Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  So he had got to Sayyid, Barbara thought bitterly. Who bloody knew where he’d go next?

  “You’re using that kid to—”

  “He needed to vent. I let him vent. I needed a story. He gave me a story. This is a reciprocal relationship Sayyid and I have. Mutually beneficial. Just like yours and mine.”

  “You and I have no relationship.”

  “But we do. And it’s growing every day.”

  Barbara felt someone tapping skeletal fingers on her spine. “Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

  “For now it means I’m following a story. You might not love the direction it’s heading in. You might want to direct its course a bit. You might need to give me more information in order to do that and when you give me that information—”

  “If, not when.”

  “When,” he repeated, “you give me that information, I’ll be happy to take a look at it or have a listen to it and I’ll decide if it constitutes a train I can climb on. That’s how it works.”

  “How it works—” she began, but he cut in.

  “You don’t get to decide that, Barb. At first you did, but now you don’t. Like I said, our relationship is growing. Changing. Developing. This could be a marriage made in heaven. If we both play our cards right,” he added.

  The skeletal fingers felt as if they would close on her neck and choke off her breath. She said, “Watch yourself, Mitchell. Because I swear to God, if you’re threatening me, you’re going to be bloody sorry about it.”

  “Threatening you?” Corsico laughed with a complete lack of humour. “That would never happen, Barb.” Then he rang off, leaving Barbara standing in Chalk Farm Road with a copy of The Source’s latest edition in one hand, her mobile phone in the other, cars whizzing by as drivers made their way to work, and pedestrians pushing past her as they made their way to the Underground station.

  She knew she ought to join the latter group. She had barely enough time to get to work in order to avoid the baleful eye and meticulous note-taking of DI John Stewart. But she needed an immediate injection of caffeine and pastry into her body in order to be able to cope—let alone think—so she decided that DI Stewart and the assignment he would doubtless give her that day—more transcription please, Sergeant, as we’re having such a time keeping up with the action reports coming in every hour—would have to wait. She ducked into a recently opened establishment called Cuppa Joe Etc. She purchased a latte and an et cetera, which in this case was a chocolate croissant. God knew she was owed both, after the conversation with Corsico.

  When her mobile chimed the opening lines of “Peggy Sue” two bites into the chocolate croissant and three gulps of latte later, Barbara hoped it was Corsico having a change of mind rather than a change of heart since the bloke apparently didn’t own a heart. But it turned out to be Lynley. Barbara’s insides did flip-flops at the possibilities attendant to a phone call from him.

  She answered with, “Good news?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Oh God. No.”

  “No, no,” Lynley said hastily. “Neither good nor bad news. Just some intriguing information that wants checking out.”

  He told her of his meeting with Azhar and his subsequent meeting with Angelina Upman. He told her of the existence of yet another married lover of Angelina’s—in addition to Azhar, this one also in London—being left for Lorenzo Mura.

  “D’you mean she was having it off with this bloke while she and Azhar . . . I mean after she had Hadiyyah by Azhar and . . . I mean once Azhar had left his wife . . . I mean . . . Hell, I don’t bloody know what I mean.”

  Yes, Lynley said to it all. This man was a fellow dancer and choreographer in London with whom Angelina had been involved at the time she met Lorenzo Mura. And at that time, she also was the lover of Azhar and the mother of his child. The bloke was called Esteban Castro, and according to Angelina Upman, she merely disappeared from his life, giving him no word why. One day she was there in his bed, the next day she was gone, having left him—and Azhar—for Mura. His wife was a friend of hers as well. So both of these people would need to be checked out. For perhaps during the brief four months of Angelina’s putative return to Azhar, she’d taken up with Castro again as well, only to leave him another time.

  “But Barbara,” Lynley told her, “this must be done on your own time, not on the Met’s time.”

  “But the guv’ll let me get onto this if you ask her, won’t she?” Barbara said. After all, Lynley and Isabelle Ardery hadn’t parted enemies from their own affair. They were both professionals, after all. DI Lynley had been sent to Italy on a case. If he rang and asked her in his most pear-shaped of I’ve-gone-to-Eton tones—

  “I did ring her,” he said. “I asked her if she might lend me you to look into this end of things in London. She won’t allow it, Barbara.”

  “Because you asked for me,” Barbara said bitterly. “’F you’d asked for Winston, she’d be all over herself to cooperate. We both know that.”

  “We didn’t go in that direction,” he said. “I could have asked for Winston but I assumed you’d prefer to do this, no matter when it had to be done.”

  There was truth in that. Barbara knew she ought to be grateful to Lynley for having recognised how important it was to her to be kept in the loop of what was going on. So she said, “I s’pose. Thanks, sir.”

  He said wryly, “Don’t overwhelm me with your gratitude, Sergeant. I’m not certain I could bear it.”

  She had to smile. “I’m tap-dancing on the tabletop here. If you could only see.”

  “Where are you?”

  She told him.

  “You’re going to be late into work,” he said. “Barbara, at some point you have to stop giving Isabelle ammunition.”

  “That’s what Winston’s been saying, more or less.”

  “And he’s correct. Having a professional death wish isn’t the best of ideas.”

  “Right,” she said. “Whatever. Point taken. Anything else?” She was about to ask him how things were going in the direction of Daidre Trahair, but she knew there was little point in this since Lynley wouldn’t tell her. There were lines between them that nothing on earth could make the bloke cross.

  “There is,” he said. “Bathsheba Ward.” He went on to tell her about the emails that Bathsheba had apparently written at the request of her twin sister, emails purportedly from Taymullah Azhar from University College to his daughter in Italy.

  “That bloody cow lied to me!” Barbara cried in outrage. “She knew all along where Angelina was!”

  “It appears that way,” Lynley told her. “So there’s a chance she might know something more about what’s going on now.”

  Barbara considered this but she couldn’t come up with a way that Bathsheba Ward might be involved in Hadiyyah’s disappearance, much less a reason for it. Unless Angelina herself was involved.

  She said, “How’s Angelina coping, then?”

  “Distraught, as you might imagine. Not well physically either, it seems.”

  “What about Azhar?”

  “Equally so, although far more self-contained.”

  “That sounds like him. I wonder how he’s holding it together. He’s been going through hell since last November.”

  Lynley told her what the Pakistani man was doing with the handbills of his daughter throughout the town and into the villages that surrounded it. “I think it’s giving him a purpose, more than anything else,” Lynley concluded. “To have to sit and wait while your child is missing . . . That’s intolerable for any parent.”

  “Yes. Well. Intolerable describes how it’s been for Azhar.”

  “As to that . . .” Lynley hesitated on his end of the conversation.

  “What?” Barbara asked, feeling trepidation.

  “I know you’re close to him but I do have to ask this. Do w
e know where he was when Hadiyyah disappeared?”

  “At a conference in Berlin.”

  “Are we certain of that?”

  “Bloody hell, sir, you can’t think—”

  “Barbara. Just as everything having to do with Angelina wants looking into, so does everything having to do with Azhar. And with everyone else remotely connected to what’s going on here, so obviously that means Bathsheba Ward as well. Because something is going on here, Barbara. A child doesn’t disappear from the middle of a crowded marketplace with no one knowing a thing about it, with no one seeing anything unusual, with no one—”

  “All right, all right,” Barbara said, and she told him about Dwayne Doughty in Bow and to what end she was employing him. They were in the process of eliminating Azhar as a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance. She’d put him onto Esteban Castro next, the man’s wife, and Bathsheba Ward as well, but only if she couldn’t get to these others on her own because she vastly preferred to have her own fingers on the pulse of an enquiry and not be relying on someone else’s.

  “Sometimes we have to rely on others” was Lynley’s concluding remark.

  Barbara wanted to scoff, but she didn’t. The fact was that of all the officers whom she knew at the Met, relying on others was a characteristic that applied to Lynley least of all.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Barbara passed the day being at the completely cooperative, borderline unctuous, and therefore highly suspect beck and call of DI John Stewart and making sure that Superintendent Ardery saw her obediently, if maddeningly, entering the reports of other officers into the Met’s computer system as if she were a civilian typist and not what she was: a trained officer of the police. She noted that, once or twice, Isabelle Ardery paused in passing from one area to another: observing her, observing Stewart, narrowing her eyes, and frowning as if she disapproved of the cut of Barbara’s hair, which, of course, she did.

  Barbara took a few moments here and there to do a little exploring via the World Wide Web. She discovered the whereabouts of Esteban Castro, currently dancing in a West End revival of Fiddler on the Roof—was there dancing in Fiddler on the Roof? she wondered—as well as teaching dance classes at his own studio in the company of his wife. He was dark-skinned, brooding, smouldering, cropped of hair, heavy-lidded of eye. His publicity pictures showed him in various dancing guises, various poses, and various costumes. He seemed to have the posture and the musculature that went with ballet and the loose body attitude that went with jazz and modern dance. Looking at his pictures, Barbara could see his appeal to a woman looking for excitement . . . or whatever Angelina Upman had been looking for because who the hell knew? She was turning out to be quite the cipher.

  There were references to Esteban’s wife, so Barbara followed the trail to her. Another dancer, she saw. Royal Ballet. Not within shouting distance of prima ballerina but someone had to dance in the chorus, no? One couldn’t exactly have the numero uno swan without the rest of the flock milling round in the back wondering what all the hoo-ha with the hunter was about. She was called Dahlia Rourke—what the hell kind of name was Dahlia? Barbara wondered—and she was pretty in the rather severe and bony way that went with ballet: all cheekbones, scarily visible collar bones, thin wrists, and very little in the hips, all the better to be hoisted around by some bloke in need of a more serious codpiece. She’d be on the scrawny side when it came to playing at the two-backed beast, so perhaps this had driven poor smouldering Esteban into the arms of Angelina. Except, Barbara thought, Angelina herself would probably be no cushion of comfort when it came to the plunge and groan of the clutch and grope. Perhaps Esteban merely liked them skeletal.

  She jotted a few notes and printed a few pictures. She also did some additional looking into Bathsheba Ward. She had a feeling that garnering the slippery cow’s cooperation in anything having to do with Hadiyyah, Angelina, and Azhar was going to be a business requiring careful planning and more than a little arm twisting. But in the case of Bathsheba, the arm twisting was going to have to be subtle or it was going to have to threaten her business.

  Barbara was considering all of the information she’d gathered when her mobile made its timeless declaration of love to Peggy Sue. It was Dwayne Doughty, reporting back on his investigation into the whereabouts of Taymullah Azhar when Hadiyyah had been snatched from the mercato in Lucca.

  “Got you on speaker, if you don’t mind,” Doughty told her. “Em’s here as well.” He went on to tell her that every detail was on the up-and-up. Azhar had indeed been in Berlin. He had indeed attended the conference. He sat in on talks and panel discussions, and he presented two papers as well. The only way he could have also got to Italy and snatched his daughter would have been to have the ability to be in two places at once or to have an identical twin that no one knew about. This last bit was of the ha-ha-ha-we-know-how-unlikely-that-scenario-is variety. But it did bring into the picture something that Barbara wanted to make sure Dwayne Doughty knew.

  “Talking of identical twins,” she said. She gave him the new information about Bathsheba Ward: that she’d apparently known all along where her sister was, that she’d written emails to Hadiyyah in the guise of her father.

  “That explains a few minor details we’ve dug up at our end,” Doughty said. “It seems our Bathsheba trotted off to bell’Italia herself last November round the same time the fair Angelina did her runner. Fascinating point, if you ask me.”

  “Got it in a bucket,” Barbara told him. For if, from the first, Bathsheba had been part of Angelina’s planned escape from London, how terribly difficult would it have been for Angelina to use her sister’s passport for her travel, thereby covering the tracks of her own movements as she made her escape?

  “Our Bathsheba’s cage needs a bit of rattling,” Doughty said. “The question is, dear Sergeant, which of us is best able to do it?”

  BOW

  LONDON

  When Dwayne Doughty rang off, he waited for Em Cass’s inevitable commentary, which was not long in coming. They were in her office—the better to record the conversation with Sergeant Havers—and Em removed her earphones after checking the quality of the recording. She set them on the table with its bank of monitors. Today she was wearing a fawn-coloured man’s three-piece suit cut perfectly to fit her. She complemented it with two-toned shoes—tan and navy—which would have looked all wrong had she not chosen a necktie to balance the ensemble. She dressed like a man better than most men did, Doughty had to admit. No bloke on earth could beat Em Cass in a dinner jacket, that was certain.

  She said to him, “We shouldn’t’ve got involved in this mess, Dwayne. You know it, I know it, and every day we know it better. Soon’s I saw her with the professor, soon’s I reckoned she was a cop, soon’s I traced her to the Met . . .”

  “Hush,” Dwayne told her. “Things are in motion and other things are being handled.”

  As if in demonstration of this latter fact, a knock sounded on the door and it opened. Bryan Smythe slipped into Em Cass’s office. Doughty saw Em roll her desk chair away from the monitors as if this would distance her from the computer wizard. Before he could welcome the sex-starved bloke, Em said, “You said you’d warn me, Dwayne.”

  “The situation’s slightly altered,” Doughty said. “I think you’ve been making that very point.” And to Bryan with a glance at his watch, “You’re early. And we’re meant to be meeting in my office, not here.”

  Bryan blushed unattractively. He was not, alas, a being whose flesh took on rosy hues with any degree of complement to the rest of him. “Knocked over there,” he said in apparent reference to Doughty’s own office. “Heard you over here so . . .”

  “You should’ve waited over there,” Em told him.

  Bryan looked at her. “I wouldn’t’ve seen you, then,” he said frankly.

  Doughty groaned. The man knew nothing about playing women, about the
chat, about anything to do with males and females and how they actually managed to end up in a horizontal position—or, in Em’s case, in any position—exchanging bodily fluids with each other. Doughty did wish that Em Cass would give the poor sod one decent go, though. A mercy bonk wouldn’t kill her, and it might allow Bryan to see that a chasm always existed between one’s dreams and the reality of those dreams coming true.

  “And,” Bryan went on, “wasn’t the point not to use the phones from now on?”

  “We all need disposable mobiles, then,” Emily said shortly. “Use once, toss it, buy another. That way this sort of encounter”—she made the words equate to this visitation of the plague—“wouldn’t need to happen.”

  “Let’s not get hasty,” Doughty said. “We’re not rolling in dosh here, Emily. We can’t be dashing out to buy disposable mobiles right and left.”

  “Yes, we can. Bill it to that slag from the Met.” Em swung round in her chair, her back to them. She pretended to tie her shoe.

  Doughty hazarded an evaluative look at Bryan. The young man wasn’t a permanent employee and they needed his amazing expertise. It was one thing for Emily Cass not to want to bed him. He couldn’t blame her for that. But to insult and estrange him to a degree that he ended up leaving them high and dry . . . ? That couldn’t be allowed.

  He said meaningfully to his assistant, “Bryan’s completely right, Emily. So let’s all get through this intriguing moment of each other’s company without permanent damage, yes?” He didn’t wait to have her cooperation. He said to Bryan, “Where are we?”

  “Phone records all have been dealt with,” Bryan said. “Going out, coming in. But it’s been expensive, more than I thought. Three blokes were involved in it by the time I was finished, and their rates’re going up.”

  “We’ll have to absorb the cost. There’s no way around that that I can see. What else?”

  “Still going after the rest. It takes a delicate hand and a lot of help from insiders. They’re available, but the money involved . . . ?”