“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 to 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.”
&n
bsp; “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.
The only answer seemed to be food. When she arrived home, she gobbled down a double takeaway portion of haddock and chips and followed this with treacle tart and a side of Victoria sponge. She quaffed a bottle of lager as she ate and finished off her meal with a cup of instant coffee. Accompanying this, she dipped into a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps, after which a virtuous apple assured her that her arteries would be thoroughly cleansed if she munched upon it hard and long enough.
Then, no longer could she put off the phone call to Italy without putting herself into some sort of caloric stupor. She lit a fag and punched in Azhar’s number. She’d never dreaded a phone call so much in her life. She was going to have to tell him everything: from the Love Rat Dad story to the claims made by the private investigator. In neither instance did she see that she had any choice.
She wasn’t prepared for where she found Azhar when she rang his mobile. He was at the hospital in Lucca. Angelina, he told her, had been taken there both at the insistence of Lorenzo Mura and the advice of Inspector Lynley. She’d been ill for two days with a variety of worrying symptoms that she believed were related to the morning sickness she’d been experiencing, but her condition had worsened and both Mura and Lynley were convinced this could be an indication of something more serious.
Barbara hated where her thoughts went immediately upon hearing this news: to how the information could best be used to appease Mitchell Corsico. A story about the mother of the kidnapped child in Italy being admitted into hospital in an emergency situation . . . possibly on the brink of losing her unborn child . . . overwrought and making herself ill because of the kidnapping of her daughter . . . desperate for the Italian police to do something—anything—to find her while all the time they were sitting round drinking copious amounts of vino . . . That story was a real gem, wasn’t it? That exposé was certain to tug at heartstrings. Of course, it depended upon the journalist and the readers of The Source having hearts in the first place, but surely it was better than a front-page piece in which Azhar answered pointed questions from Corsico and ended up throwing even more mud on his own reputation. She said, trying not to sound too hopeful, “What d’you mean, ‘not right with the pregnancy’?”
“Her symptoms are, according to Mr. Mura, severe and worrying,” Azhar told her. “The doctors here are concerned. Dehydration, vomiting, diarrhea.”
“Sounds like flu. Maybe a virus? Or that super-serious kind of morning sickness?”
“She’s very weak. It was Inspector Lynley who rang me with the news. I came at once to see if there was . . . I do not know why I came.”
Barbara knew why he’d taken himself to the hospital. He loved the woman and had always done so. Despite her sins against him and especially the sin of removing from him the daughter he lived for, there was something that remained strong between them. Barbara didn’t understand this kind of bond between people, and she reckoned she never would.
“Have you seen her?” she asked. “Is she . . . I don’t know. Is she conscious? Is she in pain? What?”
“I have not yet seen her. Lorenzo . . .” He paused, seemed to think, then changed tack. “She might be having tests just now. There are a few specialists she’s seeing, I believe. This could all be related to the stress of Hadiyyah as well as to the pregnancy . . . I know very little at this point, Barbara. I hope to learn more if I remain here.”
So that was why he was there, she thought. Lynley had given him the news, but Lorenzo Mura wasn’t about to let Azhar near her. She herself had seen the Italian man’s suspicions regarding Azhar’s feelings for Angelina when they had both turned up in London trying to find Hadiyyah. He wasn’t certain of her, Lorenzo Mura. But then, with her history, who would be?
Barbara wondered briefly about Angelina Upman’s power over men. She wondered briefly about what Angelina Upman could drive a man to do in order to keep her as his lover.
Which brought her, of course, to the reason for her call to Azhar. There was the not insignificant matter of what she’d been told by Dwayne Doughty regarding the information that he and his cohorts had amassed during the winter, not only about the whereabouts of Angelina but also about her sister’s assistance in this disappearance. According to Doughty, every single detail concerning her disappearance had been dutifully passed along to the person who’d hired him to ascertain the whereabouts of the mother and daughter: Taymullah Azhar. But Azhar had told Barbara nothing of these details over the months. So either he was lying to her by omission or Doughty was lying to her with false information.
Of the two, she knew she would believe Azhar. She felt enormous affection for him, and she didn’t want to believe he might trample on that affection with any kind of betrayal.
This was no position for a police investigator to be in, and Barbara realised this. But what she needed to say to Azhar—“Doughty claims you had mountains of information in January, so what did you do with it, my friend?”—simply would not come out. Still, she needed a variation of it or she knew she couldn’t live with herself. So she said, “This whole Italy thing, Azhar . . . ?”
“Yes?”
“Did you ever know or think or even guess she might be in Italy all along?”
“How could I have come up with Italy?” he replied and his reply was quick, easy, and regretful. “She could have been anywhere on the planet. Had I known where to find her, I would have moved heaven and earth to bring Hadiyyah home.”
There was that, Barbara thought. There would always be that: Hadiyyah and what she meant to her father. It was inconceivable that Azhar could have discovered the child’s whereabouts four months earlier and done nothing about it. He simply wasn’t made that way.
But still . . . Once Doughty had raised the spectre of betrayal in Barbara’s mind, it remained on the fringes of her thoughts. Despite what she knew of Azhar and despite what she earnestly believed about him, she was going to have to check up on his Berlin alibi herself. At this point, she couldn’t trust Dwayne Doughty to tell her the truth about anything.
BOW
; LONDON
Dwayne Doughty headed for Victoria Park. He wanted to think, and the walk itself as well as the park—should he decide to hike over to Crown Gate East—helped him to do so. To remain in the office would have meant another tête-à-tête with Emily. Her declarations of impending doom were beginning to wear on him. He had long been a believer that—significant precautions having been taken—all was going to be well at the end of the game when they scooped up the poker chips and counted the haul. But Emily didn’t see things this way.
Thus, the last thing he wanted her to know was that he was actually worried. She’d been well absorbed in chasing down the assignation whereabouts of a forty-five-year-old banker and his twenty-two-year-old little bit on the side, so for the most part he’d been able to avoid her. She was very well occupied and only marginally aware of his own activities. But she’d have the goods on the banker within a day or two—photos, credit card receipts, phone information, and everything else—and just as that bloke’s marriage would be kaput as a result, Dwayne’s own arrangement with Emily Cass would be at that point in danger of collapsing. He needed to produce some answers for his assistant. He couldn’t afford to lose her or her range of abilities, and he knew he would if he wasn’t able to sort out what was going on in Italy.
This, in part, was the reason for his walk: thinking first, followed by deciding, and then acting. He began it all with the purchase of a throwaway mobile phone. If he made any dodgy calls from the office, Em would be all over him like an outbreak of smallpox.
Things should have resolved themselves by now. Nothing about this situation had ever been rocket science. He should have had the all-clear, followed by the all’s well, soon to be tagged by an arrivederci. He had none of those and now he knew why. None of them had happened in the first place.
“I don’t know” was the answer he received to his question of “What the hell is going on?” when he placed the call.
Just One Evil Act il-18 Page 30
