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

something would be a regular event for you.”
    “Someone knows.”
    “What?”
    “About us. About Charlotte.”
    That seemed to rattle her, if only for a moment. She was quiet at first. He thought he could hear her tapping a finger against the mouthpiece of the phone. Then she said abruptly, “Nonsense.”
    “Listen. Just listen.” He read the brief message. Having heard it, she said nothing. Somewhere in the office with her, a man’s voice gave a bark of laughter. “Firstborn child, it says,”
    Luxford said. “Someone knows. Have you confided in anyone?”
    “Freed?” she said. “‘Charlotte will be
freed
’?” There was another silence in which Luxford could almost hear her mind working as she assessed the potential for damage to her credibility and measured the extent of the political fall-out. “Give me your number,” she finally said. “I’ll phone you back.”
    She had done so, but when she had, it was a different Eve on the phone. She’d said, “Dennis. God
damn
you. What have you
done?
”
    No weeping, no terror, no mother’s hysteria, no breast-beating, no rage. Just those eight words. And an end to his hopes that someone was bluffing. No one was bluffing about anything, it seemed. Charlotte was missing.
    Someone had her, someone—or someone employed by someone—who knew the truth.
    He had to keep that truth from Fiona. She had made a sacred mission of keeping no secrets from him during their ten-year marriage. It didn’t bear thinking what would happen to the trust between them should she discover the one secret he’d kept from her. It was bad enough that he’d fathered a child he never saw. Fiona might learn to absolve him for that. But to have fathered this child in the midst of his pursuit of Fiona herself, in the midst of forging a bond with her…She would see everything that had passed between them from that moment on as one variation or another of falsehood. And falsehood was what she would never forgive.
    Luxford made the turn from Highgate Road. He followed the curve of Millfi eld Lane along Hampstead Heath where small bobbing lights moving along the path by the ponds told him that bicyclers were still enjoying the late May weather, despite the hour and the darkness. He slowed as the brick wall edging his property emerged from a hedge of privet and holly. He turned in between the pillars and cruised up the slope of the drive towards the villa that had been their home for the past eight years.
    Fiona was in the garden. From a distance, Luxford saw the movement of her white mus-lin dressing gown against the emerald-black backdrop of ferns, and he went to join her. He followed the haphazard arrangement of pav-ing stones, his shoe soles brushing against baby’s tears that were already dotted with the night’s dew. If his wife had heard the car arrive, she gave no notice. She was heading for the largest tree in the garden, an umbrella-shaped hornbeam under which a wooden bench sat at the edge of the garden pool.
    She was curled on this bench when he reached her, her endless mannequin’s legs and shapely feet hidden beneath the folds of her dressing gown. She’d pinned her hair away from her face, and the first thing he did when he joined her on the bench, after kissing her fondly, was to unpin it so that it fell to her breasts. He felt the same stirring for her that he always felt, a mixture of awe, desire, and amazement at the fact that this glorious creature was actually his wife.
    He was grateful for the darkness, which made the task of this fi rst meeting between them an easier one. He was grateful that she’d chosen to come outdoors as well, because her garden—the crowning achievement in her domestic life, as she liked to call it—provided him with the means of distracting her.
    “Aren’t you cold?” he asked. “Would you like my jacket?”
    “The night’s lovely,” she replied. “I couldn’t bear to be indoors. Do you expect we’ll have a horrible summer if