Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

Lynley cast a glance at the ground-floor flat inside the conversion as he made his way along the paved path towards the back of the villa. This was, he knew, the home occupied by Barbara’s friend Taymullah Azhar, and the lights within it were still blazing out onto the terrace in front of the flat’s French windows. He assumed from his conversation with Barbara that she’d been inside her own digs when he’d spoken to her, though, and when he got behind the villa, he saw the lights were on inside her bungalow as well.

He knocked quietly. He heard a chair scraping against the floor. The door swung open.

He was unprepared for the sight of her. He said, “God in heaven. What have you done?”

He thought in terms of ancient rites of mourning in which women chopped off their hair and poured ashes upon the stubble that remained. She’d done the first, but she’d skipped the second. There were, however, ashes aplenty on the small table in what went for the kitchen. She’d sat there for hours, it seemed to Lynley, and in a glass dish that had served as her ashtray, the remains of at least twenty cigarettes lay crushed, spilling burnt offerings everywhere.

Barbara looked ravaged by emotion. She smelled like the inside of a fireplace. She was wearing an ancient chenille dressing gown in a hideous shade of mushy-peas green, and her sockless feet were tucked into her red high-top trainers.

She said, “I left him over there. I said I’d be back but I haven’t been able to. I didn’t know what to tell him. I thought if you came . . . Why didn’t you ring me? Couldn’t you tell . . . Bloody hell, sir, where the hell . . . Why didn’t you . . . ?”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t hear you on my mobile. I was . . . It doesn’t matter. Tell me what happened.”

Lynley took her arm and guided her to the table. He took away the glass dish of cigarette dog ends as well as an unopened packet of Players and a box of kitchen matches. He put all of this on the worktop of her kitchen area, where he also set the kettle to boil. He rustled in a cupboard and came up with two bags of PG Tips as well as some artificial sweetener, and he excavated through a sink filled with unwashed crockery till he discovered two mugs. He washed them, dried them, and went to the small refrigerator. Its contents were as appalling as he’d expected they would be, heavily given to takeaway food cartons and to-be-heated ready-made meals, but among all of this he found a pint of milk. He brought it out as the kettle clicked off.

Throughout everything, Havers was silent. This was completely uncharacteristic of her. In all the time he’d known the detective sergeant, she’d never been without a comment to toss in his direction, particularly in a situation like this one in which he was not only making tea but actually giving some thought to toast as well. It rather unnerved him, this silence of hers.

He brought the tea to the table. He placed a mug in front of her. There was another sitting near to where the cigarettes had been, and he removed this. It was cold, a skin of someone’s indifference to it floating on its surface.

Havers said, “That was his. I did the same thing. What is it about tea and our bloody society?”

“It’s something to do,” Lynley told her.

“When in doubt, make tea,” she said. “I could do with a whiskey. Or gin. Gin would be nice.”

“Have you any?”

“’Course not. I don’t want to be one of those old ladies who sip gin from five o’clock in the afternoon till they’re comatose.”

“You’re not an old lady.”

“Believe me, it’s out there.”

Lynley smiled. Her remark was a slight improvement. He pulled the other chair out from the table and joined her. “Tell me.”

Havers spoke of a woman called Angelina Upman, the apparent mother of Taymullah Azhar’s daughter. Lynley himself had met both Azhar and the girl Hadiyyah, and he’d known that the mother of this child had been out of the picture for some time prior to Barbara’s purchase of the leasehold on her bungalow. But he’d not been told that Angelina Upman had waltzed back into the lives of Azhar and Hadiyyah the previous July, and he’d never learned that not only were Azhar and the mother of his child not married but also that Azhar’s name was not on the birth certificate of the girl.

Other details came pouring forth, and Lynley tried to keep up with them. It hadn’t been due to the fashion of the times that Azhar and Angelina Upman had remained unmarried. Rather, there had been no marriage possible between them because Azhar had left his legal wife for Angelina, and this was a woman he’d refused to divorce. With her, he had two other children. Where they all lived was something Barbara didn’t know.

What she did know was that Angelina had seduced Azhar and Hadiyyah into believing she’d returned to take her rightful place in their lives. She needed to obtain their trust, Barbara said, so that she could lay her plans and execute them.

“That’s why she came back,” Barbara told him. “To get everyone’s trust. Mine included. I’ve been a bloody idiot most of my life. But this one . . . I’ve sodding outdone myself.”

“Why did you never tell me any of this?” Lynley asked.

“Which part?” Havers asked. “Because the bloody idiot part I would’ve expected you already knew.”

“The part about Angelina,” he said. “The part about Azhar’s wife, the other children, the divorce or lack thereof. All of that. Any of that. Why didn’t you tell me? Because you certainly must have felt . . .” He could say no more. Havers had never spoken of her feelings either for Azhar or for his young daughter, and Lynley had never asked. It had seemed more respectful to say nothing when the truth, he admitted, was that saying nothing had just been the easier thing to do.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yeah. Well, you were occupied anyway. You know.”

He knew she was talking about his affair with their superior officer at the Met. He’d been discreet. So had Isabelle. But Havers was no fool, she hadn’t been born recently, and she was nothing if not acutely percipient when it came to him.

He said, “Yes. Well. That’s over, Barbara.”

“I know.”

“Ah. Right. I expect you do.”

Havers turned her tea mug in her hands. Lynley saw it bore a caricature of the Duchess of Cornwall, helmet-haired and square-smiled. Unconsciously, she covered this caricature with her hand as if in apology to the unfortunate woman. She said, “I didn’t know what to tell him, sir. I came home from work and I found him sitting on my front step. He’d been there hours, I think. I took him back to his flat once he’d told me what happened—that she’d taken off and that Hadiyyah was with her—and I had a look round and I swear to God, when I saw she’d taken everything with her, I didn’t know what to do.”

Lynley considered the situation. It was more than difficult and Havers knew this, which was why she’d been immobilised. He said, “Take me to his flat, Barbara. Put on some clothes and take me to his flat.”

She nodded. She went to the wardrobe and rooted around for some clothes, which she clutched to her chest. She started to head towards the bathroom, but she stopped. She said to him, “Ta for not mentioning the hair, sir.”

Lynley looked at her shorn and ruined head. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Get dressed, Sergeant.”

CHALK FARM

LONDON

Barbara Havers felt appreciably better now that Lynley had arrived. She knew she should have been able to do something to take hold of the reins of the situation, but Azhar’s grief had undone her. He was a self-contained man and had always been so in the nearly two years that she had known him. As such, he’d played his cards so close that most of the time she could have sworn he had no cards at all. To see him broken by what his lover had done and to know that she herself should have recognised from their first meeting that something was up with Angelina Upman and with all of Angelina Upman’s overtures of friendship towards her . . . This was enough to break Barbara as well.