Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

Azhar was absolute stone. It was as if his mind had begun screaming at once: do nothing, say nothing, wait, wait, wait. And this was good advice that his mind was giving him, Salvatore acknowledged silently. But the vein throbbing in his temple was betraying his body’s reaction to the change of subject.

An innocent man would have no such reaction, and Salvatore knew this. What he also thus knew was that the London professor was well aware that Angelina Upman’s death was far more than the result of an unfortunate misdiagnosis on the part of her doctors.

He’d very nearly got away with it. Just a few hours more on the day Salvatore had requested his passport and he’d have been back in London, from where only the lengthy and complicated process of extradition could have wrested him, if it managed to wrest him at all.

Greco said abruptly, “Say nothing,” to Azhar. Then he turned in his chair and went on to Salvatore with, “I insist that you explain yourself, Ispettore , before I allow my client to reply. What is this you’re now talking about?”

“I’m talking about murder,” Salvatore told him.

VICTORIA

LONDON

Lynley waited until late in the day to speak to Barbara Havers, two hours after Isabelle Ardery had buttonholed him in her office. She’d wanted to know how his “sorting out” was going, and who could blame her? On her watch, an officer under her command had gone off the rails and was, for all intents and purposes, continuing to do so. Lynley’s brief was to complete the incomplete picture of John Stewart’s reports on Barbara’s activities, but he didn’t know how to do it without sinking Barbara’s entire career.

Part of him was shouting that it bloody well deserved to be sunk. Her connection to Mitchell Corsico alone was enough to put her back in uniform. When one took into account everything else—from withholding information to outright lying about details relevant to a case—she was finished in police work. He knew this intellectually. It was emotionally that he couldn’t accept that there were consequences involved and that Barbara Havers had to face them. His heart was arguing that she’d had very good reasons for betraying every tenet of their profession and, in time, everyone would accept that.

That was, of course, the lie. Not only would everyone not accept it, it was a form of insanity on his part to expect them to do so. He himself couldn’t accept what she’d done. He wouldn’t, he knew, be in so much turmoil if he wholeheartedly embraced how Barbara had behaved.

He chose the Met’s library for his meeting with Barbara. Any other place and they would be seen. At this time of day, so late in the afternoon, it was unlikely that anyone else would be on the thirteenth floor. So he asked her to join him there, and there he waited. She came in reeking of cigarette smoke. She’d had a fag in one of the stairwells, another infraction but it mattered little set beside everything else that had been going on.

They walked to one of the windows. From here, the London Eye dominated the skyline, with each of its capsules crowded with spectators, and the spires of Parliament poked hopefully upward, towards a sky that today was the colour of old pewter. It exactly matched his mood, Lynley thought.

“Been there?” Havers said to him.

For a moment he didn’t know what she meant till he glanced at her and saw that she was looking upon the enormous Ferris wheel. He shook his head and told her he hadn’t. She nodded, said, “Neither have I. It’s the glass cars or whatever they are. I don’t think I’d fancy being inside with a crowd of tourists jostling each other to get a snap of Big Ben.”

“Ah. Yes.”

And then nothing. He turned from the view and took from his jacket pocket the copy of the greeting card that Salvatore Lo Bianco had sent to him. He handed it over to Barbara. She said, “What’s—” but her words faded as she read what was on it.

Lynley said to her, “Earlier, you told me that khushi was unfamiliar to you. This was found where Hadiyyah was kept hidden. Azhar has confirmed, by the way, that this khushi was his pet name for Hadiyyah. You’ve known the two of them how long, Barbara?”

“Who?” she asked, although she seemed to have some trouble with the word.

“Barbara . . .”

“All right. Two years this month. But you know that, don’t you, so why’re you asking?”

“Because I find it impossible to believe that in that time you never heard her father call her khushi . And yet that’s precisely what you asked me to believe. That and other things as well.”

“Anyone could have known—”

“Who, exactly?” Lynley felt the first piercings of an anger he’d been holding at bay since this entire miserable affair had begun. “Do you want to argue that Angelina Upman arranged for the kidnapping of her own daughter? Or Lorenzo Mura? Or . . . who else is there who ‘might have known,’ as you say, that her father called her khushi ? An unidentified schoolmate, Barbara? A fellow nine-year-old with kidnap on his mind?”

“Bathsheba Ward would have known,” Barbara said. “If she posed as Azhar in emails to Hadiyyah, she would have called her khushi .”

“And then what, for God’s sake?”

“And then kidnapped her to hurt Angelina. Or to hurt Azhar. Or to . . . Bloody hell, I don’t know.”

“And she managed to duplicate his handwriting as well? Is that part of what you wish to argue? I’d like to hear the full story of how it all played out, from the moment that child went missing in Lucca to the moment her mother ended up in a grave.”

“He didn’t kill her!”

In frustration, Lynley walked away from her. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. He wanted to put his fist through a wall. He wanted to break one of the thirteenth-floor windows. Anything other than to have to continue this conversation with a woman so deliberately blind to what was before her. “For the love of God,” he tried a final time, “Barbara, can’t you see—”

“Those tickets to Pakistan,” she cut in. He could see that her upper lip had begun to sweat, and he reckoned she had her hands so tightly fisted in order to keep them from shaking. “They tell you that. Because why the bloody hell would Azhar purchase one-way tickets to Pakistan if he knew Angelina was going to be dead and Hadiyyah would be returned to him permanently?”

“Because he knew very well that when it came down to it, when everything finally met the light of day, you’d be standing there doing exactly what you’re doing: refusing to see what’s in front of your eyes. And you have to ask yourself why you’re doing that, Barbara, why you’re throwing away your career on the off chance that the rest of us won’t eventually hunt down every single detail that proves Taymullah Azhar was involved in each aspect of what’s happened to his daughter and what happened to Angelina Upman.”

At that, for a moment, he believed he’d got through to her. He believed that she would make a clean breast of everything she knew and everything she was hiding. She would do it, he thought, because she’d worked at his side for years, because she’d borne witness to what had led to the death of his wife and to what had followed, because she trusted him to have her best interests at heart, because she knew what was demanded of anyone who carried a warrant card and had a place at the Met.

She went back to the window and her fist pounded lightly on its sill. She said, “Those tickets to Pakistan suggest things. I see that, sir. As far as the kidnapping goes, those tickets and when they were bought and the fact that they are one-way only . . . They make things . . . difficult for Azhar. But you have to see they also eliminate him as a suspect for Angelina’s murder. Because with Angelina dead, he’d have no need to run to Pakistan with Hadiyyah. She’d been given back to him.”