Just One Evil Act

1 May

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Inside the kitchen of Torre Lo Bianco, Salvatore fondly watched the interaction of his two children with their nonna. The previous night had been one of those designated for the children to spend with their father and, as it happened because of his current abode, with their nonna. Salvatore’s mother was taking full advantage of the presence of her nipoti.

She’d given them a breakfast heavily reliant upon dolci, which naturally would have met with Birgit’s outraged protests. She’d made a vague bow to nutrition with cereale e latte—thanks be to God she’d at least chosen bran flakes, Salvatore thought—but after that she’d brought out the cakes and the biscotti. The children had devoured far more than was good for them and were showing the effects of so much sugar. For her part their nonna was plying them with questions.

Were they attending Mass every Sunday? she wanted to know. Had they gone to services on Holy Thursday? Were they on their knees for three hours on Good Friday? When was the last time they’d received the Blessed Sacrament?

To every question, Bianca answered with lowered eyes. To every question, Marco answered with an expression so solemn that Salvatore wondered where he had learned to master it. On the way to school he informed them that lying to their nonna should be Topic Number One when next they went to confession.

Before he left them at Scuola Dante Alighieri, he told Bianca that her little friend Hadiyyah Upman had been found. He hastened to assure her that the child was well, but he also spent some moments making absolutely certain that Bianca understood—“anche tu, Marco,” he added—that she was never, ever upon her immortal soul to believe anyone who might tell her to accompany him for any reason. If that person was not her nonna, her mamma, or her papà, then she should scream for help and not stop screaming until help got to her. Chiaro?

Hadiyyah Upman’s love for her father had been her downfall. She missed him terribly, and no false emails from her aunt purporting to be from her father had assuaged her feelings. All someone had to do to gain her trust was to promise the little girl that she’d be taken to the man. Praise God that she’d only ended up in the care of mad Domenica Medici. There were far worse fates that could have befallen her.

Once Hadiyyah and her parents had been reunited at the hospital, Salvatore and the London detective had gone their separate ways. Lynley’s job as liaison was complete, and he did not wish to intrude further into the Italian investigation. “I’ll pass along to you the information that my colleague in London gathers,” he said. He himself would be returning to London. “Buona fortuna, amico mio,” he’d concluded. “Tutto è finito bene.”

Salvatore tried to be philosophical about this. Things had indeed finished well for DI Lynley. They had finished far from well for himself.

He brought il Pubblico Ministero into the picture as soon as he and Lynley had parted. Fanucci, he reasoned, would want to know that the child had been found alive and well. He also assumed that Fanucci would want to know what Hadiyyah herself had reported: about the card ostensibly in her father’s handwriting, about Roberto Squali’s use of her nickname, and most of all about what these two facts suggested about culpability for her disappearance. She had, after all, not said one word about Carlo Casparia.

What he hadn’t reckoned on was Fanucci’s reaction to what he perceived as Chief Inspector Lo Bianco’s defiance. He’d been removed from the case, hadn’t he? He’d been told the investigation was being handed over to another officer, nevvero? So what had he been doing voyaging off into the Apuan Alps when he should have been sitting in his office, awaiting the arrival of Nicodemo Triglia, who was taking the case off his hands?

Salvatore said, “Piero, with the safety of a child in jeopardy, surely you did not expect me to sit upon information I had as to her possible whereabouts? This was something that had to be dealt with without delay.”

Fanucci allowed that Topo had returned the child to her parents unharmed, but that was as far as he would go in the area of congratulations. He said, “Be that as it may, everything now goes into the hands of Nicodemo, and your job is to give to him whatever it is that you have gathered.”

“Allow me to ask you to reconsider,” Salvatore said. “Piero, we parted badly in our last conversation. For my part, I am filled with apology. I would only wish—”

“Do not ask, Topo.”

“—to be allowed to finish with the final details. There are curious matters concerning a greeting card, also matters concerning the use of a special name for the child . . . The lover of the girl’s mother insists that this man—the girl’s father—must be considered before he leaves the country. Let me tell you, Piero, it is not so much that I believe the lover but that I believe something more is going on here.”

But this Fanucci did not want to hear. He said, “Basta, Topo. You must understand. I cannot allow defiance in an investigation. Now, it must please you to wait for Nicodemo’s arrival.”

Salvatore knew Nicodemo Triglia, a man who had never missed his afternoon pisolino in his entire career. He carried a gut upon him the size of an Umbrian wild boar, and he’d never encountered a bar that he passed by without stopping in for a birra and the thirty minutes that were required for him to savour it.

Salvatore was brooding upon this at the questura while he waited for the old stained Moka in the little kitchen to finish its coffee business for him on the two-burner stove. When it had done so, he poured himself a cup of the viscous liquid, dropped in a sugar cube, and watched it melt. He carried it to the room’s small window and looked out at a view that was limited to the parcheggio for the police vehicles. He was staring at them without really seeing them when one of his officers interrupted.

“We have an identification,” a woman’s voice said.

So deep into his thoughts was Salvatore that, when he turned, he did not remember the officer’s name. Just a crude joke that had been in the men’s toilet about the shape of her breasts. He’d laughed at the time, but now he felt shame. She was earnest about her work, as she had to be. It was not easy for her in this line of employment that had for so long been dominated by men.

“What identification?” he asked her. He saw that she was carrying a photo and he tried to remember why any of his officers were showing photographs to anyone.

She said, “Casparia, sir. He’s seen this man.”

“Where?”

She looked at him oddly. She said in some surprise, “Non si ricorda?” but hastily went on lest her question sound disrespectful. She looked about twenty years old, Salvatore thought, and she probably thought the antiquity of his forty-two had begun to affect his memory. She said, “Giorgio and I . . . ?”

At which point he remembered. Officers had taken photographs to the prison for Carlo Casparia’s perusal. These comprised pictures of the soccer players on Lucca’s team as well as the fathers of the boys Lorenzo Mura coached. And Carlo Casparia had recognised someone? This was an extraordinary turn of events.

He held out his hand for the picture. “Who is this?” he asked. Ottavia was her name, he thought. Ottavia Schwartz because her father was German, she’d been born in Trieste, and suddenly his head was filled with utterly useless information. He looked at the picture. The man looked roughly the same age as Lorenzo Mura, and with one glance Salvatore could see why the drug addict had remembered this individual. He had ears like conch shells. They stood out of his head in misshapen glory, and they transmitted light as if torches were being held behind them. This man in the company of anyone would be unforgettable. It could be, he thought, that they had just experienced a piece of luck. He repeated his question as Ottavia wet her forefinger on her tongue and flipped open a small notebook.

She said, “Daniele Bruno. He is a midfielder on the city team.”

“What do we know about him?”

“Nothing yet.” And when his head rose abruptly, she went on in haste. “Giorgio’s on it. He’s compiling enough information for you to—”

She looked startled as Salvatore stepped forward and closed the door of the tiny kitchen. She looked more startled when he spoke to her urgently in a low voice.

“Listen to me, Ottavia, you and Giorgio . . . You give this information to no one else but myself. Capisce?”

“Sì, ma . . .”

“That is all you need to know. Whatever you have, you hand over to me.”

For he knew where things would head should Nicodemo Triglia be given Ottavia’s information. It was already written in the stars and he had seen this on Piero Fanucci’s unfortunate features. The Big Plan was how he thought of it, and it comprised how Piero was going to save face. There was only one way for him to do it at this point since nothing that had happened to Hadiyyah Upman related in any way to Piero’s main suspect in her kidnapping. So Piero could only save face by burying information now and by biding his time until the moment that the tabloids had found other stories to pursue once the excitement of the child’s return to her parents had subsided. Then Carlo would be released very quietly to his life, and everyone else’s life—particularly Piero’s—could simply go on.

Ottavia Schwartz frowned but asked if the chief inspector wished her to put her notes into a report for him. He told her no. Just hand them over as they are, he said, and let this conversation between us slip from your mind.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Lynley did not see Taymullah Azhar again until breakfast. The Pakistani man had gone to Fattoria di Santa Zita to be with his daughter once Hadiyyah was released from the examination she’d undergone at the hospital. As liaison officer, Lynley had no need to accompany them. But his mind was uneasy in the aftermath of Hadiyyah’s rescue and Lorenzo Mura’s accusations. On the one hand, his own work was finished. On the other hand, he had questions, and it seemed reasonable to ask them of Azhar when they stood at Signora Vallera’s breakfast buffet table, spooning cereal into their bowls.

He began with “All’s well, I hope?”

Azhar said, “There is no sufficient way that I can thank you, Inspector Lynley. I know that your presence is Barbara’s doing as well as your own, and there is no way I can thank her either.” And then in answer to his question, “Hadiyyah is well. Angelina is less so.”

“One hopes her condition will now improve.”

Azhar moved towards his table and politely asked Lynley to join him. He poured coffee for them both from a white crockery jug.

“Hadiyyah told us about a card,” Lynley said as he sat. “This was a greeting card that the man Squali handed to her in the marketplace before she left with him. She said it contained a message from you, telling her to go with him as you were waiting for her.”

“She told me this as well,” Azhar said. “But I know nothing about such a card, Inspector Lynley. If there is one somewhere—”

“I believe there is.” Lynley told the other man of the tourist photographs, of the particular pictures of the happy face card in the hand of Roberto Squali, and then of the photo of Hadiyyah holding what looked like the very same card.

“Have you seen this card, Inspector?” Azhar then asked. “Was it with Hadiyyah’s belongings where she was found?”

This was something Lynley didn’t know. If there had been a card, though, it would now be in the hands of the carabinieri who’d arrived at the convent first and who had taken Domenica Medici away. These policemen would have searched the premises for anything connected to the child who’d been held in the place.

“Who else knew about Hadiyyah’s disappearance?” Lynley asked him. “I’m talking about her disappearance from London last November. Who else knew, aside from Barbara and myself?”

Azhar named the individuals he’d told over the initial weeks: colleagues at University College London, friends in the field of microbiology, Angelina’s parents and her sister Bathsheba, and his own family much later, of course, once Angelina and Lorenzo had arrived in London insisting that Hadiyyah had been snatched from the Lucca marketplace by him.

“Dwayne Doughty knew about her disappearance as well, did he not?” Lynley watched Azhar’s face closely as he said the London investigator’s name. “We’ve been told by Michelangelo Di Massimo, an investigator in Pisa, that Doughty hired him to find Hadiyyah.”

“Mr. Doughty . . . ?” Azhar said. “But I hired this man to try to find Hadiyyah straightaway when she went missing, and he told me there was no trace of her, that Angelina had left no trail from London to . . . to anywhere. And now you are saying that . . . what? That he discovered that Angelina had gone to Pisa? Last winter he knew this? While telling me that there was no trail?”

“When he told you there was no trace of her, what did you do?”

“What could I do? There is no father of record on Hadiyyah’s birth certificate,” he said. “No DNA test has ever been done. Angelina could have claimed anyone was my daughter’s father, and without a court order she still could do so in the absence of such tests. So you see, to everyone who might have helped me, I had no real, legal rights. Only the rights Angelina chose to give me. And those rights she had withdrawn when she left with Hadiyyah in the first place.”

“If that’s the case,” Lynley said quietly, reaching for a banana, which he peeled upon his plate, “then kidnapping Hadiyyah might well have been your only option if you were able to find her.”

Azhar assessed him steadily, with no indication of protest or outrage. “And had I done such a thing and then taken her back with me to London? Do you know what that would have gained me, Inspector Lynley?” Azhar waited for no reply, going on to say, “Let me tell you what it would have gained me: Angelina’s enmity forever. Believe me, I would not have been that stupid no matter how much I wanted—and still want—my daughter home with me.”

“Yet someone took her from the marketplace, Azhar. Someone promised her you. Someone wrote a card for her to read. Someone called her khushi. The man who took her left a trail behind him, one that led to Michelangelo Di Massimo. And Di Massimo gave us the name of Dwayne Doughty in London.”

“Mr. Doughty told me there was no trail,” Azhar repeated. “That this was not true . . . that he might have known all along this was not true . . .” His hands shook slightly as he poured more coffee. It was the first indication that something moved within him. “In this . . . I would like to do something to this man, Inspector. But because of what he did or intended to do or tried to do, Angelina and I have finally made peace. This terrible fear that we would lose Hadiyyah . . . It brought about something good in the end.”

Lynley wondered how a child’s kidnapping could truly result in something good, but he inclined his head for Azhar to continue.

“We have come to agree that Hadiyyah needs both of her parents,” he said, “and that both of her parents should be in her life.”

“How will this be effected with you in London and Angelina in Lucca?” Lynley asked. “Forgive me for saying it, but her situation at Fattoria di Santa Zita seems fixed at this point.”

“It is. Angelina and Lorenzo will marry soon, after the birth of their child. But Angelina agrees that Hadiyyah will spend all her holidays with me in London.”

“Will that be enough for you?”

“It will never be enough,” he admitted. “But at least I can find peace in the arrangement. She’ll come to me the first of July.”

SOUTH HACKNEY

LONDON

Barbara found Bryan Smythe’s place of business in the same location where she found his house. This was not far from Victoria Park, in a terrace that looked ready for the wrecking ball. The houses were built of the ubiquitous London brick, outstandingly unwashed in this case. Where homes weren’t looking in danger of imminent collapse, they were streaked with one hundred years of grime and guano, and the wood of windows and doors was split and rotting. However, Barbara discovered soon enough that all of this was clever camouflage. For Bryan Smythe, as it happened, owned six of the dwellings in a row and although the curtains that hung in their windows looked like the ill wishes of an envious sibling, once inside the door everything altered.

He was prepared for her visit, of course. Emily Cass had alerted him. His first words to Barbara were “You’re the Met, I presume,” and although he took in her appearance from head to toe, his facial expression didn’t alter when he read her tee-shirt’s message of No Toads Need to Pucker Up. Barbara clocked this. He was going to be good at dissimulation, she decided. He added, “DS Barbara Havers. That’s right, isn’t it?”

She said, “Last time I looked,” and elbowed her way into his house.

The place opened up like a gallery in both directions, with various large canvases of modern art on the walls and bits of metal sculpture depicting God only knew what writhing on tables, with sparse leather furniture and tasteful rugs beneath which a hardwood floor gleamed. The man himself was nothing to look at and less to talk about: ordinary except for his dandruff, which was extraordinary and copious. One could have cross-country skied on his shoulders. He was as pale as someone who rubbed elbows regularly with the walking dead, and he appeared malnourished. Too busy hacking into people’s lives to eat, Barbara reckoned.

“Nice digs,” she told him as she looked round the place. “Business must be booming.”

“There are good times and bad,” he replied. “I offer independent technological expertise to various companies and occasionally to individuals in need. I deal in making sure their systems are secure.”

Barbara rolled her eyes. “Please. I’m not here to waste your time or mine. If you know my name, you know what’s up. So let’s get to the point: I’m more interested in Doughty than I am in you, Bryan. C’n I call you Bryan? I hope so.” She sauntered into the gallery space and stood before a canvas painted red with a single blue stripe at the bottom. It looked like a proposal for a new EU road sign. She decided her preference was to remain in ignorance when it came to the subject of modern art. She turned back to Smythe. “Obviously, I c’n bring you down, but at present, I’m not ready to play that card.”

“You can try what you want,” Smythe told her blithely. He’d shut the door behind her and he’d shot the bolt home. She reckoned this had more to do with the value of the art on the walls than her presence, though. He went on to say, “Let’s look at the facts. You shut me down, I’m back up in twenty-four hours.”

“I expect that’s true,” she admitted. “But your regular customers might not like reading the news—or hearing about it on the telly—that their ‘technological security expert’ has had his gear carted off to the techies at New Scotland Yard for a lengthy scrutiny that doesn’t bode well. I can make that happen. You can, as you say, set yourself up with a whole new system before our forensic tech blokes can unpack your belongings in some cobwebbed basement in Victoria Street. But I expect the serious hit your business will take as a result of the publicity might require a rather long recovery period.”

He eyed her. She eyed his art. She picked up a sculpture that sat on a table of solid glass and she tried to make out what the thing was. Bird? Plane? Prehistoric monster? She looked from it to him and said, “Should I know what this bloody thing is?”

“You should know enough to be careful with it.”

She made a feint at dropping it. He took a quick step forward. She winked at him. “Us rozzers, Bryan? Believe me, we are thick as shoe soles when it comes to art. We are bulls in the bloody you-know-what, especially the blokes who come to cart off one’s belongings for inspection.”

“My art has nothing to do with—”

“The job? This technological expertising you do? I expect that might be the case, but the blokes who show up with court orders in their grubby hands . . . ?” She placed the sculpture carefully on the table. “They don’t know that, do they?”

“What sort of court order do you actually expect—”

“Emily Cass gave you up. You know that, Bryan. Pushed into a corner, she did not exactly come out swinging. You’re into bank records, phone records, mobile records, travel records, credit card records, and God only knows what other records. Do you really believe the local magistrate isn’t going to want to know what’s going on when you sit down at your keyboard and get in touch with your embedded mates? Where is that keyboard, by the way? Does a magic button somewhere do the business and a wall swings aside to reveal basement stairs?”

“You’ve seen too many films.”

“For my sins,” she admitted. “So what’s it to be?”

He thought about this. He wouldn’t know that she’d already determined to talk to Azhar before she reported to Lynley or to anyone else about any of her findings. He wouldn’t know that she’d decided she had to see her Pakistani neighbour in person in order to look him squarely in the face. He wouldn’t know that she could not for a moment believe that Azhar would endanger his daughter, frighten his daughter, or do anything else to his daughter in aid of either keeping her or getting her away from her mother. But those tickets to Pakistan suggested the worst and until she spoke to him and read whatever she could read from his expression or in his eyes, Barbara’s level of desperation was such that even staying calm in the presence of this bloke Smythe was taking every resource she had.

He finally said, “Come with me. At least I can enlighten you on one thing.”

He crossed the gallery space and slid open two silent pocket doors. Beyond them, a room similar in size to the gallery looked through a bank of pricey double-glazed windows out into a garden. This was brilliant with spring flowers and defined on its boundaries by ornamental cherry trees in bloom. A perfect lawn held a white gazebo. A rectangular pond supporting lily pads lay in front of this, a fountain at its centre.

The room into which he walked was his working space, as far from the cinematic version of a computer whiz’s lair as could be imagined. In films, the hacker holed up in a basement where the only light came from the monitors of the multitude of computers that encircled him. In Bryan Smythe’s reality there was a laptop on a fine stainless steel desk that faced his garden. Next to the laptop, three memory sticks sat in a holder. Another holder held sharpened pencils; another held pens. Next to the laptop were a pristine legal pad, one expensive designer fountain pen, and a printer.

Aside from that, the room morphed into a high-end kitchen at one end and a higher-end entertainment centre at the other. Speakers in the ceiling spoke of surround sound. Everything spoke of big money.

Barbara whistled soundlessly. She said, “Nice garden,” and went to look out of the window while her mind whirled into action and she tried to decide how best to wring the information from him. “Thinking of the Chelsea Flower Show, are we?”

“I like to have something pleasant to look at,” he said, and the slight emphasis he put upon the adjective indicated that Barbara wasn’t a sight for eyes even mildly sore. “While I work, that is,” he added. “Hence the positioning of the desk.”

“Always a good idea,” she acknowledged. “I expect you’d like to keep things that way.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s decision time for you, and let me be plain in case I haven’t been so far. Doughty is the fish we’re after. We’re looking at him for a kidnapping charge, something he orchestrated to occur in Lucca, Italy. It involves a nine-year-old English girl who was snatched by her mum last November and carted off to eat copious mounds of pasta, if you get my meaning. He was hired to locate her but he did more than that. He located her, claimed he hadn’t done, and then arranged to have her snatched. And then, he had you wipe every record clean. These would be all the records having anything to do with the nine-year-old girl, the original snatching, et cetera, et cetera. Are we on the same page so far?”

His mouth made a disparaging moue. She took this for acknowledgement and charged on.

“You confirm this, and our relationship—that would be yours and mine, and believe me I’ve been chuffed by it beyond my wildest dreams—is over. You refuse to confirm . . . ?” She waggled her hand. “The local rozzers, the local magistrate, and the Met’ll be wild to make your acquaintance.”

“So are you saying,” he said, “that if I confirm your imaginative theories about this nine-year-old—and I’m not confirming anything, by the way—my name does not get handed over to the Met at once? Or to the local police? Or to anyone?”

“Bryan, you are one clever lad. That is exactly what I’m saying. So what’s it going to be? Admittedly, Doughty isn’t going to want your services after this, but you can’t blame him for that, eh? Small price to pay for your continuing ability to do business at all, you ask me.”

He shook his head. He walked over to gaze at his garden. He finally turned back to her and said, “What the bloody hell kind of cop are you?”

She was taken aback by the force of loathing behind his words, but she managed to keep her face a perfect blank as she said, “Meaning?”

“You think I don’t see where this is heading?”

“Where?”

“Today what you want is confirmation and tomorrow it’s cash. Not wired to some account on the Isle of Man or tucked away in Guernsey or God knows where but handed over in an envelope in tens and twenties and fifties and next week more and next month more and always this ‘D’you really want the Met to know about you, mate?’ You’re dirtier than I am, you miserable cow. And if you think I’m going to—”

“Rein in the ponies,” Barbara said to the man, although her heart was pounding in her temples. “I told you I want Doughty, and Doughty’s who I want.”

“And your word on that is good, is it?” Bryan laughed, a high whinny that spoke of how desperate he was feeling. It came to Barbara that they were like two Wild West ne’er-do-wells out in the street in front of the saloon, both of them having drawn their rusty pistols at the exact same moment, both of them trying to work out how to walk away from the confrontation instead of ending up in the dust with a bullet in the chest.

She said, “Looks to me like we’ve got each other by the you-know-whats, Bryan. But between us, I think I’ve got the better grip. I’m telling you for the last time that I want Doughty and only Doughty and that’s an end to this. Either you go for that or you decide you’d rather risk it by escorting me to the door and seeing what I’ll do next.”

His jaw moved, teeth biting down on something unpalatable. She understood. Her teeth were doing much the same thing.

He said, “You have your confirmation. I wiped Doughty’s records. Everything having to do with a bloke called Michelangelo Di Massimo. Everything having to do with a bloke called Taymullah Azhar. Emails, bank statements, phone calls, mobile calls, wire transfers of money, websites looked at, anything discovered via search engines having to do with Lucca, Pisa, or anywhere else in Italy. Whatever you can think of, it was dealt with. As deeply as I and a few . . . a few colleagues here and there could go. All right?”

“One more thing.”

“Christ, what else?”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When did all these records begin?”

“What does it matter? I went back in time and got it all.”

“Right. Brilliant. Got that in a trap. What I’m asking is the date all these records having to do with Italy got wiped.”

“What’s that got to do with—”

“Believe me. It does.”

Astoundingly, then, Bryan went to something worthy of Dickens to sort this one out. He opened the desk and brought out—of all things—a pocket diary. He began to leaf through it, back into time. He found nothing. He rooted in his desk and brought out another. As he did so, Barbara felt her stomach tighten into a ball.

“Last December,” he said. “The fifth. That’s when it all began.”

God, Barbara thought. In advance of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping in Lucca. In advance of everything. She said, “‘It’? What’s ‘it’ supposed to be?”

A small smile, containing just enough triumph to tell Barbara she’d won the battle but lost the war. “I expect you can work that one out,” he said. To this he added, “If you’re planning your next stop to be in Bow, then you’d be wise to plan on something else as well.”

“And that would be?” she asked, although her lips were barely working at this point.

“A fail-safe position, a backup plan, whatever you want to call it,” he told her. “Dwayne’s not stupid and he’s going to have one.”

“And you know this because . . .”

“Because he always does.”

BOW

LONDON

Dwayne Doughty was not surprised to see her. Barbara was herself not surprised to discover that this was the case. The Doughty-Cass-Smythe operation had been up and running for quite some time. They might give each other up like third-rate burglars hoping to strike a deal with the cops, but they would also let each other know that they had done so. She readied herself to do battle with the man. She readied herself to see what the private investigator’s fail-safe position was going to be.

He said to her, “Very good time from South Hackney,” just in case she needed the full score on exactly whose loyalties were going to lie where. He looked at his watch. “Quarter of an hour. Did you hit all the lights green or did you use a siren?”

“I think this is about the jig being up,” Barbara told him. “And as there’s no music, we’re not talking about dancing.”

“Your way with metaphors continues to astound,” Doughty said. “But one of the reasons Bryan Smythe has at one time or another been in my employ has to do with his talent at wiping away any sign that he’s actually been in my employ.”

“Does this mean you’re assuming the Met doesn’t employ blokes whose talents match the redoubtable Bryan’s?” Barbara asked him. “Does it mean you’ve somehow jumped to the conclusion that the Met has no way to contact the cops in Italy who will come up with equally talented blokes who c’n deal with Michelangelo Di Massimo’s records? You seem to believe that no stone has been left unturned by Bryan’s magical power to erase your past manoeuvres, mate, but here’s what I’ve learned from years of dealing with villains of every make and variety: No one thinks of everything and the thing about stones and turning them over . . . ? There’s always a pebble nearby that goes unnoticed.”

He gave a little salute. “Once more with the metaphor. You do amaze.” He leaned back in his chair. It was the sort that gave way when pressure was put upon its back, and Barbara sent a fleeting prayer heavenward that he’d lean too far, fall over, and bash himself senseless on the floor. No such luck. But what he did was roll the chair over to a filing cabinet and slide open its bottom drawer. From this he took a memory stick. He said, “You can go that route with the cops in Italy, the tech experts at the Met, and the tech experts in Italy. But it isn’t something that I’d advise. To attempt your own skill at metaphor: That’s a road I wouldn’t drive a donkey cart on.”

When Barbara saw the memory stick, she reckoned they were at the fail-safe that Bryan Smythe had mentioned. There was nothing for it but to see what Doughty had on it, and she knew that all she had to do was wait for the revelation.

He gestured affably for her to sit. He offered coffee, tea, a chocolate digestive in an irritatingly specious display of manners. Her response to this was “Get to the bloody point,” and she remained standing.

“As you will,” he said, and he plugged the memory stick into his computer.

He was well prepared. It took him a two-breath moment to find what he wanted. He tapped three or four keys, turned the monitor in her direction, and said, “Enjoy the show.”

It was a film in which the stars were Dwayne himself and Taymullah Azhar. Its setting was here in Doughty’s office. Its dialogue comprised Doughty revealing every bit of information on Hadiyyah’s whereabouts in Italy as discovered by Michelangelo Di Massimo. Fattoria di Santa Zita came first, in the hills above a town called Lucca, in the home of one Lorenzo Mura, whose apparent idiocy in the arena of wiring money from Lucca to London so that Angelina would be able to finance her escape from Azhar had left a trail not of breadcrumbs but of veritable pieces of foccacia. A secondary bank account this was, as Dwayne explained to Azhar, in the name not of Angelina but of her sister Bathsheba, on whose passport Angelina departed the country on the fifteenth of November.

Barbara heard her heart pounding in her ears. But she said casually, “And your point is what, Dwayne? Way I recall things, we know all this. So you want me to know you told Azhar when I wasn’t present? Am I supposed to be impressed?”

Doughty paused the film, freezing it on a single image.

“You don’t look thick,” he said, “but I’m getting the impression that your eyesight is failing. Look at the date of the film.”

And there it was. The seventeenth of December. Barbara said nothing, although what she felt was alarm. It shot through her arms and down into her fingers. She tried to keep her face impassive although she knew if she tried to raise her arms, she’d display the degree to which her hands were shaking.

Doughty flipped back through a diary on his desk, a large one that displayed every hour of the workday and every individual he’d seen. “You’re a busy bird, I reckon, with a social calendar that would slay an It girl, so let me help you. Our final meeting—this would be you, the professor, and yours truly here—took place on November thirtieth. If you need the math on it, this meeting you’ve just watched between that lofty bloke and me happened seventeen days later. To be additionally helpful—since that’s the kind of individual I am—let me jog your memory about one minor detail of that final meeting the three of us had. I handed the professor my card. I invited him to get in touch if there was any other way I could be helpful to him. For his part? The professor got the message.”

“Bollocks,” Barbara said. “What message?”

“I had a feeling about our professor, Sergeant. Desperate times, measures, and you know the rest. I thought I could be of further assistance to him. If he was interested, that is. It turned out he was.” Dwayne leaned into the keyboard and made a few adjustments with the mouse as well. “Here’s how he expressed himself . . . and his interest, as it happened, two days later.”

The setting and the characters were the same. The dialogue, though, was entirely different. In the world of critical exegesis of cinema, it would have been breathlessly described as “electrifying dialogue.” In the world of reality, it was damning evidence. Barbara watched in gut-wrenching silence as Taymullah Azhar broached the subject of kidnapping his own daughter. Could it be done? Could this previously mentioned Michelangelo Di Massimo somehow arrange it? Could the Italian get to know the movements of Lorenzo Mura, Angelina, and Hadiyyah well? If he could, was there a way to take Hadiyyah from her mother with a promise that she would be returned to her father?

And on and on went the discussion between Azhar and Dwayne Doughty. On the film, Doughty listened sympathetically: fingers steepled at his chin, nodding when nodding was called for. The bloke was the very image of caution as, no doubt, in his head the till was ringing up how much money he was going to make if he got involved in an international kidnapping scheme.

Doughty said on film in what bordered on religious tones, “I can only put you in touch with Mr. Di Massimo, Professor Azhar. What you and he decide between you . . . ? Obviously, my work for you is finished and I would be no part of anything from this point forward.”

Oh, too bloody right, Barbara scoffed. When the film was over, she said, “This is a load of bollocks.”

Dwayne wasn’t affected by this. He said pleasantly, “Alas. It is what it is. My point is this: You take me down, I take him down, Barbara. May I call you Barbara? I have a feeling we’re growing closer here.”

She had a feeling violence was in the offing and it would be demonstrated by her jumping over the bloke’s desk and throttling him. She said, “The whole kidnap idea is rubbish on toast. Once Hadiyyah was found by this Di Massimo bloke, all Azhar had to do was show up on Angelina’s doorstep unexpectedly and demand his rights as her father. With Hadiyyah thrilled to bits to see him, with Azhar standing on her front porch or whatever the hell they have over there, what was Angelina Upman going to do then? Run from one fattoria—whatever that is—to another for the rest of her life?”

“That would have been sensible,” Doughty admitted graciously. “But haven’t you noticed—and I would think you have, in your line of work—that when passions become inflamed, good sense tends to fly right out the window?”

“Kidnapping Hadiyyah would have gained Azhar nothing.”

“In the normal garden kidnapping, how true. But let’s suppose—you and I, Barbara—that this wasn’t a garden kidnapping at all. Let’s suppose the professor’s brainchild was to have Hadiyyah kidnapped because he knew very well that the first thing her mummy would do in that case was exactly what her mummy did: come to London with the boyfriend in tow, hot in her demands to have her child back.” Doughty raised his hands to his mouth in mock horror. “But when she gets to London, it is only to find that the professor has not the slightest idea that the child is missing. My God, she’s been kidnapped? the professor says. Search my house, search my office, search my lab, search my life, search where you like because I did not do this . . . and all the rest. While all along the plan is in motion for Michelangelo Di Massimo to snatch the kid, to stow her some place very safe and very out of sight, and then—when the time is right—to release her in an equally very safe location where she can be ‘found’ by someone who has seen the news of her scurrilous kidnapping. Meantime, her dad is off to Italy to assist in the search, demonstrating his anguish by putting handbills up in every village and town, establishing himself as bereft beyond measure, having previously established an ironclad alibi for the time of her disappearance through means of a conference he was long scheduled to attend in Berlin. When the child is found, the reunion is emotional, blessed, sanctified, and all the rest. And Azhar has access to his daughter once again, this access blessed by Angelina.”

“Ridiculous,” Barbara said. “Why go to all this trouble, Dwayne? If you’d found Hadiyyah, why would Azhar want her kidnapped? Why would he terrify her or put her at risk or do anything at all besides show up one day and demand access to her as her father? He knows where she is. He knows from whatever he’s found out about Mura that she’s not going anywhere.”

“You’ve made that point already,” Doughty admitted. “But there’s one small thing you’re forgetting here.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“The larger picture.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“Pakistan.”

“What? Is your claim actually going to be that Azhar’s plan—”

“I’m claiming nothing here. I’m merely asking you to follow the dance steps because you know the music. You aren’t stupid, despite what you might feel towards our brooding professor. He had her snatched, and when the time was right, he was going to take her to Pakistan and disappear.”

“He’s a bloody professor of—”

“And bloody professors don’t commit crimes? Is that what you want to tell me? Dear sergeant, you and I both know that crimes are not the especial province of the unwashed masses. And you and I both know that if this particular professor took his daughter to Pakistan, the door of possibility of Mummy’s getting her back would be slammed for years, locked with a key, and Angelina would be left banging on it till her fists were bloody. Trying to get a kid from the kid’s father in Pakistan? The kid’s Pakistani father? The kid’s Muslim father? Exactly how many rights do you think a mere Englishwoman would have, if she was even able to find him in the first place?”

Barbara felt the persuasive truth of all this, but accepting that truth . . . ? She knew there was another explanation. She also knew that to sit in the office and to argue the cause of that explanation to Doughty was a useless endeavour. Only a conversation with Azhar was going to shed light on everything. Doughty was as dirty as the inside of a Hoover. That was the truth that she had to cling to.

It was as if he’d read her mind, though, when Doughty next spoke. “The professor is dirty, Sergeant Havers,” he said. He pushed away from his desk and returned the memory stick to his filing cabinet, which he then locked. He turned back to Barbara and held out his wrists in mock surrender. “Now . . . You can cart me off to the nick, and I can go through this all again for whoever’s interested in listening. Or you can start building a case where it’s meant to be built: right in the professor’s front garden.”

VICTORIA

LONDON

Lynley arrived in London by early afternoon, weathering a crowded flight from Pisa in which he’d suffered his six-foot-two-inch frame being jackknifed into the middle seat with a rosary-saying nun on one side of him and an overweight businessman with a very large newspaper on the other. Prior to leaving the vicinity of Lucca, he’d had a final word with Angelina Upman. She confirmed every detail of Azhar’s story on the subject of their parting on the previous night. Forgiveness was the theme of what had passed between them, as were future arrangements for Hadiyyah so that she could continue to be part of the London life of the father she adored. Only Lorenzo Mura was opposed to these plans. He didn’t like Azhar, he didn’t trust Azhar, and Angelina was a fool to consider allowing Azhar access to her daughter.

“Darling, she’s Hari’s daughter as well” did not soothe Mura. He stormed from the room breathing the fire of angry Italian into the air. Angelina sighed. “It’s not going to be easy,” she told Lynley, “but I want to do what’s right for us all.”

In her presence, Lynley had given thought to the toll this entire affair had taken upon Angelina. He reckoned she was normally a beautiful woman, but the circumstances she’d been caught in had temporarily robbed her of her looks, leaving her gaunt, lank-haired, and hollow-eyed. She needed to recover and she needed to do so as quickly as possible to safeguard the life she carried within her. He wanted to tell her this, but she would know it already. So he said to her, merely, “Be well,” and he departed.

In London, he went directly to the Yard. There, he met with Isabelle Ardery to make his report to her. It was a good result, culminating in the safe return of Hadiyyah Upman to her mother. The affair was in the hands of the Italian police now, and on the Lucca end of things, there was nothing more to be done as the public minister would determine what to do with the evidence uncovered by Chief Inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco and whoever followed him as head of the case.

“The investigation was taken away from him yesterday,” Lynley explained. “He and the public minister didn’t see eye to eye on things, as it happened.”

Isabelle picked up a phone, saying to him, “Let’s have Barbara’s report, then,” and she summoned Barbara to join them.

Lynley sighed and shook his head inwardly when he saw the sergeant’s appearance. Her hair was still a chopped-up mess, and she’d returned to a manner of dress certain to set Isabelle’s teeth on edge. At least on this day, she’d eschewed a slogan-embossed tee-shirt in favour of a jersey. Its zigzag horizontal pattern of neon colours, however, did nothing to enhance her charms. Her trousers—baggy at the seat and the knees—looked like something her grandmother had discarded.

He glanced at Isabelle. She looked at Havers, looked at him, and admirably controlled herself. She said, “Sergeant,” and indicated a seat.

Barbara shot Lynley a look that he couldn’t read, although she seemed to think she was being called onto the carpet for something. He couldn’t blame her for that. Rarely was she summoned into a superior’s office for any other thing. He said, “I’ve just brought the guv up-to-date on Italy,” and Isabelle said, “As to the London end of things, Sergeant . . . ?”

Havers looked relieved. She said by way of introduction, “Way I see it, guv, things’re going to come down to one slimy bloke’s word against another slimy bloke’s word.” She balanced the ankle of a red-trainer-shod foot on her knee and displayed a length of white sock printed with cupcakes. Lynley heard Isabelle’s sigh. Havers went on. Doughty, she told them, did not deny employing one Pisan called Michelangelo Di Massimo in an attempt to trace Hadiyyah and her mother. He claimed he had done so on behalf of Azhar, and that was the extent of what he’d done. He said that whatever money flowed from a London bank to an Italian bank—into the account of Di Massimo—was merely in payment for this service. But it proved to be a service that had gained him nothing, according to Doughty. Di Massimo had declared that the trail went dead early on. Havers said, “I reckon we have to decide which one of these blokes is the real liar. Since Di Massimo’s got the Italian cops on his back, could be we should just wait and see what comes of that.”

Isabelle hadn’t won her position as detective superintendent by failing to see where the net of an investigation had one or two gaping holes. She said, “At what point did Taymullah Azhar learn the name of this Italian private investigator, Sergeant?”

To which Havers’s reply was, “Never, guv, as far as I know. At least not before the inspector here sussed things out with the Italian coppers. And that’s really the crux of the matter, isn’t it?” Before Isabelle could answer, Havers continued with “SO12’s been onto Azhar, by the way. He’s clean.”

“SO12?” Lynley and Isabelle said simultaneously. Isabelle continued. “What have SO12 to do with things, Sergeant?”

Havers explained that she’d been intent on exploring every single avenue and—“Let’s admit it, guv, since you just brought him up, one of those avenues was Azhar”—she’d had a talk with Chief Inspector Harry Streener to see if his team had been looking into Azhar for any reason. Azhar had been in Berlin at the time of the kidnapping, and that didn’t look good, so she had figured if there was anything questionable going on, SO12 would have found it. “Azhar’s a microbiologist, guv. Azhar’s Muslim. Azhar’s Pakistani. To the SO12 blokes . . . You know how they are. I reckoned if there was anything to be turned up about him, they would have done the spadework.”

But there had been nothing, Havers said. Her conclusion was the same as DI Lynley’s. This entire mess was better left in the hands of the Italian police.

“Get me your final written report then, Barbara,” Isabelle said. “You as well, Thomas.” And she signalled an end to their meeting by gesturing towards the door.

Before Lynley could follow Barbara through it, though, Isabelle said his name once again. He turned and she lifted a finger that told him to stay where he was. A nod instructed him to shut the door.

He returned to the seat he’d taken. He watched the detective superintendent. He’d come to know how expert she was at hiding things—particularly the workings of her mind and her heart—so he waited to hear what she wished to say, knowing how unlikely was the possibility that he could guess it in advance.

She pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk. He took a sharp breath. Isabelle was a drinker, and she knew he knew this. She believed she had the problem under control. He did not. She was aware of his belief, but she was also aware of the tacit understanding between them: He would not betray her as long as she kept her drinking away from Victoria Street and away from the job should the job take her elsewhere. He could see the slight tremor in her hands, however, and he said her name.

She shot him a look. “I’m not entirely stupid, Tommy. I have things under control” was her expected remark. Instead of a bottle, she brought out of the drawer a folded tabloid, which she opened, smoothed, and began to flip through.

He could see it was The Source, the most scurrilous of the London rags. He felt wary when he considered the implications behind Isabelle’s having stowed it in her desk as well as her dismissal of Barbara Havers and her indication that she wished to speak to him alone. These were unfortunate signs. They transformed themselves into ill realities when she found what she was looking for and turned the paper towards him so that he could see for himself what was causing her concern.

He reached in his jacket for his reading glasses, although the truth was that he didn’t need them, at least for the headline of the story: Love Rat Dad’s Ties to the Met spread across the top of pages four and five. Accompanying this was a photograph of Taymullah Azhar inset onto another, larger photograph of some sort of brouhaha in a London street. This involved a shouting teenage boy in a school uniform, an enraged man who appeared to be in his late sixties, a frightened-looking woman in a shalwar kameez and headscarf, and Barbara Havers. Havers was in the act of attempting to get the old man to release his hold on the boy; the headscarf woman was in the act of attempting to get the boy away from the man. The man himself was in the act of trying to stuff the boy into a car, its back door open and waiting for him.

Lynley scanned the story, which was typical of The Source. It bore a by-line that he knew only too well: Mitchell Corsico. It contained the breathless sort of writing that was The Source’s stock-in-trade. This was of the hot-breaking-news variety in which the named reporter had uncovered a close connection between a detective sergeant from the Met and the Love Rat Dad whose daughter had recently been kidnapped in Italy. This female officer from the Met would be, gentle readers, a presence in the life of the Love Rat Dad in addition to the deserted wife in Ilford and the lover who had borne the man’s child. They live cheek by jowl, as it happens, in a north London neighbourhood where they keep separate residences on the very same property under the watchful eye of neighbours only too happy to express their opinions on the topic of the mild-mannered university professor and what was turning out to be a veritable stable of women willing to partner him.

The article followed the same pattern as so many stories featured in the daily tabloids. Their meat and potatoes had for generations consisted of destroying reputations. They built someone up one week as a hero or a sympathetic victim or a luck-struck winner of a national lottery or a grand success in the arts or an admirable self-made man . . . only to tear him down the next week when every slighted friend or colleague he had in his life crawled out of their personal rubbish tip to report “new facts” about him. Just to bring him down a few pegs, of course.

Lynley looked up when he completed his reading of the article. He wasn’t quite sure where to go with any remark he might make because he wasn’t quite sure what Isabelle knew about Barbara and Taymullah Azhar. Nor, he had to admit, was he.

She said, “What am I to make of this, Tommy?”

He took off his glasses and returned them to his jacket pocket. “It looks to me like an officer of the police coming to the aid of an adolescent boy being struck about the head by an older man.”

“Oh, I can see that. I can even tell myself that all this photo depicts is a moment in which DS Barbara Havers happened upon a conflict in the street and stepped in to sort it like the Good Samaritan we know her to be. I could do all that happily, but what prevents me is the fact that this adolescent boy is the son of Taymullah Azhar. Not to mention the fact that the older man is the father of Taymullah Azhar. I’m not to make a coincidence of that, am I, Tommy?”

“The picture could have a thousand and one interpretations, Isabelle, as can the article. Anyone reading it and looking at the picture can see that much.”

“Naturally. And one of those interpretations is that Barbara Havers may very well have a vested interest—a deeply personal and not an objective professional interest—in matters that should not concern someone involved in an investigation.”

“You can’t possibly think that Barbara—”

“I don’t know what the hell to think about Barbara,” Isabelle cut in sharply. “But I do know what I see with my eyes and I do know what I hear with my ears, and—”

“‘Hear’? From whom? What? About Barbara?” Lynley studied her for a moment before he went on. She watched him do so and she met his gaze steadily. He finally looked away from her and at the paper still spread on her desk.

Lynley knew she wasn’t a tabloid reader. He didn’t flatter himself in thinking he knew everything about her from the months they’d spent naked in each other’s beds, but he did know that much. She didn’t read tabloids. So how had this one fallen into her hands? He said, “Where did you get this?” with a gesture at the paper.

“That’s hardly as important as the ‘news’ it contains.”

Lynley glanced over his shoulder at the closed door and what lay beyond it. And then, quite simply, he knew. “John Stewart,” he said. “And now he’s waiting to see what you intend to do about her. While all along what you should be intending to do is something about John.”

“I plan to deal with John in due time, Tommy. Just now we’re dealing with the issue of Barbara.”

“There is no issue of Barbara. She may know Azhar, but as to there being the slightest indication of a romantic involvement, a physical involvement, any involvement between them other than simple friendship . . . It’s just not on, Isabelle.”

She considered this for a very long moment. Outside her office, the sounds of a typical day’s activities were ongoing. Someone called out for “a copy of that article on peat preservation Philip was going on about,” and a trolley rattled by. Inside her office, they engaged in a stare-down which Isabelle finally broke by speaking.

“Tommy, we all have blind spots,” she said.

“Barbara doesn’t,” he returned as firmly as he could. “Not in this matter.”

She looked infinitely sad when she dismissed him with the reply, “I’m not talking about Barbara, Inspector.”

VICTORIA

LONDON

He wasn’t as certain about Barbara Havers as his words had been. He wasn’t, in fact, certain about anything. For this reason, he read the activity reports Barbara had turned in during the time she’d worked on John Stewart’s team, and from there he went to spend ten minutes with Harry Streener in SO12. The fact that now two CID officers were interested in SO12’s concerns about one Taymullah Azhar gave Streener pause, but Lynley soothed him with a claim that loose ends were being tied up upon the request of Detective Superintendent Ardery and he was the bloke given the job of tying.

Thus Lynley discovered the airline tickets to Pakistan in very short order. Thus Lynley also discovered to his dismay that Barbara was withholding information. He didn’t particularly want to think what all of this meant: about Taymullah Azhar and the kidnapping of his daughter as well as about DS Barbara Havers. But he knew he had to speak to Barbara at once. For the reality she needed to face was simple: If he had learned she was withholding information about Taymullah Azhar, it stood to reason that John Stewart would unearth this fact sooner or later and turn it over to Isabelle. At that point Isabelle’s hands would be tied and so would his own be. He couldn’t let that happen.

He found Barbara at work at her desk, every inch of her announcing that she was nothing less than a nose-to-the-grindstone officer intent upon doing her duty. He said to her quietly, “I need a word, Barbara,” and he could see from her immediate expression of alarm that he’d perfectly telegraphed to her the seriousness of the situation.

He left her and went to the lifts. When she joined him there, he pushed for the fourth floor. He led her to Peeler’s. Some tables were occupied with the last of the lunchtime crowd, but most were empty. He selected one far away from the remaining hubbub of the place, and by the time they had reached the table, sat, and ordered coffees, he could tell that the sergeant was as rattled as he wanted her to be.

He said, “John Stewart’s given Isabelle a copy of The Source. There’s a story in it written by Mitch Corsico—”

“I went to the school, sir,” Barbara told him hastily. “Sayyid’s comprehensive. I’d had word from Corsico that he was intent on interviewing the kid, and I knew Sayyid would spew all sorts of rubbish about Azhar. It wasn’t only about Azhar that I went to the school, though. I knew whatever The Source might print would hurt everyone: his mum, his dad, Sayyid himself. I thought—I believed—I had to—”

“That’s not what I want to talk to you about, Barbara,” Lynley told her. “John has his reasons for handing over the tabloid, and I expect we’ll discover what they are sooner rather than later. The point is that you’re in this too far, that fact is playing itself out in the paper, and that makes your work suspect.”

Havers said nothing as their coffee was delivered to the table. When cups and saucers had been laid before them and the coffee poured, she did her business with the milk and sugar and set the spoon aside but didn’t drink. She said, “I hate that bloke.”

“You’ve reason,” Lynley told her. “I wouldn’t waste the breath to argue otherwise. But you’ve fallen into John’s hands with the way this business of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping has played out. So if you’ve given him any other evidence of your lack of objectivity in the investigation, then I think it’s to your benefit to tell me now before he discovers it and reports it to Isabelle.”

He waited then. It was, he knew, a do-or-die moment for Havers, one that was going to define what the nature of their partnership was and what, if anything, he could do to help her out of the mess into which she seemed to have got herself. It was obvious to him that DI John Stewart had loosed the dogs of an informal investigation upon her. She had to see that, and she also had to see that only a complete display of the cards she was holding would allow him to develop a strategy on her behalf.

Come on, Barbara, was what he thought. Move yourself in the right direction.

At first, he thought she was going to do just that. She said, “Sir, I lied about my mum.” And she told him of a tale she’d spun for Isabelle in order to buy herself time from work. It was about her mother’s having taken a fall. She gave him an account of everything fictitious that had followed the ostensible fall: from the ambulance service to the private hospital and all points in between. She also told him of the use she had made of her time while she was supposed to be engaged in activities assigned to her by DI Stewart. She gave an account of her dealings with Doughty and of her confrontations with that man’s associates. On the surface, it appeared that she was telling him everything. But she said nothing about airline tickets to Pakistan, and Lynley knew this damned her.

That knowledge felt like a crack in his chest. He hadn’t actually understood until that moment how important his partnership with Barbara was to him. She was at most times a maddening woman whose personal habits set his teeth on edge. But she had always been a decent cop with a very good mind, and God knew he enjoyed her fractious company. And it had to be said: She had also saved his life on a night when he hadn’t cared in the least if that life was going to be taken from him by a serial killer.

It wasn’t so much that he believed he owed Barbara Havers something, though. It was that he cared deeply for the bloody woman. She was more than a partner. She was a friend. As such, she was like the other people in his small circle of trusted intimates: She was part of the fabric of his life, and he wanted to keep that fabric as whole as he could make it considering the rent that he’d had to repair when Helen had been torn from him.

She talked on and on. Her monologue had the appearance of the unburdening of one soul to another. He waited and hoped she would be totally frank with him. When she wasn’t, he had no further choice.

He said at the end of her remarks, “Pakistan, Barbara. You’ve left that out.”

She took a slurp of her coffee. Then she took three more gulps in rapid succession and looked round Peeler’s for a top-up. She said casually, “Pakistan, sir?”

He said, “Airline tickets. One in the name of Taymullah Azhar. The other in the name of Hadiyyah Upman. Purchased in March for a flight in July. You’ve not mentioned that, but SO12 was happy to.”

Her gaze met his. He tried to read her face, but he couldn’t tell if what he was looking at was defiance or chagrin. She said, “You bloody checked my work. I can’t believe that.”

“SO12 raised questions. In my mind and, more important, in Isabelle’s.”

“‘Isabelle,’” she repeated. “Not ‘the guv’ and not ‘the superintendent.’ I reckon I know what that means, don’t I?” Her words were bitter.

“I reckon you don’t,” Lynley told her evenly. “SO12 was my own initiative.”

They were eyeball to eyeball for a moment. “Sorry, sir,” she said at last, looking away from him.

“Accepted,” he replied. “As to the airline tickets . . . ? You must see how it’s going to look when it comes out that you withheld this information. If I discovered it with a simple call upon Harry Streener, then it stands to reason that DI Stewart’s going to uncover the very same thing.”

“I c’n handle Stewart.”

“That’s where you go wrong. You want to ‘handle’ him and you think you can ‘handle’ him because I daresay you believe the truth will out and the truth will set you free and whatever other aphorisms you’d like to apply to this situation.”

“The ‘truth’ is he hates me and everyone knows it, including, pardon me, Isabelle, sir. And if we want to look at how she positioned me into working for the bloke so that—as you and I both bloody well know—I’d eventually be kicked back down to uniform when I stepped out of order, then what I ‘daresay’ is we’re going to see a master plan at work.”

Lynley had not worked as a homicide detective for years to be unaware that Havers was attempting to wrest control of their conversation in order to divert it away from the more crucial matter onto something she could bear to speak about. So he said, “Pakistan, Barbara. Airline tickets. Let’s get back to that, shall we? Anything else takes us into the realm of speculation and wastes our time.”

She ran a hand through her chopped-up hair. She said, “I don’t know what it means, all right?”

“Which part? The fact that he’s holding tickets to Pakistan, the fact that he purchased them in March when he ostensibly didn’t know where his daughter was, or the fact that you’ve withheld this detail? Which part is the part whose meaning you don’t know, Barbara?”

“You’re cheesed off,” she said. “You’ve a right to be.”

“Don’t let’s go there. Just answer me.”

“I don’t know what it means that he bought those tickets.”

“He told me she’s coming to him in July, Barbara. Spending her holidays with him is the agreement he reached with Angelina once Hadiyyah was safely returned from the convent in the Alps. That first holiday commences in July.”

“I still don’t know what it means,” she insisted. “I want to talk to him. Until he gets back to London, I won’t know what his intentions are. Until he can explain himself to me—”

“You’re intent on believing whatever he says?” Lynley asked her. “Barbara, you’ve got to see how mad that is. What you should be doing is what you should have been doing all along: following the money, the money going from Azhar to anyone else.”

“He would have paid Doughty for his services in looking for Hadiyyah,” she said. “What’s that supposed to prove? The man’s daughter disappeared with her mum, Inspector. The cops here were doing nothing about it. He had no rights and—”

“The dates of the transfers out of his account are going to tell us volumes,” Lynley said. “You know that very well.”

“Anything can be argued about dates. Azhar paid Doughty when he’d gathered enough money to pay him. It was more expensive than he’d thought it would be, so he made more than one payment. He had to do it . . . over a period of months, say. And what he paid him for was to hire someone over in Italy to find his daughter. Everything else was on Doughty’s head.”

“For the love of God, Barbara—”

“Doughty saw a way to make more money out of this. Hold her long enough to make everyone desperate, make a demand for ransom a few weeks from now, and Bob’s the rest of it.”

Lynley sat back in his chair. He stared at her, his breath taken with her self-delusion. He said, “You can’t possibly believe that. There was no demand for money, and Azhar’s damned by those airline tickets.”

“He bought them to reassure himself that she would be found. It was like hedging his bets.”

“For Christ’s sake, she hadn’t even been kidnapped from the mercato in Lucca when he bought them.”

“There’s an explanation. I’m going to find it.”

“I can’t let you decide—”

She grabbed his arm fiercely. “I need to talk to Azhar. Give me time to talk to Azhar.”

“You’re walking on the wrong side in this. The consequences are going to come down on your head like the wrath of God. How can you expect me—”

“Just let me talk to him, sir. There’s going to be an explanation. He’ll be back soon. A day. Two or three at the most. He has students at work in his lab at University College. He has courses to teach. He’s not going to hang round Italy waiting for July to roll round. He can’t do that. Just give me a chance to talk to him. If there’s no explanation he can offer for those tickets and when he bought them and all the rest, I’ll tell the guv about them and I’ll give her my conclusions. I swear to God I’ll do that. If you’ll give me the time.”

Lynley gazed at the raw appeal on her face. He knew what he was meant to do: report the entire twisted mess at once and let the inevitable gear itself up to happen. But years of partnership lay between him and what he was meant to do. So he sighed deeply and said, “Very well, Barbara.”

She breathed, “Thank you, Inspector.”

“I don’t want to regret this,” he told her. “So once you’ve spoken to Azhar, you’re to speak to me straightaway. Are we clear on this?”

“We’re absolutely clear.”

He nodded, got to his feet, and left her nursing the rest of her coffee.

There was absolutely nothing he liked about the situation. Everything was screaming Taymullah Azhar’s involvement. Since Barbara had withheld the information about those tickets to Pakistan, it stood to reason that there were other damning details she was withholding as well. He now knew she was in love with Azhar. She would never admit the fact to herself, but her relationship with the Pakistani professor went far beyond her friendship with his daughter, and it had been heading in that direction from the first. Could he rationally expect her to turn against the Pakistani man if his involvement turned out to be more than a father’s desperate search for his child? Would he himself have turned against Helen had he discovered something questionable that she had done? More to the point, would he turn against Havers now?

He cursed at the web this entire investigation had become. Barbara needed to march into Isabelle’s office, reveal everything, and throw herself upon the superintendent’s mercy. She had to take the bitter medicine Isabelle would then dole out to her. But he knew that Havers would never do it.

His mobile rang. For a moment he allowed himself to think that Barbara had seen sense. She’d thought rationally as she’d finished her coffee, and here she was to announce that she’d reconsidered.

But a glance at his phone told him it wasn’t Barbara phoning at all. It was Daidre Trahair.

“This is a pleasant surprise,” he told her in answering the mobile’s ring.

“Where are you?”

“Ringing for the lift as it happens.”

“Does that mean a lift in Italy or somewhere else?”

“It means London.”

“Ah. Lovely. You’re back.”

“Only just now. I flew in from Pisa late this morning and came directly to the Met.”

“How is it that you coppers put things, then? Did you have a ‘good result’?”

“We did.” The lift doors opened, but he waved it off, not wanting to chance losing the signal. He gave Daidre a few details about Hadiyyah’s safe return to the arms of her parents. He didn’t tell her about SO12, Pakistan, or Barbara’s perilous situation.

She said, “You must be enormously relieved to have it turn out so well. She’s safe, she’s healthy, her parents are . . . what?”

“Certainly not reconciled to each other, but in acceptance of the reality that they must share her. Admittedly, it’s not the best situation for a nine-year-old, shuttling between parents in two different countries, but it’s how things must be.”

“This is how it is for so many children, isn’t it, Tommy? I mean, going between two parents.”

“You’re right, of course. More and more, it’s the way of the world.”

“You sound . . . not quite as relieved as I’d think you’d be.”

He smiled at this. She had read him astutely, and he found, unexpectedly, that he liked that fact. He said, “I suppose that I’m not. Or perhaps I’m merely tired.”

“Too tired for a glass of wine?”

His eyes widened. “Where are you? Are you not phoning from Bristol?”

“I’m not.”

“Dare I hope . . . ?”

She laughed. “You sound like Mr. Darcy.”

“I thought women liked that. Along with those tight trousers.”

She laughed again. “As it happens, they do.”

“And . . . ?”

“I’m in London. On business, of course—”

“Of the Kickarse Electra kind?”

“Alas, no. This is business of the veterinarian kind.”

“Might I ask what a large animal veterinarian is doing in London? Have we a camel at the zoo in need of your expert ministrations?”

“That brings us back to the glass of wine. If you’ve time this evening, I’ll explain it to you. Have you the time?”

“Name the place and I’m there.”

She did so.

BELSIZE PARK

LONDON

The wine bar she suggested was in Regent’s Park Road, north of both Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill. It was situated rather unceremoniously between a newsagent’s and a kitchen shop, but its exterior position was deceptive. Inside, all was candlelight, velvet-draped windows, and linen-covered tables for two.

As the hour was still early and the place largely unoccupied, he saw Daidre at once. She was seated at a table tucked into a corner, where a painting on the wall either featured a modern look-alike to William Morris’s wife—God, what was her name? he wondered—or there was a Pre-Raphaelite extant that he wasn’t aware of. A light shone brightly upon the piece, giving Daidre sufficient illumination to inspect a set of papers she’d spread on the table. She was also speaking to someone on her mobile.

He paused before crossing the wine bar to join her, aware of experiencing a decided rush of pleasure at seeing Daidre again. He took a rare opportunity to study her without her knowledge, noting that she was wearing new spectacles—rimless and virtually unnoticeable—and that she was dressed for business in a tailored suit. The scarf she wore bore a mixture of colours that matched her sandy hair and, it was likely, her eyes as well, and it came to him that he and she could actually pass for brother and sister, so similar was their colouring.

As he approached, he saw other details. She was wearing a simple pendant necklace: its decoration a gold depiction of the wheelhouse of one of the Cornish mines from the area of her birth. She had gold studs in her ears as well, but they and the necklace comprised her only jewellery. Her hair was slightly longer now, reaching below her shoulders, and she was wearing it back from her face and fastened somehow on the back of her head. She was a handsome woman, but not a beautiful one. In a world of thin, young, airbrushed things on the covers of fashion magazines, she would not have garnered a second look.

She’d already ordered a glass of wine, but it seemed untouched. Instead, she was jotting notes on the margin of her paperwork, and as he reached the table, he heard her say into her mobile, “I’ll send it on to you then, shall I? . . . Hmm, yes. Well, I’ll wait for your word. And thank you, Mark. It’s very good of you.”

She glanced up then. She smiled at Lynley and held up a just-a-moment finger. She listened again to whatever was being said to her by whoever was on the other end of the mobile, and then, “Indeed. I depend on you,” and she rang off.

She stood to greet him, saying, “You’ve made it. It’s lovely to see you, Thomas. Thank you for coming.”

They engaged in air kisses: one cheek, then the other, with nothing touching anyone’s flesh. He asked himself idly where the maddening social nicety had come from.

He sat and tried not to notice what he noticed: that she quickly put all the paperwork into a large leather bag by the side of her chair, that a faint blush had risen to her cheeks, and that she was wearing something on her lips that made them look soft and glossy. Then it came to him suddenly that he was taking in aspects of Daidre Trahair that he hadn’t taken in, in the presence of a woman, since Helen’s death. Not even with Isabelle had he noted so much. It discomfited him, asking him to identify what it meant.

He wanted, of course, to ask who Mark was. But instead, he nodded at the large bag on the floor and said, “Work?” as he drew out a chair to sit.

She said, “Of a sort,” as she sat again herself. “You’re looking well, Thomas. Italy must suit you.”

“I daresay Italy suits most people,” he told her. “And Tuscany in particular suits everyone, I expect.”

“I’d like to see Tuscany someday,” she said. “I’ve not been.” And in less than a second and most typical of Daidre, “Sorry. That sounds as if I’m begging an invitation.”

“Perhaps coming from someone else,” he said. “Coming from you, no.”

“Why not from me?”

“Because I’ve got the impression that subterfuge isn’t part of your bag of tricks.”

“Well . . . yes. Admittedly, I have no bag of tricks.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“I ought, I suppose. But I’ve never quite had the time to develop tricks. Or to sew the bag for them. Or whatever. Are you having wine, Thomas? I’m drinking the house plonk. When it comes to wine, I’m hopeless. I doubt I could tell the difference between something from Burgundy and something made here in the cellar.” She twirled her wineglass by the stem and frowned. “I appear to be making the most disparaging remarks about myself. I must be nervous.”

“About?”

“As I was in complete order a moment ago, I must be feeling nervous with you here.”

“Ah,” he said. “Another glass of wine, perhaps?”

“Or two. Honestly, Thomas, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

A waitress came to them, a girl who had the look of a student and the accent of a recent arrival from the Eastern Bloc. He ordered wine for himself—the same plonk that Daidre was drinking—and when the girl took herself off to fetch it, he said, “Whether you’re nervous or not, I’m quite glad you rang me. Not only is it a fine thing to see you again, but frankly, I was in need of a drink.”

“Work?” she asked.

“Barbara Havers. I had an encounter with her that disturbed me rather more than I like to be disturbed by Barbara—and believe me she’s been disturbing me in one way or another for years—and getting thoroughly soused seems like a reasonable reaction to the entire mess she’s in. Either that or being diverted by your presence.”

Daidre took up her own wine but waited till he had been served his. They clinked glasses and drank to each other’s health, whereupon she said, “What sort of mess? It’s not my business, of course, but I’m available to listen should you have a mind to talk about it.”

“She’s gone her own maddening way in an investigation and not for the first time.”

“This is a problem?”

“She’s skirting far too close to ignoring her ethical responsibility as a police officer. It’s a complicated matter. Enough said on the subject. For the moment, I’d like to forget all about it. So tell me, then. What are you doing in London?”

“Interviewing for a job,” she said. “Regent’s Park. London Zoo.”

He found himself brightening, sitting up straighter all at once. Regent’s Park, the zoo . . . He had a thousand questions about what it all meant that Daidre Trahair was thinking of making a change from Bristol, but all he could manage was, stupidly, “As veterinarian?”

She smiled. “It is, more or less, what I do.”

He shook his head sharply. “Sorry. Stupid of me.”

She laughed. “Not at all. They might have wanted me to teach the gorillas to play chess or to train the parrots. One never knows.” She took more wine and gazed at him with something that looked to him like fondness. “I was contacted by a head hunter, someone employed by the zoo. I didn’t seek the position out, and I’m not altogether sure I’m interested in it.”

“Because . . . ?”

“I’m quite happy in Bristol. And, of course, Bristol is that much closer to Cornwall and I do love my cottage there.”

“Ah, yes, the cottage,” Lynley said. It was where they had first met, himself an intruder who’d broken a window to get to a phone, herself the owner of the place who’d arrived for a getaway only to find an unknown man tramping mud on her floors.

“And then, there’s my commitment to Boadicea’s Broads as well as my regular darts tournaments.”

Lynley lifted an eyebrow at this.

She laughed and said, “I’m quite serious, Thomas. I take my discretionary time to heart. Besides, the Broads rather depend on me—”

“A good jammer being difficult to find.”

“You’re teasing, of course. And I do know that I could join the Electric Magic. But then I’d be skating on occasion against my former teammates, and I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“These are serious matters,” he said. “I suppose it must come down to the job itself, then. As well as the benefits attached to taking it, should it be offered.”

They gazed at each other for a moment in which he saw the colour rise appealingly to her cheeks. He liked the look of her when she blushed. He said, “Have you listed them?”

“What?”

“The benefits. Or is it early days for that? I assume they’re interviewing other large animal vets as well. It’s an important position, isn’t it?”

“Yes and no.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they’ve done the interviews. All of the interviews. The initial ones, the secondary ones. The paper screening and checking of documents and references and all of that.”

“So this is something that’s been going on for a while,” he said.

“Since early March. That’s when I was first contacted.”

He frowned. He observed the ruby colour of his wine. He asked himself how he felt about this: that since early March she’d been part of a process that might bring her to London but she’d not told him. He said, “Since early March? You haven’t mentioned it. How am I to take that?”

Her lips parted.

He said, “Never mind. Terrible question. My ego was speaking for me. So where are you in the process, then? Tertiary interviews? Who knew so much was involved in vetting a vet, if you’ll pardon the pun. Is it a pun? I don’t quite know. You’re leaving me at sixes and sevens, Daidre.”

She smiled. “It’s made difficult by—”

“What is?”

“My decision. They’ve offered me the job, Thomas.”

“Have they indeed? That’s wonderful! Isn’t it?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Of course. Moving house is always complicated, and you’ve already listed your other concerns.”

“Yes. Well.” She took up her wine and drank. Looking for courage? he wondered. She said, “That’s not exactly what I mean by complicated.”

“Then what?”

“You, of course. But you know that already, I expect. You’re a complication. You. Here. London.”

His heart had begun to beat more heavily. He tried for lightness in his response. “It’s a disappointment for me, of course. If you take the job, I won’t have the opportunity of enjoying the personal tour of the zoo in Bristol that you once promised me. But I assure you we’ll be able to soldier on under the burden of my disappointment. Rest your mind on that score.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Yes. Of course. I suppose I do.”

She looked away from him, across the wine bar to where a couple had just been seated. They reached spontaneously for each other’s hand, twined fingers, and gazed into each other’s eyes across the candlelight. They looked to be somewhere in their twenties. They looked to be somewhere in the first stages of love.

She said, “You see, I don’t want to see you, Thomas.”

He felt himself blanch, her words unexpectedly like a blow to him.

She moved her gaze from the young couple to him, apparently saw something on his face, and said quickly, “No, no. I’ve said that badly. What I mean is that I don’t want to want to see you. There’s too much danger in that for me. There’s . . .” Again she diverted her gaze from him, but this time she put it on the candle’s flame. It guttered as someone new entered the wine bar. Voices called out a greeting to the young lovers at the table. Someone said, “Don’t trust that bastard, Jennie,” and someone else laughed.

Daidre said, “There’re too many possibilities for pain here. And I promised myself some time ago . . . It’s that I’ve had enough of pain. And I hate saying that to you, of all people, because what you’ve endured and what you’ve somehow come out whole from having endured makes anything I’ve gone through in my little life a very paltry thing and believe me, I know it.”

It was her honesty that he admired, Lynley realised as she spoke. It was her honesty that he knew he could grow to love. Understanding this, he was in that moment as afraid as she was, and he wanted to tell her this. But instead he said, “Dear Daidre—”

“God, that sounds like the beginning of the end,” she declared. “Or something very like.”

He laughed, then. “Not at all,” he said. He considered their predicament from several different angles as he took up his wineglass and drank. He said, “What if you and I screw up our courage and approach the precipice?”

“What precipice would that be exactly?”

“The one in which we admit that we care for each other. I care for you. You care for me. Perhaps we’d both rather not since, let’s face it, caring for anyone is a messy business. But it’s happened and if we get it into the air between us, we can decide what, if anything, we’d like to do about it.”

“We know the truth of things, Thomas,” she said firmly and, he thought, a little fiercely. “I don’t belong in your world. And no one knows that better than you.”

“But that’s what’s at the bottom of the precipice, Daidre. And just now . . . Well, isn’t the truth that we don’t even know if we want to jump?”

“Anything can lead to jumping,” she said. “Oh God. Oh God. I don’t want that.”

He could feel her fears. They were as real a presence at the table as was Daidre herself. Their cause was far different from the fears he himself felt, but they were nonetheless as strong as his own. Loss wears so many guises, he thought. He wanted to tell her this, but he did not. The time wasn’t right for it.

He said, “I’m actually willing to approach the precipice on my own, Daidre. I’m willing to say that I care for you, that I would welcome your presence in London for what it might mean in my life to have you closer than an extremely lengthy drive down the M4 to Bristol. Whether you wish to approach the precipice any closer just now . . . ? That’s up to you, but it’s not required.”

She shook her head and her eyes were bright and he wasn’t at all certain what this meant. She clarified with a nearly voiceless “You’re a very good man.”

“Not at all, really. My point is that we can be whatever we wish to be in each other’s life. What that is . . . ? We don’t need to define it here. Now, have you had your dinner? Would you like to have dinner with me? Not here, actually, because I have a few doubts about the quality of their food. But perhaps somewhere nearby?”

She said, “There’s a restaurant at my hotel.” And then she looked horrified and hastily added, “Thomas, you aren’t intended to think I meant . . . because I didn’t mean . . .”

“Of course you didn’t,” he said. “And that’s precisely why it’s so easy for me to say that I care for you.”