Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  “Sayyid?” A woman’s voice, then. She spoke from behind the boy, sounding as if she was in another room. “Who is there, Sayyid?”

  He made no reply. He locked eyes with his father, as if challenging him to identify himself to the wife he’d deserted. When he didn’t respond, footsteps approached and Sayyid stepped away from the door. Azhar and his wife stood face-to-face. Without looking at her son, she said, “Sayyid, go to your room.”

  Barbara had expected the traditional dress of shalwar kameez. She’d expected the scarf. What she hadn’t expected was how beautiful Azhar’s wife was because she’d thought—perhaps like most people, she reckoned—that Azhar would have left an ordinary kind of woman in order to take up life with an extraordinary one. Men being men, she’d reckoned, they’d trade up, not down, not even across. But this woman far outclassed Angelina in the beauty department: dark, sloe-eyed, with cheekbones to kill for, a sensuous mouth, an elegant long neck, and perfect skin.

  Azhar said, “Nafeeza.”

  Nafeeza said, “What brings you here?”

  Angelina was the one to answer. “We want to search the house.”

  “Please, Angelina,” Azhar said quietly. “Surely you can see . . .” And then to his wife, “Nafeeza, my apologies for this. I would not . . . If you would please tell these people that my daughter is not here.”

  She wasn’t a tall woman, but she brought herself up to her full height, and when she did this, the suggestion made was one of strength running through her body. She said, “Your daughter is upstairs in her room. She is doing her school prep. She’s a very fine student.”

  “I am pleased to hear that. You must be . . . She will be a source of . . . But I do not speak of . . .”

  “You know who he’s talking about,” Angelina said.

  Barbara took out her police ID. She could barely stand the amount of pain that seemed to be rolling off Azhar. She said to his wife, “C’n we come in, Mrs. . . .” And to her dismay she realised she hadn’t a clue what to call her. She switched to, “Madam, if we c’n come in. We’ve a missing child we’re looking for.”

  “And you think this child is within my house?”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  Nafeeza looked them over, each of them, one at a time, and she took her time doing it. Then she stepped back from the door. They entered the house and filled a narrow corridor that was already filled by a stairway, boots, coats, rucksacks, hockey sticks, and football equipment. They crowded into a small lounge to the right.

  There, they saw that Sayyid hadn’t gone to his room. He was in the lounge, on the edge of the sofa, elbows on his thighs and hands dangling between his knees. Above him on the wall a large picture featured thousands of people on pilgrimage to Mecca. There were no other pictures or decorations aside from two small school photographs in frames on a table. Azhar went to these and picked them up. His gaze upon them was hungry. Nafeeza crossed the room and removed them from his hand. She placed them facedown on the table.

  She said to him, “There is no child here, aside from mine.”

  “I want to look,” Angelina said.

  “You must tell her that I speak the truth, husband,” Nafeeza said. “You must explain to her that I have no reason to lie about this. Whatever has happened, it is nothing to do with me or with my children.”

  “So she’s the one?” Sayyid put in. “She’s the whore?”

  “Sayyid,” his mother said.

  “I am sorry, Nafeeza,” Azhar said to her. “For this. For what it was. For who I was.”

  “Sorry?” This from Sayyid. “You c’n bloody talk to Mum about sorry? You’re a piece of shit and don’t think we think anything else. If you plan to—”

  “Enough!” his mother said. “You will wait in your room, Sayyid.”

  “While this one”—with a sneer towards Angelina—“goes through our house looking for her bastard brat?”

  Azhar looked at his son. “You may not say—”

  “You, wanker, don’t tell me what to do.” And with that, he leapt to his feet, pushed his way through all of them, and left the room. His footsteps did not go up the stairs, however, but rather into the corridor, where they could hear him making a telephone call. He spoke in Urdu. This seemed to mean something to both Azhar and Nafeeza, Barbara saw, because Azhar’s wife said to him, “It will not be long,” and he said again, “I am so sorry.”

  “You do not know sorrow.” Nafeeza then spoke to the rest of them, her gaze going from one face to the other. Her voice contained perfect dignity. “The only children in this house are the children from my own body, got off this man and abandoned by him.”

  Barbara said to Azhar in a low voice, “Who’s the kid ringing?”

  “My father,” Azhar told her.

  What she thought at this was, Hot bloody hell. What she knew was that things were about to get worse. She said to Angelina, “We’re wasting time. You can see Hadiyyah isn’t here. You can tell, for God’s sake. Can’t you see these people wouldn’t do him a favour any more than your family would do you one?”

  “You’re in love with him,” Angelina snapped. “You’ve been from the first. I no more trust you than I’d trust a snake.” Then she said to Lorenzo, “You check above and I’ll—”

  Sayyid was back in the room in a flash. He threw himself at Lorenzo, shouting, “Get out of our house! Get out! Get out!”

  Lorenzo batted him away like a fly. Azhar took a step forward. Barbara grabbed his arm. Things were going in a very bad direction, and the last thing they needed was one of these people making a call to the local cops.

  “You listen to me,” she said, her tone sharp. “You have a choice here, Angelina. Either you believe what Nafeeza’s telling you, or you conduct a search and explain yourself to the cops when they get here. Because if I was Nafeeza, I’d be on the blower the minute Mr. Universe here put his big toe on the stairs. You’re wasting time. We’re wasting time. So for God’s sake think. Azhar was in Germany. He’s shown you that. He wasn’t in Italy and he had no idea that you were. So you can continue to raise holy hell, or we can all get on a plane and get back to Italy and lean on the cops there to find Hadiyyah. I suggest you decide. Now.”

  “I won’t believe till—”

  “For God’s bloody sake! What’s wrong with you?”

  “You may search.” Nafeeza spoke quietly. She indicated Barbara. “Only you,” she said.

  “Is that good enough for you?” Barbara asked Angelina.

  “How do I know that you aren’t part of this? That you and he together haven’t—”

  “Because I’m a bloody cop, because I love your daughter, because if you can’t see that the last thing either of us would do—me or Azhar—is what you’ve done to him by hiding her away somewhere and denying her access to one of her own parents, because if that’s what you really think has happened . . . He’s not like you, all right? I’m not like you. And you goddamn know that. So if you don’t stay in this room while I look through the house to prove Hadiyyah isn’t here, I’m going to ring the cops myself and have them out here on a domestic disturbance. Am I being clear enough for you?”

  Lorenzo murmured to Angelina in Italian. He put his hand gently on the back of her neck. “All right,” she said.

  Barbara made for the stairs. It was not a major project to search the house because there was so little of it. Three floors comprised its interior, with bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen, little else. Barbara startled Azhar’s other daughter in the midst of her school prep, but she was the only living creature above stairs.

  She returned to the others. She said, “Nothing. All right? Let’s leave. Now.”

  Angelina’s eyes grew bright with tears, and it came to Barbara how deeply she’d been hoping that—despite the ludicrous nature of what she’d decided had happened to her child—Hadiyyah would indeed be in the house. For a moment, Barbara felt sympathy for her. But she stamped on the feeling. Azhar was who mattered. And he was minutes away from a confr
ontation with his father. She knew they had to get him out of the neighbourhood before that occurred.

  They had no luck. They were leaving the house when two men in traditional dress came storming down the street from the direction of Green Lane. One of them carried a shovel and the other a hoe. It wasn’t a case for Sherlock to read their intentions.

  “Get in the car,” she said to Azhar. “Do it. Now.”

  He didn’t budge. The men were shouting in Urdu as they tore towards them. The taller had to be Azhar’s father, Barbara figured, because his face was transfixed by rage. The other—his companion—was much the same age, perhaps a partner in administering retribution.

  “La macchina, la macchina.” This from Lorenzo to Angelina. He opened the car door and bundled her inside. Barbara half expected him to follow her and lock the doors, but he didn’t do so. He seemed to be a bloke who liked to mix things up. He might have had no love for Azhar. But when it came to a street fight? No problema.

  Between the Urdu being shouted by the older men and the Italian being shouted by Lorenzo, Barbara had no idea who was accusing whom of what. But the target of the Pakistani men was clearly Azhar, and she didn’t intend him to get hurt. The older men came in swinging their tools. She pushed Azhar out of the way. She yelled, “Police!” at the top of her lungs. This didn’t impress. Lorenzo swung.

  She reckoned he was swearing in Italian. He didn’t sound pleasant as he chose his words. He was good with his fists and better with his feet and, farm implements or not, the potential assailants were on the ground before they knew what had hit them. But they didn’t remain there. They threw themselves back into the fray as Sayyid came roaring out of the house. Then an older woman and two other men debouched from the house next door as Sayyid barreled into his father and drove his fist into Azhar’s throat.

  Someone screamed. Barbara thought it might have been herself except she had her mobile phone in her hand and was punching in the nines to bring the local rozzers. Clearly, her declaration of identity wasn’t going to stop this lot.

  Azhar’s father got to him. He pulled Sayyid off and fell upon him himself. Lorenzo went after the man only to be jumped by the former hoe wielder. The older woman pounced upon Azhar and his father, screaming what sounded to Barbara like a name as she pulled and dragged and did what she could to put an end to things. Barbara did the same to the bloke on Lorenzo. Nafeeza came out of the house and grabbed Sayyid. But three more teenage boys came into the street with cricket bats and two women began to shout imprecations from the pavement on the opposite side.

  It took the police to break everything up. Two panda cars and four uniformed constables handled things. It was down to Barbara that no one ended up arrested, although all of them ended up explaining themselves in the local nick. She offered her identification once they got there. She said it was a family dispute. Azhar’s father spat, “He is not family,” but the cops brought in an officer who spoke good Urdu and he gave everyone a chance to say what needed to be said on the matter. The end of it all was time wasted, anguish caused, horrors visited upon everyone, and nothing learned. They rode back to Chalk Farm in near silence.

  Azhar didn’t speak. Angelina only wept.

  18 April

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  You’ve gone quite mad” was how Isabelle Ardery dealt with Barbara’s request. She added to this, “Get back to work, Sergeant, and let’s not talk of this again.”

  “You know they need a liaison officer” was how Barbara countered her superior officer’s command.

  “I know nothing of the sort,” Ardery told her. “And I have no intention of sending you or anyone else barging into a foreign investigation.”

  She’d been finishing up with someone on the phone when Barbara had entered her office. Planning an extended celebration, no doubt. The announcement had descended from on high thirty minutes earlier in the person of Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier gracing their side of New Scotland Yard’s two tower blocks with his florid-faced presence. He’d imparted upon the assembly of officers the news that Acting had been dropped—permanently—from the Detective Superintendent that until that precise moment had preceded Isabelle Ardery’s name. Kudos all around and let flow the champers. Whatever hoops she’d needed to jump through for the past nine months, Isabelle Ardery had apparently managed to catapult herself through them.

  Azhar had left early that morning, accompanying Angelina Upman and Lorenzo Mura to Lucca, Italy. Barbara had been determined to follow hard upon their heels. She had it all worked out—how this would happen—and she had just concluded presenting the matter to the superintendent.

  It had seemed perfectly logical to her. A British national had disappeared upon foreign soil. A British national may well have been kidnapped. When a crime such as this occurred, a liaison officer was generally assigned to breach the cultural, linguistic, investigatory, and legal gaps between the two countries involved. Barbara wished to be that officer. She knew the family, and all that was needed was Detective Superintendent Ardery’s okay on the matter, and off she could go.

  Ardery didn’t see things that way. She heard Barbara out, taking in the entire subject, beginning with Hadiyyah’s November disappearance in the company of her mother and ending with her current disappearance from a crowded market in Italy. She listened without asking questions other than to clarify names, locations, and relationships, and when Barbara concluded and waited for the logical “of course you must go to Tuscany at once” that she believed would be coming on the verbal wings of a hundred angels, Ardery pointed out what she called “a few salient details that the sergeant had apparently overlooked.”

  First among them was the fact that the British embassy was not involved in this matter. No one had rung them or paid a call upon them or sent them a telegram, email, fax, or smoke signal, and without the involvement of the embassy—diplomats pouring oil on potentially troubled waters in advance of the Met’s incursion into someone else’s patch—they did not barge round like bulls among the Belleek attempting an investigation where they were not wanted.

  Second, the superintendent pointed out, the purpose of the liaison officer was to liaise, which, as they both knew, meant to keep the family in the UK apprised of everything relative to the investigation that was occurring on foreign soil. But the parents of the child were in Italy, no? Or at least on their way to Italy, according to the sergeant’s own words. Indeed, the mother of the child lived in Italy, no? Somewhere in Lucca? Outside of Lucca? In the vicinity of Lucca? And with an Italian national, yes? So she had no reason to request a liaison officer. Hence, there was no case to present as to the need of sending Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers into Tuscany to be of assistance in whatever was going on.

  “What’s going on,” Barbara said, “is the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl. A nine-year-old British girl. No one saw it happen, and whatever it was that happened, it happened in the middle of a market. A crowded market with hundreds of witnesses who apparently saw nothing.”

  “As of yet,” Ardery said. “They can’t all have been talked to at this point. How long has the child been gone?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I wouldn’t think I’d need to explain that to you.”

  “Bloody hell, you know the first twenty-four hours are crucial. And now it’s been more than forty-eight.”

  “And I assure you, the Italian police know that as well.”

  “They’re telling Angelina—”

  “Sergeant.” Isabelle’s voice had been firm but not unsympathetic despite her words. Now, however, it had an edge. “I’ve told you the facts. You seem to think I have power in this matter when I don’t. When a foreign country—”

  “What part of this don’t you bloody understand?” Barbara cut in. “She’s been snatched in public. She might be dead by now.”

  “She might well be. And if that’s the case—”

  “Listen to yourself!” Barbara shrieked.
“This is a kid we’re talking about. A kid I know. And you’re declaring ‘she might well be’ like you’re talking about a cake left too long in the oven. It might well be burnt. The cheese might well be mouldy. The milk might well be sour.”

  Isabelle surged to her feet. “You damn well control yourself,” she said. “You’re too involved by half. Even if the embassy rang up and said the Met’s presence was wanted at once, you’d be the last officer I’d consider sending. You’ve no objectivity at all, and if you don’t understand that objectivity above everything else is crucial when it comes to a crime, then you need to get back to wherever you learned your policing skills and learn them again.”

  “And what if something like this happened to one of your boys?” Barbara demanded. “Just how objective would you manage to be?”

  “You’ve gone quite mad” was the conclusion to it all, plus the order to get back to work.

  Barbara stormed from Ardery’s office. For the moment, she couldn’t even recall what the work was that she was supposed to get back to. She flung herself in the direction of her desk, where her computer’s screen attempted to remind her, but she could think of nothing and would be good for nothing unless and until she got herself to Italy.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Chief Inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco had an evening ritual that he adhered to as often as he was able to be at home for dinner. With a cup of caffè corretto in his hand, he climbed to the very top of the tower in which he and his mamma lived, and there in the perfectly square rooftop garden he drank in peace and watched the sunset. He enjoyed sunsets and how they caressed the ancient buildings of his city. But more than sunsets, he enjoyed the time away from his mamma. At seventy-six years old and in possession of a very bad hip, she no longer climbed to the top of Torre Lo Bianco, the tower that had been his family home for generations. The last two flights of stairs were narrow and metal, and a misstep on them would finish her off. Salvatore didn’t want to endanger his mamma even though he hated living with her as much as she loved having him at home once again.