Just One Evil Act (87 page)

That was the extent of Salvatore’s information. Lynley had the distinct feeling that there was more going on than Salvatore was willing to say via phone. But whatever it was, it was going to have to stay in Italy until such a time that Lynley travelled to Lucca again.

A phone call from Dorothea Harriman supervened upon his conversation with Salvatore Lo Bianco. DI John Stewart was in conference with the detective superintendent now. He had taken a copy of a tabloid into the meeting, Detective Inspector Lynley. Harriman thought it was
The Source
, but she couldn’t be sure.

Lynley rang Barbara Havers another time. Another time, it was her voice mail he heard. Just a surly “This is Havers. Leave a message,” in an impatient tone. He told her to ring him as soon as possible. He added, “Salvatore tells me you’re on a flight to London. We do need to talk before you come in to the Met, Barbara.” More than that, he wouldn’t say. But he hoped she sensed the urgency in his tone.

For an hour afterwards, he was weak-stomached. He recognised this not only as completely unlike him but also as an indication of how little he could do at this point to stop the concrete ball from rolling down the ice slope on which it had been perched. When his desk phone rang at last, he snatched it up.

“Barbara,” he said.

“Me.” It was Dorothea. “Coast is clear. Detective Inspector Stewart has just left her office. He’s looking grim.”

“With triumph?”

“Couldn’t say, Detective Inspector Lynley. Raised voices for a moment or two in there, but that was it. She’s alone now. I thought you might like to know.”

He went to Isabelle at once. On his way, he met John Stewart in the corridor. As Harriman had indicated earlier, the other DI carried a tabloid with him. He had it rolled into a tube, and when Lynley nodded at him and began to pass by, Stewart stopped him. It was a sharp move in which he slapped the rolled tabloid against Lynley’s chest. He moved in far too close, and when he spoke, Lynley could smell the acrid scent of his breath. He felt rising in himself the inclination to shove the other man against the wall by means of his hand on Stewart’s throat, but he quelled this inclination and said, “Is there a problem, John?”

Stewart’s voice was a hiss. “You think you were discreet, the two of you. You think no one knew you were fucking her, don’t you? We’re going to see about that one, you and I. This isn’t over, Tommy.”

Lynley felt his muscles go so tight that the only release for the energy that made them that way would have been to throw Stewart to the floor and throttle him. But there was too much at stake here, and the truth of the matter was that he hadn’t the slightest idea what was actually going on. So he said, “I beg your pardon?”

“That’s right, mate,” Stewart sneered. “You go all public school on me. That’s just what I would expect of you. Now get out of my way or—”

“John, I believe you’re in
my
way,” Lynley said quietly. He took the tabloid from the other man’s hand, where still it pressed against his own chest. “Thank you for this, however. A little light reading over dinner tonight.”

“You piece of shit. The two of you. The three of you. All of you directly up to the top.” This said, Stewart pushed past him.

Lynley went on his way, but as he did so, he opened the tabloid to see the front page. Mitchell Corsico’s by-line was no surprise. Neither was the headline
Kidnap
Dad Behind It All
. He didn’t need to read the article to see that he had been outplayed by Dwayne Doughty. The private investigator was a master, he realised, the mouse who could wrest the cheese from the trap without even coming close to the neck snap that would kill him.

When he got to Dorothea Harriman, he nodded at Isabelle’s closed door. She said she would check and she spoke into her phone. Would the detective superintendent be available to see Detective Inspector Lynley? she enquired. She listened for a moment and then told Lynley to give his superior five minutes.

The five minutes that passed stretched to ten and then fifteen before Isabelle opened her office door. She said, “Come in, Tommy. Close the door behind you,” and when he’d done so, she gave a tremendous sigh. She gestured to her mobile and said, “It shouldn’t take such an effort to plan a holiday to the Highlands. Bob wants to argue that it’s ‘out of the country’ and as he has custody, et cetera, et cetera. Is it any wonder I took to drink?” And when he shot her a look, she said, “I’m joking, Tommy.”

She went to her desk and dropped into her chair. Uncharacteristically, she removed her simple necklace, dropped it on the desk, and rubbed the back of her neck. “Pinched nerve,” she told him. “Stress, I think. Well, it’s been a rough time.”

“I saw John in the corridor.”

“Ah. Well. He was taken aback. Who can blame him? He wasn’t to know he was being looked into, but honestly, what else could the man have been expecting?”

Lynley watched her. Her face was nothing if not completely what it ought to be. He said, “I’m not sure I understand.”

She continued to see to the tight muscles in her neck. “I wasn’t sure how it would work out, of course, once I assigned her to him and then reassigned her elsewhere, but I did think his antipathy towards both of us would do him in, which of course it did. She ran him on a merry chase all over London, and he ran after her. Doubtless there’s some fox-hunting metaphor that a man of your background might come up with—”

“I don’t hunt,” he told her. “Well, once, but once was quite enough for me.”

“Hmm. Yes. I suppose that’s in order, isn’t it? I daresay you’ve always been a traitor to your class.” She smiled at him. “How are you, Tommy?” she asked. “You’ve seemed . . . lighter these days. Have you met someone?”

“Isabelle, what’s going on, exactly? Hillier, CIB1, the DAC from police personnel management . . .”

“John Stewart’s been transferred, Tommy,” she said. “I thought you understood what I was talking about.” She returned her necklace to her neck and rebuttoned her blouse. She said, “Barbara’s brief was to suss him out. She would misuse her time left, right, and centre, and we would see if he misused his authority by setting up an unauthorised investigation of her. Of course, that’s exactly what he did as his reports to me proved from the very first. Naturally, ridding ourselves of the man entirely is a virtual impossibility, but CIB1, Hillier, and personnel management came to believe that a spate in Sheffield might be just the ticket for John. To learn how to operate effectively within the confines of a hierarchy, I mean.”

The release he felt was enormous. So was the gratitude. He said, “Isabelle . . .”

She said, “At any rate, Barbara played her part well. One would almost believe she was seriously out of order. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Why?” he said quietly. “Isabelle,
why
? With so much at risk for you . . .”

She looked at him quizzically. “You’re confusing me, Tommy. I’m not at all sure what you’re talking about. At any rate, it’s not important, I suppose. The crux of the matter is that John’s been dealt with. The coast is clear, as they say, for Barbara’s return and for a private celebration for a job well done.”

He saw that she was not going to relent. She would have this her way or not at all. He said, “I don’t know what to . . . Isabelle, thank you. I want to say that you won’t regret this, but God knows that’s not likely.”

She regarded him evenly for a very long moment. For a flash he saw in her face the woman whose body he’d so enjoyed in bed. Then that woman was gone and, he reckoned, she was gone forever. Her next words made this so.

“It’s guv, Tommy,” she told him quietly. “Or it’s ma’am. Or it’s superintendent. It’s not Isabelle, though. I hope we’re clear on that.”

CHALK FARM

LONDON

S
he hadn’t returned a single call from Lynley. What the fallout was going to be was something she didn’t want to know just yet. So when she’d returned, she’d dragged herself into her bungalow and dumped the contents of her duffel onto the floor. She’d looked at the dismal collection of dirty clothing, and she’d decided that the next step was to lug it all to the launderette. She’d done so, sitting inside the place with its saunalike temperature and its unmistakable odour of mildew. She’d washed and she’d dried and then she’d folded. When it could no longer be avoided, she’d returned home.

The aloneness of the place seeped inside her skin. Given, she’d been alone for years, but it had been an alone she’d managed to deny through work, through the obligatory visits to her mother’s care home, where the poor woman’s mind was being taken from her by the tablespoonful, and through the unexpected but always welcome interactions with her neighbours. Those neighbours she didn’t want to think about, but when she passed by their flat with its closed and curtained French windows, it was impossible to think of anything else.

It hadn’t been a wrenching parting at the Pisa airport. That was the stuff of films. Instead, it had been something of a rush in which Azhar acquired tickets for, as things turned out, a flight to Zurich, from where he would begin the process of getting himself and Hadiyyah to Pakistan. This flight was soon to depart, and Barbara worried that, in these days of international terrorists, he would be denied a ticket by virtue of being Muslim, dark-skinned, and seeking to go one way only. But perhaps it was the presence of his charming daughter, clearly thrilled at the idea of a holiday in Switzerland with Dad, that obviated the need for further questions. His documents were in order and so were Hadiyyah’s and that, it seemed, was all that would be required. Meantime, Barbara was arranging her own return to London. Soon enough—far too soon—they were on the other side of passport control and ready to part.

Barbara said, “Well, right. That’s it,” and she gave Hadiyyah a one-armed hug. She said to her with a heartiness that she made every attempt to seem real, “Bring me a kilo of Swiss chocolate, kiddo. What else do they have for souvenirs? Swiss Army knives, I reckon.”

“Watches!” Hadiyyah cried. “D’you want a watch as well?”

“Only if it’s dead pricey.” And then she looked at Azhar. There was nothing to say, and certainly nothing that could be said in front of the little girl. So she said to him with a smile that felt like a rictus, “What an adventure it’s been, eh?”

He said, “Thank you, Barbara. For what’s gone. For what comes.”

Unable to speak past the stricture in her throat, she gave him a jaunty salute instead. She managed a “Later, then, mate.” He nodded and that was it.

She had the key to his flat. Upon her return from the launderette, when there was nothing more for her to do inside her own bungalow, she walked to the front of the villa and across the lawn and let herself inside the place, empty of him, empty of Hadiyyah, but somehow bearing the echo of them both. She wandered its rooms and ended up in the one Azhar had shared with Angelina Upman. Her belongings were gone, of course, but his were not. In the clothes cupboard everything hung neatly: the trousers, the shirts, the jackets, the neckties. On the floor were shoes, arranged in a row. On the shelf were scarves and gloves for winter. On the back of the door were ties. She fingered the jackets and she held them to her face. She could smell him on them.

She spent an hour in the sitting room that Angelina had so carefully redone. She touched surfaces of furniture, she looked at pictures on the walls, she fingered books on shelves. At last she sat and did nothing at all.

Finally, she knew, there was nothing for it. She’d gone to bed. At that point, she’d had eight calls from Lynley on her mobile and two more on her landline. Each time, as soon as she heard his well-bred baritone, she deleted the message at once. Soon enough, she would face the music she’d so jauntily claimed herself perfectly capable of facing. But not yet.

She slept better than she expected. She readied herself for work with more than her usual brand of care. She actually managed to put together something that a charitable fashionista might brand an ensemble . . . of sorts. At least, she eschewed elastic or drawstring waistbands in favour of a zipper and belt loops, although she certainly did not possess a belt. She also let slogan-bearing tee-shirts sit by the sartorial wayside. Her fingers
did
pause at
This is my clone. I’m actually somewhere else having a much better time
,
but she concluded that—while true—the sentiment was largely inappropriate for work.

When she could avoid it no longer, she headed out for Victoria Street in the fine May weather. Passing beneath the profusely blossoming limbs of the ornamental cherry trees, she decided on the Underground instead of her car, and she made her way over to Chalk Farm Road. This would allow her to stop at her local newsagent. She needed to know the worst in advance of having to deal with her superiors’ reaction to it.

Inside the place, it was airless as usual, its temperature a nod to the proprietor’s homeland. It was a shop just marginally wider than a corridor, with one wall devoted to magazines, broadsheets, and tabloids and the other to every kind of sweet and savoury known to humanity. What she wanted, though, was not going to be among what was on offer that morning. So she worked her way past three uniformed schoolgirls in earnest discussion of the health benefits of pretzels over crisps and a woman with a toddler attempting to escape his pushchair. At the till she asked Mr. Mudali if he had any remaining copies of yesterday’s edition of
The Source
. He responded with the assurance that indeed he had. He brought forth a bundled square of what had not sold from among the newspapers on the previous day. It was a simple matter to hand over
The Source
—she was lucky, he said, as there was only one left—and although he refused to take money for a day-old newspaper, she pressed it on him anyway. She also purchased a packet of Players and one of Juicy Fruit before she left the place.

She didn’t open
The Source
until she was on the Northern Line, where most unusually, she actually was able to secure a seat among the commuters heading for central London. For a moment she hoped against all reason that Mitchell had not made good his threat, but a simple glance at
Kidnap Dad Behind It All
told the tale.

Her very soul felt heavy. She folded the paper without reading the story. Then, two stops farther along, she reckoned she needed to prepare herself. The many phone calls from Lynley that she’d ignored spoke of the Met’s knowledge of her participation in everything concerning Hadiyyah’s kidnapping. No matter that she had not known of Azhar’s plan. She was complicit from the moment she’d involved Mitchell Corsico in manipulating New Scotland Yard into sending Lynley to Italy in the first place. Perhaps, she thought, she could come up with some sort of defence. The only way to do it was going to be to forearm herself through reading Mitch’s story.

So she unfolded the paper and did so. It was damning, of course. Names, dates, places, exchanges of cash . . . the whole rotten business. There was only one thing missing from the article. Nowhere in it was she herself mentioned.

Mitchell had deleted every reference to her before he’d sent the piece to his editor. She had no idea if this was mercy or a Machiavellian preparation for worse to come. There were, she knew, two ways to find out. She could wait for the future to unfold or she could ring the journalist himself. She chose the latter when she reached St. James’s Park Station. Walking along Broadway in the direction of the heavily secured front entrance to the Met, she rang the man on his mobile.

He was, she found, still in Italy, hot on every part of the
E. coli
story and the arrest of Lorenzo Mura. Had Barbara seen his piece this morning? he asked. It was another front-pager and he was dining out on the information he was supplying his cohorts in Italy who, alas, did not have his sources. By which, of course, he meant Barbara herself.

She said, “You changed the story.”

He said, “Eh?”

“The one you showed me. The one you were holding over me. The one . . . Mitchell, you took out my name.”

“Oh. Right. Well, what can I say? Old times’ sake, Barb. That and the goose.”

“I’m not the goose, there are no eggs, and we have no old times,” she told him.

He laughed outright at this. “But we will, Barb. Believe me. We will.”

She rang off. She passed a rubbish bin and tossed the day-old edition of
The Source
on top of a half-eaten takeaway egg salad croissant and a banana peel. She followed the line of people going through the Yard’s enhanced security system. She was safe from one kind of judgement, she reckoned. But she certainly wasn’t safe from others.

Winston Nkata was the one to tell her. Odd for him, she would think later, since Winston wasn’t given to gossip. But that something big was going on was evident the moment she stepped out of the lift. Three detective constables were earnestly talking at the black detective while a buzz of conversation in the air spoke of changes having nothing to do with a new case developing and a team beginning to work upon it. This was something different, so Barbara approached her fellow detective sergeant. There, in short order, the news broke over her. John Stewart was gone, and someone would soon be promoted to replace him. It was that or bring in a different DI. The DCs present round Winston’s desk were telling him he was all but poised to be the man of the hour. They had no ethnic DI under Ardery’s command. “Go for it, mate” was how they put it.

Nkata, ever the gentleman like his mentor Lynley, would make no move without Barbara’s blessing, and he asked her, “Have a word, Barb?” in order to get it. After all, she’d been a DS far longer than he, and just as they had no ethnic DI under the command of Isabelle Ardery, so also had they no female DI.

Nkata took her to the stairwell for a natter. He descended two steps to mitigate the great difference in their heights. What he had to say needed to come from an equal and height was a metaphor for this, she supposed.

He said, “Took the exam a while back. I di’n’t talk about it cos . . . Seemed like I would jinx it, eh? I passed, though, but I got to say it: You been a sergeant for a long time, Barb. I’m not goin for this if you want it.”

Barbara found this oddly charming, that Winston would defer to her when the likelihood of her even keeping her job at this point was more remote than the moon. Besides, it had to be said that Winston Nkata would always be the better choice to lead a team of coppers. He played by the rules. She did not. At the end of the day, that was a critical difference.

“Do it,” she told him.

“You sure, Barb?”

“Never more than now.”

He flashed his brilliant smile.

Then she went on, heading for the superintendent’s office to learn her fate. For she’d been spared by Mitchell Corsico, but her sins were still great nonetheless. Away without leave was among the worst of them. There was a price to pay, and she would pay it.

BELSIZE PARK

LONDON

Lynley found a parking space midway down the street, in front of the long line of terrace houses. It was in an area undergoing gentrification. The house in question, alas, had not been touched by this particular brand of architectural magic. He wondered—as he always did when it came to areas in transition—about the safety of this part of town. But then what was the point of such wondering when his own wife had been gunned down on the front steps of their house in a pricey neighbourhood unknown for anything other than a house alarm accidentally blaring when an owner stumbled home too inebriated to think about disarming it?

He grabbed up what he had brought with him to Belsize Park: a bottle of champagne and two long-stemmed flutes. He got out of the car, locked it, hoped for the best as he always did when he parked the Healey Elliott in the street, and climbed the front steps to a shallow porch where the Victorian tiles that lined it had, gratifyingly, remained unmolested.

He was a little late. A conversation with Barbara Havers had resulted in his offer to drive her home. Since driving her home put him in the area to which he was going anyway, it seemed the reasonable thing to do. But traffic had been bad.

She’d spent ninety minutes in Isabelle Ardery’s office. She’d emerged, according to that most reliable source Dorothea Harriman, white-faced and seeming . . . Was it humbled? chastened? humiliated? surprised? stunned by her good fortune? Dee didn’t know. But she could tell, Detective Inspector Lynley, that no voices were raised during the colloquy that Detective Superintendent Ardery had with Detective Sergeant Havers. She’d overheard the detective superintendent say, “Sit down, Barbara, because this is going to take a while,” before the door closed. But that was it.

Barbara reported very little to him. Other than “She did it for you,” she didn’t appear to wish to talk about it. But his “I assure you, she didn’t” prompted further discussion between them because what he wanted to know was why she had refused to take his calls when his calls were meant to prepare her for what was going on at the Yard.

She said, “Guess I didn’t want to know. Guess I didn’t trust you, sir. Guess I don’t trust anyone, not even myself. Not really.”

She was silent after that and, knowing her as he did, he could tell she wanted to light a cigarette. He also knew she wouldn’t do so in the Healey Elliott. So he used her nerves to press a point. “You’ve been saved in any number of ways. I saw Corsico’s article about the kidnapping.”

“Right,” she said. “Well, that’s Corsico for you. He goes his own way.”

“For a price. Barbara, what do you owe him?”

She looked at him. He noted how drawn her face was . . . She looked broken, he thought, and he knew this had everything to do with Taymullah Azhar. She claimed they’d parted at the airport in Pisa. He wanted a few days with Hadiyyah, she said. Just the two of them, she said, to recover from everything that had happened in Italy. That was all she knew, she claimed.