Just One Evil Act (51 page)

“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.

“Doughty was right,” she said. “He found those tickets, Azhar. I expect he didn’t tell you that. SO12 found them as well, in case you’re interested. One-way to Pakistan and yourself a Muslim? That sort of purchase is like lighting firecrackers on a carriage in the Underground at half past five in the afternoon. It gets you noticed. It gets you investigated. Didn’t you think of that?”

Still, he said nothing although she saw his jaw shift. He fixed his gaze on hers, but other than his jaw, he didn’t move a muscle.

She said, “You’re taking her there. You bought the tickets in March because by then all the kidnapping plans were in place, weren’t they? You knew when and you knew how and you knew what Angelina would think and would do and by God she did it. She came to London, you returned with her to Italy, and everything played out according to plan except that one unfortunate car wreck and a dead man, but at the end of the day, you got her back and all was well. And you had—you
have
—no bloody intention of sharing Hadiyyah with Angelina at all. You’re going to take her to Pakistan and you’re bloody well going to disappear with her because that’s the only hope you have of getting Hadiyyah permanently. And once you knew that Angelina had taken up with another man, you
wanted
her permanently. You’ve family in Pakistan. Don’t tell me you don’t. And as far as getting employment there . . . ? For a man like you . . . ? A man with your education and background . . . ?”

Nothing from him. Not a change in expression, not a shifting in his chair, not a shuffling of his feet beneath the table. She thought she saw a pulse in the vein on his temple, but she also thought she saw it only because she wanted to see something in place of the nothing that she was seeing as she spoke.

“Tell me, Azhar. You goddamn bloody hell tell me what those tickets to Pakistan mean. Because Inspector Lynley knows about them, and he also knows the arrangement you and Angelina have: that Hadiyyah will come to you for her holidays and the first one begins in July.”

He shifted his gaze at last. It moved to the tiny fireplace across the room. He said, “Yes.”

“Yes to what?”

“That was what I was going to do.”

“And you still intend to do it, don’t you? You’ve got the tickets, and when she comes to you, she’ll have her passport because she’ll be coming from Italy. After a few days here to reassure her and everyone else that peace reigns between you and Angelina, off you’ll go. And there’s no way in hell that Angelina will be able to get her back. Not for years. Not for bloody decades.”

He looked at her then. His eyes were startled. He said, “No, no. You are not listening to me. I said that Pakistan
was
what I intended. It is not what I now intend. There is no need. We will share her, and both of us—Angelina and I—will make this work.”

Barbara stared at him. Finally, she felt something. It was incredulity and it was sweeping into her with the force of a polluted effluent pouring into a river. She couldn’t speak. She didn’t know the words.

He said, “Barbara, what else was I to do? You see this. I know you must see this. She is all I have. My family here is lost to me. You have seen this yourself. I could not lose her when I have lost so much already.”

“I can’t let you disappear with Hadiyyah into Pakistan. I won’t do that.”

“I will not. I will
not
. I thought I would. I intended to do it. But now, I will not, and I swear this to you.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you? After everything that’s passed? Do you think that’s reasonable?”

“I beg you,” he said. “I give you my word. When I bought those tickets . . . You must understand how I saw Angelina at that time. She had betrayed me. She had disappeared with my child. I’d had no way of knowing where they had gone or if I would ever be able to find them. I’d had no way of knowing if I would ever see Hadiyyah again. I swore to myself in November that if I could find her, I would make a way never to lose her again. Pakistan was that way. But it is not the way now. We have made our peace. It is not perfect, but it cannot be perfect. We will share Hadiyyah and I will see her on her holidays and whenever else I like. Should she wish to return here when she is of age, she will do so. I will be her father and she my daughter and this is how it will be.”

“But not if the Italian coppers track you down,” Barbara told him. “Don’t you see that?”

His fingers closed over the packet of Players on the table between them, but he did not take another one. He said, “They must not track me down. They must not make any further connections.”

“Di Massimo’s not planning to take the fall for this alone. He’s given them Doughty. And when it comes down to it, Doughty’s going to give them you.”

“Then we must stop him,” Azhar said simply.

For a crazy moment, Barbara thought he was suggesting murder. For a crazier moment, she considered the likelihood of his having meddled with the car that had sent Roberto Squali to his death. At that point, anything was beginning to seem possible when it came to Azhar. But then he spoke.

“Barbara, I beg you from the fullness of my heart to help me. I may have committed an act of evil. But this act in the end brought about vast good, not only for me but also for my daughter. You must see that. This man Bryan Smythe . . . If he has removed all traces of connection between Mr. Doughty and the Italian detective Di Massimo, can he not do the same for me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Barbara said.

“I do not see why.”

“Because Doughty has those films. Every meeting. Every plan. Every request you made. I expect he denied them all when you were in his office. I expect he phoned you later—from a call box or a throwaway mobile—and said he’d thought things over and p’rhaps there
was
a way he could help. What I’m saying is you can rest assured there’s nothing on those films that makes him look bad and everything on them that puts you in an Italian gaol for ten years and counting.”

He was quiet for a moment as he considered this. He finally said quietly, “Then we must get those films.”

Barbara did not miss his use of the plural pronoun.

SOUTH HACKNEY

LONDON

B
arbara rang the Yard in advance of what she presumed was Superintendent Ardery’s normal arrival time. She left a carefully crafted message. She was on her way to Bow for a final word with Dwayne Doughty, she told Dorothea Harriman. There were a few more details that needed to be hammered down, sewed up, or whatever, with regard to the private investigator’s place in the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Upman, and once she’d accomplished this, she’d be able to write the report that the superintendent was anticipating. Harriman asked if Detective Sergeant Havers wished her to fetch the guv so that she could give her the message personally. “She’s only just arrived,” the departmental secretary revealed. “Gone off to the ladies’. I c’n fetch her in a tick, if you’d like to speak with her yourself, Detective Sergeant.”

Speaking with Isabelle Ardery was not high on the list of things Barbara wanted to do. She replied with an airy, “No need for that, Dee,” but added that she’d be grateful if Dorothea would let DI Lynley know what she was up to when he showed his face in Victoria Street. Barbara knew quite well that she was on uneven ground with Lynley as it was. She also knew she’d go under entirely if she didn’t keep him in the loop of what she was up to. More or less.

The detective inspector was already there as well, Dee Harriman told her. So she’d give him the word as soon as they rang off. The poor man had been cornered by DI Stewart for some sort of ear bending when last she’d seen him. She’d pop round and rescue him by means of passing along the detective sergeant’s message. “Any message from you for Detective Inspector Stewart?” Harriman asked impishly.

“Very amusing, Dee,” Barbara told her. And she thought how far, far better a thing it was that Lynley and not herself be on the receiving end of one of Stewart’s diatribes.

She fetched Azhar from the ground-floor flat at the front of the big house in Eton Villas as soon as her phone call was completed. They set off, but not for Bow. Their destination was South Hackney and Bryan Smythe.

They’d been up till after two in the morning developing a strategy for dealing with Bryan Smythe. They had a separate strategy for dealing with Dwayne Doughty. But one would not function without the other.

During all of their discussing and planning, Barbara had tried to keep her mind on both Azhar and Hadiyyah and away from where she was placing herself in dealing with this situation. Azhar had been desperate, she told herself. Azhar had a right to his child. To this she added that little Hadiyyah deserved a loving father in her life. All of these facts she’d repeated to herself like a mantra. She massaged her brain with them. It was the only thing she could bear to think of.

What she hadn’t dared consider was how far she was sliding off the rails in this personal spate of employment in which she was engaged. There would be time for that later. Now, however, there was only coming up with a way to mitigate the jeopardy into which Azhar had placed himself in the cause of finding the daughter he loved.

When he opened the door to her persistent knocking, Bryan Smythe did not seem wildly chuffed to see Barbara standing on his doorstep with an unidentified dark-skinned man at her side. She couldn’t blame him for this. In his line of work, he probably didn’t much like unexpected visitors. He probably also didn’t much like attention being drawn to his house. She was betting on this latter assumption as the best means of gaining entrance to his lair should he not be ready to roll out the red carpet for them.

She said, “You were right, Bryan. Honours to you. Doughty had everything backed up on film.”

He said, “What’re you doing here? I told you what you wanted to know, and I said he’d have a fail-safe position. He had one, so the story ends there.” He glanced right and left as if with the concern that his neighbours—such as they were in this street—were behind the dismal, sagging curtains at their filthy windows taking snapshots of his tête-à-tête with a rozzer. A car turned at the corner and began rolling in their direction, its driver cruising slowly as if hunting for the proper address. Bryan gave a curse and jerked his head towards the inside of his house.

Barbara inclined her head to Azhar. She gave mental thanks that Smythe’s sense of caution tended to make him both jumpy and suspicious. They needed Bryan Smythe in their corner. If they couldn’t manoeuvre him there in the coming minutes, the game was over.

“You’ll get no aggro from me on that front,” Barbara told him as she passed over the threshold. “That’s not why we’re here.” She introduced him to Azhar. She watched as Bryan took in the other man and made whatever mental adjustments were necessary to align the reality of the Pakistani he was looking at to whatever mental image he’d had of him. “So be hospitable, eh? Make us a cuppa, toast us a teacake, and we’ll tell you what we need.”

“
Need?
” Bryan said incredulously. He shut the door smartly and locked it for good measure. “As I see it, you’re not in the position to be
needing
anything. At least nothing more than I’ve already given you.”

Barbara nodded thoughtfully. “I c’n see why you reckon that. But I think you’re forgetting a salient point.”

“What would that be?”

“That I’m the only one of you lot who’s clean. You watch every one of Dwayne’s films—’cause I bet he’s got dozens, if not hundreds—and you look through every record you c’n find on me out there in cyberland, and there’s nothing that connects me to this Italian business because I
wasn’t
connected to this Italian business. Whereas the lot of you . . . ? You’re all hanging from the precipice by broken fingernails, Bryan.”

“Including your friend here.” He jerked his head at Azhar.

“No one’s saying otherwise, mate. Now, how about that cuppa? I like mine with the works. Azhar goes with sugar. Do you lead the way or do I?”

He had little choice but to see what she was up to, so he went through to the other half of his house. There, the enormous flat screen television had been muted but was showing a chat show in which five badly dressed women appeared to be measuring the size of their bums against a life-size poster featuring the bony arse of a catwalk model. Bryan had apparently been enthralled with this when they’d knocked on his door, for on a coffee table in front of a fine leather sofa with a superb view of the telly, breakfast for one was still laid out. Eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, the works. Barbara’s stomach rumbled. She nearly regretted her single Pop-Tart and cup of coffee.

Bryan took himself to the kitchen end of the huge room, where he filled a stainless steel electric kettle. It was sleek and modern like the kitchen itself, and it matched the handles on the cabinets as well as the lighting fixtures. From an impressive fridge—also of pristine stainless steel—he brought out milk and sloshed some into a jug. Barbara told him they’d wait in the garden.

“Gorgeous day,” she said. “Out in nature. Fresh air and all the et ceteras. Don’t see gardens like this in our neighbourhood, do we, Azhar?” She led him out.

Midway between the pool with its lily pads and its sparkling fountain, there was a seating area fashioned from bluestone benches. Behind it grew a plethora of brilliant flowers artfully planted to look unarranged. Here, Barbara sat and gestured for Azhar to do the same. In the garden, Barbara reckoned, Bryan wouldn’t have a system to record whatever was said between them. For he did his business in the house itself, and she didn’t think it likely that he invited anyone who employed him to enjoy the fruits of his labours beyond the windows. Indeed, she thought it was probable that those who employed him never came to his house anyway. But better safe than sorry was how she looked at it.

She sat with Azhar next to her. When Bryan joined them with tea on a tray—the thoughtful bloke had actually provided the teacakes as requested, she saw—he sat opposite them. The tray he placed on the stone bench next to him. Barbara reckoned his hospitality didn’t extend to being mother, so she did the honours and she also scored a teacake for herself. It was tasty and the butter was real. There was nothing second-rate about the bloke.

Except perhaps his manners since he said, “You have your tea. Now what do you want? I’ve work to do.”

“Didn’t look that way from the telly.”

“I don’t care what it looked like. What do you want?”

“To employ you.”

“You can’t afford me.”

“Let’s say Azhar and I are pooling our resources, Bryan. Let’s also say that, all things considered, we reckon you’ll give us something of a cut-rate price.”

“What things?”

“What ‘what things’?”

“You said ‘all things considered.’”

“Ah.” She chowed down on more of the teacake. It had very nice currants in it, not at all dried out. Lovely, she thought. The thing had to have come from a bakery. No way did one score such a delicacy from the local Tesco. “In that, we go back to your line of work,” she said, “and what happens to it if I give the word to the blokes in Victoria Street who look into Internet crimes. We’ve been through this before, mate, so let’s not beat the horse while it’s lying in the dust. You’ve wiped all the records to make Doughty clean, and now you’re going to do something similar for Azhar. It’ll be trickier, but I reckon you’re the bloke to do it. We’ve got air tickets to Pakistan that need to be altered in the records at the Met. No worries that there’s terrorism involved. There isn’t. Just a detail on the tickets that needs changing in a file on someone who’s been investigated and vetted and is in the clear. That’s Azhar, by the way. He look like a terrorist to you?”

“Who bloody knows what a terrorist looks like these days?” Bryan said. “They’re jumping out of rubbish bins. And it’s impossible to do what you ask. Hacking into that system . . . ? D’you know how long that would take? D’you have any idea how many backups exist? I’m not talking about backups just at the Met, either. I’m talking about backups at the airline, on their main databases, on their alternative databases. I’m talking about backups on tape that you can alter only if you have the tape itself. Plus, there’re computer applications that’ve been written by hundreds of people over dozens of years and—”

“If we needed all that,” she cut in, “I c’n see it’d be something of a headache for you. But as it happens, we want the airline ticket altered, like I said, and it only needs to be altered in the Met’s system. The date of purchase needs to be changed, and it needs to be roundtrip instead of one-way. That’s it. There’s one in Azhar’s name and one in the name of Hadiyyah Upman.”

“And if I can’t get into the Met’s system . . . Which department are we talking about? Who’s got the records?”

“SO12.”

“Completely impossible. Laughable even to suggest it.”

“Not for you, and you and I know it. But to give you a little practice in advance—a bit of a way to exercise your typing skills, let’s say—we also need you to take care of a few bank records. Not a big deal for a bloke with your talents, and it’s an alteration again, not an erasure. Azhar here needs to have paid Doughty less: just enough to cover his services up to the point where the trail Angelina Upman left—such as it was—went dead as a corpse. That’s it, Bryan. Airline tickets and payments to Doughty and we’re out of your life, more or less.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I want you to hand over your fail-safe position. Just for an hour or two and you’ll have it back, but I’m going to need to take it with me. Today.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Barbara hooted. She said to Azhar, “You’re not to mind that he thinks we’re idiots. Computer nerds and their attitude problems? Hand in glove, if you know what I mean.” And then to Smythe, “Bryan, the one thing you’re not is stupid. You’ve backed up all of the information you removed from Doughty’s records. Wherever you have it—and I expect it’s right here in the house in a very nice safe with a very secure combination on it—I want it. Like I said, I need it for an hour or two and then you’ll have it back. And stop denying that you have it because you’re the sort of bloke who knows how to put the full stops where they belong.”

He said nothing at first. His expression was hard, his eyes flinty. He looked from Barbara to Azhar to Barbara and he said to her, “How many more of you are there?”

Azhar stirred next to her, but Barbara put her hand on his arm. She said, “Bryan, we’re not here to discuss—”

“No. I want to know. How many more dirty cops’re going to crawl out of the woodwork if I cooperate with you? And don’t please tell me you’re the only one. Your sort doesn’t exist alone.”

Barbara felt Azhar glance in her direction. For her part, she was surprised at how Smythe’s words stung. It wasn’t the first time he’d accused her of being dirty, but the fact was that this time, he was speaking the truth. That she was dirtying herself in the cause of a larger good, however, was not something she wished to debate with the man. So she said to him, “This is a one-time operation. It’s about Azhar, it’s about his daughter, and after that, it’s about us being gone from your life.”

“I’m expected to believe that?”

“I don’t see that you have a choice.” She waited as he thought things over. Birds were chirping pleasantly from the ornamental cherry trees in the garden, and within the pool a goldfish surfaced in the hope of feeding time’s approach. She said, “My grip’s better than yours is, mate. Face up to it and we’re out of here and you c’n go back to your breakfast and those ladies’ arses.”

“Grip,” he repeated.

“On the whatsies. We’re all hanging on to each other’s, let’s face it. But just now I’ve got the better hold. You know it. I know it. Let’s have your fail-safe data so Azhar and I c’n get on with things.”

“You’re heading for Doughty next,” he said.

“Bob’s definitely your uncle, mate.”

BOW

LONDON

“This is too much, Barbara” were Azhar’s first words. He’d said nothing at all during their encounter with Bryan Smythe, but once they were in Barbara’s car and heading over to Doughty’s office, he pressed fingers to his forehead as if trying to contain the pain in his head. “I am so sorry,” he said. “And now this. I cannot—”