Just One Evil Act

17 April

BELGRAVIA

LONDON

The day had been bloody odd. Barbara Havers was long used to still waters when it came to Lynley, but even she had been surprised that his depths had somehow managed to hide from her the fact that he had been seeing someone. If it could actually be called seeing someone. For it appeared his social life post the Isabelle Ardery entanglement consisted of regular attendance at a sporting event she had never heard of.

He’d insisted that she had to see it. An experience she was unlikely to forget, was how he’d put it. She’d avoided the dubious thrill of this attempt to broaden her social sphere for as long as she could. Ultimately, though, she’d caved in to his insistence. Thus, she’d found herself at a daylong roller derby elimination tournament in which the victors turned out to be a group of extremely athletic women from Birmingham who looked as if eating small children was their other extracurricular activity of choice.

During the event, Lynley had explained all the fine points of the sport—such as they were—to Barbara. He’d named the positions, the responsibilities of the players, the penalties, and the points. He’d talked about the pack and the objective that the pack had in relation to the jammer. And along with everyone else—including her, it had to be said—he’d leapt to his feet in protest when someone got an elbow to the face and a penalty was not called.

After several hours, she reached the point of wondering what the hell this entire experience was all about and she also reached the point of considering that Lynley might have brought her to witness the spectacle as a potential outlet for her aggressions. But then, it transpired that at the end of God only knew which bout it was, because at that point she had lost count, they were approached by a skater with lightning bolts painted on her cheeks, fire-red lipstick on her mouth, and glitter rising from her eyelids to her eyebrows. This vision of athleticism had removed her helmet, said, “How nice to see you again, Sergeant Havers,” and Barbara found herself looking upon Daidre Trahair. At which point things became remarkably clearer.

At first Barbara thought she was meant to play the duenna. She reckoned Lynley needed someone whose presence would soothe the veterinarian into accepting a dinner invitation. But then it turned out that Lynley had been seeing Daidre Trahair regularly since first running into her the previous November. That was where he had been on the night he’d failed to return her phone call. First at a roller derby match and then out for drinks although, from the look of things, matters hadn’t got too much further than that between them lo these many months that had passed, a point that Lynley made clear as they waited for the skaters at the end of the tournament.

Daidre Trahair came to join them. What happened next was, apparently, what had happened each of the times she and Lynley had met. She invited him—and Barbara—to attend a postgame celebration, which would take place in a pub called Famous Three Kings. Lynley demurred and instead invited her—and Barbara—out for an early dinner. Daidre claimed she was hardly dressed for a meal. Lynley—and Barbara twigged that this was the new bit in their routine—said that wouldn’t matter as he’d laid on something at his home. If Daidre—and Barbara, of course—would dance attendance there, he would be only too pleased to drive Daidre to her hotel afterwards.

Clever man. Barbara decided not to be offended by his use of her. She only hoped he hadn’t cooked the food himself or they were in for a meal they would long remember, and for all the wrong reasons.

Daidre hesitated. She looked from Lynley to Barbara. An Amazonian woman approached and asked them all if they were coming to tipple a few at the pub where someone called McQueen was waiting to challenge Daidre at darts again. Her moment of escape was at hand, but Daidre didn’t grasp at it. She said—her gaze flickering to the woman and then back to Lynley—that she would have to beg off. Her friends, she said, were insisting . . . if Lisa would make her excuses? Lisa tossed a knowing look Lynley’s way. Right, she said. Stay safe, not sorry.

Barbara wondered if she was supposed to leg it, now that Daidre’s presence in Lynley’s home was assured, but he made it clear that she was to do nothing of the sort. Besides, she’d left her Mini blocking his garage in a mews round the corner from his digs, so one way or another she was going to have to get to it in order to scarper.

On the way to Belgravia, they made polite conversation in the manner of their countrymen: They talked about the weather. After that, Daidre and Lynley went on to speak of gorillas, for a reason that Barbara couldn’t suss out. Some female gorilla was happily pregnant. On the other hand, something was wrong with the right front foot of one of the elephants. Negotiations were ongoing for a visit from some pandas, and Berlin Zoo still wished to get its hands on a polar bear cub born early last year. Was that difficult, Lynley wanted to know, breeding polar bears in captivity? It was always difficult breeding in captivity, Daidre told him. Then she fell silent, as if she’d accidentally spoken a double entendre.

At Lynley’s house, they parked in the mews. Since Barbara had to move her car to allow Lynley access to his garage, she made noises as if to leave them then. Lynley said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Barbara. I know you’re dying for a meal,” and he shot her a look whose meaning she couldn’t fail to read: She was not to desert him in his hour of need.

Barbara hadn’t a clue how she was supposed to facilitate matters for Lynley. She knew Daidre Trahair’s background. She knew how unlikely it was that the veterinarian would allow things—whatever they were at present—to progress with Lynley. Through no fault of his own, the poor bloke had a title, an ancestral line stretching back to the Domesday Book, and a gargantuan family pile in Cornwall. Sitting at a table laid out with sixteen pieces of silver cutlery, he would know innately which fork to use when and why there were additional spoons and whatevers at the top of his plate, along with those on each side of it. For her part, Daidre’s family probably still ate with knives and their fingers. The niceties of life where she was from did not extend to place settings of heirloom china and a line of wineglasses to the right of one’s dinner plate.

Luckily, Lynley had thought of all this, Barbara saw. Inside the house and laid out in the dining room—although it was a bit of a problem that the bloke actually had a dining room—were three settings of plain white crockery, and the cutlery had handles that looked like Bakelite. Probably purchased for this exact moment, Barbara thought sardonically. She’d seen his regular stuff. It hadn’t been purchased at the local Conran Shop.

The meal itself was simple. Anyone could have put it together, and although Barbara would have laid easy money on that anyone not being Thomas Lynley, she went along with the pretence that he’d actually stood over a hob stirring the soup and had worn an apron over his bespoke suit while he tossed the salad. Even followed a recipe to make the quiche, she decided. What he’d actually done, of course, was hoof it down to Partridges on the King’s Road. If Daidre knew this, though, she didn’t let on.

“Where’s Charlie?” Barbara asked as she and Daidre stood uselessly by with wineglasses clasped in their hands as Lynley went to and from the kitchen.

Charlie Denton had decamped to Hampstead for the day, Lynley told them, attending a matinee production of The Iceman Cometh. But “Back any time now,” he assured them heartily. Daidre was not to feel ill at ease that he might leap upon her should Barbara leave them.

Which was what she did as soon as she could. Lynley was guiding them into the drawing room for postprandial drinks when Barbara decided that she’d done her duty by her superior officer and it was time to go home. Early hours yet, she declared airily, but there you had it. There was something about roller derby, you know. She was knackered.

She saw Daidre wandering to the table between the two front windows. On it stood a silver-framed picture of Lynley and his wife on their wedding day. Barbara glanced at him and wondered why he hadn’t removed it prior to bringing Daidre into his home. He’d thought of everything, but he hadn’t thought of this.

Daidre picked up the picture as anyone might have done. Barbara and Lynley exchanged a look. Before Daidre could turn and mention the picture—the obvious comment being one about how lovely a woman Helen Lynley had been—Barbara said expansively, “So I’ll say an early good-night, sir. And thanks for the meal. Got to dash before I become a pumpkin.” She added, “Or whatever,” when she realised that her Mini would turn into the pumpkin and not herself. She’d never been good with allusions to fairy tales.

Daidre said, “I should go as well, Thomas. Perhaps Barbara can drop me at my hotel?”

Another look between Lynley and Barbara, but he jumped in before she had to come up with the reason on her own. “Nonsense,” he said. “I’m happy to drive you. Whenever you’re ready.”

“Take him up on that,” Barbara told her. “It’d take me till morning to clear the takeaway cartons from the passenger seat of my heap.”

That said, she got herself out of the town house. The last thing she saw was Lynley pouring brandy into two crystal balloons. Whoops on that one, she thought. He should have used teacups or something. Supper within a bona fide dining room had been bad enough.

She quite liked the vet, but she wondered about Lynley’s pursuit of her. There was definitely a kind of tension between them. It just didn’t seem sexual to Barbara.

No matter, she thought. It wasn’t her affair. As long as Lynley didn’t ensnare himself with Isabelle Ardery again, anyone else was fine by her. For his time with Isabelle had constituted the malodorous dead elephant. She was that happy the rotting corpse of it had finally been removed from the room.

She was thinking of nothing in particular when she saw the panda car in front of the yellow Edwardian villa when she arrived home. It was double-parked in the street next to an ancient Saab, and in the evening light, most of the inhabitants of the building behind which Barbara’s tiny bungalow sat stood along the driveway in clusters, as if waiting to see someone brought outside in handcuffs. Barbara parked hastily and illegally. She got out and heard someone saying, “Don’t know . . . Didn’t hear a thing till the cops showed up,” and she made fast time to join the onlookers.

“What’s going on?” She addressed her question to Mrs. Silver, who lived in a flat on the second floor of the house. She was wearing, as always, one of her pinafore aprons and an accompanying turban, and she was chewing nervously on what looked like a tongue depressor bearing chocolate stains.

“She’s phoned the police,” Mrs. Silver said. “Or someone has. Maybe he did it. There was shouting at first. All of us heard it. Both of them. Another man as well. Not an English speaker, him. He was shouting in I-don’t-know-what language. I couldn’t tell. Well, it’s my hearing, isn’t it? But it doesn’t matter. They must have been heard all the way to Chalk Farm Road.”

This was shorthand for something. What it was Barbara didn’t know. She looked round to see who else was in the crowd, but what she noticed was who wasn’t there. And then her gaze went to the villa itself, where every light appeared inside of the ground-floor flat and the French windows were standing open.

Her throat got tight. She murmured, “Is Azhar . . . ? Has something . . . ?”

Mrs. Silver turned to her. She read something on Barbara’s face. She said, “She’s come back, Barbara. She’s not alone. Something’s happened and she’s brought the police to sort it out.”

CHALK FARM

LONDON

“She” could have only one meaning. Angelina Upman had returned. Barbara dug in her chaotic shoulder bag and brought out her warrant card. It was the one thing that would gain her access to Azhar’s flat, no matter who was in charge inside.

She worked her way through the rest of her neighbours. She entered the picket gate and crossed the lawn. The shouting became intelligible as she approached the French windows. It was easy to recognise Angelina’s voice.

“Make him tell you!” She was screaming at someone. “It’s Pakistan! He’s put her there. She’s with his family. You’re a monster! To do this to your own daughter.”

And then Azhar’s voice, in a panic, “How can you say . . . ?”

Then a foreigner, a heavy accent, “Why you no make to arrest this man?”

Barbara entered to a scene in which everyone seemed frozen into position: Two uniformed constables had placed themselves between Taymullah Azhar and Angelina Upman. Her face looked painted with the mascara that had raccooned her eyes, and her features were pinched. The man with her was handsome, looking like someone who could pose for the sculpture of an athlete. His hair was curly and thick, his shoulders broad, his chest like a trunk. His fists were clenched as if he would punch Azhar could he only reach him. One of the constables was preventing this, holding him back as Azhar and Angelina shouted at each other.

Azhar was the first to see Barbara. His face had been worn for months, but now it looked worse. He’d been running on empty since their final conversation with Dwayne Doughty, taking on more graduate students, attending every conference that would take him as far from Chalk Farm as he could get. He’d returned from another one—this time in Berlin—only the night before, stopping by her bungalow to ask if there had been anything . . . any message . . . any word . . . ? It was his regular question upon returning. Her answer had always been the same.

Angelina turned when she saw Azhar’s expression alter. So did the man with her. In doing so, he fully exposed his face. It had a port wine birthmark like the mark upon Cain, extending from his right ear onto his cheek. It was the only thing that marred his beauty.

The constable holding back this man spoke. “Madam, you’ll have to leave.”

Barbara flipped him her warrant card. “DS Havers,” she said. “I live in the back. What’s happened? C’n I help?”

“It’s Hadiyyah” was all that Azhar managed to say.

“He’s taken my child,” Angelina cried. “He’s kidnapped Hadiyyah. He has her somewhere. Do you understand? Oh, of course you do. You’ve bloody well helped him, haven’t you?”

Barbara tried to take this in. Helped who do what? was what she wondered.

“Tell me where she is!” Angelina shouted. “You goddamn bloody well tell me where she is!”

“Angelina, what happened?” Barbara asked. “Listen to me. I don’t know what’s going on.”

The story came from all directions. When the constables understood that Barbara was a friend of the family and not there from the Met, they attempted to escort her from the premises, but at that point both Angelina and Azhar wanted her to stay, each for their own reasons, although those reasons went unspoken other than Angelina crying, “She needs to bloody hear this, she does,” and Azhar saying, “Barbara knows my daughter very well.”

“Your daughter, your daughter,” Angelina snarled. “You’re no father to a child you would treat like this.”

She’d been taken from a market in Lucca, Italy, Barbara discovered. This had happened two days previously. She’d been there with Lorenzo—the man in the flat with Angelina and obviously, to Barbara, Angelina’s new lover—as they had done their weekly shop. She was to wait where she always waited, where a musician played, but she hadn’t been there when Lorenzo arrived and he hadn’t thought to search for her.

“Why not?” Barbara asked.

“What difference does it make?” Angelina demanded. “We know what happened. We know who took her. She would never walk off with a stranger, anywhere. And no one could possibly have carried her off in the middle of a market in front of hundreds of people. She would have screamed. She would have fought. You’ve taken her, Hari, and as God is my witness, I’m going to—”

“Cara,” Lorenzo said, “non devi.” He moved to her. “La troveremo,” he said. “Te lo prometto.” At this she began to weep. Azhar took a step towards her.

“Angelina,” he said, “you must listen to me. So much depends—”

“I don’t believe you!” she cried.

“Did you phone the police in Lucca?” Barbara asked her.

“Of course I phoned them! What do you think I am? I phoned them, they came, they searched, they’re still searching. And what are they finding? Nothing. A nine-year-old gone without a trace. And he has her. Because no one else could have taken her. Make him tell me where she is.” This last she directed to the constables. They looked to Barbara as if for some sort of help.

What Barbara wanted to say was, “He supposedly took her like you took her? Like you told Azhar where she was?” But instead she turned to Angelina’s companion. “Tell me exactly what happened,” she said. “Why didn’t you look for her when she wasn’t where you expected her to be?”

“Are you accusing him?” Angelina cried.

“If Hadiyyah’s missing—”

“If? What d’you think this is?”

“Angelina, please,” Barbara said. “If Hadiyyah’s missing, there’s no time to waste. I need to know what happened from start to finish.” And to Lorenzo, “Why didn’t you look for her at once?”

“Because of my sister,” he said. And when Angelina protested the fact that he was even replying when they all knew who’d taken her daughter, he said, “Per favore, cara,” in a gentle voice. “Vorrei dire qualcosa, va bene?” Then, in the limited English he possessed, he explained. “My sister live near this mercato. There we go always after, to her house. When Hadiyyah I miss from this place, I think she go there. To play.”

“Why would you think that?” Barbara asked.

“Mio nipote . . .” He looked to Angelina for help.

“His nephew is there,” she said. “Hadiyyah and the boy play together.”

Across the room Azhar closed his eyes. “All these months,” he said. And for the first time since his child had gone missing, Barbara saw the man’s lips struggle with the effort not to weep.

“I finish with making shop,” Lorenzo said. “I think I see Hadiyyah when I go to the house.”

“She knew how to get there?” Barbara asked.

“There she go many times to play, sì. Angelina come to the mercato then, and—”

“From where?”

“Piazzale—”

“I mean what was she doing? What were you doing, Angelina?”

“Are you now accusing me—”

“Of course not. Where were you? What did you see? How long were you gone?”

She was doing her yoga, as it turned out. She went regularly to a class in the town.

“She come to the mercato, we meet like always, we go to my sister. Hadiyyah is not there.”

They’d thought at first she’d become lost somewhere in the large market. Or, perhaps, she’d become distracted on her way to the musician and now was back there in the market waiting for them in her usual place near Porta San Jacopo. They returned, this time with Lorenzo’s sister and her husband, and the four of them had begun to search.

They searched the market. They extended the search outside the city wall, where the rest of Lucca—the modern part of the town—spread out in all directions. They walked the top of the huge wall itself with its baluardi, the great ramparts from which defences were long ago maintained. On these were now planted trees and lawns, and among them were places children could play. But Hadiyyah had been nowhere on the wall, nor had she been just beneath it at the playground near Porta San Donato, so close to her school as to be a natural destination for a little girl tired of waiting for her parents.

Barbara looked at Azhar when the word parents was spoken. He looked as if he’d taken a blow.

At that point they began to think the unthinkable and had phoned the police. But Angelina had also phoned Azhar. Gone for a few days from University College, she’d learned. Not answering his mobile, she’d then discovered. Not answering his landline here in Chalk Farm, either. And that was when she knew what had actually happened.

“Angelina,” Azhar said desperately, “I was at a conference.”

“Where?” she demanded.

“Germany. Berlin.”

“You can prove that, sir?” the constable asked.

“Of course I can prove it. It was four days long. There were many sessions. I delivered a paper and also attended—”

“You left Berlin long enough to take her, didn’t you?” Angelina said. “That would have been simple. That’s what you did. Where is she, Hari? What have you done with her? Where have you taken her?”

“You must listen,” Azhar said, and then to her companion whom he had otherwise ignored, “You must ask her to listen. I could not find you once you left me, Angelina. I tried. Yes, I tried. I hired someone many months ago. But there was no trail. Please listen to me.”

“Madam,” the constable said, “this is a matter to be handled at the source, not here. The Italian police need to instigate a wider search, beyond Lucca. They’ll also be able to make sure that his attendance at this conference—”

“Do you know how easily he could have made it for himself to leave that bloody conference?” Angelina said. “He’s taken her from Italy, don’t you see? She might be in Germany. Why in God’s name won’t you listen to me?”

“How could I have taken her?” Azhar countered. He shot Barbara an agonised look.

She said, “Angelina, her passport. Her papers. Think. You took everything with you. I was here. I checked. Azhar came for me the night you left him. He couldn’t have taken her from Italy without documents of some kind.”

“Then you’re part of this,” Angelina declared. “You’ve helped him, haven’t you? You’d know how to get a false passport for her. Identity cards. Everything you need.” And saying this, she began to weep. “I want my daughter,” she cried. “I want my little girl.”

“On my life, I do not have her, Angelina,” Azhar said brokenly. “We must go to Italy at once to find her.”

ILFORD

GREATER LONDON

Neither Angelina nor her lover—a bloke whose name turned out to be Lorenzo Mura—was about to consider a return to Italy until whatever stones they’d decided needed to be turned over were turned over. Barbara learned this within a quarter hour’s conversation with them. No matter what Azhar produced in an attempt to convince his former lover that he’d been exactly where he said he’d been, no amount of paperwork—from the conference in Berlin, from the hotel in which he’d stayed, from the flight he’d taken to get there, from the restaurants in which he’d eaten—was going to persuade Angelina that time was of the essence in a kidnapping case and that time needed to be spent in Italy and not in a shouting match in Chalk Farm.

She wanted to go to Ilford, she announced. When she said this, Azhar looked so appalled that Barbara thought he might sick up on the floor. She herself said, “Ilford? What in God’s name has Ilford got to do with anything?” and Azhar answered with four words that spoke volumes, “My wife and parents.”

Barbara said to Angelina, “You think he’s got Hadiyyah stowed with his parents? Come on, Angelina. Have some sense. We need to—”

“Shut up!” she screamed. The two constables tried to intervene, but before they could stop her, she had gone for Azhar. “You’d do anything!” she cried.

Barbara grabbed her and pulled her away, and when Angelina swung on her next, she said, “All right. Ilford. We’re going to Ilford.”

“Barbara, we cannot . . .” Azhar’s voice was a separate agony from everything else.

“We’re going to have to,” Barbara told him.

The local constables, at this point, were only too happy to leave the matter in the hands of the Metropolitan police. They faded out of the flat, and the one favour they did before departing the property altogether was to disperse the neighbours. Thus, when Barbara and her companions left Azhar’s flat and headed for his car, they were able to do so in a relatively inconspicuous manner.

They rode to Ilford in silence. Barbara could hear Lorenzo murmuring something to Angelina as they went along, but he did his murmuring in Italian, and he might as well have been speaking Martian.

Azhar kept his gaze on the road and a strangling grip upon the steering wheel. From his rapid and shallow breathing, Barbara had an idea of the degree to which he was wrestling with everything going on.

Azhar’s family turned out to live directly off Green Lane, just round the corner from an establishment called Ushan’s Fruit and Veg. It was a street of terrace houses like so many other similar streets in the city where the now-lit streetlamps shone on homes distinguished only by the nature of their patch of front garden. Unlike areas closer to the centre of town, however, this particular street wasn’t lined with cars. They would be an expense most families daren’t take on.

“Which one?” Angelina said, as Azhar stopped the car midway down the street.

Lorenzo opened the car door and helped her out. He kept his hand on the small of her back. Azhar indicated the house by going to the door. When he rang the bell, a teenage boy was the one to answer. It was a terrible moment. Barbara saw the anguish of it in the very immobility of Azhar’s face. She knew he was looking at his son. She also knew he hadn’t seen him in a decade.

That the boy hadn’t a clue who this group of people was was obvious enough. He said, “Yeah?” and used the heel of his hand to move his floppy hair from his forehead. Barbara saw Azhar make a gesture as if to touch the boy, but he stopped himself short of doing so. Then he said, “Sayyid. I am your father. Will you tell these people with me that no child has been brought to this house?”

The boy’s lips parted. He seemed to tear his gaze from Azhar, and he directed it to Barbara and then to Angelina. When he finally spoke, it was clear he’d been well schooled in the family history. “Which of them is the whore?” he asked.

Azhar said, “Sayyid. Please do as I say. Tell these people that no child of nine years old—a little girl—has been brought to this house.”

“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 confrontation 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.