Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  At first he did not answer. Like her, he listened to the children. Like her, he was also probably thinking of his own child, perhaps of all his children. He raised his head and closed his eyes briefly. He finally said firmly, “Yes. Yes. All right,” and together they climbed out of the car.

  Doughty wasn’t in his office. They found him, however, in the office next door, where Em Cass was set up. She’d obviously just arrived at work since she was wearing running clothes, trainers, and a sweatband round her head, and at first it looked from his position as if Doughty was taking in the fragrance of her armpits since he was sitting at her table of computers and she was bent forward across him to use the mouse. She was saying, “No. The hotel records indicate—” But she straightened, ceasing her words abruptly, when Barbara pushed open the door. Doughty turned and said, “What the hell . . . You’re out of order walking in unannounced.”

  Barbara said, “I think that’s a social nicety we can all wave farewell to at this point, Dwayne.”

  “You can go wait in my office,” he said. “And you can thank your stars I don’t toss you and the professor back down the stairs you just tramped up.”

  “We will all speak together,” Azhar said. “Either in your office or in this office but in either case now.”

  Doughty rose from his chair. “Where’d your manners take themselves off to? I don’t take orders from people who aren’t employing me.”

  “Got that in a biscuit box, Dwayne.” Barbara brought out of her pocket Bryan Smythe’s memory sticks and dangled them from her fingertips. “But I expect you take orders from someone who’s hanging on to these trying to decide which department at the Met is going to be happiest to see them. They’re on loan, by the way. Bryan handed them over.”

  There was a moment of tight, evaluative silence among them. From below in the street, the sound of Bedlovers’ protective grille being raised came to them like the noise of a castle’s portcullis. Someone coughed, hacked, and spit with the force of a minor explosion. Em Cass grimaced at the sound. Obviously, a woman who disapproved of life’s indelicacies, Barbara thought. That was a very good thing, she reckoned, since they were well in the midst of one of them.

  “Are we going to talk or are we going to stand here staring at each other?” Barbara asked.

  Doughty said, “I know a bluff when I’m looking at one.”

  “Not in this case, mate. You c’n ring Bryan if you like. Like I said, these’re on loan from him. He feels a bit like you do when it comes to the Bill. Anything to clear one’s house of the coppers.”

  “She’s telling the truth,” Em Cass said. “Christ, Dwayne. I don’t know why I ever listen to you and your plans and your I’ve-got-everything-under-control. I should have done a runner when I was packed.”

  Barbara liked even more the fact that, along with her delicacies, Emily Cass also appeared to be someone who preferred that her line of employment not lead her in the direction of arrest. This of course begged the question: What was she doing working as a blagger for Dwayne Doughty in the first place? But economic times were tough. Perhaps it had been that or becoming a barista.

  She said, “Let’s decamp to your office, Dwayne. Without the filming this time, ’f you don’t mind. You come, too, Emily. It’s roomier, there’re chairs, and someone might go weak at the knees.” She made a sweeping gesture to the doorway. She was gratified to see Emily the first person through it. Doughty followed her, giving Barbara a withering glance and ignoring Azhar altogether.

  Inside his own office, Doughty removed the hidden camera, placed it in a drawer, and positioned himself behind his desk. Barbara wanted to guffaw at this final I’m-in-charge move. She sat, Emily went to the window and leaned against its sill, and Azhar took the other chair. Doughty said, “It wouldn’t take all those memory sticks, in case you’re actually thinking Bryan isn’t having you for a fool.”

  “When I said everything, I meant everything,” Barbara replied. “I’ve got his entire system here, Dwayne. Not just you but everyone else. My fail-safe position, if you’d like to call it that. Sometimes people need a little urging when it comes to cooperating, I find. Now what I wonder is how much urging you’re going to need.”

  “To do what, exactly?”

  “To hand over your fail-safe position—”

  “In your bloody dreams.”

  “—and to assure us you’ve seen the light of salvation and it’s called Di Massimo.”

  “What the bloody hell are you talking about?”

  Emily Cass stirred. “I expect it’s a good idea to hear her out.”

  “Oh, you expect that, do you? Did you expect that when you gave her Smythe? Which, by the way, is the only way she could have dug him out of whatever molehill he happens to operate from and don’t think I haven’t worked that one out.”

  “Let’s not start pointing fingers,” Barbara said. “It wastes my time and I’ve wasted enough of it already dealing with you lot. Now we can get down to business or, like I said, I can—”

  “Sod you,” Dwayne told her. “Sod the professor.”

  Barbara looked at Emily. “He always this stupid?”

  “He’s a man,” Emily said in reply. “Go on. Pretend he’s not here.”

  “I want him on board.”

  “He is. He won’t tell you that, but he is.”

  Barbara turned to Azhar. “How did Di Massimo come into this mess?”

  “Mr. Doughty found him,” he said, telling her what she already knew and what had been established between them on their long night of planning. “He said that we needed a detective in Italy who spoke English, and Mr. Di Massimo was that detective.”

  “How often did you speak to him?”

  “To Mr. Di Massimo? Never.”

  “How often did you contact him by email?”

  “Never.”

  “How did he get paid?”

  “Through Mr. Doughty. I paid him and he transferred the money to Italy.”

  “Keeping some for himself, you reckon?”

  “Are you bloody accusing—”

  “Relax, mate,” Barbara told Doughty. “You employed a subcontractor. You took your cut. It’s the way of the world.” She held up the memory sticks another time and she said to Azhar, “What d’you reckon these’re going to show, then?”

  “The movement of money, among other things. From my bank account to Mr. Doughty’s to Mr. Di Massimo’s. Internet activities: emails and searches. Telephone records. Mobile records. Credit card records.”

  “So what you’re saying,” she said to Azhar, “is that over there in Italy, at this very moment while Michelangelo Di Massimo is being the canary on matters having to do with the snatching of Hadiyyah, what I’ve got here in my grubby hands is proof that the bloke is telling the truth.”

  Azhar nodded. “It does appear that way, Barbara.”

  She turned to Doughty. “The point being that the interests of everyone—that would include you, Dwayne—would best be served if we took a solid look at where we ought to be applying our talents, such as they are.”

  He opened his mouth, but she cut him off before he could speak.

  “And,” she said, “I’d suggest you think that one over before you reply. We’ve got Di Massimo, but we’ve also got a dead bloke called Squali and all the information he may have left behind, which I reckon is plentiful. Now, do we climb into the boat and plug its holes and float it together, mate, or do we let it sink on its bloody own?”

  Doughty examined her before he shoved his chair back and opened the drawer in which he kept his own fail-safe memory stick.

  “You and your sodding metaphors,” he replied.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Lynley wasn’t sure what his preoccupation actually meant. He’d come into the Yard early upon Isabelle’s request, he’d been buttonholed by John Stewart
for an extended and unpleasant conversation about Barbara Havers’s tendency towards insubordination, he’d finally managed to wrest himself away from the other DI, and now as he waited in Isabelle’s office, he realised that he hadn’t taken in whatever it was that Stewart had been implying about Barbara’s performance while on his team.

  The reason was Daidre Trahair. They’d had a fine dinner together at her hotel, conversation flowing easily between them until the moment that he’d finally got up the nerve to ask her who Mark was—“That bloke you were speaking to on your mobile when I came into the wine bar?” he said to her when she looked utterly puzzled by the question—and he’d been unaccountably relieved to learn that Mark was her solicitor in Bristol. He would be looking over the contract that London Zoo had offered Daidre because, as she put it, “I’m hopeless when it comes to the ‘party of the first part’ and ‘pursuant to Clause One,’ and that sort of thing, Thomas. Why do you ask about Mark?”

  That was certainly the question, he admitted. Why did he ask? He hadn’t been this preoccupied by a woman since before his marriage to Helen. And what was puzzling to him was that Daidre Trahair was absolutely nothing like Helen. He couldn’t quite work out what it meant: that the first woman to interest him seriously was someone completely different from his dead wife. So he had to ask himself if he was truly interested in Daidre or merely interested in making Daidre interested in him.

  He’d said to her, “The answer to that question. It’s something I’m working on. Not very adeptly, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “Ah, indeed. Like you, I’m a bit at sixes and sevens.”

  “I’m not entirely sure I want to know what you mean.”

  “Believe me, I understand,” he’d said.

  At the end of their meal, she walked with him through the lobby of the hotel to the front door of the place. It was a large hotel, part of an American chain, the kind of place where businessmen and -women stayed and their comings and goings went largely ignored by the staff. This meant all sorts of things, among which was the fact that when someone went to someone else’s room, no one took note of that unless observation of the CCTV films became necessary later. He found himself acutely aware of this. He felt a sudden need to get out of the place unscathed. And what did that mean? he asked himself. What was bloody wrong with him?

  She walked out onto the pavement in his company. There, the night was inordinately pleasant. She said, “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  He said, “Will you tell me when you’ve decided about the job?”

  “Of course I will.”

  Then they looked at each other, and when he kissed her, it seemed like a natural thing to do. He fingered a piece of her sandy hair that had come loose from the slide at the back of her head, and she reached up and caught his fingers and squeezed them lightly. She said, “You’re a lovely man, Thomas. I would be every way the fool if I didn’t see that.”

  He moved his hand to her cheek—he could feel her blush, although in the dim light he couldn’t see it—and he bent to kiss her. He held her briefly and breathed in the scent of her and acknowledged that her scent was not the citrus of Helen that he’d so loved and realised that this was not a bad thing. He said, “Ring me, please.”

  “As you recall, I did. And will do again.”

  “I’m glad of that, Daidre,” he told her and then he left.

  There was no question of his going to her room. He didn’t want to. And what, he wondered, did that mean, Thomas?

  “Are you listening to me, Tommy?” Isabelle asked. “Because if you are, I’d expect at some point you’d grunt or nod or look reflective or, for God’s sake, something.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Late night and not enough coffee this morning.”

  “Shall I have Dee bring you a cup?”

  He shook his head. “John bent my ear when I got here,” he told her. “Taking that decision to put Barbara on his team, Isabelle—”

  “It was a brief enough period. It hardly killed her.”

  “Still, his antipathy for her—”

  “I hope you’re not about to tell me how to run the department. I doubt you did that with Superintendent Webberly.”

  “I did, as it happens.”

  “Then the man was a saint.”

  Before he could reply, Barbara Havers joined them. She came in in a rush. She was the personification of all business, aside from her clothing, which was, as usual, a bow to the fashion of an era that had never existed. She’d at least eschewed the cupcake socks. She’d replaced them, however, with Fred and Wilma Flintstone. They more or less made a piece with her tee-shirt: She was wearing the bones of the Natural History Museum’s T-rex across her chest.

  She said, “Here’s how it looks,” after she acknowledged the tardiness of her arrival with “Sorry. Traffic. Had to buy petrol as well.” She went on with, “Everything points to Di Massimo trying to finger Doughty for what he himself cooked up. He knows there’ll be records of communications between him and Doughty—and there are—and he reckons that as there was no ransom request, we’re going to fall into line with whatever he claims. But the link from him to Squali is what’s going to bring him down. He’s telling partial truth and partial lie, and his idea is that if he muddies the waters enough, no one is going to sort it all out.”

  “Meaning what, Barbara?” Isabelle said.

  Lynley said nothing. He merely noted that the sergeant’s colour was high and he wondered if this was due to the rush she was in or the tale she was telling.

  “Meaning Doughty hired Di Massimo to start at the airport in Pisa, which was as far as he—Doughty, that is—was able to get in working out where Angelina Upman had taken Hadiyyah. He didn’t give Azhar the information because he didn’t know where it would lead. Di Massimo’s brief was to find Angelina and report back. He was told to do whatever it took to find her because—according to Doughty’s tale—whatever it took was ultimately going to be funded by her dad. Only once Di Massimo knew where she was, it was a short journey from there to who’s-got-more-dosh and the answer to that was the extended Mura family. So he hired Squali to snatch her but what he told Doughty was that he couldn’t find her at all. Records show all communication between him and Doughty ended at the point he made his report.”

  “Which was when?”

  “December fifth.”

  “What records are we talking about, Barbara?” Lynley asked quietly.

  Another slight rush of colour to her cheeks. He reckoned that she hadn’t expected him to be sitting in Isabelle’s office as a party to this meeting. She had a few decisions to make as a result of his presence. He could only pray she made the right ones.

  “Doughty’s,” she said. “He opened them to me, sir. He’s printing up the whole lot of them and he’ll be shipping them over to the bloke in Italy who’s dealing with that end of things once we give him the name. ’Course he’ll want someone to translate, but they’ll have someone for that.” She licked her lips, and he saw her swallow. She turned back to Isabelle and went on. “What I can’t work out is the ransom request.”

  “There wasn’t one as I understand it,” Isabelle said.

  “That’s the screw in the works,” Barbara acknowledged. “What I reckon is that once Di Massimo worked out how much money the Mura family has, he planned one of those typical Italian kidnappings. Think of it: Here’s a country with a big tradition of holding people for months to get what they want. Sometimes the demand comes quickly; sometimes they like to wait till the family is ready to blow itself to bits with worry. Look at the poor Getty kid all those years ago.”

  “I doubt the Muras have pockets quite so deep as the Gettys,” Lynley said evenly, watching Barbara. Her upper lip looked damp.

  “True. But what I reckon is everything depended on what Di Massimo wanted. Was it money, land, cooperation, stock options, p
olitical influence . . . who the bloody hell knows? I mean, how much do we know about the Muras, sir? What does Di Massimo know that we don’t?”

  “You’re doing a great deal of ‘reckoning,’” Lynley said. His tone was dry and he felt, rather than saw, Isabelle glance his way.

  “I was thinking the same,” she said to Havers.

  “Well, right. Yes. Of course. But isn’t our part of the investigation to turn over what we have to this bloke in Italy . . . What’s his name, sir?”

  “Salvatore Lo Bianco. But he’s been replaced. I’ve no idea who has the case now.”

  “Right. Well. I expect we can sort that out with a phone call. Point is that it’s an Italian situation and it seems to me our part is finished.”

  Of course, their part wasn’t finished at all, and Lynley waited for Havers to bring up all those things that she was leaving out of what was going for her report to the superintendent. The list of those things was topped by one-way tickets to Pakistan. The fact that she was saying nothing about them was so damning that Lynley felt its pressure upon his chest like a pallet of bricks.

  Havers said, “Far as I can tell and far as the records’re going to show, no crime was committed on British soil, guv. Everything’s up to the Italians now.”

  Isabelle nodded. She said, “Include that in your written report, Sergeant. I don’t want another day to pass without my seeing it on my desk.”

  Havers remained where she was, obviously waiting for more. When nothing else appeared to be forthcoming, she said, “That’s it?”

  “For now. Thank you.”

  It was more than clear that Isabelle was dismissing her. It was additionally clear that she wasn’t dismissing Lynley. Havers caught this and Lynley saw her do so. She cast a look in his direction before she took herself out of the superintendent’s office.

  When the door closed behind her, Isabelle stood. She went to her window and gazed at the sunny day outside, at what she could see of rooftops and fresh green treetops and in the distance St. James’s Park. Lynley waited. He knew more was coming from her or she would have dismissed him along with Barbara.