Rodney brushed one from the side of his bowl. He said, “And?”
“The Prime Minister,” Corsico said. “Of course he wasn’t PM then, but that makes the situation even seamier, doesn’t it? It gives him something rather significant to hide in the here-and-now.”
“How did you put this together?” Rodney asked curiously, always intrigued by the intricate workings of the human imagination.
“With some heavy legwork, let me tell you.” Corsico slurped more cappuccino and referred to his notes. “Two weeks after that conference in Blackpool, the PM and his wife separated.”
“They did?”
Corsico grinned. A piece of chocolate was wedged between two of his teeth. “Didn’t know that, I expect, did you? That separation lasted nine months and, as we know, didn’t end in divorce. But I thought the nine months was an interesting time frame—all things considered—wouldn’t you agree?”
“Nine months rings all sorts of bells for me,” Rodney said. He finished off his calamari and poured himself a final glass of wine. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me what the bell-ringing heralds.”
“Just wait till you hear.” Corsico settled his buttocks happily into his chair. “I spoke to five different maids who worked at the hotel where the conference was held. Three of them still work there. Two of those three confirmed that the PM had a woman with him—just for the evenings, mind you, it was nothing official—and the woman wasn’t his wife. Now, what I propose to do tomorrow is to take some pictures of Bowen up to Blackpool and see if I can get confirmation from one of the maids that she was the PM’s dollybird. If either of them will confirm—”
“What did you offer them?”
Corsico looked blank for a moment and chewed noisily as he thought about the question.
“Are we paying them for the story or just giving them their fifteen minutes somewhere inside The Source?”
“Hey, Rod,” Corsico protested. “If they’re going to go on record, they’re going to want to be recompensed for the stress. That’s how we’ve always played it. Right?”
Rodney sighed. “Wrong.” He blotted his mouth with his napkin and crumpled it on the table. As Corsico watched in confusion—clearly incapable of comprehending this sudden change in the publishing philosophy of his own newspaper—Rodney reached into one of the capacious pockets of his khaki jacket and produced tomorrow’s paper with its redesigned front page, which had come to his attention due to a phone call from one of the news editors, a man whose loyalty Rodney had managed to cull through years of keeping silent about his wee-hours life in one of the seedier fleshpits of Soho. He tossed it in front of the reporter and said, “You might want to have a look at that. It’s hot, as they say, off the bloody presses.”
Rodney watched Corsico read what he himself had virtually memorised while waiting in the winebar. The three-hundred-and-thirty-point headline and its accompanying photograph said just about everything: Father of Bowen Love-Child Steps Forward explained what Dennis Luxford’s mug was doing decorating the front page. When Corsico saw it, he reached blindly for his cappuccino. He read and slurped with equal fury. He stopped once to look up and say, “Holy shit,” but he returned rabidly to the paper without requiring a reply. Which, Rodney knew, was what everyone else was going to be doing once this paper hit the streets in the morning. It would outsell the Globe, the Mirror, and the Sun as well, by at least one million copies. It would require successive stories as follow-up. And the papers they appeared in would outsell the Globe, the Mirror, and the Sun in their part.
Rodney watched glumly as Corsico—fulfilling every journalist’s dream—avidly made the jump with the story, turning to the inside page where it continued. When he was finished, he threw himself back in his chair and stared at Rodney. “Geez,” he said. “Rodney. Shit.”
“Exactly,” Rodney said.
“Why’s he done it? I mean, what’s he turning into these days, a man of conscience or something?”
Or something, Rodney thought. Or definitely something. He refolded the newspaper and returned it to his pocket.
“Damn,” Corsico said. “Shit. Hell. I could have sworn that my story on the PM was as solid as…” His glance flew to Rodney. “Hey. Wait a flash here. You don’t think that Luxford’s covering for Downing Street, do you? Geez, Rod. Could he be a closet Tory?”
“Not a closet one,” Rodney said, but the irony was lost on the younger man.
“Of course, our numbers are going to go through the roof now, aren’t they?” Corsico said. “And the chairman’s going to kiss his arse. But our numbers’ve been steadily building since Luxford came on board, so why’s he done it? What the hell does it mean?”
“It means,” Rodney said, pushing his chair away from the table and signalling to the waiter to bring him his bill, “that the shoot-out is officially over. For now.”
Corsico looked at him blankly.
Rodney explained. “The black hats and white hats? Dodge City? Tombstone? The O.K. Corral? Place it where you will, Mitchell. It all turns out the same.”
“What?” Corsico demanded.
Rodney looked at the bill and reached for his money. He threw down twenty pounds as he threw in the towel. “The guys in the black hats have won,” he said.
23
KNACKERED DIDN’T DESCRIBE how Barbara Havers felt as she switched off the Mini’s ignition at the top of the Lark’s Haven driveway. She was done in, blown out, beat, and burned down. She listened listlessly to the car’s engine gargle for a good fifteen seconds before it finally succumbed to petrol deprivation. When this miracle of modern mechanics ultimately supervened, she flicked the headlamps off and shoved her car door open. But she didn’t get out.
The day had been largely a bust. Now it was becoming a quagmire. She’d spoken to Lynley and learned the news of Leo Luxford’s disappearance in a conversation that had consisted of Lynley’s concise recitation of the facts and her own “What? bloody hell! What?” offered with rising intensity after each piece of information he imparted. They had not a single clue as to the whereabouts of the eight-year-old boy, he told her in conclusion, and only his father’s word for the fact that the child had been on the telephone in the first place.
“So what do you think?” Barbara asked him. “How’s our Luxford smelling these days?”
Lynley’s response was laconic. They couldn’t risk treating this as anything other than a kidnapping, he told her. Which was what he would be doing in London, in conjunction with working on the Bowen case. She was to soldier on with the murder investigation in Wiltshire. There was little doubt that the two cases were connected. What did she have? he wanted to know.
She was forced to admit to the worst. After her last confrontation with Sergeant Stanley over the deployment of the scene-of-crime team, she’d thrown her weight round Amesford CID. She’d got up DS Stanley’s nose and had a moderate row with the sergeant’s CC about Stanley’s lack of cooperation. She didn’t mention to Lynley the sergeant’s cigarette lighter or his attitude towards her. Lynley would have little sympathy with her over that. He would opine that if she wished to make her way in what was largely a man’s world, she was going to have to learn to kick arses and not expect her superior officer at Scotland Yard to do the kicking for her.
“Ah,” he said. “Business as usual, is it?”
She went on to give him the rest of the information that comprised her day’s dismal report. She’d managed to get the scene-of-crime team out to Ford to go over the dovecote that had looked so promising at Alistair Harvie’s farm. Harvie’s wife had given her most cooperative permission for the team to examine the building, but this hadn’t caused Barbara to deduce the MP’s complete innocence in the matter of the dead girl’s disappearance. Rather, Barbara concluded that Harvie’s wife was either a fine actress or that she knew nothing about her husband’s nefarious goings-on behind her back. And while it was hard to believe that a ten-year-old girl could have been held in the dovecote a mere thirty yards from t
he farmhouse without Mrs. Harvie’s knowledge, desperate circumstances called for equally desperate conclusions: While there was a chance that Charlotte had been in the dovecote, Barbara was going to have the dovecote examined.
She gleaned nothing from the exercise other than the crime scene team’s taking a decided scunner to her. Which was nothing compared to how the doves themselves felt.
The only light at the end of the day’s tunnel of disappointments was the information from forensic that the components of the grease found under Charlotte Bowen’s fingernails exactly matched the components of the grease found in Howard Short’s garage in Coate. But both samples of grease were a common brand of axle grease, and Barbara had to admit that finding axle grease under someone’s fingernails or anywhere else in a farming community was about as earth-shattering as finding fish scales on the shoe soles of someone who worked at Billingsgate Market.
Her only hope for a solid break at this point was Constable Payne. She’d had four separate telephone messages from him during the day, each one marking his progress across the county. The first had been the one she’d received from Marlborough. The next were from Swindon, Chippenham, and Warminster. They’d finally managed to make voice contact on this last call, quite late in the day upon Barbara’s less-than-victorious return to the Amesford station from the Harvie dovecote.
“You sound clapped out,” Robin commented.
Barbara gave him a compendium of the day’s events, beginning with the autopsy and ending with the waste of time and manpower at the dovecote. To all this he listened in silence from his phone box—with the roar of lorries passing nearby—and when she was finished, he said astutely, “And Sergeant Stanley’s being a nasty clot as well, isn’t he?” He didn’t give her a chance to respond. He went on with “It’s his way, Barbara. It’s nothing to do with you. He tries that game on with everyone.”
“Right. Well.” Barbara shook a cigarette from her packet and lit it. “We’re not completely out of leads at this end.” And she told him about Charlotte Bowen’s uniform, where it had been found, and where the mechanic Howard Short had claimed he got it.
“I’ve got my own leads,” Robin had said. “The local police stations have been answering some questions that Sergeant Stanley never thought to ask.”
He wouldn’t say more than that. But his voice was keyed up with an excitement that he seemed eager to control, as if it weren’t the appropriate emotion for a detective constable to be experiencing. He said only, “I’ve a bit more checking to do round here. If it’s solid, you’ll be the first to know.”
Barbara was grateful for the constable’s consideration. She’d burned more than half a bridge with Stanley and the sergeant’s chief constable during the day. It would be nice to have something—a decent clue, a piece of evidence, an eyewitness to anything—that might undo the damage she’d done to her credibility with the investigators’ useless traipse out to the dovecote that afternoon.
She’d spent the rest of the day and on into the evening fielding reports from the constables who were still tirelessly working Sergeant Stanley’s grid system. Aside from the mechanic in possession of Charlotte’s school uniform, they’d come up with nothing. Once she’d talked to Lynley and learned of Leo Luxford’s abduction, she’d called the teams back to the office, brought them up-to-date on the second kidnapping, and distributed the boy’s photograph and vital statistics.
Now she hoisted herself from the Mini and plodded through the darkness towards the house, steeling herself for yet another immersion into the Laura Ashley nightmare of Lark’s Haven. Corrine Payne had given her a key to the front door, so Barbara headed there rather than go through the kitchen as she had done on the previous night with Robin. The lights were on in the sitting room, however, and when she turned the key in the lock and swung the door open, Corrine’s breathy, asthmatic voice called out, “Robbie? Come and see a surprise, darling boy.”
The injunction made Barbara pause. A shudder passed over her. Too many times she’d heard a call so exactly similar—Barbie? Barbie? Is that you, Barbie? Come and see, come and see—and too many times she’d responded to find her mother wandering somewhere in the vast playing field of her growing dementia: perhaps planning a holiday to a destination she would never see, perhaps caressing and folding the clothes of a brother dead nearly two decades, perhaps sitting splay-legged on the kitchen floor making biscuits from flour and sugar and jam directly on the dirty yellow lino.
“Robbie?” Corrine sounded chesty, as if a few minutes with the inhaler were in order. “Is that you, darling? My Sammy’s just left, but we’ve a visitor here still and I absolutely insisted that she not stir an inch till you got home. You’ll want to see her straightaway, I dare say.”
“It’s me, Mrs. Payne,” Barbara called. “Robin’s still working.”
Corrine’s oh spoke volumes. It’s only the slug, her tone implied. She was seated at a card table that had been set up in the centre of the sitting room. A game of Scrabble was in progress on it, with Corrine’s opponent an attractive, young freckle-faced woman with a head of fashionably styled hair the colour of champagne. Beyond them on the fitted shelves, Sky television was showing an old Elizabeth Taylor film with the sound turned off. Barbara studied the picture. Taylor swathed in chiffon, Peter Finch in dinner clothes, a howlingly artificial jungle atmosphere, and a scowling native butler. Elephant Walk, she concluded. She always loved the climactic scene when the pachyderms finally smashed Peter Finch’s villa to bits.
A third chair was drawn up to the card table, and the little pew for holding the Scrabble letters was still set up, marking Sam Corey’s former place. Corrine saw Barbara’s eyes take in this third place, and she casually removed the extra letter holder lest Barbara plunk herself down for a few attempts at double and triple words scores. She was, after all, pure hell with an x, and Corrine must have instinctively known it.
“This is Celia,” Corrine said in introduction of her companion. “I may have already mentioned that she’s my Robbie’s—”
“Oh, please, Mrs. Payne. Don’t.” Celia spoke with an embarrassed laugh and a flush of pink blooming against her round cheeks. She was plump but not fat, the sort of woman one saw comfortably nude and reclining on sumptuous sofas in paintings identified as Odalisque. So this was the future daughter-in-law, Barbara thought. It was nice, for some reason, to realise that Robin Payne wasn’t the sort of man who needed a woman with a body like a broom straw.
Barbara extended her hand across the table and said, “Barbara Havers. Scotland Yard CID.” Then she wondered why she’d added that last, as if she had no other identity.
“You’re here about that little girl, aren’t you?” Celia asked. “It’s a terrible thing.”
“Murder generally is.”
“Well, our Robbie shall get to the bottom of it,” Corrine said stoutly. “Make no mistake of that.” She plunked two letters onto the board: c and a before a t. She meticulously counted up her score.
“Are you working with Rob?” Celia enquired. She reached for a digestive biscuit that sat in a wreath of other biscuits on a floral plate at the edge of the table. She took a feminine bite from it. Barbara would have shoved the whole thing into her mouth, chomped it up heartily, and washed it down with whatever fluid was immediately available. In this case it was tea, contained in a pot that was covered by a quilted cozy. The cozy—like everything else in the house—was an Ashley creation. Barbara noted that Corrine didn’t rush to remove it so as to offer her a cuppa.
It was time, she knew, to exit stage left. If Corrine’s oh hadn’t told her that much, her current lapse in hospitality had.
“Robbie’s working for the sergeant,” Corrine clarified. “And she’s happy to have him, aren’t you, Barbara?”
“He’s a good policeman,” Barbara said.
“He is indeed. First in his class from that detective school. Not two days after he finished the course and there he was in the middle of a case. Isn’t that right, Ba
rbara?” She watched Barbara shrewdly, clearly looking to measure a reaction, perhaps one that Barbara might give to her assessment of Robin’s abilities.
Celia’s round cheeks grew rounder and her blue eyes shone, perhaps at the thought of her beloved’s certain rise to prominence in his chosen field. “I knew he’d make a success of CID. I told him that before he went on the course.”
“And not just any case, mind you,” Corrine said as if Celia hadn’t spoken. “But this particular case. This Scotland Yard case. And this case, my dear”—with a pat on Celia’s hand—“will be the making of our Robbie.”
Celia smiled appealingly, her teeth pulling against her lower lip as if to contain her pleasure. In the meantime on the telly, the elephants were getting restless. One particularly huge bull was lumbering towards the estate’s outer wall, following the age-old path to water that Peter Finch’s father had so arrogantly blocked with his impressive villa. Approximately twenty-two minutes until elephant tramp-down, Barbara thought. She’d seen the film at least ten times.
She said, “I’ll just say goodnight. If Robin comes in within the next half hour, will you have him come by my room? We’ve some facts to sort out.”
“I’ll certainly tell him, but I imagine our Robbie’ll be a bit taken up with things right here,” Corrine said with a meaningful nod at Celia who was studying her tiles. “He’s waiting until he’s settled completely into the new job. Once he knows his way about, then he’ll be making some big changes in his life. Some permanent changes. Won’t he, dear?” Another pat on Celia’s hand. Celia smiled.
Barbara said, “Yes. Well. Congratulations. All the best,” and felt like a fool.
Celia said, “Thank you,” and gently laid five tiles onto the Scrabble board. Barbara glanced at the word. Celia had added to Corrine’s cat, making it catamite. Corrine frowned at it in some confusion and reached for a dictionary, saying, “Are you certain, dear?” Barbara saw her eyes widen when she read the definition. She caught the merriment on Celia’s face, which was quickly quelled when Corrine closed the dictionary and looked her way. “It’s something to do with rock formations, isn’t it?” Celia asked with spurious innocence.