Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  Between where she stood and where he drove, the air seemed to shimmer in the heat. It made her feel indolent, and although she knew she had to get Carina out of the sunken garden, up to the rooms above the barn, and into dry clothes before his arrival, somehow she couldn’t make herself move.

  So it was that she saw it all when it happened. He missed a sudden hairpin turn in the road. Engine roaring and gears changing frantically, he shot through the insubstantial crash barrier. He hung there in the sky for a moment. Then the car disappeared as it dropped and dropped down the side of a cliff into whatever lay below: boulders, gnarled trees, a dried riverbed, another villa tucked away from sight. She did not know. She only saw that he was there one moment, charging into the hills, and then in the next moment he was gone.

  She stood there unmoving, waiting for what would come next: perhaps the sound of impact or a fireball shooting into the sky. But nothing happened. It was as if the hand of God had struck her cousin down in an instant, his soul being called into the presence of the Almighty to account, finally, for his sin.

  She returned to the sunken garden, standing above it and watching the child below. The sunlight glinted off her lovely hair, and through the spray from the fountain, she looked like someone behind a veil. Seeing her thus, joyful and open and trusting, it was difficult to believe that she, too, bore the stain of sin. But so she did and so that sin had to be dealt with.

  27 April

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  When Barbara walked into Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery’s office, she knew something had gone wrong with the master plan of lies that she’d come up with to get away from the Met’s offices five days earlier in order to attempt to deal with the Sayyid crisis. She reckoned that at the eleventh hour, Mrs. Flo had developed feet of ice in the matter of confirming the “fall” taken by one of the residents of her care home in Greenford. But as it turned out, that good woman had taken the decision that only an elaboration of the story of the fall would do to persuade Barbara’s superior officers that everything was on the complete up-and-up regarding Barbara’s absence from beneath DI John Stewart’s spatulate thumb.

  Stewart was in the super’s office as well. He sat on one of the two chairs in front of Ardery’s desk, and he turned to give Barbara a barely disguised contemptuous once-over when she joined them. The superintendent herself was standing, looking trim, fit, and well turned out as always. Beyond her shoulders, the windows offered a grey day promising more rain to confirm what that poet had said about the month of April.

  Isabelle Ardery nodded as Barbara entered. She said, “Sit,” and Barbara gave idle thought to barking doglike in response. But she did as she was told. Ardery then said, “Tell her, John,” and she placed both manicured hands on the windowsill, leaning against it and listening as Stewart recited what Barbara quickly saw was her likely professional epitaph.

  “My flowers for your mother were undeliverable, as it happens,” Stewart said. And didn’t the bloody bastard look pleased about this, Barbara thought. “The hospital in question had no record of a patient with her name. I’m wondering, Sergeant . . . Has she an alias, perhaps?”

  “What’re you yapping on about?” Barbara asked him tiredly, although her mind started energetically darting round possibilities like a pinball scoring a multitude of points.

  For the purposes of dramatic effect, Stewart had brought a notebook along, and he flipped it open in his palm. “Mrs. Florence Magentry,” he announced. “An ambulance company called St. John’s, she thinks, although it could have been St. Julian’s, St. James’s, St. Judith’s, or any number of sanctified names beginning with J. At any rate, it was Saint Somebody, or so she claims despite the fact that, as it happens, there is no such creature. Next: Accident and Emergency at the local hospital and a broken hip that wasn’t a broken hip at all but seemed to be so, so she was only in for an hour or a day or two or three but who really knows because the fact of the bloody matter is that she never had a sodding fall at all.” He snapped the notebook closed. “Do you want to explain what the hell you’re up to when no one’s given you leave to—?”

  “That’ll do, John,” Ardery said.

  Taking the offensive was her only option. Barbara said to Stewart “What is it with you? You’ve got a robbery and murder case on, and you’re using your time to decide whether my poor mum . . . ? You’re outrageous, you are. As it happens, she was taken by a private ambulance to a private clinic because she has her own private insurance, and if you’d decided to sodding ask me about it instead of creeping round in the background like a third-rate housebreaker—”

  “And that’ll do as well,” Ardery said.

  But Barbara’s heart was pounding. No matter what she said, Stewart was going to be able to check her story, and her only hope was to make him look worse for his compulsion to put the thumbscrews to her than she looked doing a scarper from work because she’d had to deal with that damn louse Mitch Corsico and his determination to speak to Azhar’s son, Sayyid.

  She said to Ardery, “He’s been like this since you assigned me to him, guv. He’s got me under some bloody microscope like I’m an amoeba he wants to study. And he’s using me as a sodding typist.”

  “Are you actually trying to put the spotlight on me?” Stewart demanded. “You’re out of order, and you damn well know it.”

  “You deserve the sodding spotlight on you and you’ve needed it on you since your wife walked out and you decided to punish every female on earth because of it. And who the hell could blame the poor woman? Life with you would make anyone prefer life on the street with a dog.”

  “I want her written up for this,” Stewart said to Ardery. “I want it in her file and then I want a CIB1—”

  “Both of you are out of order,” Ardery snapped. She walked to her desk, jerked the chair out, and sank into it, looking from Stewart to Barbara to Stewart again. “I’ve had enough of whatever it is between the two of you. It stops here, in this office, this very minute or you’re both facing disciplinary action. Now get back to work. And if I hear anything more about you”—this to Barbara—“acting in any way that appears remotely dodgy, you’ll be facing not only disciplinary action but what follows it. Got it?”

  Stewart’s thin lips creased themselves into a smile. But it vanished soon enough when Ardery went on. “And you,” she said to him, “are an officer in charge of a robbery and murder enquiry so act like an officer in charge of a robbery and murder enquiry. Which, I’d like to remind you, John, means that you assign your people in a manner that utilises their talents and does not appease your need for . . . for whatever the hell it is that you apparently need. Am I being clear?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She picked up the phone, punched in a few numbers, and said in dismissal, “Now for God’s sake get out of here and get back to work.”

  They did the first but paused short of the second. In the corridor, DI Stewart grabbed Barbara’s arm. At his touch, she felt a surge of outrage steam through her veins and she was moments from applying her knee to a place on his body where he’d long remember the encounter. She said, “You bloody get your hand off me or I’ll have you charged with—”

  “You listen to me, you bleeding bovine,” he whispered. “Your move in there was clever as hell. But I’m holding cards you don’t even know about, and when I want to use them, I will. Understand that and act at your own peril, Sergeant Havers.”

  “Oh my God, you knot up my knickers,” Barbara said.

  She walked away, but her mind was like an arguing Greek chorus in her head. Part of it was shrieking to beware, to take heed, to walk the straight and narrow before it was too late. The other part was planning her next move and that part was quickly subdividing itself into the half dozen next moves that were possible.

  Into this mental embroilment, Dorothea Harriman called Barbara’s name. Barbara turned to see the departmental secretary cradling a
telephone receiver in her hand. She said, “You’re wanted at once down below.”

  Barbara cursed quietly. What now? she thought. Down below meant Reception. She had a visitor and was intended to go fetch him. She said, “Who the hell . . . ?” to Dorothea.

  “Reception says it’s someone in a costume.”

  “A costume?”

  “Dressed like a cowboy?” Then Dorothea seemed to twig because Mitchell Corsico had been inside the Met offices before. Her cornflower-blue eyes got round as she said, “Detective Sergeant, it must be that bloke who was embedded—” But Barbara stopped her as fast as she could.

  “I’m on it,” she told Dorothea, and with a nod at the phone, “Tell them I’m on my way down, okay?”

  Dorothea nodded, but Barbara had no intention of heading down to Reception to be seen in the company of Mitchell Corsico. So she ducked into the stairwell a short distance down the corridor, and she took out her mobile and punched in Corsico’s number. When he answered, she was brevity itself. “Get out of here. You and I are finished.”

  “I’ve rung you eight or nine times” was his response. “No reply, no reply? Tsk, tsk, tsk, Barb. I thought a personal appearance in Victoria Street was in order.”

  “What’s in order is for you to sod off,” Barbara hissed.

  “You and I need a word.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “I think it is. So I can remain down here and ask every Tom, Dick, and Sherlock who passes by to fetch you—introducing myself to them along the way, of course—or you can come down and we can have a quick chat. What’s it going to be?”

  Barbara shut her eyes hard, in the hope that this would allow her to think. She had to get rid of the journalist, she couldn’t be seen with him, she was a bloody fool for having used him in the first place, if anyone knew she’d been his snout in this matter of Hadiyyah and her family . . . So she had to get him clear away from the Met, and there was only one way short of killing the bugger.

  She said, “Go to the post office.”

  “What the fuck? Are you hearing me at all, Sergeant? Do you know the damage I could do if you don’t—”

  “Stop being a wanker for thirty seconds. The post office is directly across the street, all right? Go over there and I’ll meet you. It’s either that or you and I are finished because if I’m seen with you . . . You do get the point, don’t you, since you’re using it to threaten me in the first place?”

  “I’m not threatening you.”

  “And I’m your great-grandmother. Now are you going across the street or are we going to argue the finer points of blackmail: emotional, professional, monetary, or otherwise?”

  “All right,” he agreed. “The post office. And I hope you show, Barb. If you don’t . . . Well, you won’t much like what comes next.”

  “I’m giving you five minutes,” she told him.

  “That,” he said, “is all I need.”

  Barbara rang off and considered her options. There were very few in the aftermath of her meeting with Stewart and Ardery. She rubbed her forehead and looked at her watch. Five minutes, she thought. Dorothea could surely cover her for the time it would take to get to the post office, have a word with Corsico, and get back to John Stewart’s incident room.

  She gave the departmental secretary the word.

  “You’re in the ladies’,” Dorothea said cooperatively. “Female troubles, and do you need chapter and verse on what they are, Detective Inspector Stewart?”

  “Ta, Dee.” Barbara hurried for the lifts and made for Reception and, from there, out of the building.

  Corsico was just inside the post office doors. Barbara didn’t wait for him to reveal the purpose of his call upon her. Instead, she marched up to him, grabbed him by the arm, and jerked him over to a vending machine selling postage stamps.

  “Right,” she said. “Here I am at your beck and call, and this is happening once and once only. What do you want? This is our swan song, Mitchell, so make it good.”

  “I’m not here to argue.” He glanced down at her hand, still gripping his arm. She released her hold on him and he took a moment to brush his fingers against the suede of his fringed jacket where she’d left an imprint.

  “Great,” she said. “Nice. Brilliant. So let’s make this good-bye and we can part sadder but wiser with our love unfulfilled.”

  “Actually, that can’t happen quite yet.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “Because I want two interviews.”

  “I don’t bloody care what you want after the Love Rat Dad story, Mitchell.”

  “Oh, I think you need to care. And I think you will. P’rhaps not at this precise moment, but soon.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “What’re you on about?”

  He had a rucksack with him, and from this he pulled out the digital camera she’d seen round his neck at Sayyid’s comprehensive. It wasn’t a palm-size suitable-for-tourist-snaps job, either. It was, instead, a professional model with a large viewing screen. He clicked it on, scrolled, and came up with what he wanted. He turned the camera so that Barbara could see what he’d photographed.

  On the screen was the brouhaha that had occurred in front of Sayyid’s school. The boy and his grandfather were in a tangle, with Barbara and Nafeeza trying to separate them. Mitchell clicked from this to another photo, with Barbara hustling them all into the car. In a third, she was talking through the vehicle’s open window to Nafeeza, and in the background the secondary comprehensive was clearly visible. So were the date and the time on each of the photos, comprising the very moments Barbara was putatively on her way to her mother’s bedside after her tragic fall.

  “What I’m thinking,” Mitchell said, “is that Met Officer Involved with Love Rat Dad has a very nice ring to it. It’s a follow-up story that opens up worlds of additional possibilities, don’t you think?”

  The real issue for Barbara, of course, wasn’t a story in The Source about her “relationship” with Azhar but rather the evidence that she had both lied to her superior officers and disobeyed their orders. But Mitchell Corsico didn’t know this, and Barbara was determined to keep him from finding out. She said, “So . . . what? All I see is an officer from the Met breaking up a family row. What do you see, Mitchell?”

  “I see Sayyid telling me that this ‘officer from the Met’ is his father’s extra little bit on the side. I see a score of follow-up interviews coming from every quarter, or at least the quarter relating to Chalk Farm and everyone in residence at a conversion in Eton Villas.”

  “You actually want to embarrass yourself like that? You don’t have proof of anything, and I swear to God: You run a story like that and the next person you’ll hear from is my solicitor.”

  “For what? Just quoting a furious young boy who hates his dad? Come along, Barb, you know the score. Facts are interesting, but innuendo is what gives a story its charm. Involved is the operative word in the headline. It can mean anything. The reader will decide exactly what all the comings and goings between your two abodes actually mean. You didn’t mention that to me, naughty you. I hadn’t a clue you actually knew these people, let alone that you live within lip-locking distance of Love Rat Dad.”

  Barbara thought feverishly about how to handle the reporter at this point. Temporising seemed the only possibility available to her other than caving in to his demands. If she caved in, though, she knew he had her by the throat. So stalling for time was the only direction in which she could turn.

  She said, attempting to sound defeated, “Who d’you want to interview?”

  “That’s my girl,” he said.

  “I am not—”

  “Yes, yes. Whatever,” he agreed. “I want one heart-to-heart with Nafeeza. And then a follow-up with Taymullah Azhar.”

  Barbara knew that Nafeeza would have her tongue ripped out before she’d talk t
o any reporter. She also knew that Mitchell Corsico was mad as a hallucinating monkey eating plastic bananas if he thought Azhar was going to submit himself to the scrutiny of The Source. But the fact that there appeared to be no end to the reporter’s self-delusion could, she saw, be used to her advantage for at least a day. So she said, “I’ll have to speak to both of them. This will take time.”

  “Twenty-four hours,” he told her.

  “It’ll take longer, Mitchell,” Barbara argued. “Azhar’s in Italy, and if you think Nafeeza’s going to come round quickly to the idea of spilling her guts to you—”

  “That’s what I have to offer,” he said. “Twenty-four hours. After that, it’s the Met and the Love Rat Dad. Your choice, Barb.”

  CHALK FARM

  LONDON

  So she had to make a move. Barbara knew there was no point to making an attempt to convince Nafeeza that talking to The Source was in her best interests. Not only was it not in her best interests to say a single word to anyone representing that piece-of-rubbish-in-newspaper’s-clothing, it was also Barbara’s own use of the tabloid that had started them all down this road to public humiliation in the first place. To take on more of the mantle of responsibility for what The Source was doing to the abandoned family and would next do to the abandoned family should Nafeeza talk to them was something that Barbara wasn’t about to do.

  That left her with Azhar, with convincing Azhar to talk to Corsico in order to defend himself from the attack upon him as the Love Rat Dad who’d deserted wife and children. She would then have to persuade Corsico to accept this compromise of a single interview as the best she could do. She thought she could manage this manoeuvre if she explained to Azhar that her job was virtually on the line. The only question for her was whether she could live with herself after she had done so.

  She hadn’t spoken to Azhar since learning from Dwayne Doughty that all of the information collected by the investigator and his assistant regarding Angelina Upman’s whereabouts had been handed over to him in January. If this was true, it held up to doubt everything the Pakistani professor had said and done from that point forward. And if everything he had said and done from that point forward was one variation or another on a lie, then Barbara wasn’t sure what she would do about that fact or to whom she would give that information.