Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

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.”