Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

She answered with, “Good news?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Oh God. No.”

“No, no,” Lynley said hastily. “Neither good nor bad news. Just some intriguing information that wants checking out.”

He told her of his meeting with Azhar and his subsequent meeting with Angelina Upman. He told her of the existence of yet another married lover of Angelina’s—in addition to Azhar, this one also in London—being left for Lorenzo Mura.

“D’you mean she was having it off with this bloke while she and Azhar . . . I mean after she had Hadiyyah by Azhar and . . . I mean once Azhar had left his wife . . . I mean . . . Hell, I don’t bloody know what I mean.”

Yes, Lynley said to it all. This man was a fellow dancer and choreographer in London with whom Angelina had been involved at the time she met Lorenzo Mura. And at that time, she also was the lover of Azhar and the mother of his child. The bloke was called Esteban Castro, and according to Angelina Upman, she merely disappeared from his life, giving him no word why. One day she was there in his bed, the next day she was gone, having left him—and Azhar—for Mura. His wife was a friend of hers as well. So both of these people would need to be checked out. For perhaps during the brief four months of Angelina’s putative return to Azhar, she’d taken up with Castro again as well, only to leave him another time.

“But Barbara,” Lynley told her, “this must be done on your own time, not on the Met’s time.”

“But the guv’ll let me get onto this if you ask her, won’t she?” Barbara said. After all, Lynley and Isabelle Ardery hadn’t parted enemies from their own affair. They were both professionals, after all. DI Lynley had been sent to Italy on a case. If he rang and asked her in his most pear-shaped of I’ve-gone-to-Eton tones—

“I did ring her,” he said. “I asked her if she might lend me you to look into this end of things in London. She won’t allow it, Barbara.”

“Because you asked for me,” Barbara said bitterly. “’F you’d asked for Winston, she’d be all over herself to cooperate. We both know that.”

“We didn’t go in that direction,” he said. “I could have asked for Winston but I assumed you’d prefer to do this, no matter when it had to be done.”

There was truth in that. Barbara knew she ought to be grateful to Lynley for having recognised how important it was to her to be kept in the loop of what was going on. So she said, “I s’pose. Thanks, sir.”

He said wryly, “Don’t overwhelm me with your gratitude, Sergeant. I’m not certain I could bear it.”

She had to smile. “I’m tap-dancing on the tabletop here. If you could only see.”

“Where are you?”

She told him.

“You’re going to be late into work,” he said. “Barbara, at some point you have to stop giving Isabelle ammunition.”

“That’s what Winston’s been saying, more or less.”

“And he’s correct. Having a professional death wish isn’t the best of ideas.”

“Right,” she said. “Whatever. Point taken. Anything else?” She was about to ask him how things were going in the direction of Daidre Trahair, but she knew there was little point in this since Lynley wouldn’t tell her. There were lines between them that nothing on earth could make the bloke cross.

“There is,” he said. “Bathsheba Ward.” He went on to tell her about the emails that Bathsheba had apparently written at the request of her twin sister, emails purportedly from Taymullah Azhar from University College to his daughter in Italy.

“That bloody cow lied to me!” Barbara cried in outrage. “She knew all along where Angelina was!”

“It appears that way,” Lynley told her. “So there’s a chance she might know something more about what’s going on now.”

Barbara considered this but she couldn’t come up with a way that Bathsheba Ward might be involved in Hadiyyah’s disappearance, much less a reason for it. Unless Angelina herself was involved.

She said, “How’s Angelina coping, then?”

“Distraught, as you might imagine. Not well physically either, it seems.”

“What about Azhar?”

“Equally so, although far more self-contained.”

“That sounds like him. I wonder how he’s holding it together. He’s been going through hell since last November.”

Lynley told her what the Pakistani man was doing with the handbills of his daughter throughout the town and into the villages that surrounded it. “I think it’s giving him a purpose, more than anything else,” Lynley concluded. “To have to sit and wait while your child is missing . . . That’s intolerable for any parent.”

“Yes. Well. Intolerable describes how it’s been for Azhar.”

“As to that . . .” Lynley hesitated on his end of the conversation.

“What?” Barbara asked, feeling trepidation.

“I know you’re close to him but I do have to ask this. Do we know where he was when Hadiyyah disappeared?”

“At a conference in Berlin.”

“Are we certain of that?”

“Bloody hell, sir, you can’t think—”

“Barbara. Just as everything having to do with Angelina wants looking into, so does everything having to do with Azhar. And with everyone else remotely connected to what’s going on here, so obviously that means Bathsheba Ward as well. Because something is going on here, Barbara. A child doesn’t disappear from the middle of a crowded marketplace with no one knowing a thing about it, with no one seeing anything unusual, with no one—”

“All right, all right,” Barbara said, and she told him about Dwayne Doughty in Bow and to what end she was employing him. They were in the process of eliminating Azhar as a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance. She’d put him onto Esteban Castro next, the man’s wife, and Bathsheba Ward as well, but only if she couldn’t get to these others on her own because she vastly preferred to have her own fingers on the pulse of an enquiry and not be relying on someone else’s.

“Sometimes we have to rely on others” was Lynley’s concluding remark.

Barbara wanted to scoff, but she didn’t. The fact was that of all the officers whom she knew at the Met, relying on others was a characteristic that applied to Lynley least of all.

VICTORIA

LONDON

Barbara passed the day being at the completely cooperative, borderline unctuous, and therefore highly suspect beck and call of DI John Stewart and making sure that Superintendent Ardery saw her obediently, if maddeningly, entering the reports of other officers into the Met’s computer system as if she were a civilian typist and not what she was: a trained officer of the police. She noted that, once or twice, Isabelle Ardery paused in passing from one area to another: observing her, observing Stewart, narrowing her eyes, and frowning as if she disapproved of the cut of Barbara’s hair, which, of course, she did.

Barbara took a few moments here and there to do a little exploring via the World Wide Web. She discovered the whereabouts of Esteban Castro, currently dancing in a West End revival of Fiddler on the Roof —was there dancing in Fiddler on the Roof ? she wondered—as well as teaching dance classes at his own studio in the company of his wife. He was dark-skinned, brooding, smouldering, cropped of hair, heavy-lidded of eye. His publicity pictures showed him in various dancing guises, various poses, and various costumes. He seemed to have the posture and the musculature that went with ballet and the loose body attitude that went with jazz and modern dance. Looking at his pictures, Barbara could see his appeal to a woman looking for excitement . . . or whatever Angelina Upman had been looking for because who the hell knew? She was turning out to be quite the cipher.