Just One Evil Act

23 April

CHALK FARM

LONDON

Mitchell Corsico had wasted no time. He had a reputation as a reporter who didn’t let grass grow, and this alacrity, combined with a nose for scandal, did not desert him just because Barbara had thwarted him at the secondary comprehensive that Taymullah Azhar’s son Sayyid attended. When Barbara caught sight of the front page of The Source the next day, she saw that out of what Corsico had witnessed in front of Sayyid’s school he had managed to create a stop-the-presses moment. Missing Girl Has Love Rat Dad was the headline that announced the sordid tale. Beneath this, several pictures of the deserted family offered evidence to accompany the story.

Barbara didn’t see red when her gaze fell upon this latest edition of The Source. She saw black: in the form of her vision going absolutely dark for a moment so that, in front of her local newsagent, she had a terrible instant of thinking she might well faint directly onto the chewing gum–studded pavement of Chalk Farm Road. How Corsico had managed to get his hands on the material displayed on the front page of the tabloid hovered between mystery and miracle to her. What she reckoned, though, was that the reporter had followed Azhar’s family directly to their home and employed one of several strong-arm techniques to get someone to talk.

These were easy enough for Barbara to envision: Corsico having a few words with neighbours and gathering information that way; Corsico shoving his card through the post slot in the door of Nafeeza’s home, telling her through this slender opening that it was a case of talk-to-me-or-let-your-neighbours-do-the-talking-for-you. He could even have found a friend of Sayyid and in this way got a message to the boy: Meet me at the pub the park the local cinema the corner grocery the railway station the bus stop. We can talk there. Here’s your chance to tell the full story. At the end of the day, what did it matter how he had put his sticky hands on the information? For the nasty tale was in the tabloid now, and the nasty tale named names.

Barbara rang Corsico. “What the bloody hell are you up to?” she demanded without preamble.

He didn’t enquire who was ringing his mobile. Obviously, he knew because his reply was “I thought this is what you wanted, Sergeant.”

“Do not use my rank on the phone,” she hissed. “Where the hell are you?”

“In bed, actually. Having a lie-in. And what’s the problem? Don’t want anyone to know that you and I are each other’s new best friend?”

Barbara let that one go. “The story isn’t about Azhar. The story is about the Italian police and how they’re handling—or not handling or refusing to handle or whatever—Hadiyyah’s disappearance. It was about the Met not sending an officer to assist. Then it was supposed to be about the Met sending a certain, particular, you-want-a-story-on-him officer over to assist. And then it was about you getting your fat arse over to Italy to keep the pressure on. I gave you all the details you needed and all the bloody hell you had to do was to use them in a story and to follow them—and not something else, mind you—to the next story. You knew this, Mitchell.”

He yawned loudly. Barbara wanted to dive into her mobile and beam herself into the louse’s bedroom, all the better to smack him silly. He said, “What I knew, as you put, is that you wanted a story. What I know is that you’ve got your story. Several, in fact, with more on the way. I’ve got some interesting pictures of yesterday’s scuffle with . . . I take it that was Granddad?”

“You need to back off,” she told him, although the idea of pictures made her momentarily dizzy. “You need to sodding back off, Mitchell. These people in Ilford are not the story. A missing English girl in Italy is. There’s plenty of information on that and I’ll get it to you as it comes in and in the bloody meantime—”

“Uh, Sergeant . . . ?” Corsico cut in. “You don’t tell me what the story is. You don’t tell me where the story is. I follow information wherever it leads and just now the information is leading to a house in Ilford and a very unhappy teenage boy.”

So he had got to Sayyid, Barbara thought bitterly. Who bloody knew where he’d go next?

“You’re using that kid to—”

“He needed to vent. I let him vent. I needed a story. He gave me a story. This is a reciprocal relationship Sayyid and I have. Mutually beneficial. Just like yours and mine.”

“You and I have no relationship.”

“But we do. And it’s growing every day.”

Barbara felt someone tapping skeletal fingers on her spine. “Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

“For now it means I’m following a story. You might not love the direction it’s heading in. You might want to direct its course a bit. You might need to give me more information in order to do that and when you give me that information—”

“If, not when.”

“When,” he repeated, “you give me that information, I’ll be happy to take a look at it or have a listen to it and I’ll decide if it constitutes a train I can climb on. That’s how it works.”

“How it works—” she began, but he cut in.

“You don’t get to decide that, Barb. At first you did, but now you don’t. Like I said, our relationship is growing. Changing. Developing. This could be a marriage made in heaven. If we both play our cards right,” he added.

The skeletal fingers felt as if they would close on her neck and choke off her breath. She said, “Watch yourself, Mitchell. Because I swear to God, if you’re threatening me, you’re going to be bloody sorry about it.”

“Threatening you?” Corsico laughed with a complete lack of humour. “That would never happen, Barb.” Then he rang off, leaving Barbara standing in Chalk Farm Road with a copy of The Source’s latest edition in one hand, her mobile phone in the other, cars whizzing by as drivers made their way to work, and pedestrians pushing past her as they made their way to the Underground station.

She knew she ought to join the latter group. She had barely enough time to get to work in order to avoid the baleful eye and meticulous note-taking of DI John Stewart. But she needed an immediate injection of caffeine and pastry into her body in order to be able to cope—let alone think—so she decided that DI Stewart and the assignment he would doubtless give her that day—more transcription please, Sergeant, as we’re having such a time keeping up with the action reports coming in every hour—would have to wait. She ducked into a recently opened establishment called Cuppa Joe Etc. She purchased a latte and an et cetera, which in this case was a chocolate croissant. God knew she was owed both, after the conversation with Corsico.

When her mobile chimed the opening lines of “Peggy Sue” two bites into the chocolate croissant and three gulps of latte later, Barbara hoped it was Corsico having a change of mind rather than a change of heart since the bloke apparently didn’t own a heart. But it turned out to be Lynley. Barbara’s insides did flip-flops at the possibilities attendant to a phone call from him.

She answered with, “Good news?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Oh God. No.”

“No, no,” Lynley said hastily. “Neither good nor bad news. Just some intriguing information that wants checking out.”

He told her of his meeting with Azhar and his subsequent meeting with Angelina Upman. He told her of the existence of yet another married lover of Angelina’s—in addition to Azhar, this one also in London—being left for Lorenzo Mura.

“D’you mean she was having it off with this bloke while she and Azhar . . . I mean after she had Hadiyyah by Azhar and . . . I mean once Azhar had left his wife . . . I mean . . . Hell, I don’t bloody know what I mean.”

Yes, Lynley said to it all. This man was a fellow dancer and choreographer in London with whom Angelina had been involved at the time she met Lorenzo Mura. And at that time, she also was the lover of Azhar and the mother of his child. The bloke was called Esteban Castro, and according to Angelina Upman, she merely disappeared from his life, giving him no word why. One day she was there in his bed, the next day she was gone, having left him—and Azhar—for Mura. His wife was a friend of hers as well. So both of these people would need to be checked out. For perhaps during the brief four months of Angelina’s putative return to Azhar, she’d taken up with Castro again as well, only to leave him another time.

“But Barbara,” Lynley told her, “this must be done on your own time, not on the Met’s time.”

“But the guv’ll let me get onto this if you ask her, won’t she?” Barbara said. After all, Lynley and Isabelle Ardery hadn’t parted enemies from their own affair. They were both professionals, after all. DI Lynley had been sent to Italy on a case. If he rang and asked her in his most pear-shaped of I’ve-gone-to-Eton tones—

“I did ring her,” he said. “I asked her if she might lend me you to look into this end of things in London. She won’t allow it, Barbara.”

“Because you asked for me,” Barbara said bitterly. “’F you’d asked for Winston, she’d be all over herself to cooperate. We both know that.”

“We didn’t go in that direction,” he said. “I could have asked for Winston but I assumed you’d prefer to do this, no matter when it had to be done.”

There was truth in that. Barbara knew she ought to be grateful to Lynley for having recognised how important it was to her to be kept in the loop of what was going on. So she said, “I s’pose. Thanks, sir.”

He said wryly, “Don’t overwhelm me with your gratitude, Sergeant. I’m not certain I could bear it.”

She had to smile. “I’m tap-dancing on the tabletop here. If you could only see.”

“Where are you?”

She told him.

“You’re going to be late into work,” he said. “Barbara, at some point you have to stop giving Isabelle ammunition.”

“That’s what Winston’s been saying, more or less.”

“And he’s correct. Having a professional death wish isn’t the best of ideas.”

“Right,” she said. “Whatever. Point taken. Anything else?” She was about to ask him how things were going in the direction of Daidre Trahair, but she knew there was little point in this since Lynley wouldn’t tell her. There were lines between them that nothing on earth could make the bloke cross.

“There is,” he said. “Bathsheba Ward.” He went on to tell her about the emails that Bathsheba had apparently written at the request of her twin sister, emails purportedly from Taymullah Azhar from University College to his daughter in Italy.

“That bloody cow lied to me!” Barbara cried in outrage. “She knew all along where Angelina was!”

“It appears that way,” Lynley told her. “So there’s a chance she might know something more about what’s going on now.”

Barbara considered this but she couldn’t come up with a way that Bathsheba Ward might be involved in Hadiyyah’s disappearance, much less a reason for it. Unless Angelina herself was involved.

She said, “How’s Angelina coping, then?”

“Distraught, as you might imagine. Not well physically either, it seems.”

“What about Azhar?”

“Equally so, although far more self-contained.”

“That sounds like him. I wonder how he’s holding it together. He’s been going through hell since last November.”

Lynley told her what the Pakistani man was doing with the handbills of his daughter throughout the town and into the villages that surrounded it. “I think it’s giving him a purpose, more than anything else,” Lynley concluded. “To have to sit and wait while your child is missing . . . That’s intolerable for any parent.”

“Yes. Well. Intolerable describes how it’s been for Azhar.”

“As to that . . .” Lynley hesitated on his end of the conversation.

“What?” Barbara asked, feeling trepidation.

“I know you’re close to him but I do have to ask this. Do we know where he was when Hadiyyah disappeared?”

“At a conference in Berlin.”

“Are we certain of that?”

“Bloody hell, sir, you can’t think—”

“Barbara. Just as everything having to do with Angelina wants looking into, so does everything having to do with Azhar. And with everyone else remotely connected to what’s going on here, so obviously that means Bathsheba Ward as well. Because something is going on here, Barbara. A child doesn’t disappear from the middle of a crowded marketplace with no one knowing a thing about it, with no one seeing anything unusual, with no one—”

“All right, all right,” Barbara said, and she told him about Dwayne Doughty in Bow and to what end she was employing him. They were in the process of eliminating Azhar as a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance. She’d put him onto Esteban Castro next, the man’s wife, and Bathsheba Ward as well, but only if she couldn’t get to these others on her own because she vastly preferred to have her own fingers on the pulse of an enquiry and not be relying on someone else’s.

“Sometimes we have to rely on others” was Lynley’s concluding remark.

Barbara wanted to scoff, but she didn’t. The fact was that of all the officers whom she knew at the Met, relying on others was a characteristic that applied to Lynley least of all.

VICTORIA

LONDON

Barbara passed the day being at the completely cooperative, borderline unctuous, and therefore highly suspect beck and call of DI John Stewart and making sure that Superintendent Ardery saw her obediently, if maddeningly, entering the reports of other officers into the Met’s computer system as if she were a civilian typist and not what she was: a trained officer of the police. She noted that, once or twice, Isabelle Ardery paused in passing from one area to another: observing her, observing Stewart, narrowing her eyes, and frowning as if she disapproved of the cut of Barbara’s hair, which, of course, she did.

Barbara took a few moments here and there to do a little exploring via the World Wide Web. She discovered the whereabouts of Esteban Castro, currently dancing in a West End revival of Fiddler on the Roof—was there dancing in Fiddler on the Roof? she wondered—as well as teaching dance classes at his own studio in the company of his wife. He was dark-skinned, brooding, smouldering, cropped of hair, heavy-lidded of eye. His publicity pictures showed him in various dancing guises, various poses, and various costumes. He seemed to have the posture and the musculature that went with ballet and the loose body attitude that went with jazz and modern dance. Looking at his pictures, Barbara could see his appeal to a woman looking for excitement . . . or whatever Angelina Upman had been looking for because who the hell knew? She was turning out to be quite the cipher.

There were references to Esteban’s wife, so Barbara followed the trail to her. Another dancer, she saw. Royal Ballet. Not within shouting distance of prima ballerina but someone had to dance in the chorus, no? One couldn’t exactly have the numero uno swan without the rest of the flock milling round in the back wondering what all the hoo-ha with the hunter was about. She was called Dahlia Rourke—what the hell kind of name was Dahlia? Barbara wondered—and she was pretty in the rather severe and bony way that went with ballet: all cheekbones, scarily visible collar bones, thin wrists, and very little in the hips, all the better to be hoisted around by some bloke in need of a more serious codpiece. She’d be on the scrawny side when it came to playing at the two-backed beast, so perhaps this had driven poor smouldering Esteban into the arms of Angelina. Except, Barbara thought, Angelina herself would probably be no cushion of comfort when it came to the plunge and groan of the clutch and grope. Perhaps Esteban merely liked them skeletal.

She jotted a few notes and printed a few pictures. She also did some additional looking into Bathsheba Ward. She had a feeling that garnering the slippery cow’s cooperation in anything having to do with Hadiyyah, Angelina, and Azhar was going to be a business requiring careful planning and more than a little arm twisting. But in the case of Bathsheba, the arm twisting was going to have to be subtle or it was going to have to threaten her business.

Barbara was considering all of the information she’d gathered when her mobile made its timeless declaration of love to Peggy Sue. It was Dwayne Doughty, reporting back on his investigation into the whereabouts of Taymullah Azhar when Hadiyyah had been snatched from the mercato in Lucca.

“Got you on speaker, if you don’t mind,” Doughty told her. “Em’s here as well.” He went on to tell her that every detail was on the up-and-up. Azhar had indeed been in Berlin. He had indeed attended the conference. He sat in on talks and panel discussions, and he presented two papers as well. The only way he could have also got to Italy and snatched his daughter would have been to have the ability to be in two places at once or to have an identical twin that no one knew about. This last bit was of the ha-ha-ha-we-know-how-unlikely-that-scenario-is variety. But it did bring into the picture something that Barbara wanted to make sure Dwayne Doughty knew.

“Talking of identical twins,” she said. She gave him the new information about Bathsheba Ward: that she’d apparently known all along where her sister was, that she’d written emails to Hadiyyah in the guise of her father.

“That explains a few minor details we’ve dug up at our end,” Doughty said. “It seems our Bathsheba trotted off to bell’Italia herself last November round the same time the fair Angelina did her runner. Fascinating point, if you ask me.”

“Got it in a bucket,” Barbara told him. For if, from the first, Bathsheba had been part of Angelina’s planned escape from London, how terribly difficult would it have been for Angelina to use her sister’s passport for her travel, thereby covering the tracks of her own movements as she made her escape?

“Our Bathsheba’s cage needs a bit of rattling,” Doughty said. “The question is, dear Sergeant, which of us is best able to do it?”

BOW

LONDON

When Dwayne Doughty rang off, he waited for Em Cass’s inevitable commentary, which was not long in coming. They were in her office—the better to record the conversation with Sergeant Havers—and Em removed her earphones after checking the quality of the recording. She set them on the table with its bank of monitors. Today she was wearing a fawn-coloured man’s three-piece suit cut perfectly to fit her. She complemented it with two-toned shoes—tan and navy—which would have looked all wrong had she not chosen a necktie to balance the ensemble. She dressed like a man better than most men did, Doughty had to admit. No bloke on earth could beat Em Cass in a dinner jacket, that was certain.

She said to him, “We shouldn’t’ve got involved in this mess, Dwayne. You know it, I know it, and every day we know it better. Soon’s I saw her with the professor, soon’s I reckoned she was a cop, soon’s I traced her to the Met . . .”

“Hush,” Dwayne told her. “Things are in motion and other things are being handled.”

As if in demonstration of this latter fact, a knock sounded on the door and it opened. Bryan Smythe slipped into Em Cass’s office. Doughty saw Em roll her desk chair away from the monitors as if this would distance her from the computer wizard. Before he could welcome the sex-starved bloke, Em said, “You said you’d warn me, Dwayne.”

“The situation’s slightly altered,” Doughty said. “I think you’ve been making that very point.” And to Bryan with a glance at his watch, “You’re early. And we’re meant to be meeting in my office, not here.”

Bryan blushed unattractively. He was not, alas, a being whose flesh took on rosy hues with any degree of complement to the rest of him. “Knocked over there,” he said in apparent reference to Doughty’s own office. “Heard you over here so . . .”

“You should’ve waited over there,” Em told him.

Bryan looked at her. “I wouldn’t’ve seen you, then,” he said frankly.

Doughty groaned. The man knew nothing about playing women, about the chat, about anything to do with males and females and how they actually managed to end up in a horizontal position—or, in Em’s case, in any position—exchanging bodily fluids with each other. Doughty did wish that Em Cass would give the poor sod one decent go, though. A mercy bonk wouldn’t kill her, and it might allow Bryan to see that a chasm always existed between one’s dreams and the reality of those dreams coming true.

“And,” Bryan went on, “wasn’t the point not to use the phones from now on?”

“We all need disposable mobiles, then,” Emily said shortly. “Use once, toss it, buy another. That way this sort of encounter”—she made the words equate to this visitation of the plague—“wouldn’t need to happen.”

“Let’s not get hasty,” Doughty said. “We’re not rolling in dosh here, Emily. We can’t be dashing out to buy disposable mobiles right and left.”

“Yes, we can. Bill it to that slag from the Met.” Em swung round in her chair, her back to them. She pretended to tie her shoe.

Doughty hazarded an evaluative look at Bryan. The young man wasn’t a permanent employee and they needed his amazing expertise. It was one thing for Emily Cass not to want to bed him. He couldn’t blame her for that. But to insult and estrange him to a degree that he ended up leaving them high and dry . . . ? That couldn’t be allowed.

He said meaningfully to his assistant, “Bryan’s completely right, Emily. So let’s all get through this intriguing moment of each other’s company without permanent damage, yes?” He didn’t wait to have her cooperation. He said to Bryan, “Where are we?”

“Phone records all have been dealt with,” Bryan said. “Going out, coming in. But it’s been expensive, more than I thought. Three blokes were involved in it by the time I was finished, and their rates’re going up.”

“We’ll have to absorb the cost. There’s no way around that that I can see. What else?”

“Still going after the rest. It takes a delicate hand and a lot of help from insiders. They’re available, but the money involved . . . ?”

“I thought it would be simple.”

“Might’ve been. But you should’ve talked to me first. Before, not after. Laying trails? Far easier than erasing them.”

“You’re supposed to be an expert, Bryan. I pay you what I pay you to be the best.” Doughty heard Emily’s derisive guffaw. He frowned at her. She didn’t need to make the situation worse.

“I am the best but that means I have the kind of contacts you need in all the places you need them. It doesn’t mean I’m Superman.”

“Well, you need to become Superman. And you need to do it now.”

Emily, obviously, could take no more, for she burst out with “This is just great. It’s all made in heaven. I told you this was something we needed to stay away from. Now I’m telling you again. Why won’t you believe me?”

“We’re in the process of making ourselves as clean as newborns,” Doughty said. “That’s what this meeting is all about.”

“Have you ever seen a newborn?” Emily demanded.

“Point taken,” Doughty said. “Bad analogy. Given time, I’ll think of another.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “You don’t have time, Dwayne. And it’s your thinking that got us into this position.”

SOHO

LONDON

Esteban Castro’s dance studio was situated next to a car park at the midway point between Leicester Square and what went for Chinatown. Barbara Havers found it without much difficulty directly after work. Getting to it was more of a challenge, however. It was on the top floor of a six-storey building sans lift, and as she huffed and puffed her way up the stairs to the sound of postmodern music growing ever louder, Barbara gave serious thought to eliminating smoking from her life. Fortunately, as she liked to think of it, she’d recovered her sanity, if not her breath, by the time she got to the translucent half-glass door of Castro-Rourke Dance. So she dismissed the idea of committing herself to tobacco abstinence as the product of a moment’s mere idle thought.

She entered the dance establishment and found herself in a small lobby replete with posters. These featured both Dahlia Rourke in tutu mode, adopting various exotic positions suggestive of contortion, and Esteban Castro in every mode imaginable: from tight-clad and leaping through the air, to arse-pointed-outward and arm flung upward in a flamenco stance. Other than the decorative posters, the lobby had nothing else in it but a counter on which were spread brochures for various dancing classes. These appeared to run the gamut from ballroom to ballet.

There was no one in the lobby. From the noise level, though, it seemed that dancing classes were happening on both sides of it, where closed doors led to other rooms. The noise comprised the postmodern music she’d heard on the stairway, which stopped and started and stopped in one of the rooms—broken by a shout of “No, no, no! Does that actually feel to you like a toad experiencing delight and surprise?”—and loud commands of royale! royale!, which came from the other. The nos were spoken by a man, presumably Esteban Castro, so Barbara went for that door and swung it open. No one to announce her? Not a problem, she thought.

The room she entered was a good-size space with mirrored walls, ballet barres, a row of folding chairs along one side, and a pile of garments—costumes perhaps?—in one corner. In the middle on the smooth hardwood floor stood the man himself, and facing him at the far end of the room were six dancers—male and female—in various leotards, legwarmers, and ballet shoes. They looked abashed, impatient, irritated, weary. When Castro told them to “resume the starting position and feel it this time,” no one looked exactly thrilled by the idea. “He likes the motorcar,” Castro snapped at them, “and you’ve got a plan, all right? Now for God’s sake, you be a toad and you be five foxes so we can get out of here before midnight.”

Two of the dancers had clocked Barbara at the doorway, and one of them said, “Steve,” to Castro and jerked his head in her direction.

Castro swung round, took in Barbara, and said, “Class doesn’t start till seven.”

“I’m not—” she began.

“And I hope you’ve brought other shoes,” he added. “Doing the foxtrot in those? Not going to happen.” He was, of course, referring to her high-top trainers. He hadn’t yet got a clear glimpse of the rest of her clothing, or he would no doubt have pointed out that drawstring trousers and a tee-shirt reading Celebrating 600 Years of the Bubonic Plague weren’t exactly foxtrot material either.

Barbara said to him, “I’m not here for a class. You’re Mr. Castro? I need a word.”

He said, “Obviously, I’m in the middle of something.”

“Got that in a bucket. So am I.” She heaved her shoulder bag around and dug inside it for her warrant card. She crossed the room to him and let him have as much of a look as he wanted.

After a moment he said, “What’s this about?”

“Angelina Upman.”

His gaze rose from her warrant card to her face. “What about her? I haven’t seen her in ages. Has something happened to her?”

“Funny you’d go there first,” she noted.

“Where else am I supposed to go when the cops show up?” He didn’t, apparently, require an answer to this. Instead, he turned to his dancers and said, “Ten minutes, then we’ll go through this one more time.”

He spoke with no appreciable accent. He sounded like someone born in Henley-on-Thames. When she asked him about this, letting him know she’d done a little looking into a background that had told her he’d been born in Mexico City, he said he’d moved to London when he was twelve, his father a diplomat and his mother a writer of children’s books. It had been important to him to assimilate into the English culture, he said. Accent was part of it as he did not wish to be marked eternally as a foreigner in this place.

He was very good-looking. Barbara could see what the attraction had been for Angelina Upman. Indeed, she could see what the attraction would be for any woman. He smouldered in the way that Latin men often smouldered, helped along by a three-day growth of beard that made him look sexy instead of what it made most other men look, which was largely unkempt. His hair was dark and thick and so healthy-looking Barbara had to keep herself from touching it. She reckoned other women had the same reaction, and she also reckoned Esteban Castro knew it.

When they were alone in the room, Castro indicated the folding chairs and walked over to them. He moved as one would expect of a dancer: fluidly and with perfect posture. Like the dancers he’d dismissed, he wore a leotard that went miles to define every muscle on his legs and his arse. Unlike them, he also wore a tight white muscle-man tee-shirt that did much the same for his chest. His arms were bare. So were his feet.

He sat with his arms on his legs and his hands dangling between them. This gave Barbara a view of his package that she would have preferred not to have, so she moved her own chair to a position that kept his jewels from view. He said without preamble and without waiting to hear the reason for her call upon him, “My wife doesn’t know Angelina and I were involved. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“I wouldn’t place money on that,” Barbara told him. “Women aren’t stupid, as a rule.”

“She’s not quite a woman” was his reply. “That was part of the problem. Have you spoken to her?”

“Not yet.”

“There’s no need. I’ll tell you what you want to know. I’ll answer your questions. But leave her out of this.”

“‘This’?” Barbara asked.

“Whatever this is. You know what I mean.” He waited for Barbara to say something. When she gave him no assurance of any kind, he cursed and said, “Come with me.”

He led the way out of the dance studio and across the lobby. He opened the other door and jerked his head in a way that told her she was to look inside. There she saw Dahlia Rourke with a group of some dozen little girls at the barre. She was attempting to position them gracefully, one arm curved above their heads. It looked hopeless to Barbara. Nice to know, she thought, that there appeared to be no real, natural grace in life. As for Dahlia, she was skeletally thin, more X-ray than human. Perhaps feeling she was being watched, she turned towards the door.

“Daughter’s a potential for ballet,” Castro said to her, in reference to Barbara. “She wanted a look.”

Dahlia nodded. Her gaze took in Barbara but it seemed to be without speculation. She gave a hesitant smile directed at them both and then went back to her work with the nation’s future ballerinas. Castro led the way back to his own studio. He closed the door and said, “Her body functions only as a ballerina’s. Nor is she interested in its functioning as anything other than a ballerina’s.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she ceased being a woman some time ago. That’s largely why Angelina and I became involved.”

“Are there other reasons, then?”

“Have you met her?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know. She’s lovely. She’s passionate. She’s alive. That’s very appealing. Now what the hell is going on and why are you here?”

“Have you been out of the country in the last month?”

“Of course not. I’m in the middle of choreographing Wind in the Willows. How could I possibly leave? And let me repeat: What the hell is going on?”

“No quick trip for a weekend in the sun somewhere?”

“Like where? Spain? Portugal?”

“Italy.”

“Of course not.”

“What about the wife?”

“Dahlia’s doing Giselle with the Royal Ballet. And she’s got her classes here. She has no time for anything other than soaking her feet at home when she isn’t working. So the answer is no and no again and I’m not saying another word until you tell me what the hell is going on, understand?” To emphasise this point, he got to his feet. He strode into the centre of the room and stood there with his arms crossed on his chest and his legs spread. Very manly pose, Barbara thought. She wondered if it was deliberate, full of the knowledge, perhaps, of how to use what he had.

She said, “Angelina Upman’s daughter was snatched from a marketplace in Lucca, Italy.”

Castro stared at her. His mind appeared to be coming to terms with this and with what it meant that the police had come calling upon him. He said, “And what? D’you think I did it? I don’t know her daughter. I never met her daughter. Why the hell would I want to snatch her?”

“Everything has to be checked out, which means everyone whose life touches Angelina’s has to be checked out. I know she dropped you without a word, just disappeared from your life. You might have taken a bit of offence at that. You might have wanted to do something to smack her round a bit—figuratively speaking. You might have wanted to play mind games with her the way she played mind games with you.”

He laughed shortly. “That’s going nowhere, Sergeant . . . ?” He paused.

“Havers,” she said. “Detective Sergeant, actually.”

“Havers,” he said. “Detective Sergeant, actually. She didn’t play mind games. She was here, she was gone, that was it.”

“And you didn’t wonder where she’d gone off to?”

“I didn’t have the right to wonder. I knew that and she knew I knew it. Our rules were simple: I wasn’t going to leave Dahlia for her. She wasn’t going to leave Azhar for me. She’d disappeared once before for a year, but then she’d returned and she and I more or less resumed meeting. I’ve assumed this is the same sort of thing.”

“You mean you’ve reckoned she’ll be back.”

“That’s how it was in the past.”

“So you knew all along about Azhar? During the entire time you were involved with her?” It was germane to nothing, but Barbara had to know, although she would have preferred it if it made no difference to her.

“I knew. We didn’t lie to each other.”

“And Lorenzo Mura, her other lover? What about him? Did you know about him?”

To this, Castro said nothing. He walked back to the chair on which he’d been sitting. He dropped into it and gave a sharp bark of a laugh. He shook his head. Barbara got the point. He said, “So she was . . . what? Fucking all three of us?”

“It’s looking that way.”

“I didn’t know. But I’m not surprised.”

“Why not?”

He rubbed his hands through his hair. He squeezed a handful of it as if this would drive more blood to his brain. He said, “It’s this. Some women are driven by excitement. Angelina’s one of them. To settle into life with one man? Where’s the excitement in that?”

“She appears to be with one bloke now, though: Lorenzo Mura in Italy.”

“Appears is the operative word, Sergeant. She appeared to Azhar to be with Azhar. Now she appears to him to be with this Italian.”

Barbara thought about this in light of her knowledge of Angelina. The woman she knew was a consummate actress. She herself had been completely taken in by Angelina’s air of friendliness and her spurious interest in Barbara’s own life. Was it out of the question, then, that she’d managed to bamboozle everyone else around her as well? While Barbara couldn’t quite get her mind round the idea of having it off with three blokes at once, she had to admit that anything was possible. She herself would worry about mistakenly shrieking the wrong name in the height of passion. On the other hand, heights of passion weren’t regular occurrences in her life.

She said to Castro, “How long did your affair with Angelina last?”

“Is that important?”

“Matter of curiosity, I suppose.”

He glanced at her and then away. “I don’t know. A few years? Two or three? It was always off and on.”

“How often did you meet when it was ‘on’?”

“Generally twice a week. Sometimes three.”

“Where?”

Another glance. He gave her a speculative head to toe. “What does it matter?”

“Another point of curiosity. Love to know how the other half lives, if you wouldn’t mind telling me.”

He looked away, his gaze settling across the room where he was reflected in the mirror. “Anywhere,” he said. “In the back of cars, in a taxi, here in the studio, backstage in a West End theatre, at my place, at her place, at a particular lap dancing club.”

“That must have been interesting,” Barbara commented.

“She liked risk. Once we did it in the pedestrian tunnel to Greenwich. She was creative, and I liked that about her. Passion drives her. And what drives passion is excitement and secrecy. That’s who she is. That’s how she is.”

“Seems to me that she’s the sort of woman a bloke would want to hang on to, then,” Barbara noted. “You know what I mean, I expect. Any time, any place, dressed, undressed, standing, sitting, kneeling, whatever. Don’t blokes get off on that kind of thing?”

“Some do.”

“And are you ‘some’?”

“I’m Latin, Sergeant. What do you think?”

“I think it would be tough to replace her,” Barbara pointed out, “once she was gone. Could have been a real heartbreaker for you.”

“No one replaces Angelina,” he said. “And like I told you, I expect her to be back.”

“Even now?”

“With her in Italy?”

“With her living with Lorenzo Mura.”

“I don’t know.” He looked at his watch and got to his feet, ready to resume rehearsal. “I suppose I should be glad it lasted as long as it did,” he added. “Come to think of it, so should Mura.”