“Because there are only two people on earth who know the identity of my daughter’s father. I’m one of them. Dennis Luxford is the other.”
“Your daughter herself doesn’t know?”
“Of course not. Never. And it’s impossible that she could have found out on her own.”
“Your parents? Your family?”
“No one, Mr. St. James, save Dennis and me.” She took a measured sip of her wine. “It’s his tabloid’s objective to bring down the Government. At the moment, he finds himself with the right set of circumstances to crush the Conservative Party once and for all. He’s attempting to do so.”
“I don’t follow your logic.”
“It’s all rather convenient, wouldn’t you say? My daughter’s disappearance. A putative kidnapping note in Luxford’s possession. A demand for publicity in that note. And all of it falling directly on the heels of Sinclair Larnsey’s shenanigans with an underage boy in Paddington.”
“Mr. Luxford wasn’t acting like a man in the midst of orchestrating a kidnapping for the tabloids to exploit,” St. James noted.
“Not for the tabloids in the plural,” she replied. “For the tabloid in the excessively singular. He’s hardly going to let the competition scoop his own best story.”
“He seemed as intent as you are upon keeping this quiet.”
“Are you a student of human behaviour, Mr. St. James? Along with your other talents?”
“I think it’s wise to make an assessment of the people who ask me for help. Before I agree to help them.”
“How perspicacious. When we have more time, perhaps I’ll ask for your assessment of me.” She set her wineglass beside her briefcase. She removed her circular tortoiseshell spectacles and rubbed their lenses against the arm of the chair as if to polish them and to study St. James simultaneously. The tortoiseshell frames were largely the same shade as Eve Bowen’s unruffled pageboy hair, and when she replaced the spectacles on her nose, they touched the tips of the fringe she wore overlong to cover her eyebrows. “Let me ask you this. Don’t you find anything out of order in the fact that Mr. Luxford received this kidnapping note by post?”
“Obviously,” St. James said. “It was postmarked yesterday. And possibly posted the day before that.”
“While my daughter was quite safe at home. So if we examine the facts, we can agree that we have a kidnapper fairly sure of a successful outcome to his kidnapping when he posts his letter.”
“Or,” St. James said, “we have a kidnapper who knows it won’t matter if he fails because if he fails, the letter will have no effect upon its recipient. If the kidnapper and the recipient of the letter are one and the same person. Or if the kidnapper has been hired by the letter’s recipient.”
“So you see.”
“I hadn’t overlooked the postmark, Ms. Bowen. And I don’t take what’s said to me only on face value. I’m willing to agree that Dennis Luxford may be behind this in some way. I’m equally willing to suspect that you are.”
Her mouth curved briefly. She gave a sharp nod. “Well, well,” she said. “You’re not as much Luxford’s lackey as he supposes, are you? I think you’ll do.”
She got up from her chair and went to a trapezoidal bronze sculpture that stood on a pedestal between the two front windows. She tilted the sculpture and from beneath it she took an envelope which she carried to St. James before returning to her chair. “This was delivered sometime during the day. Possibly between one and three o’clock this afternoon. My housekeeper—Mrs. Maguire, she’s left for the day—found it when she returned from her weekly visit to her turf accountant. She put it with the rest of the post—you can see it has my name on it—and didn’t think about it until I phoned her at seven o’clock, asking about Charlotte, after Dennis Luxford phoned me.”
St. James examined the envelope Eve Bowen had given him. It was white, inexpensive, the sort of envelope one could buy almost anywhere, from Boots to the local newsagent’s. He donned latex gloves and slid the envelope’s contents out. He unfolded the single sheet of paper and placed it within another plastic jacket that he’d brought from his home. He removed the gloves and read the brief message.
Eve Bowen—
If you want to know what’s happened to Lottie, phone her father.
“Lottie,” St. James noted.
“That’s what she calls herself.”
“What does Luxford call her?”
Eve Bowen didn’t falter in her belief in Luxford’s involvement. She said, “The name wouldn’t be impossible to discover, Mr. St. James. Someone’s obviously discovered it.”
“Or has already known it.” St. James showed the letter to Helen. She read it before speaking.
“You said you phoned Mrs. Maguire at seven this evening, Ms. Bowen. Surely your daughter had been missing a number of hours by then. Mrs. Maguire didn’t notice?”
“She noticed.”
“But she didn’t alert you?”
The Junior Minister made a minute alteration in her position in the chair. Her breath eased out in what could have passed for a sigh. “Several times in the past year—since I’ve been at the Home Office—Charlotte has misbehaved. Mrs. Maguire knows I expect her to handle Charlotte’s mischief on her own without disturbing me at work. She thought this was an instance of misbehaviour.”
“Why?”
“Because Wednesday afternoon is her music lesson, an event Charlotte doesn’t particularly like. She drags herself to it each week and most Wednesday afternoons she threatens to throw herself or her flute down a street drain. When she didn’t turn up here immediately after her lesson today, Mrs. Maguire assumed she was up to her usual tricks. It wasn’t until six that she began phoning round to see if Charlotte had gone home with one of her schoolmates instead of going to her lesson.”
“She goes to the lesson alone, then?” Helen clarified.
The MP apparently heard the unspoken but inevitable secondary question behind Helen’s words: Was a ten-year-old girl running about unsupervised on the streets of London? She said, “Children travel in packs these days, in case you haven’t noticed. Charlotte would hardly have been alone. And when she is, Mrs. Maguire attempts to accompany her.”
“Attempts.” The word wasn’t lost on Helen.
“Charlotte doesn’t much like being trailed by an overweight Irishwoman given to wearing baggy leggings and a moth-eaten pullover. And are we here to discuss my child-minding practices or the whereabouts of my child?”
St. James felt rather than saw Helen’s reaction to the words. The air seemed to thicken with a mixture of one woman’s aggravation and the other’s disbelief. Neither emotion would bring them any closer to locating the child, however. He shifted gears.
“Once she found that Charlotte hadn’t gone home with a schoolmate, Mrs. Maguire still didn’t phone you?”
“I’d made rather a point about her responsibility to my daughter after an incident last month.”
“What sort of incident?”
“A typical display of pigheadedness.” The MP took another sip of her wine. “Charlotte had been hiding in the boiler room at St. Bernadette’s—that’s her school, on Blandford Street—because she didn’t want to keep an appointment with her psychotherapist. It’s a weekly appointment, she knows she has to go, but every month or so she makes up her mind not to cooperate. This was one of those times. Mrs. Maguire phoned me in a panic when Charlotte failed to appear in time to be taken to her appointment. I had to leave my office to hunt her down. It was after that that Mrs. Maguire and I sat down and became quite clear on what her responsibilities towards my daughter were going to be. And through what hours those responsibilities would extend.”
Helen looked increasingly perplexed by the Junior Minister’s approach to child-minding. She seemed to be ready to question the other woman further. St. James headed her off. There was no point to putting the Junior Minister any more on the defensive, at least not at the moment.
“Where exactly was the
music lesson?”
She told him the lesson took place not far from St. Bernadette’s School, in a mews area called Cross Keys Close near Marylebone High Street. Charlotte walked there every Wednesday directly after school. Her teacher was a man called Damien Chambers.
“Did your daughter show up for her lesson today?”
She had shown up. Mrs. Maguire had phoned Mr. Chambers first when she started her search for Charlotte at six o’clock. According to him, the girl had been there and gone at her regular time.
“We’ll have to speak to this man,” St. James pointed out. “And he’ll probably want to know why we’re asking him questions. Have you considered that and where it could lead?”
Eve Bowen had apparently already accepted the fact that even a private investigation into her daughter’s disappearance could not be made without questioning those who had seen her last. And those who had last seen her would no doubt wonder why a crippled man and his female companion were nosing about, dogging the child’s movements. It couldn’t be helped. The curiosity of those questioned might lead them to drop an intriguing suggestion to one of the tabloids, but that was a risk Charlotte’s mother was apparently willing to take.
“The way we’re going about it, the story is nothing but speculation,” she said. “It’s only with the police involved that things become definite.”
“Speculation can fan itself into a firestorm,” St. James said. “You need to bring in the police, Ms. Bowen. If not the local authorities, then Scotland Yard. You’ve the pull for that, I assume, because of the Home Office.”
“I have the pull. And I want no police. It’s out of the question.”
The expression on her face was adamantine. He and Helen could argue the point with her for another quarter of an hour, but St. James could tell that their efforts would be futile. Finding the child—finding her quickly—was the real point. He asked for a description of the little girl as she’d appeared that morning, for a photograph as well. Eve Bowen told them that she hadn’t seen her daughter that morning, she never saw Charlotte in the morning because she was always gone from the house before Charlotte awakened. But she’d been wearing her school uniform, naturally. Upstairs somewhere there was a picture of her wearing it. She left the room to fetch the photograph. They heard her climbing the stairs.
“This is more than odd, Simon,” Helen said in a low voice once they were alone. “From the way she’s acting, one could almost think—” She hesitated. She tucked her arms round herself. “Don’t you find her reaction to what’s happened to Charlotte rather unnatural?”
St. James got to his feet and went to examine the trophies. They bore Eve Bowen’s name and had been awarded for dressage. It seemed fitting that she would have won her dozen or more first places for such an activity. He wondered if her political staff responded to her signals as well as her horse had apparently done.
He said, “She thinks Luxford’s behind this, Helen. It wouldn’t be his intention to harm the child, just to rattle the mother. She apparently doesn’t intend to be rattled.”
“Still, one would expect to encounter a fissure or two here in private.”
“She’s a politician. She’s going to play her cards close to the chest.”
“But this is her daughter we’re talking about. Why is she out on the streets alone? And what’s her mother been doing from seven o’clock till now?” Helen gestured at the table, the briefcase, the documents that the briefcase disgorged. “I’d hardly expect the parent of a kidnapped child—no matter who kidnapped her—to be able to keep her mind on her work. It isn’t natural, is it? None of this is natural.”
“I agree entirely. But she knows quite well how things are going to appear to us. She hasn’t got where she is in the brief time it’s taken her to get there without knowing in advance how things will look.” St. James examined a gallery of photographs that stood in haphazard ranks among three houseplants on a narrow chrome and glass table. He noted a picture of Eve Bowen and the Prime Minister, another of Eve Bowen and the Home Secretary, a third of Eve Bowen in a receiving line along which the Princess Royal appeared to be offering greetings to a rather scant gathering of minority police constables.
“Things,” Helen said with delicate irony on the word St. James had chosen, “are looking rather remarkably detached, if you ask me.”
A key turned the dead bolt of the front door as Helen was speaking. The door opened and shut. The bolt sounded again. Footsteps barked on the tiles and a man stood at the doorway to the sitting room, nearly six feet tall, narrow-shouldered, and spare. He moved his tea-coloured eyes from St. James to Helen, but he didn’t speak at first. He looked tired and his hair the colour of old oak was disarranged boyishly, as if he’d ruffled it with his fingers in order to drive more blood to his head.
He finally spoke. “Hullo. Where’s Eve?”
“Upstairs,” St. James replied. “Fetching a photograph.”
“A photograph?” He looked at Helen, then back to St. James. He appeared to read something in their expressions because his tone altered from friendly indifference to instant wariness. “What’s going on?” He asked the question with an edge of aggression in his voice, which suggested that he was a man used to being answered at once and with deference. Even Government ministers, it seemed, did not entertain guests at nearly midnight without grave cause. He called sharply towards the stairs, “Eve?” And then to St. James, “Has something happened to someone? Is Eve all right? Has the Prime Minister—”
“Alex.” Eve Bowen spoke, beyond St. James’s line of vision. He heard her come quickly down the stairs.
Alex said to her, “What’s going on?”
She avoided the question by introducing Helen and St. James, saying, “My husband. Alexander Stone.”
St. James couldn’t remember ever reading that the Junior Minister was married, but when Eve Bowen introduced her husband, he realised that he must have done and filed the information somewhere in the dustier part of his memory since it was unlikely he would have entirely forgotten that Alexander Stone was the Junior Minister’s husband. Stone was one of the country’s leading entrepreneurs. His particular interest was in restaurants, and he owned at least a half dozen upscale establishments from Hammersmith to Holburn. He was a master chef, a Newcastle boy who’d managed to shed his Geordie accent sometime during the admirable journey he’d made from pastry maker at Brown’s Hotel to flourishing restaurateur. Indeed, Stone was the personification of the Conservative Party’s ideal: With no social or educational advantages—and certainly no drawing upon government assistance—he’d made a success of himself. He was possibility incarnate and private ownership nonpareil. He was, in short, the perfect husband for a Tory MP.
“Something’s happened,” Eve Bowen explained to him. She put a gentling hand on his arm. “Alex, I’m afraid it’s not very pleasant.”
Again, Stone looked from St. James to Helen. St. James was trying to digest the information that Eve Bowen had not yet made her husband aware of her daughter’s abduction. Helen, he could see, was doing the same. Both of their faces gave great scope for study, and Alexander Stone took a moment to study them while his own face blanched. “Dad,” he said. “Is he gone? His heart?”
“It’s not your father. Alex, Charlotte’s gone missing.”
He fixed his eyes on his wife. “Charlotte,” he repeated blankly. “Charlotte. Charlie. What?”
“She’s been kidnapped.”
He looked dazed. “What? When? What’s going—”
“This afternoon. After her music lesson.”
His right hand went to the disheveled hair, dishevelling it further. “Fuck, Eve. What the hell? Why didn’t you phone? I’ve been at Couscous since two. You know that. Why haven’t you phoned me?”
“I didn’t know till seven. And things happened too quickly.”
He said to St. James, “You’re the police.”
“No police,” his wife said.
He swung round to her. “Are
you out of your mind? What the hell—”
“Alex.” The MP’s voice was low and insistent. “Will you wait in the kitchen? Will you make us some dinner? I’ll be in in a moment to explain.”
“Explain what?” he demanded. “What the fuck is going on? Who are these people? I want some answers, Eve.”
“And you’ll get them.” She touched his arm again. “Please. Let me finish here. Please.”
“Don’t you bloody dismiss me like one of your underlings.”
“Alex, believe me. I’m not. Let me finish here.”
Stone pulled away from her. “Bloody hell,” he snarled. He stalked through the sitting room, through the dining room beyond it, through a swinging door that apparently led to the kitchen.
Eve Bowen contemplated the path he’d taken. Behind the swinging door, cupboards opened and slammed shut. Pots cracked against work tops. Water ran. She handed the photograph to St. James. “This is Charlotte.”
“I’ll need her weekly schedule. A list of her friends. Addresses of the places she goes.”
She nodded, although it was clear that her mind was in the kitchen with her husband. “Of course,” she said. She returned to her chair where she took up a pen and a notebook, her hair falling forward to hide her face.
Helen was the one who asked the question. “Why didn’t you phone your husband, Ms. Bowen? When you knew Charlotte was missing, why didn’t you phone?”
Eve Bowen raised her head. She looked quite composed, as if she’d taken the time of crossing the room to wrest control over any emotions that might have betrayed her. “I didn’t want him to be one of Dennis Luxford’s victims,” she said. “It seemed to me there are enough of them already.”
Alexander Stone worked in a fury. He whisked red wine into the mixture of olive oil, chopped tomatoes, onions, parsley, and garlic. He lowered the heat beneath the pan and strode from his prized state-of-the-culinary-art cooker to the chopping board where he sent his knife flashing through the caps of a dozen mushrooms. He swept them into a bowl and took them to the cooker. There, a large pot of water was beginning to boil. It was sending steam towards the ceiling in translucent plumes, which made him suddenly think of Charlie, with no defence. Ghostbird feathers, she would have called them, dragging her footstool to the cooker and chattering while he worked.