Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “Tommy, we all have blind spots,” she said.

  “Barbara doesn’t,” he returned as firmly as he could. “Not in this matter.”

  She looked infinitely sad when she dismissed him with the reply, “I’m not talking about Barbara, Inspector.”

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  He wasn’t as certain about Barbara Havers as his words had been. He wasn’t, in fact, certain about anything. For this reason, he read the activity reports Barbara had turned in during the time she’d worked on John Stewart’s team, and from there he went to spend ten minutes with Harry Streener in SO12. The fact that now two CID officers were interested in SO12’s concerns about one Taymullah Azhar gave Streener pause, but Lynley soothed him with a claim that loose ends were being tied up upon the request of Detective Superintendent Ardery and he was the bloke given the job of tying.

  Thus Lynley discovered the airline tickets to Pakistan in very short order. Thus Lynley also discovered to his dismay that Barbara was withholding information. He didn’t particularly want to think what all of this meant: about Taymullah Azhar and the kidnapping of his daughter as well as about DS Barbara Havers. But he knew he had to speak to Barbara at once. For the reality she needed to face was simple: If he had learned she was withholding information about Taymullah Azhar, it stood to reason that John Stewart would unearth this fact sooner or later and turn it over to Isabelle. At that point Isabelle’s hands would be tied and so would his own be. He couldn’t let that happen.

  He found Barbara at work at her desk, every inch of her announcing that she was nothing less than a nose-to-the-grindstone officer intent upon doing her duty. He said to her quietly, “I need a word, Barbara,” and he could see from her immediate expression of alarm that he’d perfectly telegraphed to her the seriousness of the situation.

  He left her and went to the lifts. When she joined him there, he pushed for the fourth floor. He led her to Peeler’s. Some tables were occupied with the last of the lunchtime crowd, but most were empty. He selected one far away from the remaining hubbub of the place, and by the time they had reached the table, sat, and ordered coffees, he could tell that the sergeant was as rattled as he wanted her to be.

  He said, “John Stewart’s given Isabelle a copy of The Source. There’s a story in it written by Mitch Corsico—”

  “I went to the school, sir,” Barbara told him hastily. “Sayyid’s comprehensive. I’d had word from Corsico that he was intent on interviewing the kid, and I knew Sayyid would spew all sorts of rubbish about Azhar. It wasn’t only about Azhar that I went to the school, though. I knew whatever The Source might print would hurt everyone: his mum, his dad, Sayyid himself. I thought—I believed—I had to—”

  “That’s not what I want to talk to you about, Barbara,” Lynley told her. “John has his reasons for handing over the tabloid, and I expect we’ll discover what they are sooner rather than later. The point is that you’re in this too far, that fact is playing itself out in the paper, and that makes your work suspect.”

  Havers said nothing as their coffee was delivered to the table. When cups and saucers had been laid before them and the coffee poured, she did her business with the milk and sugar and set the spoon aside but didn’t drink. She said, “I hate that bloke.”

  “You’ve reason,” Lynley told her. “I wouldn’t waste the breath to argue otherwise. But you’ve fallen into John’s hands with the way this business of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping has played out. So if you’ve given him any other evidence of your lack of objectivity in the investigation, then I think it’s to your benefit to tell me now before he discovers it and reports it to Isabelle.”

  He waited then. It was, he knew, a do-or-die moment for Havers, one that was going to define what the nature of their partnership was and what, if anything, he could do to help her out of the mess into which she seemed to have got herself. It was obvious to him that DI John Stewart had loosed the dogs of an informal investigation upon her. She had to see that, and she also had to see that only a complete display of the cards she was holding would allow him to develop a strategy on her behalf.

  Come on, Barbara, was what he thought. Move yourself in the right direction.

  At first, he thought she was going to do just that. She said, “Sir, I lied about my mum.” And she told him of a tale she’d spun for Isabelle in order to buy herself time from work. It was about her mother’s having taken a fall. She gave him an account of everything fictitious that had followed the ostensible fall: from the ambulance service to the private hospital and all points in between. She also told him of the use she had made of her time while she was supposed to be engaged in activities assigned to her by DI Stewart. She gave an account of her dealings with Doughty and of her confrontations with that man’s associates. On the surface, it appeared that she was telling him everything. But she said nothing about airline tickets to Pakistan, and Lynley knew this damned her.

  That knowledge felt like a crack in his chest. He hadn’t actually understood until that moment how important his partnership with Barbara was to him. She was at most times a maddening woman whose personal habits set his teeth on edge. But she had always been a decent cop with a very good mind, and God knew he enjoyed her fractious company. And it had to be said: She had also saved his life on a night when he hadn’t cared in the least if that life was going to be taken from him by a serial killer.

  It wasn’t so much that he believed he owed Barbara Havers something, though. It was that he cared deeply for the bloody woman. She was more than a partner. She was a friend. As such, she was like the other people in his small circle of trusted intimates: She was part of the fabric of his life, and he wanted to keep that fabric as whole as he could make it considering the rent that he’d had to repair when Helen had been torn from him.

  She talked on and on. Her monologue had the appearance of the unburdening of one soul to another. He waited and hoped she would be totally frank with him. When she wasn’t, he had no further choice.

  He said at the end of her remarks, “Pakistan, Barbara. You’ve left that out.”

  She took a slurp of her coffee. Then she took three more gulps in rapid succession and looked round Peeler’s for a top-up. She said casually, “Pakistan, sir?”

  He said, “Airline tickets. One in the name of Taymullah Azhar. The other in the name of Hadiyyah Upman. Purchased in March for a flight in July. You’ve not mentioned that, but SO12 was happy to.”

  Her gaze met his. He tried to read her face, but he couldn’t tell if what he was looking at was defiance or chagrin. She said, “You bloody checked my work. I can’t believe that.”

  “SO12 raised questions. In my mind and, more important, in Isabelle’s.”

  “‘Isabelle,’” she repeated. “Not ‘the guv’ and not ‘the superintendent.’ I reckon I know what that means, don’t I?” Her words were bitter.

  “I reckon you don’t,” Lynley told her evenly. “SO12 was my own initiative.”

  They were eyeball to eyeball for a moment. “Sorry, sir,” she said at last, looking away from him.

  “Accepted,” he replied. “As to the airline tickets . . . ? You must see how it’s going to look when it comes out that you withheld this information. If I discovered it with a simple call upon Harry Streener, then it stands to reason that DI Stewart’s going to uncover the very same thing.”

  “I c’n handle Stewart.”

  “That’s where you go wrong. You want to ‘handle’ him and you think you can ‘handle’ him because I daresay you believe the truth will out and the truth will set you free and whatever other aphorisms you’d like to apply to this situation.”

  “The ‘truth’ is he hates me and everyone knows it, including, pardon me, Isabelle, sir. And if we want to look at how she positioned me into working for the bloke so that—as you and I both bloody well know—I’d eventually be kicked back down to uniform when I stepped out
of order, then what I ‘daresay’ is we’re going to see a master plan at work.”

  Lynley had not worked as a homicide detective for years to be unaware that Havers was attempting to wrest control of their conversation in order to divert it away from the more crucial matter onto something she could bear to speak about. So he said, “Pakistan, Barbara. Airline tickets. Let’s get back to that, shall we? Anything else takes us into the realm of speculation and wastes our time.”

  She ran a hand through her chopped-up hair. She said, “I don’t know what it means, all right?”

  “Which part? The fact that he’s holding tickets to Pakistan, the fact that he purchased them in March when he ostensibly didn’t know where his daughter was, or the fact that you’ve withheld this detail? Which part is the part whose meaning you don’t know, Barbara?”

  “You’re cheesed off,” she said. “You’ve a right to be.”

  “Don’t let’s go there. Just answer me.”

  “I don’t know what it means that he bought those tickets.”

  “He told me she’s coming to him in July, Barbara. Spending her holidays with him is the agreement he reached with Angelina once Hadiyyah was safely returned from the convent in the Alps. That first holiday commences in July.”

  “I still don’t know what it means,” she insisted. “I want to talk to him. Until he gets back to London, I won’t know what his intentions are. Until he can explain himself to me—”

  “You’re intent on believing whatever he says?” Lynley asked her. “Barbara, you’ve got to see how mad that is. What you should be doing is what you should have been doing all along: following the money, the money going from Azhar to anyone else.”

  “He would have paid Doughty for his services in looking for Hadiyyah,” she said. “What’s that supposed to prove? The man’s daughter disappeared with her mum, Inspector. The cops here were doing nothing about it. He had no rights and—”

  “The dates of the transfers out of his account are going to tell us volumes,” Lynley said. “You know that very well.”

  “Anything can be argued about dates. Azhar paid Doughty when he’d gathered enough money to pay him. It was more expensive than he’d thought it would be, so he made more than one payment. He had to do it . . . over a period of months, say. And what he paid him for was to hire someone over in Italy to find his daughter. Everything else was on Doughty’s head.”

  “For the love of God, Barbara—”

  “Doughty saw a way to make more money out of this. Hold her long enough to make everyone desperate, make a demand for ransom a few weeks from now, and Bob’s the rest of it.”

  Lynley sat back in his chair. He stared at her, his breath taken with her self-delusion. He said, “You can’t possibly believe that. There was no demand for money, and Azhar’s damned by those airline tickets.”

  “He bought them to reassure himself that she would be found. It was like hedging his bets.”

  “For Christ’s sake, she hadn’t even been kidnapped from the mercato in Lucca when he bought them.”

  “There’s an explanation. I’m going to find it.”

  “I can’t let you decide—”

  She grabbed his arm fiercely. “I need to talk to Azhar. Give me time to talk to Azhar.”

  “You’re walking on the wrong side in this. The consequences are going to come down on your head like the wrath of God. How can you expect me—”

  “Just let me talk to him, sir. There’s going to be an explanation. He’ll be back soon. A day. Two or three at the most. He has students at work in his lab at University College. He has courses to teach. He’s not going to hang round Italy waiting for July to roll round. He can’t do that. Just give me a chance to talk to him. If there’s no explanation he can offer for those tickets and when he bought them and all the rest, I’ll tell the guv about them and I’ll give her my conclusions. I swear to God I’ll do that. If you’ll give me the time.”

  Lynley gazed at the raw appeal on her face. He knew what he was meant to do: report the entire twisted mess at once and let the inevitable gear itself up to happen. But years of partnership lay between him and what he was meant to do. So he sighed deeply and said, “Very well, Barbara.”

  She breathed, “Thank you, Inspector.”

  “I don’t want to regret this,” he told her. “So once you’ve spoken to Azhar, you’re to speak to me straightaway. Are we clear on this?”

  “We’re absolutely clear.”

  He nodded, got to his feet, and left her nursing the rest of her coffee.

  There was absolutely nothing he liked about the situation. Everything was screaming Taymullah Azhar’s involvement. Since Barbara had withheld the information about those tickets to Pakistan, it stood to reason that there were other damning details she was withholding as well. He now knew she was in love with Azhar. She would never admit the fact to herself, but her relationship with the Pakistani professor went far beyond her friendship with his daughter, and it had been heading in that direction from the first. Could he rationally expect her to turn against the Pakistani man if his involvement turned out to be more than a father’s desperate search for his child? Would he himself have turned against Helen had he discovered something questionable that she had done? More to the point, would he turn against Havers now?

  He cursed at the web this entire investigation had become. Barbara needed to march into Isabelle’s office, reveal everything, and throw herself upon the superintendent’s mercy. She had to take the bitter medicine Isabelle would then dole out to her. But he knew that Havers would never do it.

  His mobile rang. For a moment he allowed himself to think that Barbara had seen sense. She’d thought rationally as she’d finished her coffee, and here she was to announce that she’d reconsidered.

  But a glance at his phone told him it wasn’t Barbara phoning at all. It was Daidre Trahair.

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” he told her in answering the mobile’s ring.

  “Where are you?”

  “Ringing for the lift as it happens.”

  “Does that mean a lift in Italy or somewhere else?”

  “It means London.”

  “Ah. Lovely. You’re back.”

  “Only just now. I flew in from Pisa late this morning and came directly to the Met.”

  “How is it that you coppers put things, then? Did you have a ‘good result’?”

  “We did.” The lift doors opened, but he waved it off, not wanting to chance losing the signal. He gave Daidre a few details about Hadiyyah’s safe return to the arms of her parents. He didn’t tell her about SO12, Pakistan, or Barbara’s perilous situation.

  She said, “You must be enormously relieved to have it turn out so well. She’s safe, she’s healthy, her parents are . . . what?”

  “Certainly not reconciled to each other, but in acceptance of the reality that they must share her. Admittedly, it’s not the best situation for a nine-year-old, shuttling between parents in two different countries, but it’s how things must be.”

  “This is how it is for so many children, isn’t it, Tommy? I mean, going between two parents.”

  “You’re right, of course. More and more, it’s the way of the world.”

  “You sound . . . not quite as relieved as I’d think you’d be.”

  He smiled at this. She had read him astutely, and he found, unexpectedly, that he liked that fact. He said, “I suppose that I’m not. Or perhaps I’m merely tired.”

  “Too tired for a glass of wine?”

  His eyes widened. “Where are you? Are you not phoning from Bristol?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Dare I hope . . . ?”

  She laughed. “You sound like Mr. Darcy.”

  “I thought women liked that. Along with those tight trousers.”

  She laughed again. “As it happens,
they do.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “I’m in London. On business, of course—”

  “Of the Kickarse Electra kind?”

  “Alas, no. This is business of the veterinarian kind.”

  “Might I ask what a large animal veterinarian is doing in London? Have we a camel at the zoo in need of your expert ministrations?”

  “That brings us back to the glass of wine. If you’ve time this evening, I’ll explain it to you. Have you the time?”

  “Name the place and I’m there.”

  She did so.

  BELSIZE PARK

  LONDON

  The wine bar she suggested was in Regent’s Park Road, north of both Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill. It was situated rather unceremoniously between a newsagent’s and a kitchen shop, but its exterior position was deceptive. Inside, all was candlelight, velvet-draped windows, and linen-covered tables for two.

  As the hour was still early and the place largely unoccupied, he saw Daidre at once. She was seated at a table tucked into a corner, where a painting on the wall either featured a modern look-alike to William Morris’s wife—God, what was her name? he wondered—or there was a Pre-Raphaelite extant that he wasn’t aware of. A light shone brightly upon the piece, giving Daidre sufficient illumination to inspect a set of papers she’d spread on the table. She was also speaking to someone on her mobile.

  He paused before crossing the wine bar to join her, aware of experiencing a decided rush of pleasure at seeing Daidre again. He took a rare opportunity to study her without her knowledge, noting that she was wearing new spectacles—rimless and virtually unnoticeable—and that she was dressed for business in a tailored suit. The scarf she wore bore a mixture of colours that matched her sandy hair and, it was likely, her eyes as well, and it came to him that he and she could actually pass for brother and sister, so similar was their colouring.

  As he approached, he saw other details. She was wearing a simple pendant necklace: its decoration a gold depiction of the wheelhouse of one of the Cornish mines from the area of her birth. She had gold studs in her ears as well, but they and the necklace comprised her only jewellery. Her hair was slightly longer now, reaching below her shoulders, and she was wearing it back from her face and fastened somehow on the back of her head. She was a handsome woman, but not a beautiful one. In a world of thin, young, airbrushed things on the covers of fashion magazines, she would not have garnered a second look.