Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

He sighed. On a table between the two windows that looked out into Eaton Terrace, his wedding picture with Helen still stood in a silver frame. In it she laughed at his side among a small group of their friends. He picked it up and saw that in it, rapt and lucky, he gazed upon her.

He set the picture down and turned from it. Denton, he saw, was in the doorway.

Their gazes met, held, and then Charlie looked away. He said lightly, “Got your gear out. Few things that you’ll need but you better check through it. I looked up the weather. It’ll be warm. Printed your boarding pass. Gatwick to Pisa. You’ve a car at the airport.”

“Thank you, Charlie,” Lynley said. He headed in the direction of the stairs.

“Anything . . .” Denton hesitated.

“Anything?” Lynley said.

Denton’s gaze flicked over to the table where Helen’s picture was, then back to Lynley. “Anything I should set about while you’re gone?”

Lynley knew what Charlie Denton meant. He knew what he thought. It was the same thing everyone thought, but it was also the one thing he himself could not yet bear to address.

He said lightly, “Not that I can think of, Charlie. Just carry on as usual.” It was, of course, what they both did best.

BOW

LONDON

The private detective was Barbara’s only hope once Isabelle Ardery handed the case over to Lynley. Barbara was burning over this and burning over her failure to anticipate what Ardery’s move would be once the story hit The Source , but she knew there was no point in crying over the milk on the floor. The only point was Hadiyyah. Lynley would do what he could to help find her, within the parameters of Italian law and British-Italian police diplomacy. But both of these items were going to hobble him, and to expect Barbara to remain in London at the beck and call of John Stewart without doing something to assist in the search for the girl was lunacy on the superintendent’s part.

So she went to the only place she reckoned help was available, and that was back to Dwayne Doughty and his androgynous assistant Em Cass. She phoned in advance this time. She made a regular appointment for the end of that day. Doughty didn’t sound like a man who was going to start laying down the palm fronds in welcome, so she made sure to add the fact that she wished him to have his retainer figured out in advance as she intended to hire him.

He’d begun with, “Terribly sorry and all that, but I don’t know that I have the time—”

She countered with, “Double the retainer,” which had convinced him to have another think on the topic.

They met not in his office this time but not too far away at a rather trendy pub called the Morgan Arms in Coborn Road. There were tables outside, and at them pub-going smokers hunched in the cool evening air. Barbara would have joined them, but she found that Em Cass was the clean-living type. Apparently passive smoking and success in triathlons did not mix.

They went inside. Barbara took out her chequebook. Doughty said, “Let’s keep the cart and the horse in their respective positions,” before he went to the bar and ordered drinks. He came back with a pint of Guinness for himself, an ale for Barbara, a virtuous mineral water for Em, and a thoughtful four bags of crisps. These he tossed on the table that Barbara had chosen, in a far corner, conveniently distant from a hen party on the other side of the pub, eight women who appeared determined to build up a significant head of prematrimonial steam.

Barbara had no preamble to offer the private detective and his assistant. She said only, “Hadiyyah’s been kidnapped.”

Doughty opened the crisps, one packet at a time. He spilled them onto a napkin that he’d unfolded upon the table. He said, “This is news because . . . ?”

“I don’t mean originally,” Barbara told him. “I don’t mean by her mum. I mean now. A few days ago. She was in Italy and she’s been kidnapped.” She sketched in the details: Lucca, the market, Hadiyyah’s disappearance, Angelina Upman, Lorenzo Mura, and their arrival in Chalk Farm. She left out the bits about Ilford and the brouhaha with Azhar’s legal family. Mostly, she didn’t want to think about them.

“Angelina thinks Azhar took her. That’s why she came to London. She thinks he found her in Tuscany, took her, and has her stowed somewhere.”

“And she thinks this why?”

“Because no one saw anything. There was a crowd of people—it was in the middle of a market—and no one saw Hadiyyah get snatched. So Angelina thinks Hadiyyah wasn’t snatched. She thinks Azhar knew she’d be in the market. She thinks he waited there. She thinks Hadiyyah saw him and went with him. At least that’s what I suspect she thinks since mostly she was just screaming.”

“The child?”

“Angelina. ‘You’ve taken her, where is she, where have you put her, I want her back,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

“And no one saw a thing?”

“Apparently not.”

“These same people in the market, then, also didn’t witness what would have been, I expect, quite a reunion between a nine-year-old and the father she hasn’t seen in five months? I mean, had Mr. Azhar taken her.”

“You’re getting the point,” Barbara said. “I like that about you.”

“How was he supposed to have managed all this?” Doughty asked.

“No clue, but Angelina wasn’t thinking straight. She was in a panic—who wouldn’t be?—and all she wanted was Hadiyyah back. The Italian coppers haven’t made much progress in finding her.”

Doughty nodded. Em Cass took a sip of her mineral water. Barbara downed some ale and a handful of crisps. Not salt-and-vinegar—her favourite—but they would do. She was suddenly ravenous.

Doughty shifted his weight in his chair and looked to the windows that gave a view of the people at the tables outside on the pavement. He said, as he inspected them, “Let me ask you this, Miss Havers. How can you be sure the professor didn’t take his daughter? I’ve been in the midst of these sorts of disputes in the past, and be assured about one thing: When it comes to marital breakups and children—”

“This isn’t a marriage.”

“We can forego the niceties. They’ve been, for all intents and purposes, man and wife, no? So when it comes to relationship breakups in which children are involved, anything can happen and it usually does.”

“How is he supposed to have snatched her? And what was he supposed to be thinking? That he could grab Hadiyyah, bring her back to London, and not find Angelina on his doorstep the very next day? And how was he supposed to have found her in the first place?”

Em Cass spoke. “He could have hired an Italian detective, Miss Havers, much the same way he hired Dwayne. If he somehow found out on his own that Angelina had gone to Italy . . . or if he suspected it . . . Like Dwayne says, in this kind of situation, anything can happen.”

“Right. Whatever. Okay. Let’s say somehow Azhar sussed out she was in Italy. Let’s say that he then unearthed an Italian private detective. Let’s even say that detective—God only knows how . . . perhaps going door-to-door all over the bleeding country—actually found Hadiyyah and reported this to him. That doesn’t change the fact that Azhar was in Germany when Hadiyyah was taken. He was at a conference and there’re going to be a few hundred people, not to mention a hotel and an airline, who can confirm that.”

Doughty looked interested at last. “Now that’s a very nice detail. That’s something checkable and you can rely upon the coppers checking it. The Italians . . . Let’s face it. The country looks disorganised as hell to an outsider, but I expect they know what they’re doing when it comes to mounting an investigation, don’t you?”