Her lips moved in a brief, ironic smile. “One’s enemies in Parliament don’t sit opposite the object of their antipathy, Inspector. They sit behind her with the rest of her party.”
“The better to backstab,” Nkata remarked.
“Quite. Yes.”
“Your rise to power has been relatively swift, hasn’t it?” Lynley asked the MP.
“Six years,” she said.
“Since your first election?” When she nodded, he continued. “That’s a brief apprenticeship. Others have been sitting on the back benches for years, haven’t they? Others who might have been attempting to work themselves into the Government ahead of you?”
“I’m not the first case of a younger MP leaping past those with more seniority. It’s a matter of talent as well as ambition.”
“Accepted,” Lynley said. “But someone equally ambitious who sees himself as equally talented may have developed a bad taste in his mouth when you leap-frogged over him to get your post in the Government. That bad taste may have grown into a strong desire to see you brought down. Through Charlotte’s paternity. If that’s the case, we’re looking for someone who would also have been in Blackpool at that Tory conference where your daughter was conceived.”
Eve Bowen cocked her head, examined him closely, and said with some surprise, “He did tell you everything, didn’t he? Mr. St. James?”
“I did say I’d spoken to him.”
“Somehow I thought he might have spared you the seamier details.”
“I can’t have hoped to proceed without knowing you and Mr. Luxford were lovers in Blackpool.”
She raised a finger. “Sexual partners, Inspector. Whatever else we may have been, Dennis Luxford and I were never lovers.”
“Whatever you’d like to call it, someone knows what went on between you. Someone’s done his maths—”
“Or hers,” Nkata pointed out.
“Or hers,” Lynley agreed. “Someone knows that Charlotte was the result. Whoever that person is, he’s someone who was in Blackpool all those years ago, someone with a probable axe to grind with you, someone who very likely wants to take your place.”
She seemed to withdraw into herself as she reflected on his description of the potential kidnapper. She said, “Joel would be first to want to take my place. He runs most of my affairs as it is. But it’s unlikely he—”
“Joel?” Nkata said, pencil to paper. “Surname, Ms. Bowen?”
“Woodward, but he would have been too young. He’s only twenty-nine now. He wouldn’t have been at the Blackpool conference. Unless, of course, his father was there. He may have gone with his father.”
“Who’s that?”
“Julian. Colonel Woodward. He’s chairman of my constituency association. He’s been a party worker for decades. I don’t know if he was there in Blackpool, but he may have been. So may have Joel.” She lifted her wineglass but didn’t drink, holding it instead in both her hands and speaking to it. “Joel’s my assistant. He has political ambitions. We clash at times. Still…” She shook her head in apparent dismissal of the consideration. “I don’t think it’s Joel. He knows my schedule better than anyone. He knows Alex’s and Charlotte’s as well. He has to. It’s part of his job. But to do this…How could he have done? He’s been in London. At work. All through this.”
“The weekend long?” Lynley asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The body was found in Wiltshire, but that doesn’t mean Charlotte was held in Wiltshire from Wednesday on. She could have been anywhere, even here in London. She could have been transported to Wiltshire sometime during the weekend.”
“You mean after she was dead,” Eve Bowen said.
“Not necessarily. If she was being held in the city and the site got too hot for some reason, she may have been moved.”
“Then whoever moved her would have to know Wiltshire. If she was hidden there before…before what happened.”
“Yes. Add that to the equation as well. Someone from the Blackpool time. Someone who envies you your position. Someone with an axe to grind. Someone who knows Wiltshire. Does Joel? Does his father?”
She was looking at her papers, then suddenly looking through them. She said to herself, “Joel mentioned to me…Thursday evening…he said…”
“This Woodward bloke has a connection to Wiltshire?” Nkata clarified before adding to his notes.
“No. It’s not Joel.” She sifted through the papers. She rejected them and shoved them into their notebook. She pulled another from the stack on the chair next to her. She said, “It’s a prison. He doesn’t want it. He’s asked repeatedly to meet with me about it, but I’ve put him off because…Blackpool. Of course he was in Blackpool.”
“Who?” Lynley asked.
“Alistair Harvie. In Blackpool all those years ago. I interviewed him for the Telegraph. I asked for the interview—he was newly elected to Parliament then, outspoken and brash. Very articulate. Clever. Handsome. The party’s blue-eyed boy. There was speculation he’d be quickly assigned as PPS to the Foreign Secretary and even more speculation that he’d be Prime Minister within fifteen years. So I wanted a profile. He agreed and we set up a meeting. In his room. I thought nothing of it, until he made his first move. You’ve just got to know me, he said, and turnabout’s fair play, isn’t it, so I want to know you, to really know you. I think I laughed at him. I doubt I bothered to pretend misunderstanding in order to let him save face. That sort of come-on from a man has always made my flesh crawl.”
She found what she’d been looking for in the second notebook she pulled from the stack. She said, “It’s a prison. It’s been in the works for two years now. It’s going to be expensive, state of the art. It’ll house three thousand men. And, unless he can stop it, it’s going to be built in Alistair Harvie’s constituency.”
“Which is?” Lynley asked.
“In Wiltshire,” she replied.
Nkata folded his lanky frame into the Bentley’s passenger seat, one of his legs still out on the pavement. He balanced his notebook on his knee and continued to write.
“Put that into something readable for Hillier,” Lynley told him. “Get it to him in the morning. Avoid him if you can. He’s going to dog us every step of the way, but let’s try to keep him at a distance.”
“Right.” Nkata raised his head to observe the front of Eve Bowen’s house. “What do you think?”
“Wiltshire’s first.”
“This bloke Harvie?”
“It’s a starting place. I’ll get Havers on it at her end.”
“At this end?”
“We dig.” Lynley reflected on everything St. James had told him. “Start checking for double connections, Winston. We need to know who has a connection to Bowen as well as a connection to Wiltshire. We’ve got Harvie already, but that seems too neat to be true, doesn’t it? So look at Luxford, the Woodwards. Look at Charlotte’s music teacher Chambers, since he was last to see her. Look at Maguire, the housekeeper. Look at the stepfather, Alexander Stone.”
“Think he wasn’t as cut up as Ms. Bowen wanted us to believe?” Nkata asked.
“I think anything’s possible.”
“Including Bowen’s involvement?”
“Check her out as well. If the Home Office was looking for a site in Wiltshire for their new prison, they’d have sent a committee to study locations. If she was part of that committee, she’d have developed some knowledge of the land. She may well have known where to order someone to hold her daughter if she herself is behind the abduction.”
“There’s a big why attached to that one, man. If she set up the snatch, what’d she stand to gain?”
“She’s a creature of politics,” Lynley said. “Any answer to that question would have to come from politics as well. We can see what she’d lose easily enough.”
“If Luxford ran the story, she’d be dogmeat.”
“That’s what we’re meant to think, aren’t we? The focus has all been on what she stood to lose, and accordi
ng to St. James, every principal involved—with the exception of the music teacher—has stressed that from the first. So we’ll keep it in mind. But there’s usually some profit in taking a route that’s not being signposted so avidly for us. So let’s also dig around for what MP Bowen stood to gain.”
Nkata finished his notetaking with a precisely placed full stop. He used the book’s thin marking ribbon to hold his place. He returned notebook and pencil to his pocket. He got out of the car. Once again he examined the front of the Junior Minister’s house where the lone constable stood with arms folded across his chest.
He bent and made his final remark through the open window of the car. “This could get real nasty, couldn’t it, ’spector?”
“It’s already nasty,” Lynley replied.
A detour west from her digs in Chalk Farm to Hawthorne Lodge in Greenford put Barbara Havers onto the M4 long after rush hour. Not that her timing made all that much difference, as she soon discovered. A crash just before Reading, between a Range Rover and a lorry transporting tomatoes, had reduced the motorway to a respectful procession through crimson sludge. When she saw the endless unspooling of brake lights illuminating into the horizon, Barbara changed down gears, punched the Mini’s radio buttons until she found a station that could tell her what the hell was going on ahead of her, and settled in for a wait. She’d looked at a map before leaving her house, so she knew that she could forsake the motorway and try her luck with the A4 if necessary. But that meant coming upon an exit, always a scarce commodity when one wished to cash in one’s vehicular chips.
“Sod,” she said. It would be an age before she managed to extricate herself from this mess. And her stomach was demanding immediate attention.
She knew she should have thrown together a meal and jammed it down her gullet before taking to the road. At the time, however, consuming a hasty dinner hadn’t seemed as important as stuffing a few changes of clothes and a toothbrush into her holdall and dashing out to Greenford prior to the journey to Wiltshire in order to give her mother the Big News. I’m heading up one arm of an investigation, Mum. How’s that for professional progress at last? Being placed in charge of anything more significant than fetching sandwiches from the fourth floor for Lynley was a major development in Barbara’s life. And she had been eager to share it with someone.
She’d tried her neighbours, first. On her way to her own dwarf-sized lodgings at the bottom of the garden in Eton Villas, she’d stopped at the ground floor flat of the Edwardian building to share her news. But neither Khalidah Hadiyyah—who, at eight years old, was Barbara’s most frequent social companion in barbecues on the lawn, trips to the zoo, and boat rides to Greenwich—nor her father Taymullah Azhar was there to react with appropriate rapture to her change in professional circumstances. So she’d packed up her trousers, pullovers, underwear, and toothbrush, and she’d headed for Greenford to tell her mother.
She’d found Mrs. Havers, along with her Hawthorne Lodge companions, in the alcove that served as the dining room. They were gathered round the table with Florence Magentry—their keeper, their nursemaid, their confidante, their director of activities, and gentle gaoler—who was assisting them in assembling a three-dimensional puzzle. From its boxtop, Barbara could see that it was meant to be a Victorian mansion when completed. At the moment, it looked like a relic of the Blitz.
“It’s a fine challenge for us,” Mrs. Flo explained, smoothing her already neat grey hair back into place in its perfect wedge. “We move our fingers round the pieces and our mind makes connections between the shapes that we see, the shapes that we feel, and the shapes that we need to build the puzzle. And when it’s done, we have a lovely building to look at, don’t we, my dears?”
There were murmurs of assent from the three other women round the table, even from Mrs. Pendlebury, who was completely blind and whose contribution to the activity appeared to be swaying in her chair and singing along with Tammy Wynette’s demand that she stand by her man, which was emanating from Mrs. Magentry’s old stereo. She held a piece of the puzzle in her palm, but instead of feeling its shape with her fingers, she pressed it to her cheek and crooned, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman…”
Wasn’t that the truth, Barbara thought. She took the chair Mrs. Flo had vacated, next to her mother.
Mrs. Havers was throwing herself into the activity with enthusiasm. She was busily attempting to assemble one of the mansion’s walls, and as she did so, she confided in Mrs. Salkild and Mrs. Pendlebury that the mansion they were in the process of building was just exactly like the one she’d stayed in as a guest during her trip to San Francisco last autumn. “Such a beautiful city,” she said rhap-sodically. “Hills up and hills down, precious cable cars climbing, sea gulls sweeping in from the bay. And the Golden Gate Bridge. With the fog swirling round it like white candy floss…It’s a sight to behold.”
She’d never been there, not in the flesh. But in her mind she’d been everywhere and she had a half dozen albums crammed with travel brochures from which she’d religiously clipped pictures to prove it.
Barbara said to her, “Mum? I wanted to stop by. I’m on my way to Wiltshire. I’m on a case.”
“Salisbury’s in Wiltshire,” Mrs. Havers announced. “It has a cathedral. I was married there to my Jimmy, don’t you know. Have I mentioned that? Of course, the cathedral isn’t Victorian like this lovely house….” She reached for another puzzle piece in a hasty movement, shrinking away from Barbara.
“Mum,” Barbara said. “I wanted to tell you because this is the first time I’ve been on my own. On a case. Inspector Lynley’s handling part of it here, but I’ve been given the other part. Me. I’ll be in charge.”
“Salisbury’s cathedral has a graceful spire,” Mrs. Havers went on in a more insistent tone. “It’s four hundred and four feet tall. Imagine that, the tallest in England. The cathedral itself is quite unique because it was planned as a single unit and built in forty years. But the building’s true glory—”
Barbara took her mother’s hand. Mrs. Havers stopped talking, flustered and confused by the unexpected gesture. “Mum,” Barbara said. “Did you hear what I said? I’m on a case. I’ve got to leave tonight and I’ll be gone a few days.”
“The cathedral’s greatest treasure,” Mrs. Havers plunged on, “is one of the three original copies of the Magna Carta. Fancy that. When Jimmy and I were last there—we celebrated our thirty-sixth anniversary this year—we walked round and round the cathedral close and had tea in a sweet little shop in Exeter Street. The shop wasn’t Victorian, not like this lovely puzzle we’re making. This puzzle’s of a San Francisco mansion. It’s just like the one I stayed in last autumn. San Francisco’s so lovely. Hills up and hills down. Precious cable cars. And the Golden Gate Bridge when the fog comes in…” She wrested her hand from Barbara’s and plunked a puzzle piece into place.
Barbara watched her and knew her mother was studying her from the corner of her eye. She was trying to sort through the muddle of her mind in order to come up with a name or a label she could place upon the somewhat stout and generally untidy woman who’d come to join her at the table. Sometimes she identified Barbara as Doris, her sister long dead during World War II. Sometimes she recognised her as her own daughter. Other times, like this, she seemed to believe that if she kept talking, she could somehow avoid the inevitable admission that she hadn’t the slightest idea who Barbara was.
“I don’t come often enough, do I?” Barbara said to Mrs. Flo. “She used to know me. When we lived together, she always knew me.”
Mrs. Flo clucked sympathetically. “The mind is a mystery, Barbie. You’re not to blame yourself for something that’s clearly beyond your control.”
“But if I came more often…She always knows you, doesn’t she? And Mrs. Salkild. And Mrs. Pendlebury. Because she sees you every day.”
“It’s not possible for you to see her every day,” Mrs. Flo said. “And that’s not your fault. That’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the
way life is. Why, when you set off to be a detective, you didn’t know your mum would come to this, did you? You didn’t do it to avoid her, did you? You just followed your path.”
But she was glad to have the burden of her mother lifted from her shoulders, Barbara admitted, if only to herself. And that gladness was her second largest source of guilt. The first was the necessary lapse of time between each visit she could make to Greenford.
“You’re doing your best,” Mrs. Flo said.
The truth was that Barbara knew she wasn’t.
Now, wedged between a snail-shaped caravan and a diesel lorry on the motorway, she thought about her mother and her own expectations gone unfulfilled. What had she honestly expected her mother to do upon hearing her announcement? I’ll be heading up one part of an investigation, Mum. Wonderful, darling. Break out the champagne.
What a lump-headed thought. Barbara fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes, one wary eye fixed on the traffic ahead. She lit up, took a lungful of tobacco smoke, and celebrated in solitude the gratifying thought of being relatively on her own in an investigation. She’d be working with the local CID, naturally, but she wouldn’t be answerable to anyone but Lynley. And since he would be safely tucked away in London duelling with Hillier, the meatiest part of the case was hers: the crime scene, the evaluation of evidence, the results of the autopsy, the search for where the child had been held, the scouring of the countryside for potential evidence. And the kidnapper’s identity. She was determined to suss that out, ahead of Lynley. She was in the better position to do so, and doing so would be the coup of her career. Pro-mo-tion time, Nkata would have called it. Well and good, she thought. She was overdue.
She was finally able to depart the M4 at exit twelve, just west of Reading. This put her squarely upon the A4 and on a direct line towards the town of Marlborough, south of which lay Wootton Cross, at whose police station she was scheduled to rendezvous with the Amesford CID officers who had been assigned to the case. She was way behind schedule at this point, and when she finally pulled into the mousehole of a car park behind the squat square of bricks that went for the Wootton Cross police station, she wondered if they’d given her up altogether. The station was dark and looked unoccupied—not an unusual circumstance for a village once the sun went down—and the only car besides her own was an ageing Escort in just about as bad condition as the Mini.