Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  “One hopes her condition will now improve.”

  Azhar moved towards his table and politely asked Lynley to join him. He poured coffee for them both from a white crockery jug.

  “Hadiyyah told us about a card,” Lynley said as he sat. “This was a greeting card that the man Squali handed to her in the marketplace before she left with him. She said it contained a message from you, telling her to go with him as you were waiting for her.”

  “She told me this as well,” Azhar said. “But I know nothing about such a card, Inspector Lynley. If there is one somewhere—”

  “I believe there is.” Lynley told the other man of the tourist photographs, of the particular pictures of the happy face card in the hand of Roberto Squali, and then of the photo of Hadiyyah holding what looked like the very same card.

  “Have you seen this card, Inspector?” Azhar then asked. “Was it with Hadiyyah’s belongings where she was found?”

  This was something Lynley didn’t know. If there had been a card, though, it would now be in the hands of the carabinieri who’d arrived at the convent first and who had taken Domenica Medici away. These policemen would have searched the premises for anything connected to the child who’d been held in the place.

  “Who else knew about Hadiyyah’s disappearance?” Lynley asked him. “I’m talking about her disappearance from London last November. Who else knew, aside from Barbara and myself?”

  Azhar named the individuals he’d told over the initial weeks: colleagues at University College London, friends in the field of microbiology, Angelina’s parents and her sister Bathsheba, and his own family much later, of course, once Angelina and Lorenzo had arrived in London insisting that Hadiyyah had been snatched from the Lucca marketplace by him.

  “Dwayne Doughty knew about her disappearance as well, did he not?” Lynley watched Azhar’s face closely as he said the London investigator’s name. “We’ve been told by Michelangelo Di Massimo, an investigator in Pisa, that Doughty hired him to find Hadiyyah.”

  “Mr. Doughty . . . ?” Azhar said. “But I hired this man to try to find Hadiyyah straightaway when she went missing, and he told me there was no trace of her, that Angelina had left no trail from London to . . . to anywhere. And now you are saying that . . . what? That he discovered that Angelina had gone to Pisa? Last winter he knew this? While telling me that there was no trail?”

  “When he told you there was no trace of her, what did you do?”

  “What could I do? There is no father of record on Hadiyyah’s birth certificate,” he said. “No DNA test has ever been done. Angelina could have claimed anyone was my daughter’s father, and without a court order she still could do so in the absence of such tests. So you see, to everyone who might have helped me, I had no real, legal rights. Only the rights Angelina chose to give me. And those rights she had withdrawn when she left with Hadiyyah in the first place.”

  “If that’s the case,” Lynley said quietly, reaching for a banana, which he peeled upon his plate, “then kidnapping Hadiyyah might well have been your only option if you were able to find her.”

  Azhar assessed him steadily, with no indication of protest or outrage. “And had I done such a thing and then taken her back with me to London? Do you know what that would have gained me, Inspector Lynley?” Azhar waited for no reply, going on to say, “Let me tell you what it would have gained me: Angelina’s enmity forever. Believe me, I would not have been that stupid no matter how much I wanted—and still want—my daughter home with me.”

  “Yet someone took her from the marketplace, Azhar. Someone promised her you. Someone wrote a card for her to read. Someone called her khushi. The man who took her left a trail behind him, one that led to Michelangelo Di Massimo. And Di Massimo gave us the name of Dwayne Doughty in London.”

  “Mr. Doughty told me there was no trail,” Azhar repeated. “That this was not true . . . that he might have known all along this was not true . . .” His hands shook slightly as he poured more coffee. It was the first indication that something moved within him. “In this . . . I would like to do something to this man, Inspector. But because of what he did or intended to do or tried to do, Angelina and I have finally made peace. This terrible fear that we would lose Hadiyyah . . . It brought about something good in the end.”

  Lynley wondered how a child’s kidnapping could truly result in something good, but he inclined his head for Azhar to continue.

  “We have come to agree that Hadiyyah needs both of her parents,” he said, “and that both of her parents should be in her life.”

  “How will this be effected with you in London and Angelina in Lucca?” Lynley asked. “Forgive me for saying it, but her situation at Fattoria di Santa Zita seems fixed at this point.”

  “It is. Angelina and Lorenzo will marry soon, after the birth of their child. But Angelina agrees that Hadiyyah will spend all her holidays with me in London.”

  “Will that be enough for you?”

  “It will never be enough,” he admitted. “But at least I can find peace in the arrangement. She’ll come to me the first of July.”

  SOUTH HACKNEY

  LONDON

  Barbara found Bryan Smythe’s place of business in the same location where she found his house. This was not far from Victoria Park, in a terrace that looked ready for the wrecking ball. The houses were built of the ubiquitous London brick, outstandingly unwashed in this case. Where homes weren’t looking in danger of imminent collapse, they were streaked with one hundred years of grime and guano, and the wood of windows and doors was split and rotting. However, Barbara discovered soon enough that all of this was clever camouflage. For Bryan Smythe, as it happened, owned six of the dwellings in a row and although the curtains that hung in their windows looked like the ill wishes of an envious sibling, once inside the door everything altered.

  He was prepared for her visit, of course. Emily Cass had alerted him. His first words to Barbara were “You’re the Met, I presume,” and although he took in her appearance from head to toe, his facial expression didn’t alter when he read her tee-shirt’s message of No Toads Need to Pucker Up. Barbara clocked this. He was going to be good at dissimulation, she decided. He added, “DS Barbara Havers. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  She said, “Last time I looked,” and elbowed her way into his house.

  The place opened up like a gallery in both directions, with various large canvases of modern art on the walls and bits of metal sculpture depicting God only knew what writhing on tables, with sparse leather furniture and tasteful rugs beneath which a hardwood floor gleamed. The man himself was nothing to look at and less to talk about: ordinary except for his dandruff, which was extraordinary and copious. One could have cross-country skied on his shoulders. He was as pale as someone who rubbed elbows regularly with the walking dead, and he appeared malnourished. Too busy hacking into people’s lives to eat, Barbara reckoned.

  “Nice digs,” she told him as she looked round the place. “Business must be booming.”

  “There are good times and bad,” he replied. “I offer independent technological expertise to various companies and occasionally to individuals in need. I deal in making sure their systems are secure.”

  Barbara rolled her eyes. “Please. I’m not here to waste your time or mine. If you know my name, you know what’s up. So let’s get to the point: I’m more interested in Doughty than I am in you, Bryan. C’n I call you Bryan? I hope so.” She sauntered into the gallery space and stood before a canvas painted red with a single blue stripe at the bottom. It looked like a proposal for a new EU road sign. She decided her preference was to remain in ignorance when it came to the subject of modern art. She turned back to Smythe. “Obviously, I c’n bring you down, but at present, I’m not ready to play that card.”

  “You can try what you want,” Smythe told her blithely. He’d shut the door behind her and he’d shot the bolt home. She reckoned this had more to do with the value of the art on the walls than her presence, though.
He went on to say, “Let’s look at the facts. You shut me down, I’m back up in twenty-four hours.”

  “I expect that’s true,” she admitted. “But your regular customers might not like reading the news—or hearing about it on the telly—that their ‘technological security expert’ has had his gear carted off to the techies at New Scotland Yard for a lengthy scrutiny that doesn’t bode well. I can make that happen. You can, as you say, set yourself up with a whole new system before our forensic tech blokes can unpack your belongings in some cobwebbed basement in Victoria Street. But I expect the serious hit your business will take as a result of the publicity might require a rather long recovery period.”

  He eyed her. She eyed his art. She picked up a sculpture that sat on a table of solid glass and she tried to make out what the thing was. Bird? Plane? Prehistoric monster? She looked from it to him and said, “Should I know what this bloody thing is?”

  “You should know enough to be careful with it.”

  She made a feint at dropping it. He took a quick step forward. She winked at him. “Us rozzers, Bryan? Believe me, we are thick as shoe soles when it comes to art. We are bulls in the bloody you-know-what, especially the blokes who come to cart off one’s belongings for inspection.”

  “My art has nothing to do with—”

  “The job? This technological expertising you do? I expect that might be the case, but the blokes who show up with court orders in their grubby hands . . . ?” She placed the sculpture carefully on the table. “They don’t know that, do they?”

  “What sort of court order do you actually expect—”

  “Emily Cass gave you up. You know that, Bryan. Pushed into a corner, she did not exactly come out swinging. You’re into bank records, phone records, mobile records, travel records, credit card records, and God only knows what other records. Do you really believe the local magistrate isn’t going to want to know what’s going on when you sit down at your keyboard and get in touch with your embedded mates? Where is that keyboard, by the way? Does a magic button somewhere do the business and a wall swings aside to reveal basement stairs?”

  “You’ve seen too many films.”

  “For my sins,” she admitted. “So what’s it to be?”

  He thought about this. He wouldn’t know that she’d already determined to talk to Azhar before she reported to Lynley or to anyone else about any of her findings. He wouldn’t know that she’d decided she had to see her Pakistani neighbour in person in order to look him squarely in the face. He wouldn’t know that she could not for a moment believe that Azhar would endanger his daughter, frighten his daughter, or do anything else to his daughter in aid of either keeping her or getting her away from her mother. But those tickets to Pakistan suggested the worst and until she spoke to him and read whatever she could read from his expression or in his eyes, Barbara’s level of desperation was such that even staying calm in the presence of this bloke Smythe was taking every resource she had.

  He finally said, “Come with me. At least I can enlighten you on one thing.”

  He crossed the gallery space and slid open two silent pocket doors. Beyond them, a room similar in size to the gallery looked through a bank of pricey double-glazed windows out into a garden. This was brilliant with spring flowers and defined on its boundaries by ornamental cherry trees in bloom. A perfect lawn held a white gazebo. A rectangular pond supporting lily pads lay in front of this, a fountain at its centre.

  The room into which he walked was his working space, as far from the cinematic version of a computer whiz’s lair as could be imagined. In films, the hacker holed up in a basement where the only light came from the monitors of the multitude of computers that encircled him. In Bryan Smythe’s reality there was a laptop on a fine stainless steel desk that faced his garden. Next to the laptop, three memory sticks sat in a holder. Another holder held sharpened pencils; another held pens. Next to the laptop were a pristine legal pad, one expensive designer fountain pen, and a printer.

  Aside from that, the room morphed into a high-end kitchen at one end and a higher-end entertainment centre at the other. Speakers in the ceiling spoke of surround sound. Everything spoke of big money.

  Barbara whistled soundlessly. She said, “Nice garden,” and went to look out of the window while her mind whirled into action and she tried to decide how best to wring the information from him. “Thinking of the Chelsea Flower Show, are we?”

  “I like to have something pleasant to look at,” he said, and the slight emphasis he put upon the adjective indicated that Barbara wasn’t a sight for eyes even mildly sore. “While I work, that is,” he added. “Hence the positioning of the desk.”

  “Always a good idea,” she acknowledged. “I expect you’d like to keep things that way.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it’s decision time for you, and let me be plain in case I haven’t been so far. Doughty is the fish we’re after. We’re looking at him for a kidnapping charge, something he orchestrated to occur in Lucca, Italy. It involves a nine-year-old English girl who was snatched by her mum last November and carted off to eat copious mounds of pasta, if you get my meaning. He was hired to locate her but he did more than that. He located her, claimed he hadn’t done, and then arranged to have her snatched. And then, he had you wipe every record clean. These would be all the records having anything to do with the nine-year-old girl, the original snatching, et cetera, et cetera. Are we on the same page so far?”

  His mouth made a disparaging moue. She took this for acknowledgement and charged on.

  “You confirm this, and our relationship—that would be yours and mine, and believe me I’ve been chuffed by it beyond my wildest dreams—is over. You refuse to confirm . . . ?” She waggled her hand. “The local rozzers, the local magistrate, and the Met’ll be wild to make your acquaintance.”

  “So are you saying,” he said, “that if I confirm your imaginative theories about this nine-year-old—and I’m not confirming anything, by the way—my name does not get handed over to the Met at once? Or to the local police? Or to anyone?”

  “Bryan, you are one clever lad. That is exactly what I’m saying. So what’s it going to be? Admittedly, Doughty isn’t going to want your services after this, but you can’t blame him for that, eh? Small price to pay for your continuing ability to do business at all, you ask me.”

  He shook his head. He walked over to gaze at his garden. He finally turned back to her and said, “What the bloody hell kind of cop are you?”

  She was taken aback by the force of loathing behind his words, but she managed to keep her face a perfect blank as she said, “Meaning?”

  “You think I don’t see where this is heading?”

  “Where?”

  “Today what you want is confirmation and tomorrow it’s cash. Not wired to some account on the Isle of Man or tucked away in Guernsey or God knows where but handed over in an envelope in tens and twenties and fifties and next week more and next month more and always this ‘D’you really want the Met to know about you, mate?’ You’re dirtier than I am, you miserable cow. And if you think I’m going to—”

  “Rein in the ponies,” Barbara said to the man, although her heart was pounding in her temples. “I told you I want Doughty, and Doughty’s who I want.”

  “And your word on that is good, is it?” Bryan laughed, a high whinny that spoke of how desperate he was feeling. It came to Barbara that they were like two Wild West ne’er-do-wells out in the street in front of the saloon, both of them having drawn their rusty pistols at the exact same moment, both of them trying to work out how to walk away from the confrontation instead of ending up in the dust with a bullet in the chest.

  She said, “Looks to me like we’ve got each other by the you-know-whats, Bryan. But between us, I think I’ve got the better grip. I’m telling you for the last time that I want Doughty and only Doughty and that’s an end to this. Either you go for that or you decide you’d rather risk it by escorting me to the door and seeing w
hat I’ll do next.”

  His jaw moved, teeth biting down on something unpalatable. She understood. Her teeth were doing much the same thing.

  He said, “You have your confirmation. I wiped Doughty’s records. Everything having to do with a bloke called Michelangelo Di Massimo. Everything having to do with a bloke called Taymullah Azhar. Emails, bank statements, phone calls, mobile calls, wire transfers of money, websites looked at, anything discovered via search engines having to do with Lucca, Pisa, or anywhere else in Italy. Whatever you can think of, it was dealt with. As deeply as I and a few . . . a few colleagues here and there could go. All right?”

  “One more thing.”

  “Christ, what else?”

  “When?”

  “When what?”

  “When did all these records begin?”

  “What does it matter? I went back in time and got it all.”

  “Right. Brilliant. Got that in a trap. What I’m asking is the date all these records having to do with Italy got wiped.”

  “What’s that got to do with—”

  “Believe me. It does.”

  Astoundingly, then, Bryan went to something worthy of Dickens to sort this one out. He opened the desk and brought out—of all things—a pocket diary. He began to leaf through it, back into time. He found nothing. He rooted in his desk and brought out another. As he did so, Barbara felt her stomach tighten into a ball.

  “Last December,” he said. “The fifth. That’s when it all began.”

  God, Barbara thought. In advance of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping in Lucca. In advance of everything. She said, “‘It’? What’s ‘it’ supposed to be?”

  A small smile, containing just enough triumph to tell Barbara she’d won the battle but lost the war. “I expect you can work that one out,” he said. To this he added, “If you’re planning your next stop to be in Bow, then you’d be wise to plan on something else as well.”