Just One Evil Act (23 page)

There were references to Esteban’s wife, so Barbara followed the trail to her. Another dancer, she saw. Royal Ballet. Not within shouting distance of prima ballerina but someone had to dance in the chorus, no? One couldn’t exactly have the numero uno swan without the rest of the flock milling round in the back wondering what all the hoo-ha with the hunter was about. She was called Dahlia Rourke—what the hell kind of name was Dahlia? Barbara wondered—and she was pretty in the rather severe and bony way that went with ballet: all cheekbones, scarily visible collar bones, thin wrists, and very little in the hips, all the better to be hoisted around by some bloke in need of a more serious codpiece. She’d be on the scrawny side when it came to playing at the two-backed beast, so perhaps this had driven poor smouldering Esteban into the arms of Angelina. Except, Barbara thought, Angelina herself would probably be no cushion of comfort when it came to the plunge and groan of the clutch and grope. Perhaps Esteban merely liked them skeletal.

She jotted a few notes and printed a few pictures. She also did some additional looking into Bathsheba Ward. She had a feeling that garnering the slippery cow’s cooperation in anything having to do with Hadiyyah, Angelina, and Azhar was going to be a business requiring careful planning and more than a little arm twisting. But in the case of Bathsheba, the arm twisting was going to have to be subtle or it was going to have to threaten her business.

Barbara was considering all of the information she’d gathered when her mobile made its timeless declaration of love to Peggy Sue. It was Dwayne Doughty, reporting back on his investigation into the whereabouts of Taymullah Azhar when Hadiyyah had been snatched from the
mercato
in Lucca.

“Got you on speaker, if you don’t mind,” Doughty told her. “Em’s here as well.” He went on to tell her that every detail was on the up-and-up. Azhar had indeed been in Berlin. He had indeed attended the conference. He sat in on talks and panel discussions, and he presented two papers as well. The only way he could have also got to Italy and snatched his daughter would have been to have the ability to be in two places at once or to have an identical twin that no one knew about. This last bit was of the ha-ha-ha-we-know-how-unlikely-that-scenario-is variety. But it did bring into the picture something that Barbara wanted to make sure Dwayne Doughty knew.

“Talking of identical twins,” she said. She gave him the new information about Bathsheba Ward: that she’d apparently known all along where her sister was, that she’d written emails to Hadiyyah in the guise of her father.

“That explains a few minor details we’ve dug up at our end,” Doughty said. “It seems our Bathsheba trotted off to
bell’Italia
herself last November round the same time the fair Angelina did her runner. Fascinating point, if you ask me.”

“Got it in a bucket,” Barbara told him. For if, from the first, Bathsheba had been part of Angelina’s planned escape from London, how terribly difficult would it have been for Angelina to use her sister’s passport for her travel, thereby covering the tracks of her own movements as she made her escape?

“Our Bathsheba’s cage needs a bit of rattling,” Doughty said. “The question is, dear Sergeant, which of us is best able to do it?”

BOW

LONDON

When Dwayne Doughty rang off, he waited for Em Cass’s inevitable commentary, which was not long in coming. They were in her office—the better to record the conversation with Sergeant Havers—and Em removed her earphones after checking the quality of the recording. She set them on the table with its bank of monitors. Today she was wearing a fawn-coloured man’s three-piece suit cut perfectly to fit her. She complemented it with two-toned shoes—tan and navy—which would have looked all wrong had she not chosen a necktie to balance the ensemble. She dressed like a man better than most men did, Doughty had to admit. No bloke on earth could beat Em Cass in a dinner jacket, that was certain.

She said to him, “We shouldn’t’ve got involved in this mess, Dwayne. You know it, I know it, and every day we know it better. Soon’s I saw her with the professor, soon’s I reckoned she was a cop, soon’s I traced her to the Met . . .”

“Hush,” Dwayne told her. “Things are in motion and other things are being handled.”

As if in demonstration of this latter fact, a knock sounded on the door and it opened. Bryan Smythe slipped into Em Cass’s office. Doughty saw Em roll her desk chair away from the monitors as if this would distance her from the computer wizard. Before he could welcome the sex-starved bloke, Em said, “You said you’d warn me, Dwayne.”

“The situation’s slightly altered,” Doughty said. “I think you’ve been making that very point.” And to Bryan with a glance at his watch, “You’re early. And we’re meant to be meeting in my office, not here.”

Bryan blushed unattractively. He was not, alas, a being whose flesh took on rosy hues with any degree of complement to the rest of him. “Knocked over there,” he said in apparent reference to Doughty’s own office. “Heard you over here so . . .”

“You should’ve waited over there,” Em told him.

Bryan looked at her. “I wouldn’t’ve seen you, then,” he said frankly.

Doughty groaned. The man knew nothing about playing women, about the chat, about anything to do with males and females and how they actually managed to end up in a horizontal position—or, in Em’s case, in any position—exchanging bodily fluids with each other. Doughty did wish that Em Cass would give the poor sod one decent go, though. A mercy bonk wouldn’t kill her, and it might allow Bryan to see that a chasm always existed between one’s dreams and the reality of those dreams coming true.

“And,” Bryan went on, “wasn’t the point
not
to use the phones from now on?”

“We all need disposable mobiles, then,” Emily said shortly. “Use once, toss it, buy another. That way this sort of encounter”—she made the words equate to
this visitation of the plague
—“wouldn’t need to happen.”

“Let’s not get hasty,” Doughty said. “We’re not rolling in dosh here, Emily. We can’t be dashing out to buy disposable mobiles right and left.”

“Yes, we can. Bill it to that slag from the Met.” Em swung round in her chair, her back to them. She pretended to tie her shoe.

Doughty hazarded an evaluative look at Bryan. The young man wasn’t a permanent employee and they needed his amazing expertise. It was one thing for Emily Cass not to want to bed him. He couldn’t blame her for that. But to insult and estrange him to a degree that he ended up leaving them high and dry . . . ? That couldn’t be allowed.

He said meaningfully to his assistant, “Bryan’s completely right, Emily. So let’s all get through this intriguing moment of each other’s company without permanent damage, yes?” He didn’t wait to have her cooperation. He said to Bryan, “Where are we?”

“Phone records all have been dealt with,” Bryan said. “Going out, coming in. But it’s been expensive, more than I thought. Three blokes were involved in it by the time I was finished, and their rates’re going up.”

“We’ll have to absorb the cost. There’s no way around that that I can see. What else?”

“Still going after the rest. It takes a delicate hand and a lot of help from insiders. They’re available, but the money involved . . . ?”

“I thought it would be simple.”

“Might’ve been. But you should’ve talked to me first. Before, not after. Laying trails? Far easier than erasing them.”

“You’re supposed to be an expert, Bryan. I pay you what I pay you to be the best.” Doughty heard Emily’s derisive guffaw. He frowned at her. She didn’t need to make the situation worse.

“I am the best but that means I have the kind of contacts you need in all the places you need them. It doesn’t mean I’m Superman.”

“Well, you need to
become
Superman. And you need to do it now.”

Emily, obviously, could take no more, for she burst out with “This is just great. It’s all made in heaven. I
told
you this was something we needed to stay away from. Now I’m telling you again. Why won’t you believe me?”

“We’re in the process of making ourselves as clean as newborns,” Doughty said. “That’s what this meeting is all about.”

“Have you ever
seen
a newborn?” Emily demanded.

“Point taken,” Doughty said. “Bad analogy. Given time, I’ll think of another.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “You don’t
have
time, Dwayne. And it’s your thinking that got us into this position.”

SOHO

LONDON

Esteban Castro’s dance studio was situated next to a car park at the midway point between Leicester Square and what went for Chinatown. Barbara Havers found it without much difficulty directly after work. Getting to it was more of a challenge, however. It was on the top floor of a six-storey building sans lift, and as she huffed and puffed her way up the stairs to the sound of postmodern music growing ever louder, Barbara gave serious thought to eliminating smoking from her life. Fortunately, as she liked to think of it, she’d recovered her sanity, if not her breath, by the time she got to the translucent half-glass door of Castro-Rourke Dance. So she dismissed the idea of committing herself to tobacco abstinence as the product of a moment’s mere idle thought.

She entered the dance establishment and found herself in a small lobby replete with posters. These featured both Dahlia Rourke in tutu mode, adopting various exotic positions suggestive of contortion, and Esteban Castro in every mode imaginable: from tight-clad and leaping through the air, to arse-pointed-outward and arm flung upward in a flamenco stance. Other than the decorative posters, the lobby had nothing else in it but a counter on which were spread brochures for various dancing classes. These appeared to run the gamut from ballroom to ballet.

There was no one in the lobby. From the noise level, though, it seemed that dancing classes were happening on both sides of it, where closed doors led to other rooms. The noise comprised the postmodern music she’d heard on the stairway, which stopped and started and stopped in one of the rooms—broken by a shout of “No, no, no! Does that actually feel
to you like a toad experiencing delight and surprise?”—and loud commands of
royale! royale!
, which came from the other. The
no
s were spoken by a man, presumably Esteban Castro, so Barbara went for that door and swung it open. No one to announce her? Not a problem, she thought.

The room she entered was a good-size space with mirrored walls, ballet barres, a row of folding chairs along one side, and a pile of garments—costumes perhaps?—in one corner. In the middle on the smooth hardwood floor stood the man himself, and facing him at the far end of the room were six dancers—male and female—in various leotards, legwarmers, and ballet shoes. They looked abashed, impatient, irritated, weary. When Castro told them to “resume the starting position and
feel
it this time,” no one looked exactly thrilled by the idea. “He likes the motorcar,” Castro snapped at them, “and
you’ve
got a plan, all right? Now for God’s sake,
you
be a toad and
you
be five foxes so we can get out of here before midnight.”

Two of the dancers had clocked Barbara at the doorway, and one of them said, “Steve,” to Castro and jerked his head in her direction.

Castro swung round, took in Barbara, and said, “Class doesn’t start till seven.”

“I’m not—” she began.

“And I hope you’ve brought other shoes,” he added. “Doing the foxtrot in those? Not going to happen.” He was, of course, referring to her high-top trainers. He hadn’t yet got a clear glimpse of the rest of her clothing, or he would no doubt have pointed out that drawstring trousers and a tee-shirt reading
Celebrating 600 Years of the Bubonic Plague
weren’t exactly foxtrot material either.

Barbara said to him, “I’m not here for a class. You’re Mr. Castro? I need a word.”

He said, “Obviously, I’m in the middle of something.”

“Got that in a bucket. So am I.” She heaved her shoulder bag around and dug inside it for her warrant card. She crossed the room to him and let him have as much of a look as he wanted.

After a moment he said, “What’s this about?”

“Angelina Upman.”

His gaze rose from her warrant card to her face. “What about her? I haven’t seen her in ages. Has something happened to her?”

“Funny you’d go there first,” she noted.

“Where else am I supposed to go when the cops show up?” He didn’t, apparently, require an answer to this. Instead, he turned to his dancers and said, “Ten minutes, then we’ll go through this one more time.”

He spoke with no appreciable accent. He sounded like someone born in Henley-on-Thames. When she asked him about this, letting him know she’d done a little looking into a background that had told her he’d been born in Mexico City, he said he’d moved to London when he was twelve, his father a diplomat and his mother a writer of children’s books. It had been important to him to assimilate into the English culture, he said. Accent was part of it as he did not wish to be marked eternally as a foreigner in this place.

He was very good-looking. Barbara could see what the attraction had been for Angelina Upman. Indeed, she could see what the attraction would be for any woman. He smouldered in the way that Latin men often smouldered, helped along by a three-day growth of beard that made him look sexy instead of what it made most other men look, which was largely unkempt. His hair was dark and thick and so healthy-looking Barbara had to keep herself from touching it. She reckoned other women had the same reaction, and she also reckoned Esteban Castro knew it.

When they were alone in the room, Castro indicated the folding chairs and walked over to them. He moved as one would expect of a dancer: fluidly and with perfect posture. Like the dancers he’d dismissed, he wore a leotard that went miles to define every muscle on his legs and his arse. Unlike them, he also wore a tight white muscle-man tee-shirt that did much the same for his chest. His arms were bare. So were his feet.

He sat with his arms on his legs and his hands dangling between them. This gave Barbara a view of his package that she would have preferred not to have, so she moved her own chair to a position that kept his jewels from view. He said without preamble and without waiting to hear the reason for her call upon him, “My wife doesn’t know Angelina and I were involved. I’d like to keep it that way.”