Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  She’d already ordered a glass of wine, but it seemed untouched. Instead, she was jotting notes on the margin of her paperwork, and as he reached the table, he heard her say into her mobile, “I’ll send it on to you then, shall I? . . . Hmm, yes. Well, I’ll wait for your word. And thank you, Mark. It’s very good of you.”

  She glanced up then. She smiled at Lynley and held up a just-a-moment finger. She listened again to whatever was being said to her by whoever was on the other end of the mobile, and then, “Indeed. I depend on you,” and she rang off.

  She stood to greet him, saying, “You’ve made it. It’s lovely to see you, Thomas. Thank you for coming.”

  They engaged in air kisses: one cheek, then the other, with nothing touching anyone’s flesh. He asked himself idly where the maddening social nicety had come from.

  He sat and tried not to notice what he noticed: that she quickly put all the paperwork into a large leather bag by the side of her chair, that a faint blush had risen to her cheeks, and that she was wearing something on her lips that made them look soft and glossy. Then it came to him suddenly that he was taking in aspects of Daidre Trahair that he hadn’t taken in, in the presence of a woman, since Helen’s death. Not even with Isabelle had he noted so much. It discomfited him, asking him to identify what it meant.

  He wanted, of course, to ask who Mark was. But instead, he nodded at the large bag on the floor and said, “Work?” as he drew out a chair to sit.

  She said, “Of a sort,” as she sat again herself. “You’re looking well, Thomas. Italy must suit you.”

  “I daresay Italy suits most people,” he told her. “And Tuscany in particular suits everyone, I expect.”

  “I’d like to see Tuscany someday,” she said. “I’ve not been.” And in less than a second and most typical of Daidre, “Sorry. That sounds as if I’m begging an invitation.”

  “Perhaps coming from someone else,” he said. “Coming from you, no.”

  “Why not from me?”

  “Because I’ve got the impression that subterfuge isn’t part of your bag of tricks.”

  “Well . . . yes. Admittedly, I have no bag of tricks.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “I ought, I suppose. But I’ve never quite had the time to develop tricks. Or to sew the bag for them. Or whatever. Are you having wine, Thomas? I’m drinking the house plonk. When it comes to wine, I’m hopeless. I doubt I could tell the difference between something from Burgundy and something made here in the cellar.” She twirled her wineglass by the stem and frowned. “I appear to be making the most disparaging remarks about myself. I must be nervous.”

  “About?”

  “As I was in complete order a moment ago, I must be feeling nervous with you here.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Another glass of wine, perhaps?”

  “Or two. Honestly, Thomas, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  A waitress came to them, a girl who had the look of a student and the accent of a recent arrival from the Eastern Bloc. He ordered wine for himself—the same plonk that Daidre was drinking—and when the girl took herself off to fetch it, he said, “Whether you’re nervous or not, I’m quite glad you rang me. Not only is it a fine thing to see you again, but frankly, I was in need of a drink.”

  “Work?” she asked.

  “Barbara Havers. I had an encounter with her that disturbed me rather more than I like to be disturbed by Barbara—and believe me she’s been disturbing me in one way or another for years—and getting thoroughly soused seems like a reasonable reaction to the entire mess she’s in. Either that or being diverted by your presence.”

  Daidre took up her own wine but waited till he had been served his. They clinked glasses and drank to each other’s health, whereupon she said, “What sort of mess? It’s not my business, of course, but I’m available to listen should you have a mind to talk about it.”

  “She’s gone her own maddening way in an investigation and not for the first time.”

  “This is a problem?”

  “She’s skirting far too close to ignoring her ethical responsibility as a police officer. It’s a complicated matter. Enough said on the subject. For the moment, I’d like to forget all about it. So tell me, then. What are you doing in London?”

  “Interviewing for a job,” she said. “Regent’s Park. London Zoo.”

  He found himself brightening, sitting up straighter all at once. Regent’s Park, the zoo . . . He had a thousand questions about what it all meant that Daidre Trahair was thinking of making a change from Bristol, but all he could manage was, stupidly, “As veterinarian?”

  She smiled. “It is, more or less, what I do.”

  He shook his head sharply. “Sorry. Stupid of me.”

  She laughed. “Not at all. They might have wanted me to teach the gorillas to play chess or to train the parrots. One never knows.” She took more wine and gazed at him with something that looked to him like fondness. “I was contacted by a head hunter, someone employed by the zoo. I didn’t seek the position out, and I’m not altogether sure I’m interested in it.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “I’m quite happy in Bristol. And, of course, Bristol is that much closer to Cornwall and I do love my cottage there.”

  “Ah, yes, the cottage,” Lynley said. It was where they had first met, himself an intruder who’d broken a window to get to a phone, herself the owner of the place who’d arrived for a getaway only to find an unknown man tramping mud on her floors.

  “And then, there’s my commitment to Boadicea’s Broads as well as my regular darts tournaments.”

  Lynley lifted an eyebrow at this.

  She laughed and said, “I’m quite serious, Thomas. I take my discretionary time to heart. Besides, the Broads rather depend on me—”

  “A good jammer being difficult to find.”

  “You’re teasing, of course. And I do know that I could join the Electric Magic. But then I’d be skating on occasion against my former teammates, and I don’t know how I feel about that.”

  “These are serious matters,” he said. “I suppose it must come down to the job itself, then. As well as the benefits attached to taking it, should it be offered.”

  They gazed at each other for a moment in which he saw the colour rise appealingly to her cheeks. He liked the look of her when she blushed. He said, “Have you listed them?”

  “What?”

  “The benefits. Or is it early days for that? I assume they’re interviewing other large animal vets as well. It’s an important position, isn’t it?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning they’ve done the interviews. All of the interviews. The initial ones, the secondary ones. The paper screening and checking of documents and references and all of that.”

  “So this is something that’s been going on for a while,” he said.

  “Since early March. That’s when I was first contacted.”

  He frowned. He observed the ruby colour of his wine. He asked himself how he felt about this: that since early March she’d been part of a process that might bring her to London but she’d not told him. He said, “Since early March? You haven’t mentioned it. How am I to take that?”

  Her lips parted.

  He said, “Never mind. Terrible question. My ego was speaking for me. So where are you in the process, then? Tertiary interviews? Who knew so much was involved in vetting a vet, if you’ll pardon the pun. Is it a pun? I don’t quite know. You’re leaving me at sixes and sevens, Daidre.”

  She smiled. “It’s made difficult by—”

  “What is?”

  “My decision. They’ve offered me the job, Thomas.”

  “Have they indeed? That’s wonderful! Isn’t it?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Of course.
Moving house is always complicated, and you’ve already listed your other concerns.”

  “Yes. Well.” She took up her wine and drank. Looking for courage? he wondered. She said, “That’s not exactly what I mean by complicated.”

  “Then what?”

  “You, of course. But you know that already, I expect. You’re a complication. You. Here. London.”

  His heart had begun to beat more heavily. He tried for lightness in his response. “It’s a disappointment for me, of course. If you take the job, I won’t have the opportunity of enjoying the personal tour of the zoo in Bristol that you once promised me. But I assure you we’ll be able to soldier on under the burden of my disappointment. Rest your mind on that score.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  “Yes. Of course. I suppose I do.”

  She looked away from him, across the wine bar to where a couple had just been seated. They reached spontaneously for each other’s hand, twined fingers, and gazed into each other’s eyes across the candlelight. They looked to be somewhere in their twenties. They looked to be somewhere in the first stages of love.

  She said, “You see, I don’t want to see you, Thomas.”

  He felt himself blanch, her words unexpectedly like a blow to him.

  She moved her gaze from the young couple to him, apparently saw something on his face, and said quickly, “No, no. I’ve said that badly. What I mean is that I don’t want to want to see you. There’s too much danger in that for me. There’s . . .” Again she diverted her gaze from him, but this time she put it on the candle’s flame. It guttered as someone new entered the wine bar. Voices called out a greeting to the young lovers at the table. Someone said, “Don’t trust that bastard, Jennie,” and someone else laughed.

  Daidre said, “There’re too many possibilities for pain here. And I promised myself some time ago . . . It’s that I’ve had enough of pain. And I hate saying that to you, of all people, because what you’ve endured and what you’ve somehow come out whole from having endured makes anything I’ve gone through in my little life a very paltry thing and believe me, I know it.”

  It was her honesty that he admired, Lynley realised as she spoke. It was her honesty that he knew he could grow to love. Understanding this, he was in that moment as afraid as she was, and he wanted to tell her this. But instead he said, “Dear Daidre—”

  “God, that sounds like the beginning of the end,” she declared. “Or something very like.”

  He laughed, then. “Not at all,” he said. He considered their predicament from several different angles as he took up his wineglass and drank. He said, “What if you and I screw up our courage and approach the precipice?”

  “What precipice would that be exactly?”

  “The one in which we admit that we care for each other. I care for you. You care for me. Perhaps we’d both rather not since, let’s face it, caring for anyone is a messy business. But it’s happened and if we get it into the air between us, we can decide what, if anything, we’d like to do about it.”

  “We know the truth of things, Thomas,” she said firmly and, he thought, a little fiercely. “I don’t belong in your world. And no one knows that better than you.”

  “But that’s what’s at the bottom of the precipice, Daidre. And just now . . . Well, isn’t the truth that we don’t even know if we want to jump?”

  “Anything can lead to jumping,” she said. “Oh God. Oh God. I don’t want that.”

  He could feel her fears. They were as real a presence at the table as was Daidre herself. Their cause was far different from the fears he himself felt, but they were nonetheless as strong as his own. Loss wears so many guises, he thought. He wanted to tell her this, but he did not. The time wasn’t right for it.

  He said, “I’m actually willing to approach the precipice on my own, Daidre. I’m willing to say that I care for you, that I would welcome your presence in London for what it might mean in my life to have you closer than an extremely lengthy drive down the M4 to Bristol. Whether you wish to approach the precipice any closer just now . . . ? That’s up to you, but it’s not required.”

  She shook her head and her eyes were bright and he wasn’t at all certain what this meant. She clarified with a nearly voiceless “You’re a very good man.”

  “Not at all, really. My point is that we can be whatever we wish to be in each other’s life. What that is . . . ? We don’t need to define it here. Now, have you had your dinner? Would you like to have dinner with me? Not here, actually, because I have a few doubts about the quality of their food. But perhaps somewhere nearby?”

  She said, “There’s a restaurant at my hotel.” And then she looked horrified and hastily added, “Thomas, you aren’t intended to think I meant . . . because I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Of course you didn’t,” he said. “And that’s precisely why it’s so easy for me to say that I care for you.”

  5 May

  CHALK FARM

  LONDON

  Barbara Havers was sitting up in bed reading when Taymullah Azhar knocked on her door. His knock was so soft and her interest in her book so intense that she very nearly didn’t hear him. After all, Tempest Fitzpatrick and Preston Merck were in mutual torment over Preston’s mysterious past and his agonising inability to act upon his acutely passionate love for Tempest—although Barbara thought they would be better off in torment over his rather strange and unheroic surname—and she was paragraphs away from discovering how they were going to resolve this troubling issue. Had Azhar not also tentatively called out, “Barbara? Are you awake? Are you there?” she might have missed his visit to her bungalow altogether. As it was, though, when she heard his voice, she cried out, “Azhar? Hang on,” and she leapt out of bed.

  She looked round frantically for something to put on as a cover-up. She was wearing one of her sleeping tee-shirts, this one with a faded caricature of Keith Richards on it along with the words Forget His Money . . . I Want His Constitution written below it. She reached for her tattered chenille dressing gown but noticed as she tied its belt that she’d not laundered it since spilling tinned beef goulash down the front of it six weeks earlier. She threw it off and grabbed her mac from the wardrobe. It would have to do.

  She drew the bedcovers over the disarray of sheets, pillows, and Tempest and Preston’s amorous difficulties. She hurried to the door.

  She’d waited four days to talk to Azhar. Every evening, she’d arrived home from work and had immediately checked for his return from Italy. Every morning, she’d had to report to DI Lynley that he’d not yet come back to London. Every day, she’d had to repeat that she wanted to speak to Azhar face-to-face about everything that she’d uncovered concerning the kidnapping of his youngest child. And in response, Lynley’s reply had been unvarying: I want a report from you, Barbara, and I do not want to discover at some later date that Azhar’s been back since the evening of the first of May. She’d said passionately, I’m not lying to you. I wouldn’t lie to you. A raised aristocratic eyebrow told her exactly how seriously he took that claim.

  When she swung the door open, it was to see Azhar standing hesitantly in the shadows. She flipped on the light above the front step, but it wasn’t helpful in the illumination department as it flashed brightly once like a bolt of lightning and then went dead. She said, “Oh, bloody hell,” and then, “Come in. How are you? How’s Hadiyyah? Are you only just back?”

  She stepped away from the door, and he came into the light from the bungalow. He looked good, she thought. The relief he was feeling had to be enormous. She didn’t ask herself what the relief’s source was: having his daughter safe, having escaped Italy without anyone’s suspicions falling on him, or having a plan in place to spirit Hadiyyah to another country when the time was right. These things she shoved to the back of her mind. Not yet, she told herself.

  He was carrying a plastic carrier bag, which he ha
nded to her, saying, “I have brought you something from Italy. A very small way to say thank you for everything, Barbara. I am and have been so grateful to you.”

  She took the bag from him and closed the door as he entered. He’d brought her olive oil and balsamic vinegar. She’d not the slightest clue what to do with the former—perhaps a Mediterranean fry-up? she thought—but she reckoned the latter would be smashing on chips. She said, “Ta, Azhar. Sit, sit,” and she went to the kitchen area and put on the kettle.

  He was looking at her bed, at the light on next to it, at the cup of Ovaltine next to the light. He said, “You were in bed. Indeed, I thought you might be because of the hour, but I wanted to . . . Yet I probably should not have—”

  “You should have,” she told him. “And I wasn’t asleep. I was reading.” She hoped he didn’t ask what she was reading because she’d have to lie and tell him Proust. Or perhaps The Gulag Archipelago. That would go down a real treat.

  She brought out the PG Tips, a bowl of sugar—from which she removed the clotted evidence of a wet spoon having been dipped into it with rather too much regularity—and a jug of milk. She took mugs from a shelf and bustled round like the owner of a third-rate B & B accommodating a late-night arrival. Jaffa Cakes on a plate, two paper napkins, two spoons, then a “whoops” and a replacement for one of them when she saw it was dirty . . . Back and forth from the kitchen to the table she went until there was nothing left but to pour the water over the tea bags and sit and talk to this man whom she knew and did not know all at once.

  He watched her solemnly. He knew something was up. He said nothing at first.