He swung the door open. The sounds from the restaurant’s kitchen rose round him. He began to leave the office, then hesitated, looking back at her. She thought he was going to say something about their history, their life together, their now abortive future as husband and wife. But instead he said, “I think the worst was wanting you to be capable of love, and through that wanting, believing you were.”
“Are you going to talk to the press?” she asked him.
His answering smile was wintry. “My God, Eve,” he said. “Jesus. My God.”
28
LUXFORD FOUND HER in Leo’s bedroom. She was sorting through his drawings and placing them into neat piles by topic. Here were his meticulous copies of Giotto’s angels, Madonnas, and saints. There were quick line sketches of frail ballerinas and top-hatted dancers. Next to them sat a small stack of animals, mostly squirrels and dormice. And all by itself in the centre of the desk lay a drawing of a small boy sitting dejectedly on a three-legged stool, behind the bars of a prison cell. This last looked like an illustration from a children’s book. Luxford wondered if his son had copied it from Dickens.
Fiona appeared to be studying this last picture. She was holding the top of a pair of Leo’s plaid pyjamas to her cheek. She rocked gently in the chair, a barely perceptible movement with her face pressed against the worn flannel.
Luxford couldn’t conceive how she would be able to endure the newest blow he’d come to deal her. He’d wrestled with his past and with his conscience all the way from Westminster to Highgate. But he’d managed to find no easy way to tell her what the kidnapper was requiring of him now. Because the full horror was that he didn’t have the information that was being demanded of him. And he hadn’t been able to create a single way to tell his wife that their son’s life sat in the pan of a balance into whose other pan Luxford could place nothing.
“There were calls,” Fiona said quietly. She didn’t look away from the drawing.
Luxford felt a surge in his guts. “Did he—”
“Not from the kidnapper.” She sounded empty, as if every emotion had been wrung out of her. “Peter Ogilvie first. He wanted to know why you held back the story on Leo.”
“Good God,” Luxford whispered. “Who’s he been talking to?”
“He said you’re to phone him at once. He said you’re forgetting your obligations to the paper. He said you’re the key to the biggest story of the year, and if you’re holding back on your own newspaper, he wants to know why.”
“Oh God, Fi. I’m sorry.”
“Rodney phoned as well. He wants to know what you want on tomorrow’s front page. And Miss Wallace wants to know if she should allow Rodney to continue using your office for the news meetings. I didn’t know what to tell any of them. I said you’d phone when you could.”
“Sod them.”
She rocked gently, as if she’d managed to divorce herself from what was going on. Luxford bent to her. He touched his mouth to the honey-coloured hair at her crown. She said, “I’m so afraid for him. I imagine him alone. Cold. Hungry. Trying to be brave and all the time wondering what’s happened and why. I remember reading once about a kidnapping where the victim was put in a coffin and buried alive, with an air supply. And there was only so much time to find her before she suffocated. And I’m so frightened that Leo’s been…that someone may have hurt him.”
“Don’t,” Luxford said.
“He won’t understand what’s happened. And I want to do something to help him understand. I feel so useless. Sitting here, waiting. Not being able to do a thing while all the time someone out there holds my whole world hostage. I can’t bear thinking of his terror. And I can’t think of anything else.”
Luxford knelt by her chair. He couldn’t bring himself to say what he’d been saying to her for more than twenty-four hours: We’re going to get him back, Fiona. Because for the very first time, he wasn’t sure: of Leo’s safety or of anything else. He felt he was walking on ice so brittle that one precipitate step would destroy them all.
Fiona stirred, turned in her chair to face him. She touched the side of his head and dropped her hand to his shoulder. “I know you’re suffering as well. I’ve known that from the first, but I didn’t want to see it because I was looking for someone to blame. And you were there.”
“I deserve the blame. If it hadn’t been for me, none of this would have happened.”
“You did something unwise eleven years ago, Dennis. But you aren’t to blame for what’s happened now. You’re a victim as much as Leo is. As much as Charlotte and her mother were victims. I know that.”
The generosity of her forgiveness felt like a claw tightening round his heart. Guts roiling, he said, “I must tell you something.”
Fiona’s grave eyes watched him. “What was missing from the story in this morning’s paper,” she concluded. “Eve Bowen knew. Tell me. It’s all right.”
It wasn’t all right. It could never be all right. She’d spoken about looking for someone to blame and until this afternoon he’d been doing the same thing. Only in his case he’d been blaming Evelyn, using her paranoia, her odium, and her gross stupidity as reasons why Charlotte was dead and Leo was hostage. But now he knew where true responsibility lay. And sharing that knowledge with his wife was going to shatter her.
She said, “Dennis, tell me.”
He did. He began with what little Eve Bowen had been able to contribute to the story in the newspaper, he continued with Inspector Lynley’s interpretation of the phrase your firstborn child, and he concluded with a verbalisation of what he’d been contemplating ever since leaving New Scotland Yard. “Fiona, I don’t know this third child. I never knew of its existence before now. As God is my witness, I don’t know who it is.”
She looked dazed. “But how can you possibly not know…?” As she realised what his ignorance implied, she turned away from him. “Were there so many of them, Dennis?”
Luxford sought a way to explain who he had been in the years before they’d met, what had driven him, what demons had trailed him. He said, “Before I knew you, Fiona, sex was something I just did.”
“Like brushing your teeth?”
“It was something I needed, something I used to prove to myself…” He gestured aimlessly. “I don’t really know what.”
“You don’t? You don’t really know? Or you don’t want to say?”
“All right,” he said. “Manhood. An attraction to women. Because I was always afraid if I didn’t keep proving to myself how deadly attractive I was to women…” He looked back, as she did, to Leo’s desk, to the drawings, their delicacy, their sensitivity, their heart. They represented the fear he’d lived his life in avoidance of facing. Finally, it was his wife who gave it voice.
“You’d have to deal with having been so deadly attractive to men.”
“Yes,” he said. “That. I thought there must be something wrong with me. I thought I was somehow giving off something: an aura, a scent, an unspoken invitation….”
“Like Leo.”
“Like Leo.”
She reached forward then for the picture of the little boy that their son had drawn. She held it up so that the light caught it directly. She said, “This is how Leo feels.”
“We’ll get him back. I’ll write the story. I’ll confess. I’ll say anything. I’ll name every woman I’ve known and beg each one to step forward if—”
“Not how he feels right now, Dennis. I mean this is how Leo feels all the time.”
Luxford took the picture. Holding it closer, he could see the boy was meant to be Leo. The white hair identified him, as did the too-long legs and the fragile ankles, exposed because the trousers were outgrown and the socks were rucked. And he’d seen that defeated posture before, only last week in the restaurant in Pond Square. A closer inspection of the sketch showed him that another figure had been in it initially. Erased now, the faint outline remained, enough to see the paisley braces, the crisp shirt, and the etching of a scar across the chin. Th
is figure was overly large—inhumanly large—and it loomed over the child like a manifestation of his future doom.
Luxford crumpled the picture. He felt beaten down. “God forgive me. Have I been that hard on him?”
“As hard as you’ve been on yourself.”
He thought of his son: how watchful he was in his father’s presence, how careful not to make a mistake. He recalled the times the boy tried to accommodate his father by toughening his walk, roughing up his voice, avoiding the words that might brand him a sissy. But the real Leo always bled through the persona he worked so hard to produce: sensitive, easily given to tears, open-hearted, eager to create and to love.
For the first time since, as a schoolboy, he’d accepted the importance of masking emotion and soldiering on, Luxford felt anguish ballooning dangerously in his chest. But he shed no tears. “I wanted him to be a man,” he said.
“I know that, Dennis,” Fiona replied. “But how could he be? He can’t be a man until he’s allowed to be a little boy.”
Barbara Havers felt deflated when she saw that Robin’s car wasn’t in the drive of Lark’s Haven upon her return from Stanton St. Bernard. She hadn’t consciously thought about seeing him since her odd conversation with Celia—Celia’s conclusion about the nature of their relationship being too stupid to dignify by considering it—but when she saw the vacant spot where he usually left his Escort, she breathed out, “Oh hell,” and realised that she’d been counting on talking the case through with a colleague, much in the way she talked through cases with Inspector Lynley.
She’d been back to the rectory in Stanton St. Bernard where she’d shown the photograph of Dennis Luxford to Mr. Matheson and his wife. They’d stood with it under the light in their kitchen—each holding a side of it—and one saying to the other, “What do you think, pet? Is he someone familiar?” and the other answering, “Oh my dear, my memory’s a useless old thing,” and both of them tentatively concluding that this was a face they hadn’t seen. Mrs. Matheson said she would have probably remembered the hair, noting with a sheepish little smile that she always “did like a young man with a lovely head of hair.” Mr. Matheson, whose hair was rather sparse, said that unless he’d engaged in some sort of liturgical, personal, or religious dialogue with an individual, he never did much remember faces. But still, if this one had been at the church, in the graveyard, or at the fête, his face would have looked at least somewhat familiar. As it was…They were sorry but they couldn’t remember him.
Barbara acquired no different answer from anyone else in the village. Nearly everyone she met wanted to help, but no one was able to. So, knackered and hungry, she returned to Lark’s Haven. It was long past time to phone London anyway. Lynley would be waiting to assemble something suitable to keep AC Hillier out of their hair.
She trudged to the door. There’d been no word on Leo Luxford. DS Stanley was employing his grid once again, with a heavier concentration on the area round the windmill. But they’d had no indication that the kid was even in Wiltshire, and showing his picture in every hamlet, village, and town had produced nothing but a montage of shaking heads.
Barbara wondered how two children could disappear so thoroughly. Having grown up in a sprawling metropolitan area, she herself had been drilled endlessly in her childhood with the only injunction that was secondary to “look both ways before crossing the street.” This was “and never talk to strangers.” So what had happened with these two children? Barbara wondered. No one had seen them dragged screaming off the street, which meant that each of them had gone willingly. So had they never been told to be wary of strangers? Barbara found this impossible to believe. So if they had been drilled with that timeless injunction as she had been, then the only conclusion was that whoever had taken them wasn’t a stranger to them at all. So who was common to both these children?
Barbara was too hungry to look for a link. She needed to eat—she’d stopped and bought a Corned Beef Crispbake (“just pop it in the oven”) for that express purpose at Elvis Patel’s Grocery—and after she ate, perhaps she’d have the blood sugar and the brainpower necessary to make sense of the data she had and to look for a connection between Charlotte and Leo.
She glanced at her watch as she went in the front door, Crispbake in hand. It was nearly eight o’clock, the perfect hour for elegant dining. She hoped Corrine Payne wouldn’t mind if she commandeered the oven for a while.
“Robbie?” Corrine’s wispy voice came from the direction of the dining room. “That you, darling?”
“It’s me,” Barbara said.
“Oh. Barbara.”
Since the dining room was on Barbara’s route to the kitchen, she couldn’t avoid a meeting with the woman. She found her standing over the dining table on which was spread out a length of sprigged cotton. Corrine had pinned a pattern to this and was in the process of cutting it.
Barbara said, “Hullo. Mind if I use the oven?” and she lifted the Crispbake for Corrine’s inspection.
“Robbie isn’t with you?” Corrine slid the scissors beneath the material. She snipped along the pattern.
“Still on the job, I expect.” Barbara winced, realising after she’d said it that she’d chosen a rather unfortunate expression.
Corrine smiled down at her work and murmured, “Yourself as well, I suppose?”
Barbara felt her neck itch. She tried to speak airily. “Masses of stuff to be done. I’ll just heat this up and get out of your way.” She headed towards the kitchen.
“You almost had Celia convinced,” Corrine said.
Barbara stopped. “What? Convinced?”
“About you and Robbie.” She continued to cut along the line of the pattern. Was it imagination, Barbara wondered, or had Corrine’s scissors picked up the pace? “She phoned here not two hours ago. You didn’t expect that, did you, Barbara? I could tell by her voice, of course—I’m very good at that—and while she didn’t want to tell me, I had the story out of her. I think she needed to talk. One does, you know. Would you like to talk to me?” She looked up and met Barbara’s gaze quite pleasantly. But the way she raised her scissors sent hackles running like mice up and down Barbara’s spine.
Barbara wasn’t one for subterfuge. She’d missed that coursework entirely during her days at school. She often thought her inability to master feminine wiles was the main reason she spent every New Year’s Eve listening to the radio and eating most of a St. Michael’s Toffee Pecan Dream Pie. So she thrashed round in her head for an appropriate response that would direct Corrine Payne onto another topic, but she ended up saying, “Celia’s got the wrong idea about me and Robin, Mrs. Payne. I don’t know where she got it, but it’s altogether wrong.”
“Corrine,” Corrine said. “You’re to call me Corrine.” She lowered the scissors and began to cut again.
“Right. Corrine. So I’ll just pop this in the oven and—”
“Women don’t get ‘wrong ideas,’ Barbara. We’re far too intuitive for that. I’ve seen the change in Robbie myself. I simply didn’t know what name to put upon it until your arrival. I understand why you might lie to Celia.” On the word lie, the scissors snapped with excessive energy. “She is, after all, Robbie’s intended. But you’re not to lie to me. That won’t do at all.” Corrine gave a gentle cough as she concluded. Barbara noticed for the first time that her breathing was congested. She watched as the older woman patted her chest smartly, smiled, and said, “Nasty old asthma. Too much pollen in the air.”
“Rough in the springtime,” Barbara said.
“You can’t imagine how rough.” Corrine had moved round the table as she’d continued her cutting. She now stood between Barbara and the kitchen door. She cocked her head and produced an affectionate smile. She said, “So tell me, Barbara. No lies to Corrine.”
“Mrs. Pay—Corrine. Celia’s upset because Robin’s preoccupied. But that’s always the way it is in a murder investigation. One gets caught up. One forgets about everything else for a while. But when the case is over, l
ife gets back to normal, and if she’ll just be patient, she’ll see I’m telling the truth.”
Corrine tapped the tip of the scissors against her lip. She examined Barbara appraisingly and when she returned to her cutting, she returned to her theme of choice as well. “Please don’t take me for a fool, dear. That’s unworthy of you. I’ve heard you together. Robbie’s tried to be discreet. He’s always been terribly thoughtful that way. But I’ve heard him going in to you in the night, so I’d prefer we be honest with each other about everything. Lies are so unpleasant, aren’t they?”
The implication rendered Barbara speechless for a moment. She stammered, “Going in? Mrs. Payne, are you thinking that we’ve been—”
“As I said, Barbara, you may feel the need to lie to Celia. She is, of course, his intended bride. But you mustn’t lie to me. You’re a guest in my home, and that isn’t very nice.”
Paying guest, Barbara wanted to clarify as Corrine’s scissors began to pick up speed. Soon to be ex-guest if she could pack her belongings fast enough. She said, “You’ve got everything wrong, both you and Celia. But let me clear out. It’ll be better for everyone.”
“And give you greater access to Robbie? Through a place where you can meet and do your business with perfect freedom?” Corrine shook her head. “That wouldn’t be proper. And it wouldn’t be fair to Celia, would it? No. I think it’s best that you stay right here. We’ll get this sorted out as soon as Robbie gets home.”
“There’s nothing to sort. I’m sorry if Robin and Celia are having troubles, but it’s nothing to do with me. And you’ll only embarrass the hell out of him if you try to make a case that he and I…that we…that he’s been…I mean while I’ve been here…” Barbara had never felt so flustered.
“Do you think I’m making this up?” Corrine asked. “Are you accusing me of producing a falsehood?”