Just One Evil Act: A Lynley Novel

by Elizabeth George

  “That’s just it, isn’t it?” Isabelle countered. “If you’re doing the job. Which, as it happens, you haven’t been doing. Which, as it happens, you’ve just walked in here proposing not to do for a few more days or perhaps weeks. While, I expect, you plan to continue collecting your wages in order to keep the only member of your family ensconced in the care home into which she’s been placed. Now what is it exactly that you want, Sergeant? To continue to be employed and to be paid for being employed or to chase round aiding some nonexistent member of your family in an objective about which, by the way, you are being remarkably closemouthed.”

  They were face-to-face across the acting superintendent’s desk. Outside her office, the buzz of activity rose and fell. Conversations were going on up and down the corridor. The occasional hush among Barbara’s fellow officers told her that sound of her argument with Superintendent Ardery was being heard. More gossip for the water cooler, she thought. DS Havers has blotted her copybook again.

  She said, “Look, guv, a friend of mine has lost his kid. She’s been taken by her mother—”

  “So she’s hardly lost, is she? And if she’s been taken against a ruling of the court, then this ‘friend’ of yours can ring up his solicitor or his local nick or anyone else who comes to mind because it is not your job to swan round the country assisting people in distress unless you are ordered to do so by your commanding officer. Have I made myself clear, Sergeant Havers?”

  Barbara was silent. She was also steaming. Her brain was racing with what she wanted to say, which was along the lines of “What’s twisting your knickers, you bloody cow?” But she knew where a remark like that could get her. The Shetland Islands would seem like paradise compared to where she’d end up. She said reluctantly, “I s’pose you have.”

  “Good,” Isabelle told her. “Now get back to work. And work consists of a meeting you have with the CPS. You can speak to Dorothea about it. She’s set it up.”

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Dorothea Harriman was not only the departmental secretary but also the fashion plate upon whose image Barbara had been supposed to model her makeover. But from the first Barbara had failed to see how Dee Harriman managed to be so gorgeously done up on her paltry Met salary. She’d declared more than once that it was just a matter of knowing one’s colours—whatever that meant—and knowing how to accessorise. Plus, she’d revealed, it did help to keep a record of where the best consignment shops were. Anyone could do it, Detective Sergeant Havers. Really. I could teach you if you like.

  Barbara didn’t like. She reckoned that Dee Harriman spent every free moment hiking up and down each high street in the capital, prowling for clothes. Who the bloody hell wanted to live like that?

  Upon seeing Barbara on her way into Isabelle Ardery’s office, Dorothea had been kind enough not to say a word about her head and the ski cap covering it. She’d been an ardent admirer of the cut and the highlights that Barbara had received at the hands of a Knightsbridge stylist. But after wailing “Detective Sergeant Havers!” she’d seemed to read on Barbara’s face that the road to interpersonal hell was going to be paved with any questions she might ask about what Barbara had done to herself.

  She’d come to whatever terms she needed to come to with regard to Barbara’s appearance when Barbara stopped at her desk. She’d obviously overheard the row in the superintendent’s office, and she was ready with the information that Isabelle had said she would hand over.

  She was supposed to ring the number on this message, Harriman told Barbara. That clerk from the CPS that she’d been meeting with when she skipped out to help Detective Inspector Lynley up in Cumbria . . . ? He was waiting to take up business again. Those witness statements needed going over. The detective sergeant remembered, surely?

  Barbara nodded because, of course, she did. The Crown Prosecutor was a Silk with chambers in Middle Temple. She would, she told Harriman, make the call and get on to this business without delay.

  “Sorry.” Harriman tilted her head towards Isabelle’s office. “She’s not altogether herself today. Don’t know why, exactly.”

  Barbara did. God only knew how many times a week Isabelle Ardery and Thomas Lynley had been doing their mutual knicker-trawling. But with that at an end, she wagered things round the Yard were going to get tense.

  She went to her desk and plopped into its chair. She looked at the phone number Dee Harriman had handed to her. She picked up the handset of the phone and was about to punch in the number when she heard her name spoken—a simple “Barb”—and she looked up to see her fellow detective sergeant Winston Nkata towering over her. He was fingering the long scar on his cheek, the one that marked his formative years spent ganging on the streets of Brixton. He was, as always, impeccably groomed, a man who looked like someone who did his shopping with Harriman hovering at his side. Barbara wondered if he removed his shirt every half hour or so for a spot of pressing in a back room somewhere. Not an inch was wrinkled, not a seam was rucked.

  “I had to ask.” His voice was soft, his accent a blend of his background, with its Caribbean and its African history.

  “What?”

  “DI Lynley. He told me . . . your . . . the difference. I ’spect you know what I mean. No big deal to me, ’course, but I reckoned something happened, so I asked him. Plus”—with a tilt of his head towards Isabelle’s office—“there was that.”

  “Oh. Right.” He was talking about her hair. Well, everyone was going to be doing that, either to her face or behind her back. At least Winston, as always, was courteous enough to talk to her directly.

  “Inspector told me what’s going on,” he said. “’Bout Hadiyyah and her mum. Look, I know she’s . . . how you feel about her and all that, Barb. I reckoned the guv wasn’t going to go for your wanting more time off, so . . .” He slipped a torn bit of a daily calendar towards her. It was one of those desk calendars that had upon it an inspirational saying. This one was “To make God laugh, tell Her your plans,” which, Barbara decided, fitted the situation quite well. On this slip of calendar Winston’s copperplate handwriting had unfurled a name, Dwayne Doughty, along with an address on the Roman Road in Bow and a telephone number. Barbara read this and looked up. “Private detective,” Winston told her.

  “Where’d you find a private detective so quick?”

  “Where everything gets found: the Internet, Barb. Section on his site from satisfied customers and all the rest. He may’ve put ’em there himself, but he’s worth looking into.”

  “You knew she’d lock me to my desk, didn’t you?” Barbara said shrewdly.

  “Figgered, is all,” he told her. Kindly, once again, he made no exact mention of what Barbara had done to her appearance.

  19 November

  BOW

  LONDON

  Barbara Havers laboured at the job of metaphorically keeping her nose clean at work for the next two days. This meant several meetings with the clerk at the CPS, during which the only pleasurable moment came from once being taken by the Crown Prosecutor for lunch in the impressive dining hall of Middle Temple. The lunch might have been nicer had the Silk not wished to discuss the case in minute detail, but in a situation in which beggars couldn’t be et cetera, Barbara did her best to add sparkle and wit to a conversation that actually made her want to bury her head in her mash and commit suicide by carbohydrate inhalation. It was the kind of employment she particularly despised, and she reckoned that Superintendent Ardery was forcing her into it because this was her only way of taking revenge upon Barbara for what she had done to herself.

  She’d had to shave the rest of her head. There was nothing else for it, as the hairstyle could not have been saved. What remained was stubble that left her looking vaguely like a cross between a neo-Nazi and a female boxer. She kept it covered with a selection of knitted caps, on which she’d stocked up at the Berwick Street market.

  There wer
e actually two cases ongoing to which she could have been assigned, had Ardery chosen to do so. DI Philip Hale was heading one; DI Lynley was heading the other. But until Isabelle Ardery had reached the conclusion that Barbara had been punished enough for her transgressions, Barbara knew that she was stuck with the clerk from the CPS and the witness statements that the Crown Prosecutor was intent upon verifying.

  They finished early in the afternoon two days after Barbara’s confrontation with the superintendent. She saw her chance in this, so she took it. She rang up Azhar at University College London and she told him she was heading his way. Where are you? she wanted to know. Having a conference with four graduate students in the lab, he told her. Wait for me there, she said. I’ve come up with something.

  The lab proved easy enough to find. It was a place of white coats, computers, fume cupboards, and biohazard signs, complete with impressive microscopes, petri dishes, boxes of slides, glass-fronted cabinets, refrigerators, stools, work stations, and other, more mysterious furnishings. When Barbara joined Taymullah Azhar there, he introduced her politely to the students. Their names were lost to her almost as soon as Azhar said them, mostly because of Azhar himself.

  Barbara had seen him daily since Hadiyyah’s disappearance. She’d taken him food, but she could tell he had eaten very little of it. Now he was looking worse than ever, mostly from lack of sleep, she decided. Obviously, he was maintaining himself on a diet of cigarettes and coffee. So was she.

  She asked him how soon he could get away from the lab. She added that she’d come up with the name of someone who could probably help them. He’s a private detective, she told him. Hearing this, Azhar told Barbara he could leave at once.

  On their way to Bow, Barbara told Azhar what she had managed to learn about the man towards whose office they were heading. Despite the affirmations of putative “satisfied customers,” she’d done some digging about him, and it hadn’t been tough, considering the sort of nonsense people advertised about themselves these days on the Internet. She knew Dwayne Doughty was fifty-two years old. She knew he played weekend rugby. She knew he’d been married twenty-six years and was the father of two. Considering the photos he’d posted on his Facebook page, she’d concluded it was a matter of pride to him that each generation of his family had done better than the last. His progenitors had excavated a living from the coal mines of Wigan. His children were graduates of redbrick universities. The way things were going for the Doughty clan, his grandchildren—if he had any off his kids—would take firsts at either Oxford or Cambridge. They were, in short, an ambitious family.

  The building that housed Doughty’s office, however, didn’t suggest ambition. It sat above an establishment called Bedlovers Bedding and Towels, which was closed at the moment and sheltered by a faded blue metal drop-down security door in need of having its rust seen to. Bedlovers itself was housed in a narrow building, bookshelved between the Money Shop and Bangla Halal Grocers.

  Oddly, virtually no one was out and about. Two Muslim men in traditional garb were exiting a building some thirty yards down the street, but that was it. Most of the shops were closed. It was a far cry from central London, where the pavements seemed packed both day and night.

  They gained access to Dwayne Doughty’s office through a door to the left of Bedlovers. It was unlocked, and it opened to a staircase at the foot of which was a square of speckled lino with a welcome mat upon it.

  Above stairs, there were two offices only. One bore a sign reading Knock First Please. The other, apparently with no need of knocking, bore a request that asked enterers not to let the cat out. They chose Knock First Please as being more likely. They did so and a man’s voice called, “S’okay. Enter,” with an accent that suggested the Doughtys had left Wigan for the East End many decades ago.

  Barbara had already told Azhar that she wouldn’t be identifying herself as someone from the Met. Doughty might get the wrong idea, like this was a sting operation. They didn’t want that.

  Doughty was in the middle of attempting to upload photos into a digital picture frame of the sort that altered images every ten seconds or so. He had the directions spread out on his desk along with cords, his camera, and the frame itself. He was squinting at the brochure of directions, one fist clenched and the other ready to crumple the directions into a ball.

  He looked up at them and said, “Written by some Chinese bloke with a bloody sadistic streak, this is. I don’t know why I bother.”

  “I hear you,” Barbara said.

  Even had she not known Doughty played amateur rugby, his nose would have told her as much. It looked as if it had been broken multiple times and his NHS doctor had finally thrown up his hands in defeat and said, “Let it do what it will.” It was certainly doing that. It headed off in one direction and then swerved in another, giving his face such an odd asymmetry that it was impossible to move one’s gaze from it. Everything else about the man was average: medium build, medium-brown hair, medium weight. Aside from his nose, he was the kind of man one wouldn’t notice on the street. But the nose made him unforgettable.

  “Miss Havers, I take it?” He rose. Medium height as well, Barbara thought. He added, “And this is the friend you spoke of?”

  Azhar crossed the room and extended his hand. “Taymullah Azhar,” he said.

  “Is it mister?”

  “Just Azhar.”

  Hari, Barbara thought out of nowhere. Angelina called him Hari.

  “And this is about a missing child?” Doughty said. “Your child?”

  “It is.”

  “Sit, then.” Doughty indicated a chair in front of his desk. There was another, mismatched to the first, at the window—as if its use was for spying on action in the street—and Doughty placed it next to the first, carefully matching one’s angle to the other’s.

  Barbara glanced round the office as he did this. She’d half expected the place to be in the best tradition of private eyes from nearly a century of gumshoe novels. But this office looked like something inhabited by a military officer with its olive-green desk, olive-green metal filing cabinets, and olive-green bookshelves. These contained a matching set of books, neat stacks of periodicals, and university graduation photos of both of his children. There was also—on his desk—a photo of a woman near Doughty’s own age, presumably his wife.

  Everything was neatly in its place, from the maps of Greater London and the UK pinned to bulletin boards on the wall to the in-and-out boxes on the desk, to the holder for mail and the holder for business cards. Aside from the photos, there was nothing in the room suggestive of decoration beyond a dusty artificial plant atop one of the filing cabinets.

  Together, Barbara and Azhar went over the details for Dwayne Doughty. He took notes and Barbara was reassured when he asked good, sharp questions. These gave evidence to the fact that he knew the law. Unfortunately, these also gave evidence to the fact that there was very little that he could do.

  Barbara was able to tell him something more than Azhar had been able to reveal to Lynley and to her when they’d met with him on the night of his daughter’s disappearance. In what little spare time Isabelle Ardery had been allowing her, she’d managed to locate Bathsheba Ward, the sister of Angelina Upman.

  “She’s in Hoxton,” Barbara told Doughty, and she gave him the address, which he took down in block letters, all upper case. “Married to a bloke called Hugo Ward. Two kids, but they’re his, not hers. I had her on the blower, and she pretty much confirmed everything already known about Angelina and her family. The whole lot of them broke off communications about ten years ago when Angelina got together with Azhar. She claims to have no clue where she is and even less interest in finding out. Some sort of digging might be in order there. Bathsheba could be lying.”

  Doughty nodded as he wrote. “Rest of the family?”

  “The Upmans are in Dulwich,” Barbara said. She felt Azhar’s gaze on her, and she sa
id, “I phoned one evening. Just to see if they’d had any word. Nothing. Except Bathsheba seemed to be telling the truth: no love lost.”

  “Spoke to them at length, did you?” Doughty asked, his eyes narrowing in on Barbara speculatively.

  “The dad. Not at length. Just to ask where Angelina was. Old school chum looking for her. That sort of thing. He hadn’t a clue and was happy to announce it. He could’ve been covering for her, but he didn’t seem the type to go to that much trouble.”

  Doughty gave Azhar his attention, then. He turned to a fresh page in the legal pad on which he’d been taking down the details Barbara had given him. He used the same block printing to put DAD at the top of the page. Barbara hadn’t seen what he’d put at the top of her own. He said to Azhar, “Give me every name that you can think of associated with Angelina Upman. I don’t care who it is, where it comes from, or when she might have known this person. Then we’ll do the same for your daughter. Let’s see what we can come up with.”

  BOW

  LONDON

  Dwayne Doughty stood at the window once the woman and man had left. He waited till they departed the building that housed his office. He watched them walk towards the arch at the corner that announced one was entering the precinct of the Roman Road. They disappeared round the corner to the left. For good measure, he waited another thirty seconds. Then he left his office and went next door.

  He didn’t worry about letting the cat out. There was no cat, the sign merely a device to keep people from entering precipitately. He went inside, where a woman was sitting at a bank of three computer monitors. She was wearing a set of earphones, and she was watching a replay of the meeting Doughty had just had. He said nothing until the replay ended with a shaking of hands and with the woman—Barbara Havers—looking round his office a second time.

  He said, “What d’you reckon, Em?”