Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  “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 family. 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.

  “Bryan Smythe,” Emily said quietly.

  Barbara turned her head back to gaze at Emily. “And he does . . . ?”

  “Phone records, bank records, credit card records, emails, net searches, computer trails, all the rest. Anything having to do with computer technology.”

  Barbara dug out her notebook and flipped it open. She said, “Where c’n I find this stellar individual?”

  Emily had to get this information from her mobile phone. She read it out—the bloke’s address and phone numbers—and shoved the mobile back into her pocket. She added, “He didn’t know what it was all in service of. He just did what Dwayne told him to do.”

  “No worries there,” Barbara said. “I know Dwayne’s the big fish, Emily.” She pushed back from the table and dropped her notebook back into her shoulder bag. She got to her feet. “You might want to look for another line of employment. Between you and me, Doughty’s private investigation business is going to have a serious setback sooner rather than later.”

  She left the young woman sitting in the pub. She reckoned Doughty was in his office, so that was where she took herself next. With Bryan Smythe’s name in her possession, she was now holding a rather good hand of cards.

  Above Bedlovers, she gave two knocks to Doughty’s door, entering without being bidden to do so. She found the man in consultation with a middle-aged estate manager type. They were bent over Doughty’s desk, examining photos, and in the estate manager’s fingers was a handkerchief that he was in the act of crushing to bits.

  Doughty looked up. “D’you mind?” he snapped. “We’re conducting business.”

  “So’m I.” Barbara took out her warrant card and showed it to the poor bloke who was being presented with the cold, hard, and no doubt slimy facts of someone’s betrayal of him. “I’m going to need a word with Mr. Doughty,” she said. And with a glance at the pictures—two nude young men, as it happened, cavorting together with rather too much enthusiasm in a tree-sided pond—she added, “What’d that idiot film director say? ‘The heart wants what the heart wants’? I’m sorry.”

  Doughty gathered up the pictures and said to her, “You’re a piece of work.”

  “For my sins,” she agreed.

  The estate manager had backed off from his perusal of the photos. He was taking a chequebook from his jacket pocket, but Barbara took him by the arm and urged him towards the door. “I expect Mr. Doughty—decent bloke that he is—wants to make this one on the house.” She bade him farewell, watched him go for the stairs with his head hanging low, and added her hope that the rest of his day was going to be more pleasant than his just-completed meeting in the office above Bedlovers had been.

  Then she closed the door and turned to Doughty. He was red in the face, and it wasn’t embarrassment making him so. He said, “How bloody dare you!”

  To which she replied, “Bryan Smythe, Mr. Doughty. At least Bryan Smythe on this end. On the other end is Michelangelo Di Massimo. He doesn’t have his own Bryan Smythe, as it happens. His computers won’t be as squeaky clean as yours. Same goes for his telephone records, I expect. And then there’s the small matter of his bank account and what it might show when we get our hands on it.”

  “I told you Di Massimo was employed to do some checking in Italy,” Doughty snapped. “This is fresh off the presses for what sterling reason?”

  “Because what you didn’t tell me was that he was employed to snatch Hadiyyah, Dwayne.”

  “I didn’t employ him to do that, Sergeant. I’ve told you that before and I’m going to continue telling you that. If you think otherwise, then it’s time you took a suggestion from me.”

  “And that is . . . ?”

  “The professor. Taymullah Azhar. It’s been him from the first, but you haven’t wanted to look at that, have you? So I’ve had to do your bloody job for you and believe me I’m not happy about that.”

  “His Berlin story—”

  “Bugger Berlin. This was never about Berlin. Berlin’s been a malodorous red herring from the first. Of course he was there. He was giving his paper and attending lectures and popping up all over the bloody hotel like a Pakistani jack-in-the-box. He would’ve had a convenient leg break in the lobby of the place if he’d needed to make certain his stay was memorable, but as it happens, he didn’t need to make certain of that because all his colleagues are willing to believe every word that comes out of the blighter’s mouth. As was I, as it happens. And, let’s be frank here, as are you.”

  He went to one of his filing cabinets as he spoke. He jerked open the top drawer, and he brought out a manila folder. This he tossed on his desk, and he sat behind it. He said, “Oh, bloody sit down and let’s have a rational conversation for once.”

  Barbara trusted the man in the same way she would have trusted a cobra sliding towards her big toe. She narrowed her eyes and observed him for anything that would allow her to read what was going on. But he looked, maddeningly, as he always looked: everything about him average save for that nose, veering in several directions before it got round to presenting his nostrils to a less-than-admiring public.

  She sat. She wasn’t about to let him wrest from her the reins of the conversation, however. So she said, “Bryan Smythe’s going to confirm a phone sweep and he’s going to confirm a computer sweep as well. Put that together with the blagging on the part of Ms. Cass and—”

  “You might want to take a look at these before you cha-cha any further in that direction.” Doughty opened the manila folder and handed over two documents. They were, Barbara saw, copies of plane tickets, coming from the sort of reservations made online by millions of people every day. The flight in question departed from Heathrow. It was a one-way ticket, and its destination was Lahore.

  Barbara felt her heart slam against her chest and her mouth went dry. For the name of the first passenger was Taymullah Azhar. The name of the second was Hadiyyah Upman.

  She found that she couldn’t think for a moment. She couldn’t think what it meant, she couldn’t think why the tickets existed at all, and she couldn’t think—because she didn’t want to think—that everything she believed she knew about Azhar was about to crumble into dust.

  Doughty apparently read all this on her face, for he said, “Yes. There you have it. Tied up with a ribbon and I ought to bill you hours for doing your bleeding job for you.”

  She said, with an attempt at bravado, “What I have here is a piece of paper, Mr. Doughty. And as you and I know, anyone can generate a piece of paper, just like anyone can buy a ticket to anyplace in anyone else’s name.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, then have a look at the dates,” he advised her. “The date of the flight is interesting enough, but I think you’ll find the date of the purchase more interesting still.”

  So Barbara looked at these and then she tried to decide what the two dates were telling her about her friend. The date of the flight was the fifth of July, which one could argue spoke of Azhar’s hope that his daughter would be found alive and perfectly well. Or it spoke of a ticket purchase made months and months earlier, far in advance of Hadiyyah’s November disappearance from London. But the date of purchase changed the playing field. It was the twenty-second of March, well in advance of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping in Italy but during the time when Azhar had, ostensibly, not even known where she was. That suggested only one thing, and Barbara couldn’t bear to consider the extent to which she’d been played for a fool.

  She spent a moment searching for something to explain this information. She said, “Anyone could have—”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Doughty said. “But the question is why would someone other than our friend the quiet, unassuming, and brokenhearted professor of whatever the hell he professes buy two one-way tickets to Pakistan?”

  “Someone who wanted him to look guilty—like yourself, for example—could have made the purchase.”

  “You think so, eh? So ask you
r blokes over there in Special Branch to track this thing down because you and I both know that in these days of playing at Who’s the Terrorist, anyone going to a country where people wear headscarves, towels, bedsheets, and dressing gowns in the street is going to be looked at fairly closely once you give them the word it’s got to be done.”

  “He might have—”

  “Known his kid was going to be snatched in Italy?”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “But it’s what you know, Sergeant Havers. Now, I think you and I c’n agree it’s game, set, and match we’re looking at here. So are you going to continue harassing me, or are you going to do something about getting that miserable excuse of a father—if he even is her father—to tell the cops over there where he’s stowed that poor kid?”

  BOW

  LONDON

  Barbara sat inside her rust-dappled Mini, lit a fag, and inhaled so deeply that she could have sworn the heavenly carcinogen managed to travel all the way to her ankles. She smoked the entire thing before she would even allow herself to think. Buddy Holly helped in this. A tape deck in the car that functioned only on an off-and-on basis today was leaning towards the on end of things, although the very idea of Buddy’s telling her that anything was a-getting closer was not doing much to lift her spirits.

  Doughty was right. A call to Special Branch and she’d know the truth about those tickets to Lahore. It wasn’t enough that Azhar was a respected professor of microbiology. That alone would never save him from scrutiny. When it came to travelling to a Muslim country, a man with a name like Taymullah Azhar was going to be looked at, even more so because he’d bought a one-way ticket to the place. In fact, he’d probably already been investigated by the blokes in SO12 because his purchase of that ticket—if indeed he was the person who had made the purchase—was going to light up the roadside flares. All she had to do was dig out her mobile, place a call to the Met, and hear the worst. Or hear the best, she thought. Pray God in his heaven that it was the best.