Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

Bathsheba herself was rather unnerving, Barbara found. Her resemblance to her sister was so startling that Barbara first concluded that the two women could have impersonated each other. With a closer look, however, Barbara saw that Bathsheba was the mirror image of Angelina: identifying physical marks upon each of them had been reversed, with a beauty mark at the edge of Bathsheba’s left eye which, on Angelina, was on the right, and the same situation with a dimple. Bathsheba also had none of Angelina’s light sprinkling of freckles, but this would have been owing to keeping herself out of the sun.

She also had none of Angelina’s warmth, although, Barbara reckoned, that warmth had just been a ruse to ease Barbara into not noticing the myriad ways in which Angelina had been, from the first, planning her escape with Hadiyyah. Chances were very good that both women were, by nature, as sly as anacondas hiding hungrily behind one’s sofa. She made a mental note to take care, to keep her eyes open and her wits in ready-for-anything mode.

As things turned out, she needn’t have worried. Once Barbara let it be known that she was there under false pretences, that this really wasn’t about purchasing a £25,000 focal point for a state-of-the-art flat along the river in Wapping, Bathsheba Ward was less than pleased and didn’t try to hide it.

“I’ve been contacted already about this matter,” she said. They were at a conference table in her office where, in advance of their meeting, she’d spread out photographs of some of her work in situ. It was dead gorgeous and Barbara told her as much before she dropped the unfortunate bomb of her real reason for this call upon the furniture designer’s valuable time. “That private detective person . . . the one my sister’s whatever-he-is hired to find her . . . ? I told him I have no idea where Angelina is or with whom she might currently be cohabitating because, believe me, she will be cohabitating with someone. She might have moved in next door to me, and I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen her in years.”

“Expect you’d recognise her, though,” Barbara said sardonically.

“Being identical twins doesn’t extend to having identical thoughts, Sergeant . . .” She looked at Barbara’s card, which she held in manicured fingers. As she’d spoken, she’d moved to her desk upon which sat photographs of a beaky-faced man who was, presumably, her husband, along with photographs of two young adults—one with a toddler in arms—who were, also presumably, her stepchildren from that beaky husband’s first marriage. “. . . Havers,” Bathsheba finished, reading Barbara’s surname from the card. The card itself she tossed on the desk.

“She’s managed to disappear without leaving a trail,” Barbara told her. “All her belongings’re gone, and so far we’ve not been able to trace how she got her gear to wherever she got it, along with Hadiyyah’s.”

“Perhaps she got her ‘gear’”—Bathsheba made the word sound like cow dung —“over to Oxfam, deposited it there, and waved farewell to it. She’d hardly leave a trail of shipping slips if she’d done that, wouldn’t you say?”

“A possibility,” Barbara admitted. “But so is having someone’s assistance, along the lines of she-doesn’t-ship-it-but-someone-else-does. We’ve also not been able to find any means of her leaving Chalk Farm. Public transport, taxi, minicab. It’s like she beamed herself out of the place. Or someone else did the beaming for her.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be me,” Bathsheba said. “And if you’ve tracked no one else who helped her, perhaps you ought to be thinking something a little more ominous than you’ve been thinking.”

“Such as?”

Bathsheba pushed her chair away from her desk. Both the desk and the chair were her own pieces: sleek and modern with gorgeous bits of various unnameable woods worked into them. She herself was sleek and modern as well, with the same long and light hair as her sister, with a fashion sense that accentuated everything about her that was trim and lithe. She looked like someone who spent hours sweating in the company of a personal trainer. Even her earlobes looked as if they’d been given marching orders as to what kind of workout would keep them as youthful and vigorous as possible. She said, “I do wonder if you or that man—the detective man—might have given thought to Angelina and her daughter having been disposed of.”

It took a moment for Barbara to work out what Bathsheba meant, so casually had the remark been made. “You mean murdered? By whom, exactly? There wasn’t a single sign of violence in the flat, and she’d left a message on my answer machine that didn’t sound like someone was forcing her into pretending she was doing a runner while in reality holding a knife to her throat.”

Bathsheba raised her well-developed shoulders. “I have no explanation for that message, obviously. But I do wonder . . . Everyone seems so intent upon believing him, you see.”

“Who?”

Bathsheba’s eyes—blue and large like her sister’s—opened wider. “Surely you don’t need me to spell out . . . ?”

“Are you talking about Azhar? Doing what? Murdering Angelina and Hadiyyah—his own daughter, for God’s sake—and then putting on a BAFTA-worthy performance of grief for the past five weeks? What’d he do with their bodies, in your vision of how things happened?”

“Buried them, I’d suppose.” She smiled ghoulishly. “You do see how it could have been, I hope. None of us—her family—have seen Angelina in years. We wouldn’t know from Adam or Eve if she went missing. All I’m suggesting is what might be possible.”

“All you’re suggesting is something ludicrous. Have you met Azhar?”

“Once. Long ago. Angelina brought him to a wine bar to show him off. She was like that, my sister. Always wanting me to know what she’d managed to accomplish, what made her absolutely unique. To be frank, she hated being a twin as much as I did. Our parents shoved twinship down our throats. I daresay even today they’re not entirely sure of our names. To them, we were always ‘the twins.’ Sometimes we got lucky and became ‘the girls.’”

Barbara hadn’t missed the past tense, and she pointed this out. Any implication made no difference to Bathsheba Ward. She said in turn that she hadn’t seen her sister since a day in a South Kensington Starbucks where they’d met in order that Angelina might triumphantly announce her pregnancy ten years earlier.

“There was no further point after that,” Bathsheba said. “My sister would have trotted out that child or the fact of that child every time we spoke.”

“No kids of your own?” Barbara asked shrewdly.

“Two, as you can see from the pictures.” She indicated the frames on her desks.

“Look a bit old to be yours.”

“Children don’t necessarily need to be . . . how do they put it? . . . the fruit of one’s own loins.”

Barbara wondered if women had loins. She also wondered what the bloody hell “loins” were when it came to Homo sapiens . But she recognised the inherent uselessness of leading their conversation in that direction. The only topic remaining to them was Bathsheba’s reference to her sister fleeing Azhar into the arms of another man. Did Bathsheba have anything she wished to offer on that front? Barbara asked. Did Bathsheba know, for example, that Angelina had left Azhar once before, spending a year away from both him and Hadiyyah in a location that they had referred to as Canada but that might, in reality, have been anywhere on the planet?

“I’m not surprised” was Bathsheba’s airy reply.

“Why not?”

“I assume things between her and whatever-his-name-is became a little too tame for Angelina. So if you’re looking for her now and you’ve convinced yourself that he didn’t harm them, then look among men who are different from Angelina, in the way whatever-his-name-is is different.”