Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  A heads-up is always nice, I reckon, so you’re getting one.”

  Barbara Havers didn’t need Mitchell Corsico to identify himself. At this point his tenor tones had become a permanent echo inside her skull. Had he rung her on her mobile, she could have avoided the call. As it was, he’d rung her at work, claimed to have information on “the situation DS Havers is investigating,” and the bluff had proved perfectly efficacious. The call had come through, Barbara had picked it up, she’d barked, “DS Havers,” and there he was.

  She said, “What? What?”

  “As my sainted mum would say, ‘Don’t take that tone with me,’” he returned. “She’s out of hospital.”

  “Who? Your mum? So you should celebrate, shouldn’t you? I’d tipple back one or two with you, but I’ve work to do.”

  “Don’t try to be amusing, Barb. There’s no story over here, and I expect you bloody well knew that. Do you have any idea what position this puts me in with my editor? Do you?”

  He was in Italy at last. Barbara thanked her stars. “If she’s out of hospital, I expect that confirms that she was in hospital,” she replied. “It’s not down to me that she’s been released. What I gave you, I gave you in good faith.”

  “I’m going with the Love Rat Dad and Officer of the Met,” he said. “Complete with pictures. Expect it tomorrow. I’ve already written it, it’s attached to my breathless email on the topic of what-hot-information-I’ve-just-managed-to-uncover-dear-editor, and I’m about to hit send. Do you want that to happen or not?”

  “What I want—” Barbara looked up as someone came to stand in front of her desk. It was Dorothea Harriman, so she said to Corsico, “Hang on,” and then to Dorothea, “Something up?”

  “You’re wanted, Detective Sergeant Havers.” She tilted her perfectly coiffed blond head in the general direction of Isabelle Ardery’s office. Barbara sighed.

  “Right,” she said, and then to Corsico, “We’ll have to have this conversation later.”

  “Are you completely mad?” he demanded. “Do you think I’m bluffing? The only way for you to stop this is to give me either Lynley or Azhar. You can get me access that no one else has and I swear to God, Barb, if you don’t get off the bleeding fence on this one—”

  “I’ll speak to Inspector Lynley directly,” she lied. “That satisfy you? Now, Superintendent Ardery is asking to see me and while I’d love to continue this bloody well stimulating discussion with you, I’ve got to ring off.”

  “As long as you know that I’m holding off on this other story for a quarter hour, Barb. That time passes and I hit send and you look for it in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “As always, my timbers are shivering,” she said. She banged down the phone and said to Dorothea, “What’s her nibs want with me? Any idea?”

  “Detective Inspector Stewart is with her.” She sounded regretful. This wasn’t good.

  Barbara thought of fortifying herself with a fag in the stairwell, but she decided that keeping Isabelle Ardery waiting when she had been summoned wasn’t a particularly wise move. So she followed Dorothea to the superintendent’s office, and there she found Ardery in conversation with John Stewart, who’d brought a pile of manila folders with him for some reason that probably wasn’t going to be good.

  Barbara joined them. She glanced from Stewart to Ardery to Stewart. She nodded but made no other greeting. Her brain went into high gear, however. She didn’t see how Stewart could have known that she’d been to see Dwayne Doughty in advance of jumping to do his bidding and conducting the interviews he’d assigned to her. And even if he had made that discovery, she’d got the bloody interviews done. What more did the sodding bloke want of her?

  As it happened, Stewart wanted nothing of her. He’d apparently been summoned into Isabelle Ardery’s office as well, and just like Barbara, he was in the dark about why the superintendent had called him in to a meeting.

  Ardery didn’t waste time to bring them both into the picture. She said, “John, I’m reassigning Barbara for a few days. There’s a branch of the investigation in—”

  “What?” Stewart looked like someone whose balloon had just got popped. He was staring, outraged, at Ardery as if she’d been the person wielding the pin that had popped it.

  The superintendent took a moment. She let his tone act like an echo in the room. Then she said carefully, “I’d no idea your hearing was undergoing a change. As I said, I’m reassigning Barbara to another investigation.”

  “What bloody other investigation?” he demanded.

  Ardery’s spine underwent a minute adjustment. “I’m not certain you require that knowledge,” she pointed out.

  “You put her on my team,” he countered. “And that’s where she stays: on my team.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Ardery had been sitting behind her desk with Stewart in front of it, the manila folders still in a neat pile on his lap. She rose now and leaned her height of six feet in his direction, her well-groomed fingertips on a set of reports. “I don’t think you’re in a position to make those kinds of declarations,” she pointed out. “Perhaps you need a moment to sort yourself? I’d take that moment, if I were you.”

  “Where’re you putting her?” he demanded. “Every team’s got enough manpower on it. If this is a power play you’ve decided to engage in, it’s not on.”

  “You’re out of order.”

  “Oh, I’m always out of order with you. D’you know what I’ve got here? Right here in these folders?” He lifted one and shook it at her. Barbara felt her arms go limp.

  “I’m not the least interested in what you’ve got there unless it’s the documentation for an arrest in one of the cases you’ve been handling.”

  “Oh, too right,” Stewart said. “You’re not the least interested in anything other than—” He stopped himself directly on the brink. He said, “Just forget it. All right. She’s reassigned. Have her. We all know who she’s going to be working with—as he’s the only person who ever wants her on his team—and all of us know why you’re only too happy to hand her to him.”

  Barbara drew in a sharp breath. She waited to see what the superintendent would do with this one.

  Ardery said steadily, “What are you implying, John?”

  “I think you know.”

  “And I think you’d be wise to reconsider the route you’re taking. As it happens, Barbara will be working directly for me on a matter involving another police officer. And that, John, concludes what you need to know about why I require her. Are we absolutely clear on this or do we need to take our discussion to a higher level?”

  Stewart stared at Ardery. She held his gaze. Her face was rigid and his was florid and Barbara knew that they were both enraged. One of them had to take a step away from the other, but she knew it wasn’t going to be the superintendent. Whether it would be Stewart remained to be seen. Misogyny had been driving his behaviour for so many years, it was difficult to know if he could get it under control long enough to get himself out of the superintendent’s office and back to work before she had his head on a platter.

  He finally rose. “I take your meaning,” he said. He turned and left the superintendent’s office without a glance in Barbara’s direction. She wondered what he had in those folders of his, though. She reckoned it wasn’t good.

  With Stewart gone, the superintendent gestured Barbara to take one of the two chairs in front of her desk. Barbara chose the one Stewart hadn’t been sitting on, all the better not to besmirch her trousers with any of his essence. She waited for clarification, which was quick in coming.

  “This situation in Italy has a tentacle reaching to London,” she said. “I had a phone call from DI Lynley early this morning. He needs someone on the case at this end.”

  So it was Lynley, Barbara thought. Stewart, for all his odious and thinly veiled ac
cusations, had not been very far off the mark. She blessed Lynley for his efforts to get her onto his team. He knew how deep was her concern about Hadiyyah and Azhar, he recognised the nature of her friendship with both of them, and more than anything, he understood how unwelcome it was to her ever to have to work with John Stewart. Bless him, bless him, bless him, Barbara thought. She owed him, she would repay him, she would be tireless in getting to the bottom of—

  “I want to make something clear to you, Barbara,” the superintendent said. “DI Lynley asked for Winston. He’s the obvious choice as, let’s be frank, he has a good track record of obeying orders while that’s not exactly the case for you. But I’d like to give you the opportunity to prove to me directly that you can do the same. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about your time on John Stewart’s team before you and I move along to what the inspector needs you to do for him?”

  Here was the moment to fess up, Barbara thought. But she couldn’t risk telling the superintendent that she’d gone her own way more than once in the past few days. Ardery might well pull her off the assignment she’d just put her on. So she said, “It’s not anyone’s secret that John Stewart and I don’t get along, guv. I try. P’rhaps he tries as well. But we’re chalk and cheese.”

  Ardery evaluated this, her gaze evenly on Barbara’s. She finally said, “Right,” in a slow and thoughtful drawl. Then she turned and picked up the topmost report on her desk and handed it over.

  “The police in Italy have traced the kidnapping of your friend’s little girl back to London.”

  “Dwayne Doughty, right?” Barbara said.

  Ardery nodded. “They’ve brought in a bloke in Italy who was evidently operating on Doughty’s direction. He appears to have found the child without apparent difficulty but instead of giving the word to her father, Doughty came up with a scheme to kidnap her. What’s been done with her, the Italian doesn’t know. He claims he was given instructions in bits and pieces: It was, he says, a case of ‘Snatch her and I’ll tell you what happens next.’”

  “Bloody pig,” Barbara said. “I took Azhar to meet this bloke, guv, when Hadiyyah’s mum disappeared with her. He seemed to be on the up-and-up. He worked a bit on looking for her, and he finally told us there was no bloody trail and I’m-dead-sorry-I-am and that was that.” Barbara didn’t add anything about Azhar: the Berlin alibi, khushi, or anything else. Least of all did she add the claims Doughty had made when she’d seen him in the Bow Road nick since the superintendent didn’t know she’d seen him in the Bow Road nick, and she didn’t need to know.

  Ardery said, “Yes. Well. He’s involved in some way that DI Lynley needs sorted. I’ve been told that there was never a ransom demanded for the child, so my guess is that someone else beyond Doughty is also involved. Phone the inspector if you have more questions.”

  “I will,” Barbara said.

  Ardery handed over the report she’d received, and she eyed Barbara before giving her the word to go on her way. She said, “I want to learn at the end that you’ve handled every aspect of this situation in a professional manner, Barbara. Anything less than that, and you and I will be having a different sort of conversation. Am I being clear?”

  As mountain spring water, Barbara thought. She said, “Yes, guv, you are. I won’t disappoint you.”

  Ardery dismissed her. She didn’t look convinced.

  BOW

  LONDON

  Barbara decided that Doughty was not the place to begin. Presented with the facts as they’d apparently been recited by Michelangelo Di Massimo in the police station in Lucca, he would doubtless be able to produce an airtight rationale for all of them. Barbara could even imagine what it would be: I hired the bloke to find her, and he swore he tried every avenue of exploration to no avail. Are you suggesting that it’s down to me that he found her without letting me know? That he planned her kidnapping and handed her over to God only knows who for God only knows what reason and that’s down to me as well? Look, Sergeant, Di Massimo was in a far better position than I to carry this kid off into the hinterlands or wherever the hell he carried her to. I’m supposed to know enough about Italy—where, to be frank, I have never set foot—to have made a kid disappear? And why? For money? Whose money? I don’t know these people. Do any of them even have money?

  And on and on Doughty would go, wearing her down with logic, illogic, and everything in between. So she wouldn’t begin with talking to him. Emily Cass seemed a more likely source of information.

  Barbara spent some time digging up whatever might be useful in her conversation with the young woman, who turned out to be no intellectual slouch. She held an advanced degree in economics from the University of Chicago, but since attaining that degree, she’d held a string of jobs that suggested personal unsuitability for the world of business or finance: She’d been a security consultant in Afghanistan, a bodyguard to the children of a minor branch of the Saudi royal family, a personal trainer to a Hollywood actress in need of a task master to keep her body beautiful a body beautiful, and an assistant chef on a yacht whose owner was one of the biggest names in British petroleum. She was, literally, all over the map in her employment history. How she’d ended up in the employ of a private investigator was anyone’s guess.

  Her record was clean when it came to the law, though, and she’d sprung from a solidly middle-class family whose paterfamilias was a noted ophthalmologist and whose mother was a paediatrician. With three brothers involved in the medical field as well and another a highly successful Formula One driver, she probably wouldn’t want to have her reputation sullied by any activity she might have engaged in that danced on the wrong side of the law. She was, Barbara assured herself, the better bet when it came to having a tête-à-tête with someone bearing a warrant card.

  She had no intention of bearding Em Cass in the den of Dwayne Doughty’s place of business. She didn’t want to ring the woman either. Better not to give her time to inform the private investigator that she was going to be questioned. So she positioned herself in a window of the Roman Café and Kebab a short distance from Bedlovers, whose upper floor housed Dwayne Doughty’s office. There she waited for Emily Cass to appear.

  It took four kebabs and a jacket potato topped with cheese and chili for this to happen. By that point, Barbara was practically a member of the family who ran the establishment. They were looking at her a bit askance—probably considering the nature of the eating disorder the dishevelled woman in the window was suffering from—but they nonetheless accepted her money in exchange for copious amounts of food. They smiled ingratiatingly and also enquired as to her marital status, possibly as a suitable mate for a son who hung about the place with a suspicious dribble of drool escaping from his gaping mouth. Barbara was grateful for the appearance of Em Cass at the end of an extended period within the café. She was equally grateful that Emily, who had on running clothes, set off in her direction and not in the opposite, which would have made it impossible—her recent gustatory history considered—for Barbara to catch her up.

  Barbara was out of the door in a flash. She was planted on the pavement directly in Emily’s path before the young woman knew what was happening. She was saying, “You and I need to talk” and clamping onto her arm before Emily could either run off or dash back to the office. Barbara hustled her across the street and into the Albert pub—vaguely wondering why there appeared to be a pub called the Albert in every neighbourhood of the capital—where she strong-armed her to a table near a fruit machine with Out of Order hanging prominently upon it.

  “Here’s what you need to know,” she told her. “Michelangelo Di Massimo has given you lot up to the Italian police. Now, this might not be a major problem for you since, extradition being what it is, you could be a grandmother before you found yourself standing in front of an Italian magistrate. But—and I like to think of this as the nice bit, Emily—a senior officer from the Met is over there acting as liaison for the fam
ily. One more word from him—aside from the several words that sent me here to have this little natter with you—and you’re in trouble of the I-appear-to-need-a-solicitor variety. D’you receive my meaning here, or do I have to spell things out more clearly?”

  Emily Cass seemed to make an effort at swallowing. Barbara could hear the gulp from across the table. She idly thought about getting the woman a lager, but she reckoned she wouldn’t need to go to the expense if she gave her a little time to dwell upon the significance of what she intended to say to her next.

  “I expect you were more of an adjunct player in what went on. You did your bit of blagging on the phone to get information—it’s what you excel in, and who can blame you for using your talents, eh?—but you did it on someone else’s orders and we both know who that someone else is.”

  Emily had been gazing at her steadily, but she allowed her glance to go to the street and then back to Barbara. She wet her lips.

  “Now my guess is that if our Dwayne has you to operate the phones and impersonate everyone from doddering old ladies to the Duchess of Cambridge, you’re not the only talent he employs. He’s not a fool. The bloke sets me a challenge called examine-every-one-of-my-records-here-if-you-don’t-believe-me, and what that suggests to me is someone else’s involvement in the whole bloody scheme, someone competent at sweeping records clean, someone who looks at that as child’s play. I want that name, Emily. I suspect it’s a bloke called Bryan that Doughty mentioned early on. I want his phone number, his email address, his street address, whatever. You give me that, and you and I part friends. Everyone else and I? Not so much. But there comes a point when common sense suggests one remove one’s neck from the noose. We’ve reached that point. What’s it going to be?”

  That was it. Cards on the table. Barbara waited to see what would happen. The seconds ticked by. During them, a gust of wind blew a yellow carrier bag down the street and a Muslim cleric emerged from a narrow doorway with a crocodile of little boys in tow. Barbara watched them and thought how times had changed in London. No one looked innocent any longer. A simple outing took on multiple potential meanings. The world was becoming such a miserable place.