Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

So that was why he was there, she thought. Lynley had given him the news, but Lorenzo Mura wasn’t about to let Azhar near her. She herself had seen the Italian man’s suspicions regarding Azhar’s feelings for Angelina when they had both turned up in London trying to find Hadiyyah. He wasn’t certain of her, Lorenzo Mura. But then, with her history, who would be?

Barbara wondered briefly about Angelina Upman’s power over men. She wondered briefly about what Angelina Upman could drive a man to do in order to keep her as his lover.

Which brought her, of course, to the reason for her call to Azhar. There was the not insignificant matter of what she’d been told by Dwayne Doughty regarding the information that he and his cohorts had amassed during the winter, not only about the whereabouts of Angelina but also about her sister’s assistance in this disappearance. According to Doughty, every single detail concerning her disappearance had been dutifully passed along to the person who’d hired him to ascertain the whereabouts of the mother and daughter: Taymullah Azhar. But Azhar had told Barbara nothing of these details over the months. So either he was lying to her by omission or Doughty was lying to her with false information.

Of the two, she knew she would believe Azhar. She felt enormous affection for him, and she didn’t want to believe he might trample on that affection with any kind of betrayal.

This was no position for a police investigator to be in, and Barbara realised this. But what she needed to say to Azhar—“Doughty claims you had mountains of information in January, so what did you do with it, my friend?”—simply would not come out. Still, she needed a variation of it or she knew she couldn’t live with herself. So she said, “This whole Italy thing, Azhar . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“Did you ever know or think or even guess she might be in Italy all along?”

“How could I have come up with Italy?” he replied and his reply was quick, easy, and regretful. “She could have been anywhere on the planet. Had I known where to find her, I would have moved heaven and earth to bring Hadiyyah home.”

There was that, Barbara thought. There would always be that: Hadiyyah and what she meant to her father. It was inconceivable that Azhar could have discovered the child’s whereabouts four months earlier and done nothing about it. He simply wasn’t made that way.

But still . . . Once Doughty had raised the spectre of betrayal in Barbara’s mind, it remained on the fringes of her thoughts. Despite what she knew of Azhar and despite what she earnestly believed about him, she was going to have to check up on his Berlin alibi herself. At this point, she couldn’t trust Dwayne Doughty to tell her the truth about anything.

BOW

LONDON

Dwayne Doughty headed for Victoria Park. He wanted to think, and the walk itself as well as the park—should he decide to hike over to Crown Gate East—helped him to do so. To remain in the office would have meant another tête-à-tête with Emily. Her declarations of impending doom were beginning to wear on him. He had long been a believer that—significant precautions having been taken—all was going to be well at the end of the game when they scooped up the poker chips and counted the haul. But Emily didn’t see things this way.

Thus, the last thing he wanted her to know was that he was actually worried. She’d been well absorbed in chasing down the assignation whereabouts of a forty-five-year-old banker and his twenty-two-year-old little bit on the side, so for the most part he’d been able to avoid her. She was very well occupied and only marginally aware of his own activities. But she’d have the goods on the banker within a day or two—photos, credit card receipts, phone information, and everything else—and just as that bloke’s marriage would be kaput as a result, Dwayne’s own arrangement with Emily Cass would be at that point in danger of collapsing. He needed to produce some answers for his assistant. He couldn’t afford to lose her or her range of abilities, and he knew he would if he wasn’t able to sort out what was going on in Italy.

This, in part, was the reason for his walk: thinking first, followed by deciding, and then acting. He began it all with the purchase of a throwaway mobile phone. If he made any dodgy calls from the office, Em would be all over him like an outbreak of smallpox.

Things should have resolved themselves by now. Nothing about this situation had ever been rocket science. He should have had the all-clear, followed by the all’s well, soon to be tagged by an arrivederci . He had none of those and now he knew why. None of them had happened in the first place.

“I don’t know” was the answer he received to his question of “What the hell is going on?” when he placed the call.

“What d’you mean you ‘don’t know’?” was his subsequent demand. “You’re paid to know. You’re paid to make things happen.”

“I set everything in motion as requested. But the plan went foul somewhere and I don’t know where.”

“How in God’s name can you not know where?”

There was a silence. Doughty listened intently. For a moment, he thought he’d lost the connection and he nearly rang off to redial the number. But then the other said, “I couldn’t risk it. Not the way you wanted it done. Using the mercato ? I’d have been remembered.”

“The mercato came from you, not from me, you sodding fool. It didn’t need to be the mercato . It could have been anywhere: the school, a park, on an outing, at the farm.”

“None of that matters. What you do not understand is . . .” A pause and then, “No, you will not blame me. You wished her found, and I found her. I gave you the name. I gave you the place and its location. It was your idea to snatch her, not mine. Had you told me in advance that this was your intention, I never would have come . . . how do you say? . . . onto the train with you.”

“You liked the idea of money well enough when I first found you, you bastard.”

“You will think what you will think, my friend. But the fact that the police have not made progress in finding her tells me my plan was right. Giusto , we say.”

Doughty felt a cold wind dive into his underwear when he heard my plan . There was supposed to be only one plan. His plan. Get the girl, stow her, and wait for his word to move her. That there was another plan which he’d not been told about made it nearly impossible for Doughty to speak. But he managed, “You’re after the Muras’ money, aren’t you? That’s been your scheme from the first.”

“ Pazzo ” was the reply. “You listen like a jealous housewife.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means the cops have found me, sciocco . It means that had I not developed a plan different from yours, I would now be sitting in a gaol cell waiting for il Pubblico Ministero to decide how to deal with me. I am not in a gaol cell for the very reason you wish to berate me: I had a plan. You wished her taken. I arranged her taken. Capisce? ”

Doughty twigged the man’s meaning. “Someone else . . . ? Are you mad? Who took her? What did he do with her? Is it even a he or did you use some poor Italian grandmother in need of cash? How about an Albanian immigrant? Or an African? Or a bloody Romanian gypsy, for that matter? Did you even know who you were tagging to do this job? Or was it someone you picked up off the street?”

“These insults of yours . . . They get us nowhere.”

“I want that kid!”

“I, too, am of the same mind, although I suspect for different reasons. I put things in motion as I told you. Something has happened, and I do not know what. She was being fetched to put an end to this matter, but the . . . the messenger sent to fetch her . . . This is what I do not know.”