion magazine. With Fiona to come home to—and Rodney could only hotly imagine the state of dress, state of mind, and state of anticipation in which an ethereal enchantress like Fiona would greet her lord and master upon his return from Fleet Street each night—what in God’s name was Luxford doing playing bury the banger with anyone else?
It made no sense to Rodney why any man would cheat on a woman like Fiona, why any man would want to cheat on a woman like Fiona. But having a torrid little poke-and-dash on the side while married to the Cheeks did explain Luxford’s recent preoccupation, the questionable state of his nerves, and his mysterious disappearance last night. Not at home, according to the spectacular spouse. Not at work, according to the newsroom nosies. Not in the car, according to his cellular service. At the time Rodney had accepted the suggestion that Luxford had probably slipped out for dinner. But now he knew that if any slipping had been done, Luxford had been doing it with Beech-Leaf Hair.
She looked damned familiar too, although Rodney couldn’t quite put a name to her face. She was someone though. A high-powered lawyer or a corporate somebody.
He edged closer to her as they approached the escalators. He’d had only one look at her face as she came out of the restaurant; everything else had been the back of her head. If he could manage somehow to have a good fifteen-second study of her, he was certain he’d be able to name her.
It was impossible, he found. Short of throwing himself in front of her on the escalator and then riding it backwards so as to face her, there was really no way. He had to make do with trailing her in the hope that something would give her away.
She rode directly to the ground floor in a mass of shoppers, most of whom, like her, were heading for the exits. They were a roiling lava flow of green shopping bags. They yammered in a dozen languages and gesticulated wildly to punctuate their words. He was reminded for the second time that day—the first time had been on the ride upwards in Luxford’s wake—why he never darkened the doorway of Harrods.
The hour caused the ground floor to be jammed, a jostling mass of shoppers making for the doors. As Beech-Leaf Hair headed out with them, Rodney prayed that her chosen direction on the street would be towards the Knightsbridge tube station. It was true that her manner of dress suggested limos, taxis, or a car of her own. But one could still hope. Because if she took the tube, he was on her tail. All he had to do was follow her home and her identity would be a matter of formality.
Hope was defeated, however, as he gained the street doors some ten seconds behind her. He searched the pavement for the familiar colour of her hair, looking hopefully through the throngs heading round the corner of Basil Street towards Knightsbridge Station. He saw her among them, and at first he thought she was going to cooperatively ride the tube. But as he trotted along behind her and made the turn into Hans Crescent, he watched her stride towards a black Rover, out of which a dark-suited chauffeur was climbing. She turned in Rodney’s direction as she slid into the back seat, and again for an instant he saw her face.
He memorised that face: the straight hair framing it, the tortoiseshell specs, the full lower lip, the pointed chin. She wore power clothing, she carried a power briefcase, she had power posture, she walked with a determined, powerful gait. She wasn’t at all what he figured a bastard like Dennis Luxford would go for in a vigorous round of cheating-on-the-wife. But on the other hand, there was no doubt a primitive caveman satisfaction was to be found in wrestling a woman like that to the mattress. Rodney himself didn’t go in for the dominant types. But Luxford—a dominant type himself—would probably find the challenge of thawing her first, seducing her second, and vanquishing her third a veritable aphrodisiac. So who was she?
He watched her car slide into the slipstream of late afternoon traffic. It rolled in his direction. As it passed him, Rodney shifted his attention from the passenger to the driver of the car itself. Which is when he saw the number plate and, more important, the plate’s last three letters. His eyes widened at the sight of them. They were part of a series, making the Rover part of a fleet of cars. And he’d hung round Westminster long enough in his past to know exactly where that fleet of cars came from. He felt his mouth curve upward happily. He heard himself crow.
As the car swept round the corner, the vision of it remained in Rodney’s mind. As well as the interpretation of that vision.
The number plates belonged to the Government. Which meant the Rover belonged to the Government’s fleet. Which meant Beech-Leaf Hair was a member of the Government. Which meant—and at the thought Rodney could not and did not bother to contain his shout of joy—that Dennis Luxford, putative supporter of the Labour Party, editor of a Labour newspaper, was bonking the Enemy.
7
WHEN ST. JAMES told Eve Bowen’s political assistant that he would wait for the
MP’s return, he was favoured with a pinched-nose look of disapproval. The man said, “Whatever you like. Sit over there, then,” but his expression implied that St. James’s presence was something akin to a noxious gas emanating from the office’s central heating. He went about his business with the air of a man intending to demonstrate how much of a burden this unscheduled visit was going to put on everyone. There was much dashing about: from phone calls to fax machines, from filing cabinets to an oversize calendar that hung on the wall. Watching him, St. James was reminded of the White Rabbit in Alice, although his physical appearance was more suggestive of a flagpole from which was waving a bulbous banner of Guinness-coloured hair.
The young man was on his feet in an instant when Eve Bowen entered the office some twenty minutes after St. James’s arrival. He crossed to the door, saying, “I was about to send out the bloodhounds on you,” and reaching for her briefcase. He scooped up a handful of telephone messages as he went on. “The committee meeting’s been put off till tomorrow. The Commons debate begins at eight tonight. The delegation from Customs wants to schedule a lunch, not a dinner. Lancaster University would like you to speak before the Conservative Feminist Association in June. And Mr. Harvie is asking if you intend to give him an answer on the Salisbury question within the next decade: Do we really need another prison and must it be in his constituency?”
Eve Bowen snatched the messages from him. “I don’t think I’ve lost my ability to read in the last two hours, Joel. Isn’t there something more productive you could be doing?”
At the rebuke, an eyeblink of anger flashed on the assistant’s face. He said formally, “Virginia’s left for the day, Ms. Bowen. I thought it best, as this gentleman wished to wait for your return, not to leave the office unoccupied.”
At this, Eve Bowen looked up from her messages and saw St. James. Without looking at Joel, she said, “Take a break for dinner. I won’t be wanting you again before eight.” To St. James she said, “In here, please,” and led him into her office.
A wooden desk faced the door, and Eve Bowen went to the credenza behind it, where she poured herself a plastic cup of water from a Thermos. She fished in her desk drawer, brought out a bottle of aspirin, shook four into her hand. Once she had taken them, she sank into the green leather chair behind the desk, removed her spectacles, and said, “Well?”
St. James told her first what Helen and Deborah had managed to unearth after their day in Marylebone. He had met with them at the Rising Sun pub at five o’clock. And they, like him, had been satisfied that the information they were gathering was beginning to form a pattern that might prove to be the trail which would lead them to Charlotte Bowen.
From her photograph, the little girl had been recognised in more than one shop. “Chatty little thing,” or “Quite the talker, that missy,” was the general assessment of her. While no one had been able actually to name her, those who had recognised her were able to say with at least a fair degree of certainty when they had seen her last. And California Pizza on Blandford Street, along with Chimes Music Shop on the high street and Golden Hind Fish and Chips on Marylebone Lane, had been able to pinpoint exactly their last sighting of the girl. In the case of the pizza place and the music shop, Charlotte had been in the company of another girl from St. Bernadette’s, a girl with a happy willingness to allow Charlotte Bowen to spend a fistful of five-pound notes on her: on pizza and Cokes in the former location, on CDs at the latter. This had been on the Monday and the Tuesday, respectively, prior to Charlotte’s disappearance. At the Golden Hind—the shop closest to the music teacher’s home and hence the shop closest to the possible location of Charlotte’s abduction—they discovered that the little girl was a regular visitor on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays she fingered a handful of sticky coins across the glass counter and always made the same purchase of a bag of chips and a Coke. She doused the chips with enough vinegar to cross the eyes of a creature with more sensitive taste buds, and she took them along with her to eat. When asked, the shop owner chewed over the possibility of Charlotte’s being in the company of another girl at the time of her purchases. He said at first no, then yes, then perhaps, then he declared he couldn’t really say for a certainty because the fish and chips shop was a regular hang-out for the local “little buggers” after school, and he couldn’t tell the girls from the boys these days, let alone who was with who.
However, from the pizza place and the music shop, Helen and Deborah had obtained a description of the girl who had been in Charlotte’s company on the afternoons preceding her disappearance. She was frizzy-haired, she favoured fuchsia berets or, alternately, neon headbands, she was heavily freckled, she bit her fingernails down to the quick. And, like Charlotte, she wore the school uniform of St. Bernadette’s.
“Who is this?” Eve Bowen asked. “And why is she with Charlotte when Charlotte is supposed to be at a dancing lesson or with her psychologist?”
Chances were, St. James told her, that Charlotte was in her company prior to her afternoon’s assigned activity. Both shops confirmed that the girls had been there in the half hour immediately after school. The girl in question was called Brigitta Walters. Did Eve Bowen know her?
The MP said she didn’t. She’d never met the girl. She said she herself had little enough opportunity to be with Charlotte, so when the time allowed, she chose to spend it with her daughter alone or with her daughter and her husband, but not in the company of her daughter’s friends.
“So chances are you don’t know Breta either,” St. James said.
“Breta?”
He recounted what he knew about Charlotte’s friend. He said, “I thought at first that Breta and Brigitta were one and the same since Mr. Chambers told us that Breta generally accompanies Charlotte to her music lesson on Wednesdays.”
“But they aren’t one and the same?”
In answer, St. James told her about his meeting with Brigitta, who was tucked up in bed with a furious headcold in Wimpole Street. He’d met with the girl under the watchful eye of her crimp-haired grandmother, who sat in the corner of her bedroom in a rocking chair like a suspicious duenna. As soon as he had walked into the child’s room, he had known this was Charlotte’s unnamed companion at California Pizza and Chimes Music Shop. Even if her hair hadn’t been as frizzy as freshly gathered fleece, even if her neon-green headband hadn’t given her away, she was chewing on her fingernails with the singular passion of a performance artist, and she ceased only when a reply to one of his questions was necessary.
He’d thought at first that he was at the end of the trail, with Breta at last. But she wasn’t Breta and Breta wasn’t a nickname for hers. She had no nicknames, she informed him. She was, in fact, named for her great-aunt who was Swedish and who lived in Stockholm with her fourth husband, with seven greyhounds, and with gobs of money. More money than Lottie Bowen ever had, she said. Brigitta visited her great-aunt every summer hols, along with Gran. And here was Auntie’s picture, if he wanted to see it.
St. James had asked the child if she knew Breta. Indeed she did. Lottie’s mate from one of Marylebone’s state schools, she confided with a meaningful look in her grandmother’s direction, where they had normal teachers who dressed like humans, not ancient old ladies who slobbered when they talked.
“Have you any idea what school this might be?” St. James asked Eve Bowen.
She considered the question. “It might be the Geoffrey Shenkling School,” she told him. It was in Crawford Place, not far from the Edgware Road. The MP named it as a likely location where St. James might find Breta because the Shenkling school was where Charlotte had wished to be enrolled. “She wanted to go there rather than to St. Bernadette’s. She still wants to, in fact. I’ve no doubt that some of the scrapes she gets into are designed to get her expelled from St. Bernadette’s so that I’ll have to send her to Shenkling.”
“Sister Agnetis did tell me that Charlotte caused a small scene when she took your cosmetics to school.”
“She’s always i
nto my make-up. If not that, then my clothes.”
“It’s something you row about?”
The minister rubbed the skin above her eyes with thumb and forefinger, as if urging her headache to be on its way. She returned her glasses to her nose. “She isn’t the easiest child to discipline. She’s never seemed to have any particular need either to please or be good.”
“Sister Agnetis told me that Charlotte was punished for taking your make-up. She used the term ‘punished severely,’ in fact.”
Eve Bowen regarded him evenly before replying. “I don’t ignore it when my daughter disobeys me, Mr. St. James.”
“How does she generally react to punishment?”