Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  The last time she’d met her snout, it had cost her a bundle. Foolishly, she’d suggested lunch and he’d been more than happy to oblige her. She’d ended up having to pay for the lout’s roast beef, Yorkshire pud, and all the et ceteras in exchange for a single name from the bloke.

  She wasn’t about to make that mistake twice as she could hardly put “gathering information from a tabloid journalist” down on a convenient expense account. So she made arrangements to meet her snout at the Watts Memorial. This worked out fine because the journalist was covering a trial at the Old Bailey anyway.

  It had begun to rain as she’d left the Yard. The downpour increased as she wended her way to Postman’s Park. She found shelter under the green-tiled roof that preserved the Watts Memorial from the ravages of both time and London’s weather, and she lit up a fag beneath a particular memorial celebrating an act of equine heroism in Hyde Park: a runaway carriage in 1869 and the requisite damsel in distress. The death involved was to her rescuer, one William Drake. Alas, Barbara thought, they didn’t make men the way they used to.

  And they certainly didn’t make them like Mitchell Corsico. When he appeared from the direction of the Royal Courts of Justice, he was garbed as usual, like an American cowboy. Barbara wondered, also as usual, how he got away with the get-up. Obviously, one’s manner of dress at The Source was not nearly as important as one’s manner of gathering information for the scurrilous tabloid.

  She had that in spades, and she intended to give it to Corsico. One way or another, a fire was going to be lit beneath Superintendent Ardery’s Pilates-maintained bum, and Barbara reckoned she’d come up with that way. She’d brought with her photographs that she’d snared from Azhar’s flat that morning. There was one of him. There was one of Hadiyyah. There was one of Angelina Upman. Best of all, there was one of the three of them together making at happy families in the distant past.

  Corsico spied her. He clomped through puddles in his pointy-toed boots and beneath the memorial’s roof he removed his Stetson. Barbara half expected him to say, “Howdy, ma’am,” at this, but it turned out he merely wished to remove the excess water from it, which he did. She received most of it against her legs. Good thing, she decided, that she was in trousers. Still, she brushed the water off and eyed him. He said sorry and dropped onto the bench at her side.

  “So?” he said.

  “Kidnapping.”

  “And I should be gobsmacked by this information because . . . ?”

  “Kidnapped in Italy.”

  “And kidnapped in Italy should send me scurrying for my laptop and an Internet connection why . . . ?”

  “The victim’s British.”

  Corsico gave her a look. “Okay. I’m moderately interested.”

  “She’s nine years old.”

  “I’m getting intrigued.”

  “She’s bright, personable, and pretty.”

  “Aren’t they always?”

  “Not like this.” Barbara brought out the first photo, the one of Hadiyyah. Corsico was no fool. He clocked at once that she was mixed race, and one eyebrow rose to indicate Barbara was to proceed with the titillation of his brain cells. She handed over the photo of Angelina Upman, then the one of Azhar, then the happy family together with Hadiyyah in a pushchair at two years old. Everyone, thank God, was suitably attractive.

  The Source, Barbara knew as one of its devoted readers, was never going to go front page with anyone—kidnapped, dead, or otherwise—unless that person had a certain look. Hardened criminals with mugs like three-day-old roadkill made the front page if they were arrested for a crime that had taken the tabloid’s fancy. But an ugly kid kidnapped? An ugly woman murdered? A grief-stricken father or husband with a face like a salmon? Not going to happen.

  “Kid could be dead,” Barbara pointed out, although she despised herself for having to use the word kid to refer to Hadiyyah, not to mention dead. But Corsico couldn’t be made to know her interest in the case. If he twigged, she knew he’d not cooperate. He’d see at once that he was being used and, story or not, he would walk away. “Kid could be in a Bangkok cathouse,” she added. “Kid could be sold to someone with a cellar in the Belgian countryside. Kid could be in the US by now. Who the hell knows . . . because we bloody well don’t.”

  The we got him as she’d hope it might. The we meant more was in the offing. The we meant there was a chance for The Source to lead a charge against the Met, and both of them knew that when it came to news, leading charges against the Met was a close second to having a salacious scoop on a Member of Parliament or a picture of an inebriated naked prince clutching at the crown jewels as someone snapped away with a mobile’s camera.

  But still he was cautious, Mitchell Corsico. Caution in moments like these had got him where he was today, with a page-one by-line two or three times each week and every other tabloid in the country willing to offer him six figures to start digging up dirt. So he said, careful to sound noncommittal, “Why’s no other paper got this tale, then?”

  “Because none of them have the whole story, Mitch.”

  “Sordid, is it?” He meant sordid enough, of course.

  “Oh, I think it’s right up your alley,” she told him.

  21 April

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Dorothea Harriman was the one who gave the word that Detective Superintendent Ardery had been called over to Tower Block. Sent for was the actual term she used. When Barbara heard this from the departmental secretary as she herself was depositing coins into one of the vending machines to score a Fanta, she knew that the assistant commissioner was the likeliest person to have given the order for Ardery to make haste to Tower Block. This probably wasn’t good for the super, but Barbara was no mourner for that news. If she was condemned to continue working with DI Stewart as a bloody typist till Ardery saw fit to assign her elsewhere, then whatever Ardery had to suffer was fine by her.

  It didn’t occur to Barbara that Sir David Hillier’s request for the detective superintendent might have to do with her and her machinations on the Mitchell Corsico front. She’d been ringing Corsico practically hourly since their meeting at Postman’s Park, and as far as she’d been able to gather, “working on it” was the extent to which he’d gone.

  She was at the point of gnashing her teeth with impatience to see something happen. She had heard only single words from Azhar since he’d left with Angelina and her lover. But it was always the same word, “Nothing,” and the sound of his voice was like a lump of ice in her throat, freezing off words of comfort that she might have said to him.

  That something was about to happen became clear the moment Isabelle Ardery returned from Tower Block. She barked, “Sergeant Havers, into my office at once,” and added, “Inspector Lynley, you as well,” in a voice only slightly less hostile. Murmurs rose from the rest of the officers bent to various tasks. Only DI Stewart looked pleased. Any dressing-down that was delivered to Barbara Havers had always been fine with him.

  Barbara shot Lynley a what’s-going-on look. He shook his head in an I-don’t-know. He led the way to Ardery’s office and stepped aside to let Barbara enter first. He did the honours with the door at Ardery’s request.

  The superintendent had thrown something on her desk. That something was a tabloid. That tabloid was The Source. The day of reckoning for the Met had arrived—not bad, Barbara thought, as Mitch had managed it within forty-eight hours—and finally something was going to be done about the matter of a British child’s disappearance in Italy.

  Mitch had done a fine job, from what Barbara could see. UK Schoolgirl Kidnap! comprised a three-inch headline, Mitchell Corsico comprised the by-line, and a photograph of Hadiyyah looking utterly winsome took up half the page. There was an inset of an aerial photo as well. Top of a huge wall, a paroxysm of European cobbled streets, the tops of market stalls, masses of people . . . The hold-up in the story, Barbar
a reckoned, had had to do with getting a decent shot of the place from which Hadiyyah had disappeared. She angled closer to see if the story made a jump from page one and, if so, where. Page three! She wanted to crow when she saw it. This signalled to one and all that the story was going to have significant legs. Those legs would have feet, those feet would be in metal-toed Doc Martens, and those Doc Martens would be stamping all over the Met from now till the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Khalidah was resolved. Hillier would have known that the moment the press office got the tabloid to him hot off the metaphorical presses. Which was, naturally, what Isabelle Ardery wished to discuss with Detective Sergeant—“And believe me, I’d kick you down to filing clerk if I could”—Barbara Havers.

  She gathered up the tabloid, threw it at Barbara, and told her to regale herself, Inspector Lynley, and Ardery as well with an oral reading of what she’d “clearly been determined to see publicised.”

  Barbara said, “Guv, I didn’t—”

  “Your jelly-covered fingers are all over this, Sergeant,” Ardery said. “Do not presume to believe that I’m quite so stupid.”

  “Guv,” Lynley said, and his tone spoke of an attempt at appeasement.

  She said sharply to him, “I want you to hear this as well. You need to be entirely up-to-date and completely in the picture, Thomas.”

  Barbara felt her first niggle of discomfort at this. It presaged something she didn’t want to consider. She cooperated with Ardery’s command to read the story aloud. When she reached each significant point—and there were many—Ardery had her stop and repeat it.

  So what they all came to learn and hear repeated was that no British police were involved in the search for a missing English child snatched from a market in Lucca, Italy; that no British police had been sent to Tuscany to be of assistance to the Italian coppers; that no British police had been assigned to liaise with the desperate family of the kidnap victim here in the UK or in Italy either. There were hints aplenty as to why this state of affairs was this state of affairs: The girl in question was a mixed-race child; as a result this was not a crime destined to be heavily investigated in either country, where foreigners—particularly those with origins in the Middle East—were looked upon daily with more and more suspicion and equal distaste. Bradford was given as an example of this. So was the condition of the housing estates in “the worst of our inner cities.” Mosques were attacked; women in chadors or headscarves were harassed; young dark-skinned men were chased down and frisked for weapons or bombs . . . Tsk, tsk, tsk, declared the tabloid piously. What was the world coming to?

  Corsico had included every possible detail that might juice up the story and produce follow-ups via the sorts of hush-hush phone calls that had long been every tabloid’s bread and butter in London: the father’s position as a professor of microbiology at University College; the maternal grandparents’ upper-middle-class status as denizens of Dulwich; the maternal aunt’s career as an award-winning designer of furniture; the mother’s late-autumn disappearance with the now-missing child into regions heretofore unknown but now suspected to have been Tuscany all along; the unwillingness of all parties to comment upon anything that had occurred. All of this begged for someone with inside information on any person whose name appeared in the story to ring The Source and spill beans of the reputation-ruining kind. This would happen in due course, naturally. It always did.

  Assistant Commissioner Hillier had, it seemed, called Isabelle onto his Wilton carpet for a proper caning, and she was bound and determined to pass the joy on to Barbara. The AC had done his homework in advance as well. So what he’d known when Ardery had entered his office was that the story was true from start to finish, with the possible embellishment of the women in chadors. No police from the UK were involved, not even the coppers in north London where the girl’s father apparently lived. Had she, Isabelle, heard from the Camden police at all in this matter? No, of course not. Well, get on it, then. Because the press office wants something to report in the morning and it had better be of the nature of someone’s being assigned to this.

  What Barbara knew was that Isabelle Ardery could not prove that Barbara herself was behind the story. Every person in the department despised Mitchell Corsico from the time he’d been embedded with them during an investigation of serial killings. No one wanted to touch him with a barge pole, which was what made him so useful to Barbara.

  She laid the paper carefully back on Ardery’s desk. She said just as carefully, “Seems to me it was bound to come out, guv.”

  “Oh, is that how you see it?” Ardery was standing at the bank of windows with her arms crossed beneath her breasts, and it came to Barbara how tall she was—more than six feet when she had her shoes on—and how she used her height to intimidate. Her posture was a straight edge and, as she was dressed in a pencil skirt and a fine silk blouse, it was no large problem for Barbara to see the shape she was in. This shape was also meant to intimidate, so Barbara decided not to be intimidated. The woman had, after all, a fatal flaw and he was standing there in the office with them.

  She glanced at Lynley. He was looking sombre. He said, “It’s not a good situation any way you look at it, guv.”

  “It’s not a ‘good situation’ because the sergeant here has made it so.”

  “Guv, how can you possibly say—”

  Barbara’s protest was cut off abruptly when Ardery said, “You’re assigned to it. You’re leaving for Italy tomorrow. You’re given leave to make your preparations.” She wasn’t, however, looking at Barbara when she made the declaration.

  Barbara said, “But I know the family, guv! And the inspector’s already dealing with an investigation. You can’t send him—”

  “Are you questioning me?” Ardery snapped. “Are you actually presuming that the result of this”—with gesture at the tabloid—“would be some sort of imprimatur on my part, including a blessing as you skip off to Italy, on some all-expenses-paid jaunt? Do you actually think I’m so easily manipulated, Sergeant?”

  “I’m not saying . . . I’m only—”

  “Barbara.” Lynley’s voice was quiet. It served as both warning and solace, and clearly the superintendent heard this as well because she said, “Do not dare to take her side in this matter, Thomas. You know as well as I that she’s behind this story, and the fact that she’s not at this moment filing memos at a nick on the Isle of Dogs is owing only to a lack of proof that she and this . . . this Corsico person are inside each other’s pocket.”

  “I’m not taking anyone’s side,” Lynley said calmly.

  “And don’t you take that infuriating tone with me,” she snapped. “You’re thinking appeasement, and I won’t be appeased. I want this Italy thing handled, I want it finished, and I want you back here at work in London before I know you’re missing. Is that clear?”

  Barbara saw a muscle work in Lynley’s jaw. Definitely, this wasn’t the tone of the pillow talk he and Ardery had once engaged in. He said, “You do know I’m working on—”

  “It’s been reassigned to John Stewart.”

  “But he’s already working on another case,” Barbara protested.

  “And he has your capable assistance, doesn’t he, Sergeant?” Ardery said. “So you’ll be rather busy from this moment on. Now, get out of this office and get your next assignment from him because at this point he has enough to keep you occupied and out of trouble indefinitely. For which, by the way, you ought to get down on your knees and thank God. So leave us. And don’t let me catch sight of you doing anything but seeing to what DI Stewart decides you’re actually capable of doing.”

  Barbara opened her mouth to protest. Lynley shot her a look. It wasn’t the least bit friendly, for like it or not, the deed was done. At her machinations, he was going to Italy. At her machinations, she was going nowhere.

  BELGRAVIA

  LONDON

  Lynley waited until he got home to ring Daidre Tra
hair. He found the vet still at the Bristol Zoo, discussing with a team of assistants the problems attendant to anaesthetising an ageing male lion for the purpose of removing three of his teeth.

  “He’s eighteen,” she told Lynley. “In lion years . . . Well, one must consider the condition of his heart and his lungs. It’s always delicate when you anaesthetise an animal that large anyway.”

  “I suppose you can’t just ask him to say ‘Ah’ and administer novocaine,” Lynley commented.

  “One would wish,” she said. Then, “Unfortunately, I’m set to do this on Wednesday, Thomas. So I’m afraid I’ll not be in London again this month.”

  Lynley wasn’t happy with this news as her bimonthly roller derby matches had become more an anticipated event than an amusing diversion in the last few months. Still, he said, “As to that . . .” And he gave her his news. He was off to Italy as a result of Barbara Havers’s fruitless effort to insert herself into a Tuscan investigation. “I’ll be setting off in the morning. So please forge ahead with your feline dental work with complete impunity.”

  “Ah.” There was a pause. In the background he could hear a man’s voice call out, “You coming with us, Dai, or meeting us there?”

  She said to him in reply, “Hang on. I’ll be along in a moment,” and then into the phone to Lynley, “You’ll be gone a while, then?”

  “I’ve no idea, actually.” He waited for a disappointed “Oh, I see” upon which he could hang one or two hopes. Instead she said, “What sort of investigation is it?”

  “Kidnapping,” he said. “A nine-year-old British girl.”

  “That’s dreadful.”