Just One Evil Act (48 page)

In London, he went directly to the Yard. There, he met with Isabelle Ardery to make his report to her. It was a good result, culminating in the safe return of Hadiyyah Upman to her mother. The affair was in the hands of the Italian police now, and on the Lucca end of things, there was nothing more to be done as the public minister would determine what to do with the evidence uncovered by Chief Inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco and whoever followed him as head of the case.

“The investigation was taken away from him yesterday,” Lynley explained. “He and the public minister didn’t see eye to eye on things, as it happened.”

Isabelle picked up a phone, saying to him, “Let’s have Barbara’s report, then,” and she summoned Barbara to join them.

Lynley sighed and shook his head inwardly when he saw the sergeant’s appearance. Her hair was still a chopped-up mess, and she’d returned to a manner of dress certain to set Isabelle’s teeth on edge. At least on this day, she’d eschewed a slogan-embossed tee-shirt in favour of a jersey. Its zigzag horizontal pattern of neon colours, however, did nothing to enhance her charms. Her trousers—baggy at the seat and the knees—looked like something her grandmother had discarded.

He glanced at Isabelle. She looked at Havers, looked at him, and admirably controlled herself. She said, “Sergeant,” and indicated a seat.

Barbara shot Lynley a look that he couldn’t read, although she seemed to think she was being called onto the carpet for something. He couldn’t blame her for that. Rarely was she summoned into a superior’s office for any other thing. He said, “I’ve just brought the guv up-to-date on Italy,” and Isabelle said, “As to the London end of things, Sergeant . . . ?”

Havers looked relieved. She said by way of introduction, “Way I see it, guv, things’re going to come down to one slimy bloke’s word against another slimy bloke’s word.” She balanced the ankle of a red-trainer-shod foot on her knee and displayed a length of white sock printed with cupcakes. Lynley heard Isabelle’s sigh. Havers went on. Doughty, she told them, did not deny employing one Pisan called Michelangelo Di Massimo in an attempt to trace Hadiyyah and her mother. He claimed he had done so on behalf of Azhar, and that was the extent of what he’d done. He said that
whatever
money flowed from a London bank to an Italian bank—into the account of Di Massimo—was merely in payment for this service. But it proved to be a service that had gained him nothing, according to Doughty. Di Massimo had declared that the trail went dead early on. Havers said, “I reckon we have to decide which one of these blokes is the real liar. Since Di Massimo’s got the Italian cops on his back, could be we should just wait and see what comes of that.”

Isabelle hadn’t won her position as detective superintendent by failing to see where the net of an investigation had one or two gaping holes. She said, “At what point did Taymullah Azhar learn the name of this Italian private investigator, Sergeant?”

To which Havers’s reply was, “Never, guv, as far as I know. At least not before the inspector here sussed things out with the Italian coppers. And that’s really the crux of the matter, isn’t it?” Before Isabelle could answer, Havers continued with “SO12’s been onto Azhar, by the way. He’s clean.”

“SO12?” Lynley and Isabelle said simultaneously. Isabelle continued. “What have SO12 to do with things, Sergeant?”

Havers explained that she’d been intent on exploring every single avenue and—“Let’s admit it, guv, since you just brought him up, one of those avenues was Azhar”—she’d had a talk with Chief Inspector Harry Streener to see if his team had been looking into Azhar for any reason. Azhar had been in Berlin at the time of the kidnapping, and that didn’t look good, so she had figured if there was anything
questionable going on, SO12 would have found it. “Azhar’s a microbiologist, guv. Azhar’s Muslim. Azhar’s Pakistani. To the SO12 blokes . . . You know how they are. I reckoned if there was anything to be turned up about him, they would have done the spadework.”

But there had been nothing, Havers said. Her conclusion was the same as DI Lynley’s. This entire mess was better left in the hands of the Italian police.

“Get me your final written report then, Barbara,” Isabelle said. “You as well, Thomas.” And she signalled an end to their meeting by gesturing towards the door.

Before Lynley could follow Barbara through it, though, Isabelle said his name once again. He turned and she lifted a finger that told him to stay where he was. A nod instructed him to shut the door.

He returned to the seat he’d taken. He watched the detective superintendent. He’d come to know how expert she was at hiding things—particularly the workings of her mind and her heart—so he waited to hear what she wished to say, knowing how unlikely was the possibility that he could guess it in advance.

She pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk. He took a sharp breath. Isabelle was a drinker, and she knew he knew this. She believed she had the problem under control. He did not. She was aware of his belief, but she was also aware of the tacit understanding between them: He would not betray her as long as she kept her drinking away from Victoria Street and away from the job should the job take her elsewhere. He could see the slight tremor in her hands, however, and he said her name.

She shot him a look. “I’m not entirely stupid, Tommy. I have things under control” was her expected remark. Instead of a bottle, she brought out of the drawer a folded tabloid, which she opened, smoothed, and began to flip through.

He could see it was
The Source
, the most scurrilous of the London rags. He felt wary when he considered the implications behind Isabelle’s having stowed it in her desk as well as her dismissal of Barbara Havers and her indication that she wished to speak to him alone. These were unfortunate signs. They transformed themselves into ill realities when she found what she was looking for and turned the paper towards him so that he could see for himself what was causing her concern.

He reached in his jacket for his reading glasses, although the truth was that he didn’t need them, at least for the headline of the story:
Love Rat Dad’s Ties to the Met
spread across the top of pages four and five. Accompanying this was a photograph of Taymullah Azhar inset onto another, larger photograph of some sort of brouhaha in a London street. This involved a shouting teenage boy in a school uniform, an enraged man who appeared to be in his late sixties, a frightened-looking woman in a
shalwar kameez
and headscarf, and Barbara Havers. Havers was in the act of attempting to get the old man to release his hold on the boy; the headscarf woman was in the act of attempting to get the boy away from the man. The man himself was in the act of trying to stuff the boy into a car, its back door open and waiting for him.

Lynley scanned the story, which was typical of
The Source
. It bore a by-line that he knew only too well:
Mitchell Corsico
. It contained the breathless sort of writing that was
The Source
’s stock-in-trade. This was of the hot-breaking-news variety in which the named reporter had uncovered a close connection between a detective sergeant from the Met and the Love Rat Dad whose daughter had recently been kidnapped in Italy. This female officer from the Met would be, gentle readers, a presence in the life of the Love Rat Dad in addition
to the deserted wife in Ilford
and
the lover who had borne the man’s child. They live cheek by jowl, as it happens, in a north London neighbourhood where they keep separate residences on the very same property under the watchful eye of neighbours only too happy to express their opinions on the topic of the mild-mannered university professor and what was turning out to be a veritable stable of women willing to partner him.

The article followed the same pattern as so many stories featured in the daily tabloids. Their meat and potatoes had for generations consisted of destroying reputations. They built someone up one week as a hero or a sympathetic victim or a luck-struck winner of a national lottery or a grand success in the arts or an admirable self-made man . . . only to tear him down the next week when every slighted friend or colleague he had in his life crawled out of their personal rubbish tip to report “new facts” about him. Just to bring him down a few pegs, of course.

Lynley looked up when he completed his reading of the article. He wasn’t quite sure where to go with any remark he might make because he wasn’t quite sure what Isabelle knew about Barbara and Taymullah Azhar. Nor, he had to admit, was he.

She said, “What am I to make of this, Tommy?”

He took off his glasses and returned them to his jacket pocket. “It looks to me like an officer of the police coming to the aid of an adolescent boy being struck about the head by an older man.”

“Oh, I can see that. I can even tell myself that all this photo depicts is a moment in which DS Barbara Havers happened upon a conflict in the street and stepped in to sort it like the Good Samaritan we know her to be. I could do all that happily, but what prevents me is the fact that this adolescent boy is the son of Taymullah Azhar. Not to mention the fact that the older man is the father of Taymullah Azhar. I’m not to make a coincidence of that, am I, Tommy?”

“The picture could have a thousand and one interpretations, Isabelle, as can the article. Anyone reading it and looking at the picture can see that much.”

“Naturally. And one of those interpretations is that Barbara Havers may very well have a vested interest—a deeply personal and not
an objective professional interest—in matters that should not concern someone involved in an investigation.”

“You can’t possibly think that Barbara—”

“I don’t know what the hell to think about Barbara,” Isabelle cut in sharply. “But I do know what I see with my eyes and I do know what I hear with my ears, and—”

“‘Hear’? From whom? What? About Barbara?” Lynley studied her for a moment before he went on. She watched him do so and she met his gaze steadily. He finally looked away from her and at the paper still spread on her desk.

Lynley knew she wasn’t a tabloid reader. He didn’t flatter himself in thinking he knew everything about her from the months they’d spent naked in each other’s beds, but he did know that much. She didn’t read tabloids. So how had this one fallen into her hands? He said, “Where did you get this?” with a gesture at the paper.

“That’s hardly as important as the ‘news’ it contains.”

Lynley glanced over his shoulder at the closed door and what lay beyond it. And then, quite simply, he knew. “John Stewart,” he said. “And now he’s waiting to see what you intend to do about her. While all along what you should be intending to do is something about John.”

“I plan to deal with John in due time, Tommy. Just now we’re dealing with the issue of Barbara.”

“There is no issue of Barbara. She may know Azhar, but as to there being the slightest indication of a romantic involvement, a physical involvement,
any
involvement between them other than simple friendship . . . It’s just not on, Isabelle.”

She considered this for a very long moment. Outside her office, the sounds of a typical day’s activities were ongoing. Someone called out for “a copy of that article on peat preservation Philip was going on about,” and a trolley rattled by. Inside her office, they engaged in a stare-down which Isabelle finally broke by speaking.

“Tommy, we all have blind spots,” she said.

“Barbara doesn’t,” he returned as firmly as he could. “Not in this matter.”

She looked infinitely sad when she dismissed him with the reply, “I’m not talking about Barbara, Inspector.”

VICTORIA

LONDON

He wasn’t as certain about Barbara Havers as his words had been. He wasn’t, in fact, certain about anything. For this reason, he read the activity reports Barbara had turned in during the time she’d worked on John Stewart’s team, and from there he went to spend ten minutes with Harry Streener in SO12. The fact that now two CID officers were interested in SO12’s concerns about one Taymullah Azhar gave Streener pause, but Lynley soothed him with a claim that loose ends were being tied up upon the request of Detective Superintendent Ardery and he was the bloke given the job of tying.

Thus Lynley discovered the airline tickets to Pakistan in very short order. Thus Lynley also discovered to his dismay that Barbara was withholding information. He didn’t particularly want to think what all of this meant: about Taymullah Azhar and the kidnapping of his daughter as well as about DS Barbara Havers. But he knew he had to speak to Barbara at once. For the reality she needed to face was simple: If he had learned she was withholding information about Taymullah Azhar, it stood to reason that John Stewart would unearth this fact sooner or later and turn it over to Isabelle. At that point Isabelle’s hands would be tied and so would his own be. He couldn’t let that happen.

He found Barbara at work at her desk, every inch of her announcing that she was nothing less than a nose-to-the-grindstone officer intent upon doing her duty. He said to her quietly, “I need a word, Barbara,” and he could see from her immediate expression of alarm that he’d perfectly telegraphed to her the seriousness of the situation.

He left her and went to the lifts. When she joined him there, he pushed for the fourth floor. He led her to Peeler’s. Some tables were occupied with the last of the lunchtime crowd, but most were empty. He selected one far away from the remaining hubbub of the place, and by the time they had reached the table, sat, and ordered coffees, he could tell that the sergeant was as rattled as he wanted her to be.

He said, “John Stewart’s given Isabelle a copy of
The Source
. There’s a story in it written by Mitch Corsico—”

“I went to the school, sir,” Barbara told him hastily. “Sayyid’s comprehensive. I’d had word from Corsico that he was intent on interviewing the kid, and I knew Sayyid would spew all sorts of rubbish about Azhar. It wasn’t only about Azhar that I went to the school, though. I knew whatever
The Source
might print would hurt everyone: his mum, his dad, Sayyid himself. I thought—I
believed
—I had to—”