“She generally sulks. After which she even more generally works herself up to disobedience again.”
“Has she ever run off? Or threatened to run off?”
“I note your wedding band. Have you children of your own? No? Well, if you did, you would know that the most common threat a child makes to a parent when being corrected for an act of defiance is ‘I’m going to run away and then you’ll be sorry. See if you won’t.’ ”
“How might Charlotte have met this other girl: Breta?”
The MP got to her feet. She walked restlessly to the window, hands cradling elbows. “I see the direction you’re heading in, naturally. Charlotte reveals to Breta that her mother beats her—which would no doubt be the manner in which my daughter would portray five hard smacks on the bum administered, by the way, only upon the third occasion of her pinching my lipstick. Breta suggests that the two of them give Mum a proper little shake-up. So they scarper off and wait for Mum to learn her lesson.”
“It’s something to consider. Children often act without full comprehension of how their behaviour is going to affect their parents.”
“Children don’t act like that often. They act like that all the time.” She studied Parliament Square below them. She raised her eyes and appeared to reflect upon the Gothic architecture of the Palace of Westminster. She said without turning from the view, “If the other girl goes to the Shenkling school, Charlotte probably met her in my constituency office. She’s there each Friday afternoon. Breta most likely came to my surgery with one of her parents and wandered off while we were talking. If she’d poked her head into the conference room, she would have seen Charlotte doing her schoolwork.” She turned back from the window. “But this isn’t about Breta, whoever she is. Charlotte isn’t with Breta.”
“Nonetheless, I need to talk with her. She’s the best possible chance we have of getting a description of whoever it is holding Charlotte. She may have seen him yesterday afternoon. Or earlier, if he was stalking your daughter.”
“You don’t need to find Breta to get a description of whoever snatched Charlotte. You already have the description since you’ve met him yourself. Dennis Luxford.”
At the window, framed by an early evening sky, she told him of her meeting with Luxford. She related Luxford’s tale about the telephone call from the kidnapper. She told him about the threat to Charlotte’s life and the demand that the story of her birth—with names, dates, and places included—be run on the front page of tomorrow’s Source and written by Dennis Luxford himself.
Every mental alarm went off in his head when St. James heard that a threat had been made against the child’s life. He said firmly, “This changes everything. She’s in danger. We must—”
“Rubbish. Dennis Luxford wants me to think she’s in danger.”
“Ms. Bowen, you’re wrong. And we’re phoning the police. Now.”
She walked back to the credenza. She poured herself another cupful of water from the Thermos. She drank it down, looked at him steadily, and said with utter calm, “Mr. St. James, have another think. I’d like to point out how easily I could obstruct an unnecessary police investigation into this matter. It’s as easy as making a single phone call. And if you think I can’t—or won’t—do that from my position at the Home Office, then you don’t understand much about who wields what power and where.”
St. James felt astonishment coursing through him. He would not have believed that such an obdurate lack of reason was possible in any man or woman caught up in such circumstances. But when she continued with her previous line of conversation, he not only recognised the situation for what it was, but he also realised that there was only one course left open to him. He cursed himself for having become involved in this wretched mess.
As if she were a party to his mental processes and to the conclusion he’d reached, she went on. “You can imagine what publication of the story would do for Mr. Luxford’s circulation and his advertising revenue. The fact that he himself is intimately involved in the story will hardly adversely affect the sale of newspapers. On the contrary, his involvement will probably stimulate sales and he knows it. Oh, he’ll be a little embarrassed to have been caught out, but Charlotte is, after all, living evidence of Mr. Luxford’s virility, and I think you’ll agree that men tend to be boyishly sheepish—and only momentarily sheepish—over public revelations of their sexual prowess. In our society, it’s the woman who pays the bigger price for being publicly unveiled as a sinner.”
“But Charlotte’s illegitimacy isn’t a secret.”
“No. Indeed. Her paternity is. And it’s her paternity—and what will be seen as my unfortunate and inarguably hypocritical choice of lovers—that will go down as my sin. Because despite what you think, this is about politics, Mr. St. James. This isn’t about life or death. This isn’t even about morality. And while I’m not as high profile a politician as the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, publication of this story—following hard on the heels of Sinclair Larnsey and his rent boy—will cost me my career. Oh, I shall be able to remain Marylebone’s MP for the present. In a constituency where I began with a mere eight hundred vote majority, I’m unlikely to be asked to stand down and thus force a by-election. But odds are very good that I’ll be deselected by my committee at the next general election. And even if that isn’t the case, and even if the Government manages to survive this latest blow, to what level of political power do you expect I’ll be able to rise after my romp with Dennis Luxford is made public? This isn’t a situation in which I had a long-term love affair, in which my foolish little female heart ached for a man I adored but could not have, in which I was seduced like Tess of the bloody D’Urbervilles. This is about sex, hard and sweaty sex. With, of all people, the Conservative Party’s public enemy number one. Now, Mr. St. James, do you honestly expect the Prime Minister to reward me for that? But what a story it will make across the front page, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
St. James could see that she was finally shaking. When she uncradled her elbows long enough to adjust her spectacles on her nose, her hands were trembling. She looked round the office and seemed to see in its collection of notebooks, binders, reports, letters, photographs, and framed commendations the newly defined limits of her political life. She said, “He’s a monster. The only reason he’s never run the story before is that the occasion wasn’t right. With Larnsey and the rent boy, now it is.”
“There have been other exposés of sexual misconduct in the last ten years,” St. James pointed out. “It’s difficult to believe that Luxford would wait until now.”
“Look at the polls, Mr. St. James. The PM’s approval rating has never been this low. A Labour newspaper couldn’t have a better moment to whack away at the Tories and hope against hope that their whacking is enough to fell the entire Government. For which whacking, I assure you, I shall be held responsible.”
“But if Luxford’s behind this,” St. James said, “he’s risking everything himself. He stands to go to prison for kidnapping if we can construct a chain of evidence that leads to him.”
“He’s a newspaperman,” she pointed out. “They risk everything as a matter of course, if it means a story.”
A flash of yellow dressing gown at the laboratory doorway caught his attention and St. James looked up. Backed by the darkness of the corridor, Deborah stood watching him.
“Coming to bed?” she asked. “You were up awfully late last night. Are you staying up late again?”
He set the magnifying glass on top of the plastic jacket in which lay the kidnapping note sent to Dennis Luxford. He straightened on the stool and winced at the cramping of muscles held too long in one position. Deborah frowned as he reached to massage his neck. She came to him and gently shooed his hands away. She brushed aside his overlong hair, dropped a loving kiss on the back of his neck, and took over the massaging herself. He leaned back and let her minister to him.
“Lilies,” he murmured as the muscles
she was working on began to warm.
“What about them?”
“Your scent. I like it.”
“That’s good, especially if it can manage to lure you to bed at a decent hour.”
He kissed her palm. “It can manage that, and at any hour.”
“We could do this more easily in the bedroom anyway.”
“We could do many things more easily in the bedroom,” he replied. “Shall I suggest a few?”
She laughed. She moved closer to him and slipped her arms round his waist, holding him snugly against her, back to front. She said, “What are you working on? You were so quiet all through dinner. Dad asked afterwards if you’d taken a sudden dislike to his duck à l’orange. I told him that so long as he continues to make duck à l’orange with chicken, it should never present a problem. Ducks and rabbits, you know, I told him. Simon will never put his teeth to a duck or a rabbit. Or a deer. Dad doesn’t quite understand that. But then he’s never had your partiality for Donald, Thumper, and Bambi.”
“Too much Walt Disney as a child.”
“Hmm. Yes. I’m still trying to recover from the death of Bambi’s mother myself.”
He chuckled. “Don’t remind me. I had to carry you sobbing from the cinema. Even an ice cream did no good. Had you stayed until the conclusion of the film, you would have seen that it does have a happy ending.”
“But it did strike rather close to home, my love. At the time.”
“Of course, I realised that later. Less than a year after your mother died…What had happened to my brains? But at the time I thought, ‘I shall take little Deborah to see this nice film for her birthday. I saw it myself when I was her age and I enjoyed it thoroughly.’ I thought your father would have my head in a basket when I explained to him why you were so upset.”
“He’s quite forgiven you. As have I. But you always did have the strangest ideas of what we ought to do to celebrate my birthday. Looking at mummies. The Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. Watching Bambi’s mother get shot.”
“So much for my capacity to deal with children,” he said. “Perhaps it’s just as well that we haven’t—” He stopped himself. He dropped his hands to hers and held her where she was before she could withdraw. “Sorry,” he said. When she didn’t respond at once, he turned on the stool so that he faced her. She looked as if she was mentally chewing over his words, testing them for their flavour as well as for their gist. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“Did you mean it?”
“No. I was just talking aimlessly. I was talking without thinking. I let my guard down.”
“I don’t want you to be on guard with me.” She took a step away from him. Her hands—so recently warming his body—twisted the ties of her dressing gown’s belt. “I want you to be who you are. I want you to say what you think. Why won’t you stop trying to protect me from that?”
He thought about her question. Why did people guard their thoughts from others? Why did they veil their language? What did they fear? Loss, of course. Which was what everyone feared, although everyone tended to survive loss when it occurred in their lives. Deborah knew that better than anyone.
He reached for her. He felt her resistance. He said, “Deborah. Please,” and she came to him. “I want what you want. But unlike you, I don’t want it more than anything in the world. What I want more than anything in the world is you. Each time you lost a baby, I lost part of you. I didn’t want to go on in that way because I knew where it would end. And while I could cope with losing part of you, I knew I couldn’t cope with losing you altogether. And that, my love, is the unguarded truth. You want children at any price. I don’t. For me, some prices are far too high.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and he thought with despair of descending the quick downward spiral of yet another painful discussion with his wife, a discussion that might well last till dawn, reach no resolution, bring neither of them peace, and trigger another lengthy depression in her. But she surprised him, as she frequently did.
“Thank you,” she whispered. She used the sleeve of her dressing gown to wipe at her eyes. “You really are the most remarkable man.”
“I’m not feeling particularly remarkable tonight.”
“No, I can see that. You’ve had something on your mind ever since you got home, haven’t you? What is it?”
“A growing sense of unease.”
“Charlotte Bowen?”
He told her of his conversation with the little girl’s mother. He told her of the threat to Charlotte’s life. He saw concern growing upon her as one of her hands rose to her lips.
“I’m caught,” he explained. “If the child’s to be found, it’s up to me.”
“Should we phone Tommy?”
“Useless. From her level at the Home Office, Eve Bowen can stonewall a police investigation into eternity. And she gave me little doubt that she’d do it.”
“Then what can we do?”
“Hope Bowen’s right and soldier on.”
“But you don’t think that she’s right?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
Her shoulders drooped. “Oh, Simon,” she said. “Oh, God. I’ve done this to you, haven’t I?”
St. James could not deny that he’d become involved because of her request, but he knew there was little to be gained and much to be lost by pointing the finger of blame either at Deborah or at himself. So he said, “Rationally, I should see that we’ve made some progress. We know the route Charlotte took to get home from school or from her music lesson. We know the shops she stopped in. We’ve tracked down one of her companions and we have a good lead on the other. But I’m uneasy about where we’re heading.”
“Is that why you’re studying the notes again?”
“I’m studying the notes again because I can’t think what else to do at this point. And I like that fact even less than I like feeling uneasy about what I’ve been doing all day in the first place.” He leaned past her and switched off the two high-intensity lamps that were blazing brightly on the laboratory table, leaving the ceiling lights to shine with a softer glow.
“That must be how Tommy feels all the time when he’s in the midst of an enquiry,” Deborah noted.
“Well and good for him because he’s a police detective. He has the patience required to gather the facts, to piece them together, and to allow the evidence to fall into place. I haven’t that patience. And I doubt I’m going to be able to develop it at this late date.” St. James gathered up the plastic jackets and the other handwriting sample. He returned them to the top of a filing cabinet next to the door. “And if this is a bonafide kidnapping and not what Eve Bowen’s determined to believe it is—a hoax perpetrated by Dennis Luxford to hurt the Government and to benefit his newspaper—then there’s a real urgency to get to the bottom of everything that no one seems to feel but me.”
“Dennis Luxford seemed to feel it.”
“But he’s as adamant as she about how the case is handled.” He returned to the laboratory table, to her. “That’s what bothers me about this whole mess. And I don’t like to be bothered. I don’t like the distraction. It keeps muddying the waters for me. Which I don’t like in the least because my waters are generally as clear as Swiss air.”
“Because bullets and hairs and fingerprints can’t argue with you,” she pointed out. “They have no point of view that they need to express.”
“I’m used to dealing with things, not with people. Things cooperate by lying inertly beneath the microscope or inside the chromatograph. People won’t do that.”
“But the way seems obvious at this point, doesn’t it?”
“The way?”
“To proceed. We’ve got the Shenkling school to look into. And those squats on George Street.”
“Squats? What squats?”
“Helen and I told you about them this afternoon, Simon. At the pub. Don’t you remember?”
He did, then. A row of abandoned buildings not far from either St
. Bernadette’s School or Damien Chambers’ house. Helen and Deborah had both waxed enthusiastic about them over tea. They were close to the possible point of abduction, convenient in location to the child’s home, and at the same time they were too decayed and forbidding in appearance for the casual passerby to want to explore them. But for someone looking for a hiding place, they were perfect as a potential element in the puzzle of Charlotte’s disappearance. They hadn’t been part of this day’s agenda, so Helen and Deborah had left them for tomorrow when blue jeans, plimsolls, sweat-shirts, and torches would make their exploration easier. St. James sighed with disgust at the realisation that he’d forgotten about the buildings. “Another reason I couldn’t possibly hope to have success as a private detective,” he said.
“So we have a direction to head in.”
“I don’t feel any better for the knowledge.”
She reached for his hand. “I have confidence in you.”
But her voice betrayed the anxiety she felt with another day coming and a child’s life on the line.
Charlotte swam up from sleep, the way she swam up to the boat in Fermain Bay when they went on holiday to Guernsey. But unlike a summer’s holiday on Guernsey, she swam into darkness.
Her mouth felt like cat’s fur. Her eyes felt like glue had been thumb-printed into their corners. Her head felt heavier than the bag of flour Mrs. Maguire dug into when she started her scones. And her hands were so weary that they could barely pluck at the smelly wool of the blanket in order to pull it closer to her shivering body. Feel crumpy, she thought, and she could almost hear her granny saying to her granddad, “Peter, come have a look at the child. I think she’s ailing.”
She’d got dizzy first. Then her legs had begun to quiver. She hadn’t wanted to sit on the brick floor, and she’d tried to find her way back to the crates so she could sit on them. But she’d got turned about somehow and she’d tripped over the blanket he’d left on the floor. She’d forgotten all about the blanket. Its edges were soaked with the water she’d sloshed from the bucket when she’d decided to use the bucket as a loo.