Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  “But that’s what’s at the bottom of the precipice, Daidre. And just now . . . Well, isn’t the truth that we don’t even know if we want to jump?”

  “Anything can lead to jumping,” she said. “Oh God. Oh God. I don’t want that.”

  He could feel her fears. They were as real a presence at the table as was Daidre herself. Their cause was far different from the fears he himself felt, but they were nonetheless as strong as his own. Loss wears so many guises, he thought. He wanted to tell her this, but he did not. The time wasn’t right for it.

  He said, “I’m actually willing to approach the precipice on my own, Daidre. I’m willing to say that I care for you, that I would welcome your presence in London for what it might mean in my life to have you closer than an extremely lengthy drive down the M4 to Bristol. Whether you wish to approach the precipice any closer just now . . . ? That’s up to you, but it’s not required.”

  She shook her head and her eyes were bright and he wasn’t at all certain what this meant. She clarified with a nearly voiceless “You’re a very good man.”

  “Not at all, really. My point is that we can be whatever we wish to be in each other’s life. What that is . . . ? We don’t need to define it here. Now, have you had your dinner? Would you like to have dinner with me? Not here, actually, because I have a few doubts about the quality of their food. But perhaps somewhere nearby?”

  She said, “There’s a restaurant at my hotel.” And then she looked horrified and hastily added, “Thomas, you aren’t intended to think I meant . . . because I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Of course you didn’t,” he said. “And that’s precisely why it’s so easy for me to say that I care for you.”

  5 May

  CHALK FARM

  LONDON

  Barbara Havers was sitting up in bed reading when Taymullah Azhar knocked on her door. His knock was so soft and her interest in her book so intense that she very nearly didn’t hear him. After all, Tempest Fitzpatrick and Preston Merck were in mutual torment over Preston’s mysterious past and his agonising inability to act upon his acutely passionate love for Tempest—although Barbara thought they would be better off in torment over his rather strange and unheroic surname—and she was paragraphs away from discovering how they were going to resolve this troubling issue. Had Azhar not also tentatively called out, “Barbara? Are you awake? Are you there?” she might have missed his visit to her bungalow altogether. As it was, though, when she heard his voice, she cried out, “Azhar? Hang on,” and she leapt out of bed.

  She looked round frantically for something to put on as a cover-up. She was wearing one of her sleeping tee-shirts, this one with a faded caricature of Keith Richards on it along with the words Forget His Money . . . I Want His Constitution written below it. She reached for her tattered chenille dressing gown but noticed as she tied its belt that she’d not laundered it since spilling tinned beef goulash down the front of it six weeks earlier. She threw it off and grabbed her mac from the wardrobe. It would have to do.

  She drew the bedcovers over the disarray of sheets, pillows, and Tempest and Preston’s amorous difficulties. She hurried to the door.

  She’d waited four days to talk to Azhar. Every evening, she’d arrived home from work and had immediately checked for his return from Italy. Every morning, she’d had to report to DI Lynley that he’d not yet come back to London. Every day, she’d had to repeat that she wanted to speak to Azhar face-to-face about everything that she’d uncovered concerning the kidnapping of his youngest child. And in response, Lynley’s reply had been unvarying: I want a report from you, Barbara, and I do not want to discover at some later date that Azhar’s been back since the evening of the first of May. She’d said passionately, I’m not lying to you. I wouldn’t lie to you. A raised aristocratic eyebrow told her exactly how seriously he took that claim.

  When she swung the door open, it was to see Azhar standing hesitantly in the shadows. She flipped on the light above the front step, but it wasn’t helpful in the illumination department as it flashed brightly once like a bolt of lightning and then went dead. She said, “Oh, bloody hell,” and then, “Come in. How are you? How’s Hadiyyah? Are you only just back?”

  She stepped away from the door, and he came into the light from the bungalow. He looked good, she thought. The relief he was feeling had to be enormous. She didn’t ask herself what the relief’s source was: having his daughter safe, having escaped Italy without anyone’s suspicions falling on him, or having a plan in place to spirit Hadiyyah to another country when the time was right. These things she shoved to the back of her mind. Not yet, she told herself.

  He was carrying a plastic carrier bag, which he handed to her, saying, “I have brought you something from Italy. A very small way to say thank you for everything, Barbara. I am and have been so grateful to you.”

  She took the bag from him and closed the door as he entered. He’d brought her olive oil and balsamic vinegar. She’d not the slightest clue what to do with the former—perhaps a Mediterranean fry-up? she thought—but she reckoned the latter would be smashing on chips. She said, “Ta, Azhar. Sit, sit,” and she went to the kitchen area and put on the kettle.

  He was looking at her bed, at the light on next to it, at the cup of Ovaltine next to the light. He said, “You were in bed. Indeed, I thought you might be because of the hour, but I wanted to . . . Yet I probably should not have—”

  “You should have,” she told him. “And I wasn’t asleep. I was reading.” She hoped he didn’t ask what she was reading because she’d have to lie and tell him Proust. Or perhaps The Gulag Archipelago. That would go down a real treat.

  She brought out the PG Tips, a bowl of sugar—from which she removed the clotted evidence of a wet spoon having been dipped into it with rather too much regularity—and a jug of milk. She took mugs from a shelf and bustled round like the owner of a third-rate B & B accommodating a late-night arrival. Jaffa Cakes on a plate, two paper napkins, two spoons, then a “whoops” and a replacement for one of them when she saw it was dirty . . . Back and forth from the kitchen to the table she went until there was nothing left but to pour the water over the tea bags and sit and talk to this man whom she knew and did not know all at once.

  He watched her solemnly. He knew something was up. He said nothing at first.

  Then his initial statement: “Inspector Lynley will have told you the details.”

  “Most of them, yeah,” Barbara said. “I would have rung you to get the rest of them, but I reckoned you had a lot to cope with. With Hadiyyah, with Angelina and Lorenzo. With the coppers as well, I expect.” She watched his face as she said this last, but he was busying himself with the tea, much dunking of the tea bag and then a questioning look as to where he was supposed to put it. She fetched an ashtray for the bag. She fetched her fags as well. She offered him one but he demurred and she found she didn’t feel much like a smoke either.

  He said, “There was much to discuss. The nightmare has, I believe, finally ended.”

  “Which means what exactly?”

  He stirred his tea. He’d used sugar but no milk. Barbara saw to hers and waited for his answer. She found that nerves were making her suddenly ravenous. She grabbed up a Jaffa Cake and shoved it into her mouth.

  “Not that Hadiyyah is restored to me,” he said, “but that she will come to me and I may go to her—to Lucca—as often as I like. I need only ring Angelina first. I believe it took this . . . this loss of Hadiyyah to allow Angelina to see that to either parent, the loss of a child cannot be contemplated, let alone endured. I think she did not realise this, Barbara.”

  “Bollocks. She has to have known that.”

  “I think not. She wanted Hadiyyah with her. She wanted Lorenzo and the life she now is making with him. She knew no other way to achieve this. She is not, at heart, an evil woman.”

  “She’s capable of evil,” Barbara noted.

  “Perhaps we all are,” Azhar said quietly.

  It was
as good an entrée as she was going to get. She said, “Where do things stand between you now, Azhar? Between you and Angelina?”

  “We have an uneasy peace. I hope that trust might develop between us in time. There has been little enough of that in the past.”

  “Trust,” she noted. “Always important in relationships, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t reply. He was looking at his tea. She said his name questioningly. He looked up then, and when their gazes met, she tried to read his dark eyes for something—anything—that would tell her he hadn’t used her in the worst possible way, putting everything she was and everything she had in jeopardy. She saw nothing. His eyes looked peculiarly flat, and she tried to tell herself their lack of depth was owing to the overhead light.

  She forged ahead. “Dwayne Doughty was someone you shouldn’t have trusted, Azhar. I’m partly responsible, I reckon, because I took you to him. I checked him out, and he seemed completely on the up-and-up. He probably is in a lot of ways, long as what he’s asked to do is perfectly in order and on the up-and-up as well. When it isn’t, though . . . ? When something tempts him . . . ? He protects himself. I expect you didn’t know that, did you?”

  Still he said nothing. But he reached for her packet of Players and he lit one and she could see that his hand wasn’t steady. So could he. He glanced at her as he shook the match out. He waited. Good move on his part, she thought.

  She said, “Doughty’s office is wired. Both for film and for sound. In his line of work, it’s not a bad idea when you think of it. And I should have thought of it. Or perhaps you should have.” She lit a cigarette herself. She saw that her own hands were none too steady. “So every meeting you and I had with him is documented, backed up, signed, sealed, and whatever. So is every meeting you had with him alone. ’Course, I don’t know how many there were—those you-and-him meetings—’cause he only showed me two. But then, two was all it took, Azhar.”

  The Pakistani man had gone as pale as someone with pecan-coloured skin could go. He said in a nearly inaudible voice, “I did not know how . . .” But he did not continue.

  She said, “How what, Azhar? How to tell me? How to get Hadiyyah back? Or how bloody wretched I was going to feel when I saw the film of you making the suggestion that you and our Dwayne find a way that she could be snatched? How what? You’d best tell me because the water you’re in is hot and promising to get a hell of a lot hotter now you’re back in London.”

  “I did not know what else to do, Barbara.”

  “About what? Hadiyyah? Angelina? Life? What?”

  “That day I rang you in December,” he said. “You were in Oxford Street. You remember this. I rang to tell you that Mr. Doughty had found no trace.” He waited for her nod before continuing. “I lied to you. He told me that day that he had traced her to Italy on Bathsheba’s passport. Hadiyyah’s passport was the same, of course. He found that they had landed in Pisa, but there the trail ended.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you lie?”

  “He said that we—he and I—could hire an Italian detective if I wished. It would be costly, he said, for an Italian to conduct a search such as we needed, but if I wished him to carry on . . . ? This, of course, I wished. So he hired a Pisan, and the Pisan eventually found them. Mr. Doughty reported it all to me as the Pisan discovered it: Lucca, the farm in the hills, Lorenzo Mura, Angelina’s presence at his farm, Hadiyyah’s presence, the name of her school. All of it. Everything. I could tell this man was very thorough. I asked myself what was possible with so thorough a man. Could he, I wondered, discover more? What their days were like? What their lives were like? This I asked Mr. Doughty, and he made the arrangements for the Pisan detective to do more research. This the man did. He made a report of their daily movements. The markets they went to, the shops they frequented, their lives on the farm, the mercato near Porta Elisa, Angelina’s yoga class, Hadiyyah’s watching and listening to the accordion player. All of this the Pisan detective sorted out. He was very good.”

  “When?” Barbara’s throat felt sore and dry, and she gulped down tea to relieve the tightness in it. “When did you know everything? Everything you just told me.”

  “All of the details? In February. By the end of the month.”

  “And you didn’t tell me.” Instead, he had let her agonise about his state of mind, about his daughter, about what to do and how to make things different for him, her friend. “What kind of friendship—”

  “No!” He crushed out his cigarette so abruptly that he upended the ashtray and the sodden tea bags within it. Neither of them moved to alter the mess that dripped onto the table like the remains of a doused fire. “You must not think this. You must not think I valued you any less because I kept silent about this. I believed that at the end of the knowledge I had acquired about Angelina and where she’d taken my daughter was losing her completely. You must understand this. I have no rights. Not without tests, which Angelina would have denied me. And not without a case brought to court and where would that court case be held? Here? In Italy? And Angelina would fight like a tiger if it came to a court case and through all this would Hadiyyah be dragged and how could I do that to my own daughter?”

  “So you did . . . what, Azhar? What the bloody hell did you do?”

  “If there is a film and you have seen it, then you know what I have done.”

  “You planned her kidnapping. You planned it to take place when you were in Berlin with a cast-iron alibi. You knew Angelina would turn up here. And then what, for God’s sake? You would go to Italy and play the part of the distraught father in search of his daughter till she turned up unharmed in some village God knows where after having been traumatised—” To her horror, her voice broke and she felt the swelling behind her eyes that signalled tears were on their way.

  “I could see no other way,” he said. “You must understand this, Barbara. It seemed to me the lesser evil. And this man in Italy . . . he had his instructions. Tell Hadiyyah he was going to bring her to me, call her khushi so she will know it’s the truth, take her to a very safe place where she will not be frightened, and when word is sent to you, take her to a town or a village that will be named—because I myself will have gone to Italy and will have found that village and will know it is safe—and release her close to the police station there because I will have found the police station in advance. Thus she will be returned by those police to her mother at once, but I will be there as well. And having gone through this trial, having seen me there suffering as she herself will suffer, Angelina will no longer deny Hadiyyah her father because Hadiyyah will see me there in Italy and she will want her father back in her life.”

  Barbara shook her head. “No. That’s not it. You could have accomplished the same bloody thing by turning up on the doorstep of that farmhouse or whatever the hell it is and saying, ‘Yoo-hoo, surprise, I’m here to collect the daughter you snatched.’ If you knew the school, you could have gone to the school. You could have shown up in the market yourself. You could have done a dozen different things, but instead—”

  “You do not see. Angelina had to feel. And none of those things would have allowed her to feel. She had to see what she had done to me. She had to feel in equal measure. It was the only way. You must know this, Barbara, as you know Angelina.”

  “You’ve bollocksed everything up. You must know that.”

  “What I did not know was that this Italian detective would hire someone else to carry the plan off. I still do not know why he did that. But so he did, and that person was killed as he went to fetch Hadiyyah from the Alps. And then none of us knew where he had taken her. And then I saw how badly I had gone wrong with this plan. But what was I to do at that point? What would you have done? Had I told the truth . . . Have you any idea what Angelina would have done then, had she learned that Hadiyyah’s father had arranged for her kidnapping? You cannot think she would have dealt with me in a way that indicated a sudden understanding of how much I wanted and was desperate for my da
ughter’s return.”

  “There are trails, Azhar,” Barbara said. Other than numb to her soul, she wasn’t sure what else she felt and, worse, she found herself wondering if she would ever feel anything again other than numb to her soul. “There are trails between you and Doughty. And who paid Di Massimo? You? And what about the other bloke? Who the bloody hell paid him? You can’t be thinking that all of this mess was handled without a trace of your involvement, and once the Italians sort this out—which they will, let me tell you—then how exactly are you going to commune with Hadiyyah from inside a bloody Italian prison? And how the hell is Angelina going to feel when she learns you were behind the whole thing? And what sodding court in the world is going to allow you shared custody or even visitation or whatever else when it’s proved you were behind her kidnapping?”

  “Mr. Doughty told me of a man,” he said. “He spoke of his skills with computers and the trails they leave.”

  “Of course he bloody well told you because what Bryan Smythe really did—and you c’n bet your life on this—was wipe out any connection between Doughty and Di Massimo, not between you and anyone. And as to the rest . . . ? As to your connection with any of these blokes . . . ? What the hell did you think? That once Hadiyyah was restored to her mum, the Italian cops were going to let everyone kiss and make up and there would be no further investigation? You can’t have been that bloody mad, Azhar. Don’t ask me to believe that you were because—”

  And then she knew. She stopped herself. All of the facts spread out in front of her like a map of the world and she recognised every country depicted. She breathed, “Oh my God. Pakistan. That was it all along.”

  He said nothing. He watched her. She wondered if she’d ever really known him. A chasm seemed to exist between who she’d thought he was and who he was turning out to be, and in that moment what she truly wanted was to fling herself into the void created, so stupid had she been, such a dupe, such a fool.