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You’ve no need to protect me.”
    “I don’t want to get involved in this, Deborah. There’s too much risk. I don’t want it on my conscience if something happens to the girl.”
    “This doesn’t appear to be a typical abduction though, does it? No demand for money, just a demand for publicity. And no threat of death. If you don’t help them, you know they’ll just go to someone else.”
    “Or they’ll go to the police, which is where they should have gone in the fi rst place.”
    “But you’ve done this sort of work before.
    So has Helen. Not recently, of course. But you’ve done it in the past. And you’ve done it well.”
    St. James made no reply. He knew what he ought to do: what he’d already done. Tell Luxford that he wanted no part of the situation.
    But Deborah was watching him, her face a mirror of the absolute faith she’d always had in him. To do the right thing, to be wise when necessary.
    “You can put a time limit on it,” she said reasonably. “You can…What if you say that you’ll give it…what, one day? Two? To establish a trail. To talk to people who know her.
    To…I don’t know. To do something. Because if you do that much, at least you’ll know that the investigation is being handled properly.
    And that’s what you want, isn’t it? To be sure that everything’s handled properly?”
    St. James touched her cheek. Her skin was hot. Her eyes seemed too large. She looked little more than a child herself despite her twenty-five years. He shouldn’t have let her listen to Luxford’s story in the fi rst place, he thought again. He should have sent her off to work on her photographs. He should have insisted. He should have…St. James brought himself round abruptly. Deborah was right.
    He always wanted to protect her. He had a passion to protect her. It was the bane of their marriage, the largest disadvantage of being eleven years her senior and having known her since her birth.
    “They need you,” she said. “I think you ought to help. At least talk to the mother. Hear
    what she has to say. You could do that much tonight. You and Helen can go to her. Right away.” She reached for his hand that still grazed her cheek.
    “I can’t promise two days,” he said.
    “That won’t matter, so long as you’re involved. Will you do it, then? I know you won’t regret it.”
    I already do
, St. James thought. But he nodded his assent.
    Dennis Luxford had plenty of time to put his psychological house in order before returning home. He lived in Highgate, a considerable drive north from the St. James home near the river in Chelsea, and while he was guiding his Porsche through the traffic, he assembled his thoughts and constructed a facade that his wife, he hoped, would not be able to pierce.
    He’d phoned her after talking to Eve. Estimated time of arrival had changed, he explained. Sorry, darling. Something’s come up. I’ve a photographer in South Lambeth waiting for Larnsey’s rent boy to come out of his parents’ house; I’ve a reporter ready when the boy makes his statement; we’re holding up the presses as long as possible to get it in the morning’s edition. I need to stand by here.
    Am I ballsing up your evening plans?
    Fiona said no. She’d just been reading to Leo when the phone rang, or rather reading
with
Leo because no one read
to
Leo when Leo wanted to do the reading himself. He’d chosen Giotto, Fiona confided with a sigh.
    Again. I do wish his interest might be caught by another period of art. Reading about religious paintings quite puts me to sleep.
    It’s good for your soul, Luxford had said in a tone that tried to achieve wry amusement although what he had thought was, Shouldn’t he be reading about dinosaurs at his age?
    About constellations? About big-game hunters? About snakes and frogs? Why in hell was an eight-year-old reading about a fourteenth-century painter? And why was his mother encouraging him to do so?
    They were too close to each other, Luxford