In The Presence Of The Enemy Read Online Free PDF Page B

Somewhere between Blandford Street and Devonshire Place Mews.”
    “Has there been a demand for money?”
    “Just the demand for public acknowledgement of Charlotte’s paternity.”
    “Which you’re unwilling to make.”
    “I’m willing to make it. I’d rather not, it would cause me difficulties, but I’m willing.
    It’s Eve who won’t hear of it.”
    “You’ve seen her?”
    “Talked to her. After that I phoned David. I remembered his having a brother…I knew you were involved in criminal investigations somehow, or at least that you had been. I thought you might help.”
    St. James shook his head and returned letter and envelope to Luxford. “This isn’t a matter for me to handle. It can be dealt with discreetly by—”
    “Listen to me.” Luxford hadn’t touched either his cake or his coffee, but he reached for the coffee now. He gulped down a mouthful and replaced the cup in its saucer. Some of the coffee sloshed out, wetting his fingers. He didn’t make a move to dry them. “You don’t know how newspapers actually work. The cops will go to Eve’s house first and no one will hear of it, true. But they’ll need to speak to her more than once, and they won’t be willing to wait for an hour when she’s in seclusion in Marylebone. So they’ll go to see her at the Home Office because that’s near enough Scotland Yard, and God knows this particular kidnapping is going to be a Scotland Yard case unless we do something to head that off now.”
    “Scotland Yard and the Home Office live in each other’s pocket,” St. James pointed out.
    “You know that. Even if that weren’t the case, the investigators wouldn’t go to see her in uniform.”
    “Do you actually think they need to be in uniform?” Luxford demanded. “There isn’t a journalist alive who can’t tell when he’s looking at a cop. So a cop shows up at the Home Office and asks for the Undersecretary of State. A correspondent for one of the papers sees him. Someone in the Home Office is willing to snout—a secretary, a filing clerk, a caretaker, a fi fth-rank civil servant with too many debts and too much interest in money. However it happens, it happens. Someone talks to the correspondent. And his newspaper’s attention is now zeroed in on Eve Bowen. Who
is
this woman, the paper starts asking. What’s going on that the police have come to call?
    Who
is
the father of her child, by the way? It’s only a matter of time before they trace Charlotte to me.”
    “If you haven’t told anyone, that’s unlikely,”
    St. James said.
    “It doesn’t matter what I’ve told or not told,”
    Luxford said. “The point is that Eve’s told.
    She claims she hasn’t, but she must have done.
    Someone knows. Someone’s waiting. Bringing in the police—which is what the kidnapper expects us to do—is just the ticket to get the story into the press. If that happens, Eve’s finished. She’ll have to stand down as Junior Minister and I dare say she’ll lose her seat as well. If not now, because of this, then in the next election.”
    “Unless she becomes a figure of public sympathy, in which case this entire affair serves her interests quite well.”
    “That,” Luxford said, “is a particularly vile comment. What are you suggesting? She’s Charlotte’s mother, for God’s sake.”
    Deborah turned to her husband. She’d been sitting on the ottoman in front of his chair, and she touched his good leg lightly and got to her feet. “Could I have a word, Simon?” she asked him.
    St. James saw that she was f lushed. He regretted at once allowing her to be part of the interview. The moment he’d heard it was about a child, he should have sent her from the room on some pretext. Children—and her inability to bear them—were her greatest vulnerability.
    He followed her into the dining room. She stood by the table with her hands behind her, resting them against the polished wood. She said, “I know what you’re thinking, but it isn’t that.