Barbara rolled her eyes. “Please. I’m not here to waste your time or mine. If you know my name, you know what’s up. So let’s get to the point: I’m more interested in Doughty than I am in you, Bryan. C’n I call you Bryan? I hope so.” She sauntered into the gallery space and stood before a canvas painted red with a single blue stripe at the bottom. It looked like a proposal for a new EU road sign. She decided her preference was to remain in ignorance when it came to the subject of modern art. She turned back to Smythe. “Obviously, I c’n bring you down, but at present, I’m not ready to play that card.”
“You can try what you want,” Smythe told her blithely. He’d shut the door behind her and he’d shot the bolt home. She reckoned this had more to do with the value of the art on the walls than her presence, though. He went on to say, “Let’s look at the facts. You shut me down, I’m back up in twenty-four hours.”
“I expect that’s true,” she admitted. “But your regular customers might not like reading the news—or hearing about it on the telly—that their ‘technological security expert’ has had his gear carted off to the techies at New Scotland Yard for a lengthy scrutiny that doesn’t bode well. I can make that happen. You can, as you say, set yourself up with a whole new system before our forensic tech blokes can unpack your belongings in some cobwebbed basement in Victoria Street. But I expect the serious hit your business will take as a result of the publicity might require a rather long recovery period.”
He eyed her. She eyed his art. She picked up a sculpture that sat on a table of solid glass and she tried to make out what the thing was. Bird? Plane? Prehistoric monster? She looked from it to him and said, “Should I know what this bloody thing is?”
“You should know enough to be careful with it.”
She made a feint at dropping it. He took a quick step forward. She winked at him. “Us rozzers, Bryan? Believe me, we are thick as shoe soles when it comes to art. We are bulls in the bloody you-know-what, especially the blokes who come to cart off one’s belongings for inspection.”
“My art has nothing to do with—”
“The job? This technological expertising you do? I expect that might be the case, but the blokes who show up with court orders in their grubby hands . . . ?” She placed the sculpture carefully on the table. “They don’t know that, do they?”
“What sort of court order do you actually expect—”
“Emily Cass gave you up. You know that, Bryan. Pushed into a corner, she did not exactly come out swinging. You’re into bank records, phone records, mobile records, travel records, credit card records, and God only knows what other records. Do you really believe the local magistrate isn’t going to want to know what’s going on when you sit down at your keyboard and get in touch with your embedded mates? Where is that keyboard, by the way? Does a magic button somewhere do the business and a wall swings aside to reveal basement stairs?”
“You’ve seen too many films.”
“For my sins,” she admitted. “So what’s it to be?”
He thought about this. He wouldn’t know that she’d already determined to talk to Azhar before she reported to Lynley or to anyone else about any of her findings. He wouldn’t know that she’d decided she had to see her Pakistani neighbour in person in order to look him squarely in the face. He wouldn’t know that she could not for a moment believe that Azhar would endanger his daughter, frighten his daughter, or do anything else to his daughter in aid of either keeping her or getting her away from her mother. But those tickets to Pakistan suggested the worst and until she spoke to him and read whatever she could read from his expression or in his eyes, Barbara’s level of desperation was such that even staying calm in the presence of this bloke Smythe was taking every resource she had.
He finally said, “Come with me. At least I can enlighten you on one thing.”
He crossed the gallery space and slid open two silent pocket doors. Beyond them, a room similar in size to the gallery looked through a bank of pricey double-glazed windows out into a garden. This was brilliant with spring flowers and defined on its boundaries by ornamental cherry trees in bloom. A perfect lawn held a white gazebo. A rectangular pond supporting lily pads lay in front of this, a fountain at its centre.
The room into which he walked was his working space, as far from the cinematic version of a computer whiz’s lair as could be imagined. In films, the hacker holed up in a basement where the only light came from the monitors of the multitude of computers that encircled him. In Bryan Smythe’s reality there was a laptop on a fine stainless steel desk that faced his garden. Next to the laptop, three memory sticks sat in a holder. Another holder held sharpened pencils; another held pens. Next to the laptop were a pristine legal pad, one expensive designer fountain pen, and a printer.
Aside from that, the room morphed into a high-end kitchen at one end and a higher-end entertainment centre at the other. Speakers in the ceiling spoke of surround sound. Everything spoke of big money.
Barbara whistled soundlessly. She said, “Nice garden,” and went to look out of the window while her mind whirled into action and she tried to decide how best to wring the information from him. “Thinking of the Chelsea Flower Show, are we?”
“I like to have something pleasant to look at,” he said, and the slight emphasis he put upon the adjective indicated that Barbara wasn’t a sight for eyes even mildly sore. “While I work, that is,” he added. “Hence the positioning of the desk.”
“Always a good idea,” she acknowledged. “I expect you’d like to keep things that way.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s decision time for you, and let me be plain in case I haven’t been so far. Doughty is the fish we’re after. We’re looking at him for a kidnapping charge, something he orchestrated to occur in Lucca, Italy. It involves a nine-year-old English girl who was snatched by her mum last November and carted off to eat copious mounds of pasta, if you get my meaning. He was hired to locate her but he did more than that. He located her, claimed he hadn’t done, and then arranged to have her snatched. And then, he had you wipe every record clean. These would be all the records having anything to do with the nine-year-old girl, the original snatching, et cetera, et cetera. Are we on the same page so far?”
His mouth made a disparaging moue. She took this for acknowledgement and charged on.
“You confirm this, and our relationship—that would be yours and mine, and believe me I’ve been chuffed by it beyond my wildest dreams—is over. You refuse to confirm . . . ?” She waggled her hand. “The local rozzers, the local magistrate, and the Met’ll be wild to make your acquaintance.”
“So are you saying,” he said, “that if I confirm your imaginative theories about this nine-year-old—and I’m not confirming anything, by the way—my name does not get handed over to the Met at once? Or to the local police? Or to anyone?”
“Bryan, you are one clever lad. That is exactly what I’m saying. So what’s it going to be? Admittedly, Doughty isn’t going to want your services after this, but you can’t blame him for that, eh? Small price to pay for your continuing ability to do business at all, you ask me.”
He shook his head. He walked over to gaze at his garden. He finally turned back to her and said, “What the bloody hell kind of cop are you?”
She was taken aback by the force of loathing behind his words, but she managed to keep her face a perfect blank as she said, “Meaning?”
“You think I don’t see where this is heading?”
“Where?”
“Today what you want is confirmation and tomorrow it’s cash. Not wired to some account on the Isle of Man or tucked away in Guernsey or God knows where but handed over in an envelope in tens and twenties and fifties and next week more and next month more and always this ‘D’you really want the Met to know about you, mate?’ You’re dirtier than I am, you miserable cow. And if you think I’m going to—”
“And your word on that is good, is it?” Bryan laughed, a high whinny that spoke of how desperate he was feeling. It came to Barbara that they were like two Wild West ne’er-do-wells out in the street in front of the saloon, both of them having drawn their rusty pistols at the exact same moment, both of them trying to work out how to walk away from the confrontation instead of ending up in the dust with a bullet in the chest.
She said, “Looks to me like we’ve got each other by the you-know-whats, Bryan. But between us, I think I’ve got the better grip. I’m telling you for the last time that I want Doughty and only Doughty and that’s an end to this. Either you go for that or you decide you’d rather risk it by escorting me to the door and seeing what I’ll do next.”
His jaw moved, teeth biting down on something unpalatable. She understood. Her teeth were doing much the same thing.
He said, “You have your confirmation. I wiped Doughty’s records. Everything having to do with a bloke called Michelangelo Di Massimo. Everything having to do with a bloke called Taymullah Azhar. Emails, bank statements, phone calls, mobile calls, wire transfers of money, websites looked at, anything discovered via search engines having to do with Lucca, Pisa, or anywhere else in Italy. Whatever you can think of, it was dealt with. As deeply as I and a few . . . a few colleagues here and there could go. All right?”
“One more thing.”
“Christ, what else?”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When did all these records begin?”
“What does it matter? I went back in time and got it all.”
“Right. Brilliant. Got that in a trap. What I’m asking is the date all these records having to do with Italy got wiped.”
“What’s that got to do with—”
“Believe me. It does.”
Astoundingly, then, Bryan went to something worthy of Dickens to sort this one out. He opened the desk and brought out—of all things—a pocket diary. He began to leaf through it, back into time. He found nothing. He rooted in his desk and brought out another. As he did so, Barbara felt her stomach tighten into a ball.
“Last December,” he said. “The fifth. That’s when it all began.”
God, Barbara thought. In advance of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping in Lucca. In advance of everything. She said, “‘It’? What’s ‘it’ supposed to be?”
A small smile, containing just enough triumph to tell Barbara she’d won the battle but lost the war. “I expect you can work that one out,” he said. To this he added, “If you’re planning your next stop to be in Bow, then you’d be wise to plan on something else as well.”
“And that would be?” she asked, although her lips were barely working at this point.
“A fail-safe position, a backup plan, whatever you want to call it,” he told her. “Dwayne’s not stupid and he’s going to have one.”
“And you know this because . . .”
“Because he always does.”
BOW
LONDON
Dwayne Doughty was not surprised to see her. Barbara was herself not surprised to discover that this was the case. The Doughty-Cass-Smythe operation had been up and running for quite some time. They might give each other up like third-rate burglars hoping to strike a deal with the cops, but they would also let each other know that they had done so. She readied herself to do battle with the man. She readied herself to see what the private investigator’s fail-safe position was going to be.
He said to her, “Very good time from South Hackney,” just in case she needed the full score on exactly whose loyalties were going to lie where. He looked at his watch. “Quarter of an hour. Did you hit all the lights green or did you use a siren?”
“I think this is about the jig being up,” Barbara told him. “And as there’s no music, we’re not talking about dancing.”
“Your way with metaphors continues to astound,” Doughty said. “But one of the reasons Bryan Smythe has at one time or another been in my employ has to do with his talent at wiping away any sign that he’s actually been in my employ.”
“Does this mean you’re assuming the Met doesn’t employ blokes whose talents match the redoubtable Bryan’s?” Barbara asked him. “Does it mean you’ve somehow jumped to the conclusion that the Met has no way to contact the cops in Italy who will come up with equally talented blokes who c’n deal with Michelangelo Di Massimo’s records? You seem to believe that no stone has been left unturned by Bryan’s magical power to erase your past manoeuvres, mate, but here’s what I’ve learned from years of dealing with villains of every make and variety: No one thinks of everything and the thing about stones and turning them over . . . ? There’s always a pebble nearby that goes unnoticed.”
He gave a little salute. “Once more with the metaphor. You do amaze.” He leaned back in his chair. It was the sort that gave way when pressure was put upon its back, and Barbara sent a fleeting prayer heavenward that he’d lean too far, fall over, and bash himself senseless on the floor. No such luck. But what he did was roll the chair over to a filing cabinet and slide open its bottom drawer. From this he took a memory stick. He said, “You can go that route with the cops in Italy, the tech experts at the Met, and the tech experts in Italy. But it isn’t something that I’d advise. To attempt your own skill at metaphor: That’s a road I wouldn’t drive a donkey cart on.”
When Barbara saw the memory stick, she reckoned they were at the fail-safe that Bryan Smythe had mentioned. There was nothing for it but to see what Doughty had on it, and she knew that all she had to do was wait for the revelation.
He gestured affably for her to sit. He offered coffee, tea, a chocolate digestive in an irritatingly specious display of manners. Her response to this was “Get to the bloody point,” and she remained standing.
“As you will,” he said, and he plugged the memory stick into his computer.
He was well prepared. It took him a two-breath moment to find what he wanted. He tapped three or four keys, turned the monitor in her direction, and said, “Enjoy the show.”
It was a film in which the stars were Dwayne himself and Taymullah Azhar. Its setting was here in Doughty’s office. Its dialogue comprised Doughty revealing every bit of information on Hadiyyah’s whereabouts in Italy as discovered by Michelangelo Di Massimo. Fattoria di Santa Zita came first, in the hills above a town called Lucca, in the home of one Lorenzo Mura, whose apparent idiocy in the arena of wiring money from Lucca to London so that Angelina would be able to finance her escape from Azhar had left a trail not of breadcrumbs but of veritable pieces of foccacia. A secondary bank account this was, as Dwayne explained to Azhar, in the name not of Angelina but of her sister Bathsheba, on whose passport Angelina departed the country on the fifteenth of November.
Barbara heard her heart pounding in her ears. But she said casually, “And your point is what, Dwayne? Way I recall things, we know all this. So you want me to know you told Azhar when I wasn’t present? Am I supposed to be impressed?”
Doughty paused the film, freezing it on a single image.
“You don’t look thick,” he said, “but I’m getting the impression that your eyesight is failing. Look at the date of the film.”
And there it was. The seventeenth of December. Barbara said nothing, although what she felt was alarm. It shot through her arms and down into her fingers. She tried to keep her face impassive although she knew if she tried to raise her arms, she’d display the degree to which her hands were shaking.
Doughty flipped back through a diary on his desk, a large one that displayed every hour of the workday and every individual he’d seen. “You’re a busy bird, I reckon, with a social calendar that would slay an It girl, so let me help you. Our final meeting—th
is would be you, the professor, and yours truly here—took place on November thirtieth. If you need the math on it, this meeting you’ve just watched between that lofty bloke and me happened seventeen days later. To be additionally helpful—since that’s the kind of individual I am—let me jog your memory about one minor detail of that final meeting the three of us had. I handed the professor my card. I invited him to get in touch if there was any other way I could be helpful to him. For his part? The professor got the message.”
“Bollocks,” Barbara said. “What message?”
“I had a feeling about our professor, Sergeant. Desperate times, measures, and you know the rest. I thought I could be of further assistance to him. If he was interested, that is. It turned out he was.” Dwayne leaned into the keyboard and made a few adjustments with the mouse as well. “Here’s how he expressed himself . . . and his interest, as it happened, two days later.”
The setting and the characters were the same. The dialogue, though, was entirely different. In the world of critical exegesis of cinema, it would have been breathlessly described as “electrifying dialogue.” In the world of reality, it was damning evidence. Barbara watched in gut-wrenching silence as Taymullah Azhar broached the subject of kidnapping his own daughter. Could it be done? Could this previously mentioned Michelangelo Di Massimo somehow arrange it? Could the Italian get to know the movements of Lorenzo Mura, Angelina, and Hadiyyah well? If he could, was there a way to take Hadiyyah from her mother with a promise that she would be returned to her father?
And on and on went the discussion between Azhar and Dwayne Doughty. On the film, Doughty listened sympathetically: fingers steepled at his chin, nodding when nodding was called for. The bloke was the very image of caution as, no doubt, in his head the till was ringing up how much money he was going to make if he got involved in an international kidnapping scheme.
Doughty said on film in what bordered on religious tones, “I can only put you in touch with Mr. Di Massimo, Professor Azhar. What you and he decide between you . . . ? Obviously, my work for you is finished and I would be no part of anything from this point forward.”
Just One Evil Act Page 44