Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

“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—”