Free In The Presence Of The Enemy by Elizabeth George

were slogging hip-deep through porridge, Alex went to the cooker and carried through the motions of stirring, lowering the heat, lifting the pot, setting a dif-fuser into position, while all the time he heard
Charlotte’s father, Charlotte’s father, Charlotte’s
father
roaring round the room. He set his stirring fork on its holder carefully before he turned back to his wife. She was naturally fair-skinned, but in the light of the kitchen she looked deadly pale.
    “Charlie’s father,” he said.
    “He claims to have received a kidnapping note. I received one as well.” Alex saw her fi ngers tighten on her elbows. The gesture looked to him like a girding of mental or emotional loins. The worst, he realised, was yet to come.
    “Keep going,” he said evenly.
    “Don’t you want to see to your pasta?”
    “I haven’t much of an appetite. Have you?”
    She shook her head. But she left him for a moment and returned to the sitting room, during which time he numbly stood stirring his sauce and his pasta and wondering when he’d feel like eating again. She returned with an opened bottle of wine and two glasses. She poured at the bar that extended from the cooker. She slid one of the glasses in his direction.
    He realised that she wasn’t going to say it unless he forced her. She would tell him everything else—what had apparently happened to Charlie, at what time of day, and exactly how and with what words she had come to learn about it. But she wouldn’t speak the name unless he insisted. In the seven years he’d known her, in the six years of their marriage, the identity of Charlotte’s father was the one secret she hadn’t revealed. And it hadn’t seemed fair to Alex to press her. Charlie’s father, whoever he was, was part of Eve’s past.
    Alex had wanted only to be part of her present and her future.
    “Why’s he taken her?”
    She answered emotionlessly, a recital of conclusions she’d already reached. “Because he wants the public to know who her father is.
    Because he wants to embarrass the Tories further. Because if the Government continues to be faced with sexual scandals that erode the public’s faith in their elected officials, the Prime Minister is going to be forced to call a general election and the Tories are going to lose it. Which is what he wants.”
    Alex homed in on the words that chilled him most and told him most about what she’d kept hidden for so many years. “Sexual scandals?”
    Her lips curved mirthlessly. “Sexual scandals.”
    “Who is it, Eve?”
    “Dennis Luxford.”
    The name meant nothing to him. Years of dreading, years of wondering, years of speculating, years of calculating, and the name meant absolutely sod bloody all. He could tell that she saw he was making no connection.
    She gave a sardonic and self-directed chuckle and walked to the small kitchen table that sat in a bay window overlooking the back garden.
    There was a rattan magazine holder next to one of the chairs. It was where Mrs. Maguire kept her lowbrow reading material that entertained her through her daily elevenses. From this rattan holder Eve took a tabloid. She carried it to the bar and laid it before Alex.
    Its masthead was a blaze of red into which garish yellow letters spelled out
The Source!
    Beneath this masthead three inches of headline screamed
Love-Cheat MP
. The headline was accompanied by two colour photographs, one of Sinclair Larnsey, MP for East Norfolk, looking grim-faced as he emerged from a building in the company of a cane-wielding elderly gentleman who had
Constituency Association Chairman
incised all over him, the other of a magenta Citroën, under which ran the caption: “Sinclair Larnsey’s mobile love nest.” The rest of the front page was devoted to Win A Dream Holiday (Chapter 1), Breakfast With Your Favourite Star (Chapter 1), and Cricket Murder Trial Coming (Chapter 2).
    He frowned at the tabloid. It was tawdry and noisome, as it no doubt intended to be. It howled for