Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

“That’s the screw in the works,” Barbara acknowledged. “What I reckon is that once Di Massimo worked out how much money the Mura family has, he planned one of those typical Italian kidnappings. Think of it: Here’s a country with a big tradition of holding people for months to get what they want. Sometimes the demand comes quickly; sometimes they like to wait till the family is ready to blow itself to bits with worry. Look at the poor Getty kid all those years ago.”

“I doubt the Muras have pockets quite so deep as the Gettys,” Lynley said evenly, watching Barbara. Her upper lip looked damp.

“True. But what I reckon is everything depended on what Di Massimo wanted. Was it money, land, cooperation, stock options, political influence . . . who the bloody hell knows? I mean, how much do we know about the Muras, sir? What does Di Massimo know that we don’t?”

“You’re doing a great deal of ‘reckoning,’” Lynley said. His tone was dry and he felt, rather than saw, Isabelle glance his way.

“I was thinking the same,” she said to Havers.

“Well, right. Yes. Of course. But isn’t our part of the investigation to turn over what we have to this bloke in Italy . . . What’s his name, sir?”

“Salvatore Lo Bianco. But he’s been replaced. I’ve no idea who has the case now.”

“Right. Well. I expect we can sort that out with a phone call. Point is that it’s an Italian situation and it seems to me our part is finished.”

Of course, their part wasn’t finished at all, and Lynley waited for Havers to bring up all those things that she was leaving out of what was going for her report to the superintendent. The list of those things was topped by one-way tickets to Pakistan. The fact that she was saying nothing about them was so damning that Lynley felt its pressure upon his chest like a pallet of bricks.

Havers said, “Far as I can tell and far as the records’re going to show, no crime was committed on British soil, guv. Everything’s up to the Italians now.”

Isabelle nodded. She said, “Include that in your written report, Sergeant. I don’t want another day to pass without my seeing it on my desk.”

Havers remained where she was, obviously waiting for more. When nothing else appeared to be forthcoming, she said, “That’s it?”

“For now. Thank you.”

It was more than clear that Isabelle was dismissing her. It was additionally clear that she wasn’t dismissing Lynley. Havers caught this and Lynley saw her do so. She cast a look in his direction before she took herself out of the superintendent’s office.

When the door closed behind her, Isabelle stood. She went to her window and gazed at the sunny day outside, at what she could see of rooftops and fresh green treetops and in the distance St. James’s Park. Lynley waited. He knew more was coming from her or she would have dismissed him along with Barbara.

She went to a filing cabinet and brought out a manila folder. She returned to her desk. She handed it to him wordlessly, and he knew that whatever was within it was something he wasn’t going to want to see. He could tell that much from her expression, which seemed caught in the undecided no-man’s-land between hardness and compassion. The hardness came from the set of her jaw. The compassion came from her eyes.

She sat again. He put on his reading glasses and opened the folder. It contained a series of documents. They were official activities reports, but the activities they documented were unofficial in the extreme. Every out-of-line and off-the-record move Barbara Havers had made since the earlier time of being put to work as a member of John Stewart’s team was contained in the report of activities. Stewart had continued this surveillance of her after Isabelle had reassigned her. He had assigned two detective constables to shadow Havers, to check on her work or the lack thereof, to confirm the reasons for her every absence from the Yard. He’d verified details about her mother’s life in Greenford at the home of Florence Magentry. He’d identified every person with whom she met: Mitchell Corsico, the family of Taymullah Azhar, Dwayne Doughty, Emily Cass, Bryan Smythe. The only thing missing was SO12. There was no mention of the airline tickets to Pakistan. Lynley wasn’t sure why this was the case except that as it had to do with Barbara’s actions inside the Met’s actual buildings, perhaps there had been no need to shadow her. Or, he thought, perhaps John Stewart was holding back on this as the pièce de résistance on the off chance that Isabelle decided to do nothing about what his unauthorised investigation had revealed.

Lynley handed the report back when he’d finished it. He said the only thing he could. “You and I both know you’re going to have to do something about him, Isabelle. That he’d be using the Met’s manpower to conduct his own investigation . . . It’s outrageous and we both know that. Did any of this”—with what he hoped was a dismissive gesture at Stewart’s paperwork—“get in the way of Barbara’s completion of whatever John assigned her to do? If not, then what does it matter that she did this as well?”

Her gaze upon him was perfectly even and quintessentially Isabelle. She looked at him unspeaking for a good thirty seconds in which she kept her gaze on him before she said quietly, “Tommy.”

He had to break the look. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say and he certainly didn’t want to know what she might ask of him.

She said, “You know that Barbara’s completion of John’s assignments isn’t the point. Nor is the when and how of her completing them. You know that what occurred just now among the three of us says it all. I know you know that. In what we do, there’s no place for a sin of omission, no matter who’s involved.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to do what needs to be done.”

He wanted to plead, which told him how far he himself had waded into the river into which Barbara Havers had dived headlong. But he did not do so. Instead he said, “Will you give me a few days to deal with this? To try to sort things out?”

“Do you actually suppose there’s something to sort at this point? More important, do you really think there’s something exculpatory that will come out of the sorting?”

“There probably isn’t, but I’m asking all the same.”

She picked up the folder and tapped the papers within it neatly so that they were aligned. She handed it to him and said, “Very well. This is your copy. I’ve another. Do what you must.”

SOUTH HACKNEY

LONDON

He was caught between anger and sorrow, in the land of others’ expectations of him. He asked himself what sort of person he seemed to be to other people and in particular to his longtime partner Barbara Havers. She clearly expected him to hold his tongue, to take her part, to be the breathing personification of like-a-bridge-over-troubled-water in her life, no matter what she did or how far out of order she took herself. This expectation on her part angered him: not only that she would have it but that he would have—through his own past actions—somehow schooled her into having it. And what, he wondered, did that say about him as an officer of the Met?

More, what did the information contained within John Stewart’s report say about Barbara, and what was he to do with what it said? He needed to think about this and to consider it from every angle, and he couldn’t do so standing in the corridor at the door to Isabelle’s office, so he took himself down to the underground car park—avoiding conversation with everyone on his way—and he climbed into the Healey Elliott. There, he opened the manila folder and read every word of the damning information inside and tried like the devil to think what it meant beyond what DI Stewart wanted it to show, which was Barbara’s normal means of doing business, with her the living embodiment of going her own way whenever the inclination came upon her.