Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “Azhar wants to know where his daughter is,” Barbara told Angelina’s mother quietly. “You can understand that, can’t you?”

  She seemed completely indifferent. “Whether I understand or not makes no difference to anything. My answer remains the same. I’ve had no personal contact with Angelina.”

  Barbara brought her card from the pocket of her jacket. She held it out to the woman. She said, “I’d like you to ring me if you hear from her. It being Christmastime, you may well do.”

  “You might like me to do that,” Ruth-Jane Upman said. “But granting your wishes isn’t one of my powers.”

  Barbara laid her card on a table nearby. She said, “You think about that, Mrs. Upman.”

  Azhar looked as if he wanted to make some sort of appeal, but Barbara tilted her head towards the doorway. There was no point to further discussion with the woman. She might let them know if she heard from Angelina. She might not do so. It was not in their hands to bend her will to theirs.

  They headed for the door. In the corridor leading to it, the walls bore pictures, three of them black-and-white shots of a spontaneous nature. Barbara paused to look at them. They were all, she saw, of the same subjects: two girls. In one they were at the seaside building a sand castle, in another they rode a merry-go-round with one of them on the high pony and the other on a low one, in the last they stood holding out carrots to a mare and her adorable foal. What was interesting was not the expert nature of the photographs, however. Nor was it notable how they’d been framed and mounted. What would cause any viewer to stop and give the pictures a thorough study was the girls themselves.

  They would be Angelina and Bathsheba, Barbara reckoned. She wondered why no one had ever mentioned that the girls were perfectly identical twins.

  20 December

  ISLINGTON

  LONDON

  It seemed to Barbara that there was a final possibility to be explored. She did so on her lunch hour the very next day, and she didn’t tell Azhar she was going to do it. He was dispirited enough. To him, writing out a cheque to pay Dwayne Doughty was the same as saying, “Case closed.” To her, perhaps the case was closed in Doughty’s eyes, but till she’d worked every possible angle that she could think of, she couldn’t accept that Hadiyyah and her mother were permanently gone.

  Barbara had been keeping her nose remarkably clean at New Scotland Yard. There was nothing she could do about the wreck she’d made of her hair, but she’d decided it behooved her to slither onto the better side of Acting Detective Superintendent Ardery, so her manner of dress had been for days if not impeccable then at least not worthy of note. She’d worn tights, and she’d polished her brogues. At Ardery’s command, she’d even begun working on a case with DI John Stewart without complaint, although most of the time what she wanted to do was crush out a burning fag on his face. As for fags, she’d refrained from smoking in the Met stairwells as well. She was on the border of making herself ill with her own wonderfulness, so she knew it was time to do a little something on the side.

  She went to WARD. She had the home address of Angelina’s sister, but she reckoned Bathsheba would greet her appearance on the doorstep in a fashion not dissimilar from her parents. Going at her in her own workplace at least would give Barbara the advantage of surprise.

  WARD was on Liverpool Road, conveniently close to the Business Design Centre. It was one of those achingly trendy establishments, so uncrowded with its products as to make Barbara wonder if it was, perhaps, a front for money laundering instead of what it purported to be, which was a showroom for the furniture designed by its eponymous owner. The woman herself was within. Barbara had ascertained as much with a phone call and an appointment made earlier in the day. She knew better than to make it known to Bathsheba Ward that her putative customer was actually a police officer. Instead, she offered her an airy explanation along the lines of “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  In advance she’d done a bit of homework on the woman. She’d managed this while ostensibly entering a report into HOLMES for DI Stewart, who’d decided he’d play out his personal dislike of her by giving her an assignment which should have gone to a civilian typist. Instead of grousing, arguing, or banging about the incident room making her displeasure known, she’d said, “Right. Will do, sir,” and she’d offered him what passed for a congenial smile when his eyes narrowed at her quick cooperation. Thus, she’d had time to delve into Bathsheba Ward née Upman, so when she walked into the showroom she knew that Bathsheba had eschewed university for design school after having failed to make it as a professional model because of her height and after also having failed to find her place in the cutthroat world of fashion design. With furniture, however, she’d been wildly successful: awards aplenty along with photos of the pieces which had won them. The crowning glory of a young career had been the acquisition of one of her pieces by the V&A and another by the Museum of London. These two events were especially memorialised in Bathsheba’s office by plaques and exquisitely preserved articles from glossy magazines.

  Bathsheba herself was rather unnerving, Barbara found. Her resemblance to her sister was so startling that Barbara first concluded that the two women could have impersonated each other. With a closer look, however, Barbara saw that Bathsheba was the mirror image of Angelina: identifying physical marks upon each of them had been reversed, with a beauty mark at the edge of Bathsheba’s left eye which, on Angelina, was on the right, and the same situation with a dimple. Bathsheba also had none of Angelina’s light sprinkling of freckles, but this would have been owing to keeping herself out of the sun.

  She also had none of Angelina’s warmth, although, Barbara reckoned, that warmth had just been a ruse to ease Barbara into not noticing the myriad ways in which Angelina had been, from the first, planning her escape with Hadiyyah. Chances were very good that both women were, by nature, as sly as anacondas hiding hungrily behind one’s sofa. She made a mental note to take care, to keep her eyes open and her wits in ready-for-anything mode.

  As things turned out, she needn’t have worried. Once Barbara let it be known that she was there under false pretences, that this really wasn’t about purchasing a £25,000 focal point for a state-of-the-art flat along the river in Wapping, Bathsheba Ward was less than pleased and didn’t try to hide it.

  “I’ve been contacted already about this matter,” she said. They were at a conference table in her office where, in advance of their meeting, she’d spread out photographs of some of her work in situ. It was dead gorgeous and Barbara told her as much before she dropped the unfortunate bomb of her real reason for this call upon the furniture designer’s valuable time. “That private detective person . . . the one my sister’s whatever-he-is hired to find her . . . ? I told him I have no idea where Angelina is or with whom she might currently be cohabitating because, believe me, she will be cohabitating with someone. She might have moved in next door to me, and I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen her in years.”

  “Expect you’d recognise her, though,” Barbara said sardonically.

  “Being identical twins doesn’t extend to having identical thoughts, Sergeant . . .” She looked at Barbara’s card, which she held in manicured fingers. As she’d spoken, she’d moved to her desk upon which sat photographs of a beaky-faced man who was, presumably, her husband, along with photographs of two young adults—one with a toddler in arms—who were, also presumably, her stepchildren from that beaky husband’s first marriage. “. . . Havers,” Bathsheba finished, reading Barbara’s surname from the card. The card itself she tossed on the desk.

  “She’s managed to disappear without leaving a trail,” Barbara told her. “All her belongings’re gone, and so far we’ve not been able to trace how she got her gear to wherever she got it, along with Hadiyyah’s.”

  “Perhaps she got her ‘gear’”—Bathsheba made the word sound like cow dung—“over to Oxfam, deposited it there, and waved farewell to it.
She’d hardly leave a trail of shipping slips if she’d done that, wouldn’t you say?”

  “A possibility,” Barbara admitted. “But so is having someone’s assistance, along the lines of she-doesn’t-ship-it-but-someone-else-does. We’ve also not been able to find any means of her leaving Chalk Farm. Public transport, taxi, minicab. It’s like she beamed herself out of the place. Or someone else did the beaming for her.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t be me,” Bathsheba said. “And if you’ve tracked no one else who helped her, perhaps you ought to be thinking something a little more ominous than you’ve been thinking.”

  “Such as?”

  Bathsheba pushed her chair away from her desk. Both the desk and the chair were her own pieces: sleek and modern with gorgeous bits of various unnameable woods worked into them. She herself was sleek and modern as well, with the same long and light hair as her sister, with a fashion sense that accentuated everything about her that was trim and lithe. She looked like someone who spent hours sweating in the company of a personal trainer. Even her earlobes looked as if they’d been given marching orders as to what kind of workout would keep them as youthful and vigorous as possible. She said, “I do wonder if you or that man—the detective man—might have given thought to Angelina and her daughter having been disposed of.”

  It took a moment for Barbara to work out what Bathsheba meant, so casually had the remark been made. “You mean murdered? By whom, exactly? There wasn’t a single sign of violence in the flat, and she’d left a message on my answer machine that didn’t sound like someone was forcing her into pretending she was doing a runner while in reality holding a knife to her throat.”

  Bathsheba raised her well-developed shoulders. “I have no explanation for that message, obviously. But I do wonder . . . Everyone seems so intent upon believing him, you see.”

  “Who?”

  Bathsheba’s eyes—blue and large like her sister’s—opened wider. “Surely you don’t need me to spell out . . . ?”

  “Are you talking about Azhar? Doing what? Murdering Angelina and Hadiyyah—his own daughter, for God’s sake—and then putting on a BAFTA-worthy performance of grief for the past five weeks? What’d he do with their bodies, in your vision of how things happened?”

  “Buried them, I’d suppose.” She smiled ghoulishly. “You do see how it could have been, I hope. None of us—her family—have seen Angelina in years. We wouldn’t know from Adam or Eve if she went missing. All I’m suggesting is what might be possible.”

  “All you’re suggesting is something ludicrous. Have you met Azhar?”

  “Once. Long ago. Angelina brought him to a wine bar to show him off. She was like that, my sister. Always wanting me to know what she’d managed to accomplish, what made her absolutely unique. To be frank, she hated being a twin as much as I did. Our parents shoved twinship down our throats. I daresay even today they’re not entirely sure of our names. To them, we were always ‘the twins.’ Sometimes we got lucky and became ‘the girls.’”

  Barbara hadn’t missed the past tense, and she pointed this out. Any implication made no difference to Bathsheba Ward. She said in turn that she hadn’t seen her sister since a day in a South Kensington Starbucks where they’d met in order that Angelina might triumphantly announce her pregnancy ten years earlier.

  “There was no further point after that,” Bathsheba said. “My sister would have trotted out that child or the fact of that child every time we spoke.”

  “No kids of your own?” Barbara asked shrewdly.

  “Two, as you can see from the pictures.” She indicated the frames on her desks.

  “Look a bit old to be yours.”

  “Children don’t necessarily need to be . . . how do they put it? . . . the fruit of one’s own loins.”

  Barbara wondered if women had loins. She also wondered what the bloody hell “loins” were when it came to Homo sapiens. But she recognised the inherent uselessness of leading their conversation in that direction. The only topic remaining to them was Bathsheba’s reference to her sister fleeing Azhar into the arms of another man. Did Bathsheba have anything she wished to offer on that front? Barbara asked. Did Bathsheba know, for example, that Angelina had left Azhar once before, spending a year away from both him and Hadiyyah in a location that they had referred to as Canada but that might, in reality, have been anywhere on the planet?

  “I’m not surprised” was Bathsheba’s airy reply.

  “Why not?”

  “I assume things between her and whatever-his-name-is became a little too tame for Angelina. So if you’re looking for her now and you’ve convinced yourself that he didn’t harm them, then look among men who are different from Angelina, in the way whatever-his-name-is is different.”

  Barbara wanted to grab Bathsheba by the throat and recite Taymullah Azhar into her face, forcing her to say the name till she was clear on the fact that he was actually a human being and not some sort of unmentionable social disease. But really, what would have been the point? Bathsheba would only have found another way to indicate her distaste for Azhar, probably choosing his ethnicity or his religion as likely areas for her aversion. Barbara also wanted to point out to her that Mr. Beaky Face didn’t look like such a prize if it came to that. At least her sister has chosen a handsome man, she wanted to sneer. But instead, she politely said, “Azhar. Your sister calls him Hari. That should be easy to remember, eh?”

  “Azhar. Hari. Whatever you like. My point is that Angelina was always interested only in men who were—who are—different from her.”

  “In what way?”

  “In any way. Different from her makes her distinct. She’s spent her life trying to be just that: distinct. I don’t blame her for that. Our parents expected us to be close. Devoted, capable of reading each other’s mind, whatever you like. We were dressed identically and forced into each other’s company from the day we were born. ‘Celebrate your twinship’ was how my mother put it. ‘Other people would kill to have an identical twin.’”

  Barbara wondered if other people would also kill because they had an identical twin. The street of Angelina’s potential murder ran in both directions, after all. If Azhar had supposedly disposed of his lover and their daughter, why could Bathsheba Ward not have done the same thing to her sister and niece? Stranger things had happened in the great city of London.

  “You sound fairly unworried about her,” Barbara said. “About your niece as well.”

  Bathsheba smiled with perfect insincerity. “You seem intent upon the fact that Angelina’s alive. I’m merely accepting your judgement. As to my niece, I don’t know the child. And none of us intend to get to know her.”

  BOW

  LONDON

  Dwayne Doughty was the next final stone because, Barbara had to admit, she couldn’t take no and if there was the slightest chance that she didn’t have to take no, she was going to go for that chance like Ophelia being tossed a rope from a bridge on the off chance she was having second thoughts as she floated by. So at day’s end, she drove to Bow.

  The area hadn’t improved since she’d last seen it, although there were more people along the pavements. In the Roman Road, the Roman Café and Kebab was doing a bang-up business, and the halal grocer appeared to be bagging goods as fast as housewives in chadors managed to fling them in the vicinity of the till. The money store was closing for the day, but the door that led to Dwayne Doughty’s office was still unlocked, so Barbara helped herself. She entered and at the top of the stairs, she met Doughty in conversation with an androgynous being who turned out to be Em Cass, the woman Azhar had said Doughty employed. Em Cass and Doughty exchanged what looked to Barbara like a wary glance when they clocked Barbara’s presence. They acted a wee bit like guilty lovers, which Barbara supposed they might well have been. Until Doughty made it clear that his companion was a woman by calling her Emily, Barbara reckoned he was the sort of man who like
d a bit of boy flesh on the side. Turned out she was wrong on all fronts. They’d been discussing a triathlon along with the intentions of some bloke called Bryan to accompany Em with stopwatch, mineral water, and power bars. Doughty was finding this amusing. Em Cass was not.

  They were leaving for the day, Doughty told Barbara. He did wish she’d rung first for an appointment. As it was, he needed to be off and so did Em.

  Barbara said, “Yeah. Sorry. Should have but I was in the area and thought I’d take a chance. Just five minutes of your time?”

  They both looked supremely doubtful about all of it: from being in the area to five minutes of their time. One wasn’t generally in the area of the Roman Road, and nothing they did took only five minutes unless it was to endorse a client’s cheque, which could be accomplished in far less time.

  “Five minutes?” Barbara repeated. “I swear.” She brought out her chequebook. A dead moth fell out of it. Not a good sign, but Doughty overlooked this. “I’ll pay, of course.”

  “This is about . . . ?”

  “Same as before.”

  They exchanged another look. Barbara wondered again. Private eyes were notorious for all sorts of skulduggery. They were also known for providing the fruits of their labour to various tabloids round the capital. If Doughty or his assistant had been into this game, Barbara wondered was there something they didn’t want her to know.

  Doughty sighed and said, “Five minutes.” He opened the office and ushered her inside.

  Barbara said, “What about . . . ?” in reference to his employee.

  “Triathlon training is triathlon training,” he told her. “You’ll have to make do with me.”