Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “I thought it would be simple.”

  “Might’ve been. But you should’ve talked to me first. Before, not after. Laying trails? Far easier than erasing them.”

  “You’re supposed to be an expert, Bryan. I pay you what I pay you to be the best.” Doughty heard Emily’s derisive guffaw. He frowned at her. She didn’t need to make the situation worse.

  “I am the best but that means I have the kind of contacts you need in all the places you need them. It doesn’t mean I’m Superman.”

  “Well, you need to become Superman. And you need to do it now.”

  Emily, obviously, could take no more, for she burst out with “This is just great. It’s all made in heaven. I told you this was something we needed to stay away from. Now I’m telling you again. Why won’t you believe me?”

  “We’re in the process of making ourselves as clean as newborns,” Doughty said. “That’s what this meeting is all about.”

  “Have you ever seen a newborn?” Emily demanded.

  “Point taken,” Doughty said. “Bad analogy. Given time, I’ll think of another.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “You don’t have time, Dwayne. And it’s your thinking that got us into this position.”

  SOHO

  LONDON

  Esteban Castro’s dance studio was situated next to a car park at the midway point between Leicester Square and what went for Chinatown. Barbara Havers found it without much difficulty directly after work. Getting to it was more of a challenge, however. It was on the top floor of a six-storey building sans lift, and as she huffed and puffed her way up the stairs to the sound of postmodern music growing ever louder, Barbara gave serious thought to eliminating smoking from her life. Fortunately, as she liked to think of it, she’d recovered her sanity, if not her breath, by the time she got to the translucent half-glass door of Castro-Rourke Dance. So she dismissed the idea of committing herself to tobacco abstinence as the product of a moment’s mere idle thought.

  She entered the dance establishment and found herself in a small lobby replete with posters. These featured both Dahlia Rourke in tutu mode, adopting various exotic positions suggestive of contortion, and Esteban Castro in every mode imaginable: from tight-clad and leaping through the air, to arse-pointed-outward and arm flung upward in a flamenco stance. Other than the decorative posters, the lobby had nothing else in it but a counter on which were spread brochures for various dancing classes. These appeared to run the gamut from ballroom to ballet.

  There was no one in the lobby. From the noise level, though, it seemed that dancing classes were happening on both sides of it, where closed doors led to other rooms. The noise comprised the postmodern music she’d heard on the stairway, which stopped and started and stopped in one of the rooms—broken by a shout of “No, no, no! Does that actually feel to you like a toad experiencing delight and surprise?”—and loud commands of royale! royale!, which came from the other. The nos were spoken by a man, presumably Esteban Castro, so Barbara went for that door and swung it open. No one to announce her? Not a problem, she thought.

  The room she entered was a good-size space with mirrored walls, ballet barres, a row of folding chairs along one side, and a pile of garments—costumes perhaps?—in one corner. In the middle on the smooth hardwood floor stood the man himself, and facing him at the far end of the room were six dancers—male and female—in various leotards, legwarmers, and ballet shoes. They looked abashed, impatient, irritated, weary. When Castro told them to “resume the starting position and feel it this time,” no one looked exactly thrilled by the idea. “He likes the motorcar,” Castro snapped at them, “and you’ve got a plan, all right? Now for God’s sake, you be a toad and you be five foxes so we can get out of here before midnight.”

  Two of the dancers had clocked Barbara at the doorway, and one of them said, “Steve,” to Castro and jerked his head in her direction.

  Castro swung round, took in Barbara, and said, “Class doesn’t start till seven.”

  “I’m not—” she began.

  “And I hope you’ve brought other shoes,” he added. “Doing the foxtrot in those? Not going to happen.” He was, of course, referring to her high-top trainers. He hadn’t yet got a clear glimpse of the rest of her clothing, or he would no doubt have pointed out that drawstring trousers and a tee-shirt reading Celebrating 600 Years of the Bubonic Plague weren’t exactly foxtrot material either.

  Barbara said to him, “I’m not here for a class. You’re Mr. Castro? I need a word.”

  He said, “Obviously, I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Got that in a bucket. So am I.” She heaved her shoulder bag around and dug inside it for her warrant card. She crossed the room to him and let him have as much of a look as he wanted.

  After a moment he said, “What’s this about?”

  “Angelina Upman.”

  His gaze rose from her warrant card to her face. “What about her? I haven’t seen her in ages. Has something happened to her?”

  “Funny you’d go there first,” she noted.

  “Where else am I supposed to go when the cops show up?” He didn’t, apparently, require an answer to this. Instead, he turned to his dancers and said, “Ten minutes, then we’ll go through this one more time.”

  He spoke with no appreciable accent. He sounded like someone born in Henley-on-Thames. When she asked him about this, letting him know she’d done a little looking into a background that had told her he’d been born in Mexico City, he said he’d moved to London when he was twelve, his father a diplomat and his mother a writer of children’s books. It had been important to him to assimilate into the English culture, he said. Accent was part of it as he did not wish to be marked eternally as a foreigner in this place.

  He was very good-looking. Barbara could see what the attraction had been for Angelina Upman. Indeed, she could see what the attraction would be for any woman. He smouldered in the way that Latin men often smouldered, helped along by a three-day growth of beard that made him look sexy instead of what it made most other men look, which was largely unkempt. His hair was dark and thick and so healthy-looking Barbara had to keep herself from touching it. She reckoned other women had the same reaction, and she also reckoned Esteban Castro knew it.

  When they were alone in the room, Castro indicated the folding chairs and walked over to them. He moved as one would expect of a dancer: fluidly and with perfect posture. Like the dancers he’d dismissed, he wore a leotard that went miles to define every muscle on his legs and his arse. Unlike them, he also wore a tight white muscle-man tee-shirt that did much the same for his chest. His arms were bare. So were his feet.

  He sat with his arms on his legs and his hands dangling between them. This gave Barbara a view of his package that she would have preferred not to have, so she moved her own chair to a position that kept his jewels from view. He said without preamble and without waiting to hear the reason for her call upon him, “My wife doesn’t know Angelina and I were involved. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “I wouldn’t place money on that,” Barbara told him. “Women aren’t stupid, as a rule.”

  “She’s not quite a woman” was his reply. “That was part of the problem. Have you spoken to her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s no need. I’ll tell you what you want to know. I’ll answer your questions. But leave her out of this.”

  “‘This’?” Barbara asked.

  “Whatever this is. You know what I mean.” He waited for Barbara to say something. When she gave him no assurance of any kind, he cursed and said, “Come with me.”

  He led the way out of the dance studio and across the lobby. He opened the other door and jerked his head in a way that told her she was to look inside. There she saw Dahlia Rourke with a group of some dozen little girls at the barre. She was attempting to position them gracefully, one arm curved a
bove their heads. It looked hopeless to Barbara. Nice to know, she thought, that there appeared to be no real, natural grace in life. As for Dahlia, she was skeletally thin, more X-ray than human. Perhaps feeling she was being watched, she turned towards the door.

  “Daughter’s a potential for ballet,” Castro said to her, in reference to Barbara. “She wanted a look.”

  Dahlia nodded. Her gaze took in Barbara but it seemed to be without speculation. She gave a hesitant smile directed at them both and then went back to her work with the nation’s future ballerinas. Castro led the way back to his own studio. He closed the door and said, “Her body functions only as a ballerina’s. Nor is she interested in its functioning as anything other than a ballerina’s.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning she ceased being a woman some time ago. That’s largely why Angelina and I became involved.”

  “Are there other reasons, then?”

  “Have you met her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know. She’s lovely. She’s passionate. She’s alive. That’s very appealing. Now what the hell is going on and why are you here?”

  “Have you been out of the country in the last month?”

  “Of course not. I’m in the middle of choreographing Wind in the Willows. How could I possibly leave? And let me repeat: What the hell is going on?”

  “No quick trip for a weekend in the sun somewhere?”

  “Like where? Spain? Portugal?”

  “Italy.”

  “Of course not.”

  “What about the wife?”

  “Dahlia’s doing Giselle with the Royal Ballet. And she’s got her classes here. She has no time for anything other than soaking her feet at home when she isn’t working. So the answer is no and no again and I’m not saying another word until you tell me what the hell is going on, understand?” To emphasise this point, he got to his feet. He strode into the centre of the room and stood there with his arms crossed on his chest and his legs spread. Very manly pose, Barbara thought. She wondered if it was deliberate, full of the knowledge, perhaps, of how to use what he had.

  She said, “Angelina Upman’s daughter was snatched from a marketplace in Lucca, Italy.”

  Castro stared at her. His mind appeared to be coming to terms with this and with what it meant that the police had come calling upon him. He said, “And what? D’you think I did it? I don’t know her daughter. I never met her daughter. Why the hell would I want to snatch her?”

  “Everything has to be checked out, which means everyone whose life touches Angelina’s has to be checked out. I know she dropped you without a word, just disappeared from your life. You might have taken a bit of offence at that. You might have wanted to do something to smack her round a bit—figuratively speaking. You might have wanted to play mind games with her the way she played mind games with you.”

  He laughed shortly. “That’s going nowhere, Sergeant . . . ?” He paused.

  “Havers,” she said. “Detective Sergeant, actually.”

  “Havers,” he said. “Detective Sergeant, actually. She didn’t play mind games. She was here, she was gone, that was it.”

  “And you didn’t wonder where she’d gone off to?”

  “I didn’t have the right to wonder. I knew that and she knew I knew it. Our rules were simple: I wasn’t going to leave Dahlia for her. She wasn’t going to leave Azhar for me. She’d disappeared once before for a year, but then she’d returned and she and I more or less resumed meeting. I’ve assumed this is the same sort of thing.”

  “You mean you’ve reckoned she’ll be back.”

  “That’s how it was in the past.”

  “So you knew all along about Azhar? During the entire time you were involved with her?” It was germane to nothing, but Barbara had to know, although she would have preferred it if it made no difference to her.

  “I knew. We didn’t lie to each other.”

  “And Lorenzo Mura, her other lover? What about him? Did you know about him?”

  To this, Castro said nothing. He walked back to the chair on which he’d been sitting. He dropped into it and gave a sharp bark of a laugh. He shook his head. Barbara got the point. He said, “So she was . . . what? Fucking all three of us?”

  “It’s looking that way.”

  “I didn’t know. But I’m not surprised.”

  “Why not?”

  He rubbed his hands through his hair. He squeezed a handful of it as if this would drive more blood to his brain. He said, “It’s this. Some women are driven by excitement. Angelina’s one of them. To settle into life with one man? Where’s the excitement in that?”

  “She appears to be with one bloke now, though: Lorenzo Mura in Italy.”

  “Appears is the operative word, Sergeant. She appeared to Azhar to be with Azhar. Now she appears to him to be with this Italian.”

  Barbara thought about this in light of her knowledge of Angelina. The woman she knew was a consummate actress. She herself had been completely taken in by Angelina’s air of friendliness and her spurious interest in Barbara’s own life. Was it out of the question, then, that she’d managed to bamboozle everyone else around her as well? While Barbara couldn’t quite get her mind round the idea of having it off with three blokes at once, she had to admit that anything was possible. She herself would worry about mistakenly shrieking the wrong name in the height of passion. On the other hand, heights of passion weren’t regular occurrences in her life.

  She said to Castro, “How long did your affair with Angelina last?”

  “Is that important?”

  “Matter of curiosity, I suppose.”

  He glanced at her and then away. “I don’t know. A few years? Two or three? It was always off and on.”

  “How often did you meet when it was ‘on’?”

  “Generally twice a week. Sometimes three.”

  “Where?”

  Another glance. He gave her a speculative head to toe. “What does it matter?”

  “Another point of curiosity. Love to know how the other half lives, if you wouldn’t mind telling me.”

  He looked away, his gaze settling across the room where he was reflected in the mirror. “Anywhere,” he said. “In the back of cars, in a taxi, here in the studio, backstage in a West End theatre, at my place, at her place, at a particular lap dancing club.”

  “That must have been interesting,” Barbara commented.

  “She liked risk. Once we did it in the pedestrian tunnel to Greenwich. She was creative, and I liked that about her. Passion drives her. And what drives passion is excitement and secrecy. That’s who she is. That’s how she is.”

  “Seems to me that she’s the sort of woman a bloke would want to hang on to, then,” Barbara noted. “You know what I mean, I expect. Any time, any place, dressed, undressed, standing, sitting, kneeling, whatever. Don’t blokes get off on that kind of thing?”

  “Some do.”

  “And are you ‘some’?”

  “I’m Latin, Sergeant. What do you think?”

  “I think it would be tough to replace her,” Barbara pointed out, “once she was gone. Could have been a real heartbreaker for you.”

  “No one replaces Angelina,” he said. “And like I told you, I expect her to be back.”

  “Even now?”

  “With her in Italy?”

  “With her living with Lorenzo Mura.”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at his watch and got to his feet, ready to resume rehearsal. “I suppose I should be glad it lasted as long as it did,” he added. “Come to think of it, so should Mura.”

  24 April

  HOXTON

  LONDON

  Bathsheba Ward was next on Barbara’s list. Since the wily cow had lied to her about her sister—and this was looking more and more like a bloody family trait, wa
sn’t it?—Barbara was determined to show her no pity. She was also determined to give DI Stewart and Detective Superintendent Ardery no further ammunition to fire upon her. For both of these reasons, she rose in what for her were the wee hours of the morning and headed to Hoxton. She bought a takeaway coffee on her way and used it to wash down a gratifyingly extra-large bacon butty. She was more than ready to take on the world when she arrived in Nuttall Street, where Bathsheba and her husband Hugo Ward lived in a flat on a very nicely kept estate of buildings fashioned from London brick.

  No one was up and about on the estate when Barbara arrived, but that was no surprise as it was a quarter past six. She found the Ward flat with no trouble at all, and she leaned on the external bell for as long as it took until a man’s voice demanded, “What in God’s name do you want? Do you know what time it is?”

  “New Scotland Yard,” Barbara told him. “I need a word. Now.”

  This was greeted by silence as the man—presumably Hugo Ward—thought this one over. She gave him five seconds and then rang the bell a second time. He buzzed her inside the place without another word, and she made her way to the flat on the second floor.

  Before she could knock, he had the door open. Despite the hour, he was dressed for the day in complete business regalia: three-piece suit, crisp shirt—although hideously two-toned with white collar and blue body—striped tie, and professionally polished shoes. He said, “You’re the police?” in apparent confusion. Barbara reckoned it was her trainers, which apparently were causing him undue concern. She showed him her police identification. He admitted her into the flat.

  “What’s this about?” he asked, not unreasonably.

  “A word with your wife,” Barbara told him.

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Wake her up.”

  “Are you aware of the time?”

  She wore a wristwatch, and she shook it next to her ear and squinted at it.

  “Damn,” she said. “Mickey’s gone belly up.” And to Hugo Ward, “You’ve already mentioned the time, Mr. Ward. And I don’t have a hell of a lot of it to waste. So if you’ll fetch your wife . . . ? Tell her it’s Sergeant Havers, here to share a morning cuppa with her. She knows who I am. Tell her it’s about her trip to Italy last November.”