Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  When he was finished, he glanced up at Doughty and Em Cass, over the top of his glasses. He said, “It tends to come down to trust in the end, Mr. Doughty. Trust always trumps money on the wrong side of the law.”

  Doughty said, “All right. Agreed. She came to see me more than once evidently. Which, obviously, is why I decided to look into her.”

  “Indeed. But I’m not talking about your trusting Barbara Havers. I’m talking about anyone trusting Di Massimo. Had he not subcontracted Hadiyyah’s kidnapping out to a bloke called Roberto Squali, had Squali not been photographed by a tourist, had he not driven an expensive convertible far too quickly up a mountain road, had he and Di Massimo not been in contact by mobile phone . . . Indeed, had the investigation in Italy not been handled by Salvatore Lo Bianco, who appears to be a shinier coin in the collection plate than the magistrate who heads the case, everything might have gone along the way you intended it to go. But those phone calls piqued Lo Bianco’s interest, and he followed the trail of them rather more quickly than you—at this end—apparently anticipated. So what he ended up with is a set of records far different from those you later provided him. And, Barbara Havers aside for the moment, that’s quite an interesting development in the kidnapping investigation.”

  Silence. Lynley let it go on. Outside, down in the Roman Road, two men argued loudly in a foreign tongue. A dog barked and a dustbin’s lid clanged against the receptacle. But in the office, there was nothing.

  Lynley said, “What I’m assuming is that, in the manner of similar shady characters, all of you have been double- and triple-crossing each other. One person gets a leg up on the other, then that person raises the ante and so on. Now, I’m not going to involve myself in any further questioning at the moment, as the hour is late and I’d like to get home, as I expect you would as well. But before you go, I’d like you to reflect on your neck, Ms. Cass’s neck, and the neck of your colleague Mr. Smythe. While you’re doing this reflecting, I’d like you to consider that Inspector Lo Bianco will be employing a forensic technology expert to follow all the diddling you’ve been doing with everyone’s records, and the Metropolitan police will be doing the same thing. Computers, as I expect you know, leave trails of cookie crumbs along the paths they take. To the average soul—like me, for example—these trails are impossible to find. To the expert in modern computer technology, this sort of work is a piece of cake. Or cookie, if you will.”

  He gave Doughty time to look at the material Lo Bianco had sent him. Doughty did so and, as the man could read, he was fully capable of interpreting the message on the wall.

  17 May

  ISLE OF DOGS

  LONDON

  Prior to going to bed, Dwayne Doughty had been able to hold things together in front of his wife because he didn’t want to worry her nor did he want to watch her China-blue eyes fill with tears at the thought of their having to flee the country one step ahead of a police enquiry. He rued the day he’d ever got involved in the Italian mess, and the effort to hide from his wife his ruing from the time he arrived home to the time he went to bed resulted in what felt like a very sharp knitting needle piercing his head.

  Candace knew something was wrong. She wasn’t stupid. But he managed to fend off her questions with the stock answer of “just a bit of a head-scratcher at work, luv,” which she accepted for the evening but wasn’t likely to accept into the following day. He needed either to perfect his acting skill—a doubtful prospect when it came to facing off with Can—or he needed to work out a solution to his little problem.

  He rose at half past three. In the kitchen of their semidetached, he quietly made a pot of coffee, which he began to drink, sitting at the table and mostly staring at nothing as he turned over various possibilities. He had worked his way through an entire package of fig bars—always his favourite, since childhood—but had got not much further than a mild case of heartburn and a more serious case of dietary guilt.

  There had to be possibilities for him at this point, he thought, for the simple reason that there always were if one took the time and had the patience to develop them. No way in hell was he going to flush his line of employment, the years he’d spent coaxing it out of nothing, and his whole life down the loo. He’d never let anything defeat him in the past, and he sure as bloody hell wasn’t going to be defeated now. Especially was he not going to be defeated by a Scotland Yard detective with a posh public school voice and a Savile Row suit that fairly screamed, Carefully worn by a faithful retainer for two years before being donned by me. Absolutely no way was that ever going to happen. But unless something did happen to prevent it, he was a few short days away from a knock on his office door that doubtless would herald the advent of some serious difficulties in his future.

  It was his own fault. From the first and with Em Cass’s insistence, he’d twigged that the woman was a cop, but that hadn’t stopped him. He’d agreed to help the professor find his kid—Christ but he had to harden his soft heart or it would finish him off in this line of work—and now look where that had led. He’d spent the past twenty years of his postmilitary life working his arse down to nothing—like his father before him—in order to take the family and its name another step up from the coal mines of Wigan. He had two kids who’d collected respectable university degrees, and he swore that their children—when they had them—would do the same from Oxford or Cambridge. He wasn’t about to miss that due to having to flee the country or because of the need to spend a stretch of time playing some sweaty yob’s wife behind prison bars . . . so what in God’s name was he going to do to avoid either prospect?

  Another cup of coffee. Another four fig bars. This took him to thoughts of his associates and how much blame he could possibly assign them. He’d always been a careful man, so there was no direct link from him to all the manoeuvring and the tinkering that had gone on. Aside from the one time in Emily’s sumptuous flat in Wapping and—all right—once in Emily’s office, he never himself actually discussed business with Bryan Smythe, so the truth was that he could throw up his hands in shock and despair and throw Em to the legal wolves. She, after all, had passed along his verbal instructions to Smythe. How difficult would it be to establish that every idea skittering to every lawless act had come from her? But the question was: Could he really do that to Em after the years in which they’d worked together?

  He knew the answer to that before he even got to the end of the question. He had history with Em. He also had history with Bryan. So together they had to climb out of this pit. It was his curse that he was such an ethical bloke.

  The second hour into his brooding about the problem had gained him only the insight that he might be able to use this bloke Lynley’s potential attachment to DS Barbara Havers in some way to benefit himself, much as he’d used her obvious attachment to the Pakistani professor to keep her in order. The difficulty with this was that he couldn’t work his mind round to believing there was an attachment between the detective sergeant and the posh inspector. So he was left with a nut needing to be cracked and having ninety minutes more in which to crack it before Can’s alarm went off and she staggered into the kitchen completely unamused at his having devoured all the fig bars.

  The thought of Can’s displeasure with regard to the fig bars stirred Dwayne to hide the evidence. He needed to make another pot of coffee, so he roused himself from the kitchen table and crumpled the wrapping of the sinful biscuits. He couldn’t put this in the rubbish. His wife would find it and a lecture about his nutritional habits would ensue. So he grabbed up a folded newspaper from the stool by the kitchen door, where others of its ilk waited for recycling, and he unfolded it on the draining board. He would, he decided, dump the coffee grounds on this and hide the fig bar wrapping beneath them. He was supposed to recycle the grounds as well—or was it compost the grounds? He could never remember all the terminology for what one did with one’s rubbish these days—but allowance could be made this once for not puttin
g the grounds to use for a higher purpose.

  He took them from the coffeemaker. He spread the fig bar wrapping neatly onto the unfolded newspaper, and he was just about to dump the coffee grounds on top of this when his hand was stayed in best biblical fashion. There before him beneath the fig wrapping lay the answer. Or at least part of it. For he’d opened the newspaper to a story whose elements he well recognised: Italy, an Englishwoman’s death, a possible cover-up, and stay tuned for more. He shoved the fig bar wrapping to one side and read, and the names leapt out at him. The problem was that he’d opened the paper to the middle of the story, and one paragraph into it the floodgates of his ability to plan and devise and ultimately triumph opened . . . but he needed the rest of the story.

  He wasn’t a praying man, but he did pray that Candace hadn’t used the front of the paper to discard last night’s leftover chili con carne into. He rooted through the stack of recycling aspirants, and he found what he was looking for. This was a name, a reporter’s name. And there it was beneath the page-one headline: Mitchell Corsico. It sounded Italian to Dwayne, but Italian or not, obviously the bloke spoke English. And since he spoke English, he was the answer. He was the plan.

  For Dwayne Doughty, aside from heartburn and caffeine nerves strung out like wires for a tightrope walker, all was finally well.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  What Barbara hadn’t anticipated was Hadiyyah’s desire to be with her father. She’d been so anxious to get her away from Lorenzo Mura and to protect her from whatever might occur should her foul grandparents show up to fetch her that there had been nothing else on her mind but scooping her up and dashing back to Lucca with her.

  That had been enough at first. They’d had dinner in Lucca, at a multinational restaurant/cafeteria in Via Malcontenti, where upon the walls hung placemats decorated by past clientele extolling the virtues of the pizzas, the goulash, and the hummus in various languages. They’d had gelato afterwards, from a vendor near the main tourist office in Piazzale Giuseppe Verdi. Then they’d walked up from that office to a section of the ancient wall among the Italians enjoying their evening stroll. When at last they’d returned to Pensione Giardino, Hadiyyah had been more than ready just to sleep in the second bed in Barbara’s room.

  Bullets were not dodged for long, though. The first was from Corsico, who rang at half past seven in the morning wanting the next story for his editor, which, he told her, needed to be along the lines of English Child’s Agony with Dad in Prison. He said he’d be happy to make it all up—“par for the course, Barb”—if Barbara just produced the kid for a picture looking soulfully out of the window of the pensione. “Missing her dad and all that rubbish, you know what I mean,” he said. Barbara foisted him off with the information that Hadiyyah was still asleep and she would ring him when the child awakened. But that put her into contact with the second bullet, which was Hadiyyah’s desire to see her father.

  That, Barbara knew, was the last thing Azhar would ever want: his beloved child getting an eyeful of him in prison garb, sitting alongside the other inmates on visiting day. She wasn’t about to do that to either of them, so she told Hadiyyah that her dad was helping Inspector Lo Bianco look into a few things about her mummy’s death. He was out of town just then, she explained to the child, and he wanted her to remain in Barbara’s care. This was true so if she had to expand on the story at a later time, she could do so without having to retrace her steps. She didn’t like keeping the full truth from Hadiyyah, but she didn’t see any other course.

  What she knew was that she had to make some sort of arrangement to keep Hadiyyah out of the hands of the Upmans. The investigation into Angelina’s death was never going to lead to Azhar, but until the Italians saw things that way, he was going to stay in prison, giving the Upmans the ability to claim her if they chose to do so. She had to make Hadiyyah unavailable to them, and the best way to do that was to get her out of Italy and in a location where she couldn’t be found.

  It didn’t take her long to come up with that location. She needed Lynley, though, in order to arrange it. So she suggested to Hadiyyah that they ask Signora Vallera if she could, perhaps, watch television in the family section of the pensione while Barbara made a few pressing phone calls, and when Hadiyyah said with an anxious but eager crumpling of her forehead, “Could I watch the film of Mummy, Barbara?” Barbara snatched at the idea as the best possible plan. It would soothe the little girl at the same time as it would occupy her. She said, “Let’s see if we c’n sort out a DVD player, then,” and she hoped Hadiyyah’s Italian was good enough to do so.

  It was. In short order she and the Vallera toddler were side by side on a sofa watching Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar speak to the camera, and Barbara was back in the breakfast room, ringing Inspector Lynley’s mobile.

  Before he could say anything other than “Isabelle’s had an appointment with Hillier, Barbara,” she cut in.

  “I’ve got Hadiyyah. I need to get her back to London. Mura’s rung Angelina’s parents to fetch her, and in advance of that, we need to—”

  He cut in irritably with “Barbara, do you ever listen to me? Did you hear me? I’ve no idea what they talked about, but whatever it is, it’s probably not good.”

  “What you still don’t understand is that Hadiyyah is what matters,” she said. “I’ve got my police ID, so I can get her a ticket back to London, but you need to meet her at the other end.”

  “And what?” he asked.

  “And then you’ve got to hide her.”

  “Tell me I’m not hearing you correctly as I think you might have just said I must hide her.”

  “Sir, it would only be for as long as it takes me to get Azhar out of gaol. I need to rattle a few doorknobs over here. I need to shake a few skeletons. You and I know that if the Upmans get their hands on Hadiyyah, they’re going to make it impossible for Azhar to get her back.”

  “You and I,” Lynley said, “know nothing of the sort.”

  “Please, sir,” she said. “I’ll beg if I have to. I need your help. She c’n stay with you, can’t she? Charlie can mind her. He’ll love her to bits. And she’ll love him.”

  “And when he has an audition, is he to take her with him or perhaps give her an assignment in the house? Something along the lines of polishing the silver, perhaps?”

  “He can take her with him. She’d enjoy it. Or he c’n pop her over to Simon and Deborah. Deborah’s dad can mind her or Deborah herself can. She’s mad about kids. You know she is. Please, sir.”

  He was silent. She prayed. But when he responded, it was not to say anything that lifted her spirits.

  “I’ve been to his lab, Barbara.”

  Her stomach was liquid. “Whose lab?”

  “There’s another connection, one that existed between Azhar and Italy far in advance of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping and Angelina’s death. You’re going to need to come to terms with this, and you’re going to need to prepare Hadiyyah to do the same.”

  “What?” She forced the word out. In the other room, she could hear the voice-over on the film of Angelina and Azhar, and she could hear Hadiyyah’s chatter in Italian either to Signora Vallera or to her daughter.

  Lynley said, “He has incubators, Barbara. Two sets of them, in fact. One set comes from here, from Birmingham. The other set comes from Italy.”

  “And?” she demanded, although her incredulity was forced. “He may have a bloody pair of Italian shoes as well, Inspector, but it’s rubbish to think that has anything to do with Angelina dying over here. Italian incubators have nothing to do with anything anyway, and you know it. Christ, what if he has Italian olive oil in his kitchen cupboard? How ’bout a bag of imported pasta? What about cheese? He might like Parmesan.”

  “Are you quite finished? May I continue?” When she said nothing more, he did so. “Italian incubators in and of themselves mean nothing. But if you have incubat
ors you also have the conditions under which the incubators are tested by the company that makes them, to make certain they do the job for which they were designed. Can we agree on that?”

  She was silent for a moment, thinking about this. There was a heaviness within her that she couldn’t ignore. “S’pose,” she finally said.

  “Right. And what better way to test those incubators, Barbara, than with the different kinds of bacteria they’re meant to grow?”

  She rallied. “Oh, please. That’s completely ridiculous. So what did he do? Drop by the company over here and say, ‘Afternoon, you lot. How ’bout handing over some truly virulent E. coli for a little romp on top of someone’s pizza? Just to see, mind you, if the incubators really work?’”

  “I think you know what I’m saying, Barbara.”

  “I bloody well don’t.”

  “I’m saying there’s another link. And you can’t afford to ignore a link.”

  “And what, exactly, do you intend to do with this information?”

  “It has to go to Chief Inspector Lo Bianco. What he then decides to do with it—”

  “Oh, for God’s bloody sake. What’s the matter with you? You’ve lost the plot. And when did you become such a sodding prig? Who turned you, eh? Has to be Isabelle.”

  He was silent. She reckoned he was counting to ten. She knew she’d crossed over a line with the mention of Superintendent Ardery, but she was beyond social niceties at this point. He finally said, “Let’s not venture in that direction.”

  She said, “No, no. Let’s stick to what we know for sure. What I know is that you’re not about to help me. Chuck Hadiyyah out with the bathwater and let her swim in it as best she can. That’s your game, isn’t it? You’ll do your duty. Or whatever you do, you’ll call it your duty. You’ll sigh and say, ‘It is what it is,’ or some rubbish like that and meantime lives hang in the balance but what do you care because one of those lives isn’t yours.” She waited for him to reply to this and when he did not, she went on. “Well. Right, then. I won’t ask you to hold back information for a day or two. That wouldn’t be doing your duty, would it?”