Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “Barbara knows the family.”

  “Lord. No wonder she wanted to go.”

  Lynley didn’t really want to hear any justification for Barbara Havers’s behaviour, especially as he was the one who appeared to be paying the price for it. He said, “Perhaps. Nonetheless, I could have done without being sent over to mediate between the parents and the Italian police.”

  “Will that be your job?”

  “It’s likely.”

  “Should I wish you good luck? I’m not sure of the proper form.”

  “It hardly matters,” but what he wanted to say was, “You might tell me you’ll miss me,” although he had an idea this might not be the case.

  “When do you leave for Italy, then?”

  “As soon as I can arrange the details. Or Charlie can, actually. He’s working on it now.”

  “Ah. I see. Well.” Still there was no disappointment in her words or her tone, despite his wish to hear this from her. He tried to come up with a reason for this that avoided the cold reality of her simply not being disappointed at all.

  He said, “Daidre . . .” and then wasn’t sure where else to go with the conversation.

  She said, “Hmm?”

  “I suppose I should let you be off, then. Sounds as if you’ve got something on this afternoon.”

  “Darts tournament,” she said. “After work. Down the local pub. Well, not local to my home but local to the zoo.”

  Her home was a place he had not seen. He tried to make nothing of this, but he knew better than to do so. “You plan to scour the floor with your opponents, I daresay. I recall how wily you are when it comes to darts.”

  “You fell into my scheme,” she replied lightly. “As I recall, you and I had a bet, with the loser doing the washing up after dinner. No worries in this instance, though. There’s no washing up to be done and my opponent knows we’re evenly matched.”

  He wanted to ask who her opponent was, but he couldn’t bring himself to be so pathetic. So he said, “I hope to see you when I’m back from Italy.”

  “Do ring me when you return.”

  That was that. He rang off and stood looking at the phone. He was in the drawing room of his home in Eaton Terrace, a formal room with pale-green walls and creamy woodwork, with a gilt-framed portrait of his paternal great-grandmother hanging above the fireplace. Dressed in white in an impressionistic rose garden, she stood in profile, a study in Edwardian lace and Edwardian good manners, and she seemed to gaze into a distance that she wished to encourage him to see. Look elsewhere, Thomas, she was saying to him.

  He sighed. On a table between the two windows that looked out into Eaton Terrace, his wedding picture with Helen still stood in a silver frame. In it she laughed at his side among a small group of their friends. He picked it up and saw that in it, rapt and lucky, he gazed upon her.

  He set the picture down and turned from it. Denton, he saw, was in the doorway.

  Their gazes met, held, and then Charlie looked away. He said lightly, “Got your gear out. Few things that you’ll need but you better check through it. I looked up the weather. It’ll be warm. Printed your boarding pass. Gatwick to Pisa. You’ve a car at the airport.”

  “Thank you, Charlie,” Lynley said. He headed in the direction of the stairs.

  “Anything . . .” Denton hesitated.

  “Anything?” Lynley said.

  Denton’s gaze flicked over to the table where Helen’s picture was, then back to Lynley. “Anything I should set about while you’re gone?”

  Lynley knew what Charlie Denton meant. He knew what he thought. It was the same thing everyone thought, but it was also the one thing he himself could not yet bear to address.

  He said lightly, “Not that I can think of, Charlie. Just carry on as usual.” It was, of course, what they both did best.

  BOW

  LONDON

  The private detective was Barbara’s only hope once Isabelle Ardery handed the case over to Lynley. Barbara was burning over this and burning over her failure to anticipate what Ardery’s move would be once the story hit The Source, but she knew there was no point in crying over the milk on the floor. The only point was Hadiyyah. Lynley would do what he could to help find her, within the parameters of Italian law and British-Italian police diplomacy. But both of these items were going to hobble him, and to expect Barbara to remain in London at the beck and call of John Stewart without doing something to assist in the search for the girl was lunacy on the superintendent’s part.

  So she went to the only place she reckoned help was available, and that was back to Dwayne Doughty and his androgynous assistant Em Cass. She phoned in advance this time. She made a regular appointment for the end of that day. Doughty didn’t sound like a man who was going to start laying down the palm fronds in welcome, so she made sure to add the fact that she wished him to have his retainer figured out in advance as she intended to hire him.

  He’d begun with, “Terribly sorry and all that, but I don’t know that I have the time—”

  She countered with, “Double the retainer,” which had convinced him to have another think on the topic.

  They met not in his office this time but not too far away at a rather trendy pub called the Morgan Arms in Coborn Road. There were tables outside, and at them pub-going smokers hunched in the cool evening air. Barbara would have joined them, but she found that Em Cass was the clean-living type. Apparently passive smoking and success in triathlons did not mix.

  They went inside. Barbara took out her chequebook. Doughty said, “Let’s keep the cart and the horse in their respective positions,” before he went to the bar and ordered drinks. He came back with a pint of Guinness for himself, an ale for Barbara, a virtuous mineral water for Em, and a thoughtful four bags of crisps. These he tossed on the table that Barbara had chosen, in a far corner, conveniently distant from a hen party on the other side of the pub, eight women who appeared determined to build up a significant head of prematrimonial steam.

  Barbara had no preamble to offer the private detective and his assistant. She said only, “Hadiyyah’s been kidnapped.”

  Doughty opened the crisps, one packet at a time. He spilled them onto a napkin that he’d unfolded upon the table. He said, “This is news because . . . ?”

  “I don’t mean originally,” Barbara told him. “I don’t mean by her mum. I mean now. A few days ago. She was in Italy and she’s been kidnapped.” She sketched in the details: Lucca, the market, Hadiyyah’s disappearance, Angelina Upman, Lorenzo Mura, and their arrival in Chalk Farm. She left out the bits about Ilford and the brouhaha with Azhar’s legal family. Mostly, she didn’t want to think about them.

  “Angelina thinks Azhar took her. That’s why she came to London. She thinks he found her in Tuscany, took her, and has her stowed somewhere.”

  “And she thinks this why?”

  “Because no one saw anything. There was a crowd of people—it was in the middle of a market—and no one saw Hadiyyah get snatched. So Angelina thinks Hadiyyah wasn’t snatched. She thinks Azhar knew she’d be in the market. She thinks he waited there. She thinks Hadiyyah saw him and went with him. At least that’s what I suspect she thinks since mostly she was just screaming.”

  “The child?”

  “Angelina. ‘You’ve taken her, where is she, where have you put her, I want her back,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

  “And no one saw a thing?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “These same people in the market, then, also didn’t witness what would have been, I expect, quite a reunion between a nine-year-old and the father she hasn’t seen in five months? I mean, had Mr. Azhar taken her.”

  “You’re getting the point,” Barbara said. “I like that about you.”

  “How was he supposed to have managed all this?” Doughty asked.

  “No clue, but Angelina w
asn’t thinking straight. She was in a panic—who wouldn’t be?—and all she wanted was Hadiyyah back. The Italian coppers haven’t made much progress in finding her.”

  Doughty nodded. Em Cass took a sip of her mineral water. Barbara downed some ale and a handful of crisps. Not salt-and-vinegar—her favourite—but they would do. She was suddenly ravenous.

  Doughty shifted his weight in his chair and looked to the windows that gave a view of the people at the tables outside on the pavement. He said, as he inspected them, “Let me ask you this, Miss Havers. How can you be sure the professor didn’t take his daughter? I’ve been in the midst of these sorts of disputes in the past, and be assured about one thing: When it comes to marital breakups and children—”

  “This isn’t a marriage.”

  “We can forego the niceties. They’ve been, for all intents and purposes, man and wife, no? So when it comes to relationship breakups in which children are involved, anything can happen and it usually does.”

  “How is he supposed to have snatched her? And what was he supposed to be thinking? That he could grab Hadiyyah, bring her back to London, and not find Angelina on his doorstep the very next day? And how was he supposed to have found her in the first place?”

  Em Cass spoke. “He could have hired an Italian detective, Miss Havers, much the same way he hired Dwayne. If he somehow found out on his own that Angelina had gone to Italy . . . or if he suspected it . . . Like Dwayne says, in this kind of situation, anything can happen.”

  “Right. Whatever. Okay. Let’s say somehow Azhar sussed out she was in Italy. Let’s say that he then unearthed an Italian private detective. Let’s even say that detective—God only knows how . . . perhaps going door-to-door all over the bleeding country—actually found Hadiyyah and reported this to him. That doesn’t change the fact that Azhar was in Germany when Hadiyyah was taken. He was at a conference and there’re going to be a few hundred people, not to mention a hotel and an airline, who can confirm that.”

  Doughty looked interested at last. “Now that’s a very nice detail. That’s something checkable and you can rely upon the coppers checking it. The Italians . . . Let’s face it. The country looks disorganised as hell to an outsider, but I expect they know what they’re doing when it comes to mounting an investigation, don’t you?”

  The fact was Barbara didn’t at all have that expectation of the Italian police. She barely had that expectation of their own police. So she said, “Brilliant. Yes. Whatever in a teacup. But I need your help, Mr. Doughty, no matter what the Italian rozzers are up to.”

  Doughty shot a look at Em Cass. Neither of them said, “What kind of help?” This wasn’t a good sign, but Barbara forged on.

  “Look. I know this kid. I know her dad. I need to do something. You get that, yes?”

  “Perfectly understandable,” Doughty said.

  “What about the UK police, then?” Em Cass fixed her gaze on Barbara, and the blandness of her expression told the tale that Barbara would have preferred to go unspoken.

  There was a little silence among them. Across the room, the hen party was heating up. The bride-to-be had mounted the banquette and was squashing her face against the window. She was shouting, “This’s my las’ chance, lads!” with her veil askew and the red L on her back descending to her arse as if it and not she were embarking on matrimony.

  “The Met’s sent a DI over to liaise,” Barbara said. “He’s called DI Lynley. He’s going over today.”

  “Intriguing that you should be in possession of this bit of knowledge.” Doughty munched on his crisps. He looked at Em Cass. They both looked steadily at Barbara.

  She downed some ale. “All right. I could have given you some other name—called myself Julie Blue-eyes or whatever—and I didn’t,” she pointed out. “I knew it would take you less than five minutes to suss out I’m a cop. That has to count for something.”

  “I half expect you to say ‘trust me’ next,” Em Cass said dryly.

  “I am saying that! I’m not here with a wire in my knickers to play-act desperation and catch you doing something you shouldn’t. I know you lot cross over the line now and then, and I don’t bloody care. Fact is, I want you to cross the line if you need to. I need to find this kid, and I’m asking for your help because my colleague—the DI?—he’s not going to do what you lot can do because he won’t have the resources over there to do it. He’s also not going to be keen on breaking any laws. That’s not who he is.” Implying, of course, that breaking laws was who she was so she’d not be saying word one about any law-breaking that Doughty and Em Cass did.

  Nonetheless, Doughty said, “You’ll need someone else. We don’t break—”

  “What I’m saying is I don’t care if you break laws or not, Mr. Doughty. Spy on anyone you need to spy on. Go through their rubbish. Hack into their mobiles and their Internet accounts. Take over their email. Pretend to be their mothers. Pretend to be them. I’ve given you more than one angle to pursue and I need you pursuing it. Please.”

  They didn’t ask why she wasn’t pursuing it herself, so Barbara didn’t have to tell them the unpalatable truth: that once again and through her own fault, her job was on the line. With Ardery watching her and John Stewart throwing work at her and two cases now his responsibility, her ability to do anything other than keep her nose on the grindstone of her regular employment was not only severely curtailed; it was also virtually nonexistent. Employing Doughty and his assistant was at least something she could do. This meant, at least, that she wouldn’t have to wait for word from Lynley, who probably wasn’t going to keep her in the picture anyway because, she knew, he was displeased with her, because she was the reason he’d been sent out of the country at all.

  Doughty sighed. He said, “Emily?” and seemed to defer to his assistant.

  She said, “We’ve nothing pressing on at the moment. Just the divorce case and that bloke claiming compensation for the back injury. I suppose there’re a few things we can check. This Germany business would top the list.”

  “Azhar didn’t—”

  “Hang on.” Doughty pointed a meaningful finger at Barbara. “For starters, you’d be keeping an open mind about everything, Miss . . . Oh, nonsense. May I call you what you are? Detective Sergeant, isn’t it, Em?”

  “Is,” Em acknowledged.

  “So you’d be wise to prepare yourself for anything, Detective Sergeant. Question is, are you ready for that?”

  “For anything?” Barbara clarified.

  Doughty nodded.

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  BOW

  LONDON

  They walked out of the pub together, but on the pavement they went their separate ways. Dwayne Doughty and Em Cass watched the ill-dressed detective heading towards the Roman Road. When she was out of sight, he and Em ducked back into the pub. This was completely at Emily’s urging.

  “This is a bad idea,” she said. “We don’t work for cops, Dwayne. That’s a road to a place we don’t want to go.”

  He didn’t entirely disagree with her. But she wasn’t seeing the complete equation. “Checking an alibi in Berlin . . . Child’s play, Emily. And one wants the child to be found, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “That can’t be in our hands. There’re all sorts of limitations on what we can do, and with Scotland Yard breathing down our neck—”

  “She admitted her position there. She could have lied. That indicates something.”

  “It indicates bollocks. She knew we’d check on her the moment she gave her name when she first came to see us with the professor. She’s not stupid, Dwayne.”

  “But she is desperate.”

  “So she’s in love with him. So she’s in love with the girl.”

  “And love, as we know, is quite wonderfully blind.”

  “No. You are. You haven’t asked for my vote on the matter, but you’re going to get it.
I say no. I say we tell her ta-ta and we wish you the best but there’s nothing we can do to help you. Because that’s the truth. There’s nothing, Dwayne.”

  He considered her. Emily rarely spoke with passion. She was far too cool a customer for that. She didn’t command the kingly salary he paid her because she was a woman who ever got caught up in the emotion of the moment. But she was passionate about this, which told him the extent to which she was also worried about it.

  “Really, there’s nothing to be concerned about,” he told her. “And this allows us to keep our eyes on the ball. Our job remains what it’s always been: information providers. Whether we provide the information for the coppers or for Joe Ordinary off the street, it’s no matter to us. What people do with what we give them is their business, not ours, once we hand it over.”

  “Do you actually think anyone’s likely to believe that?”

  He eyed her and smiled his long, slow smile. “Come along, Em. Where’s the trouble in this? I’m happy to listen if you care to point it out.”

  “I have. The Metropolitan police. That woman: Sergeant Havers.”

  “Who, as you yourself have said, has come to us driven by love. And love, as I myself pointed out, is wonderfully—”

  “Blind. All right. Brilliant.” Emily stepped back outside, positioning herself downwind of the smokers. “Where do you want to begin?” she asked Doughty dully. She wasn’t happy, but she was a pro. And she, like him, had bills to pay.

  “Thank you, Emily,” he said. “We do this German business as arranged. But in advance and for safety’s sake, we do phone records. A very clean sweep.”

  “What about computers?”

  He gave her a look. “Going deep with computers means we bring in Bryan.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Give me notice so I can vacate the office.”

  “I will do. But really, you should just submit to him, Em. Things would go much more swimmingly if you did.”

  “You mean he’d do as I say when you need him to do it.”

  “There are worse things than having a man like Bryan Smythe under your thumb.”