Just One Evil Act

“She’s capable of evil,” Barbara noted.

“Perhaps we all are,” Azhar said quietly.

It was as good an entree as she was going to get. She said, “Where do things stand between you now, Azhar? Between you and Angelina?”

“We have an uneasy peace. I hope that trust might develop between us in time. There has been little enough of that in the past.”

“Trust,” she noted. “Always important in relationships, isn’t it?”

He didn’t reply. He was looking at his tea. She said his name questioningly. He looked up then, and when their gazes met, she tried to read his dark eyes for something—anything—that would tell her he hadn’t used her in the worst possible way, putting everything she was and everything she had in jeopardy. She saw nothing. His eyes looked peculiarly flat, and she tried to tell herself their lack of depth was owing to the overhead light.

She forged ahead. “Dwayne Doughty was someone you shouldn’t have trusted, Azhar. I’m partly responsible, I reckon, because I took you to him. I checked him out, and he seemed completely on the up-and-up. He probably is in a lot of ways, long as what he’s asked to do is perfectly in order and on the up-and-up as well. When it isn’t, though . . . ? When something tempts him . . . ? He protects himself. I expect you didn’t know that, did you?”

Still he said nothing. But he reached for her packet of Players and he lit one and she could see that his hand wasn’t steady. So could he. He glanced at her as he shook the match out. He waited. Good move on his part, she thought.

She said, “Doughty’s office is wired. Both for film and for sound. In his line of work, it’s not a bad idea when you think of it. And I should have thought of it. Or perhaps you should have.” She lit a cigarette herself. She saw that her own hands were none too steady. “So every meeting you and I had with him is documented, backed up, signed, sealed, and whatever. So is every meeting you had with him alone. ’Course, I don’t know how many there were—those you-and-him meetings—’cause he only showed me two. But then, two was all it took, Azhar.”

The Pakistani man had gone as pale as someone with pecan-coloured skin could go. He said in a nearly inaudible voice, “I did not know how . . .” But he did not continue.

She said, “How what, Azhar? How to tell me? How to get Hadiyyah back? Or how bloody wretched I was going to feel when I saw the film of you making the suggestion that you and our Dwayne find a way that she could be snatched? How what? You’d best tell me because the water you’re in is hot and promising to get a hell of a lot hotter now you’re back in London.”

“I did not know what else to do, Barbara.”

“About what? Hadiyyah? Angelina? Life? What?”

“That day I rang you in December,” he said. “You were in Oxford Street. You remember this. I rang to tell you that Mr. Doughty had found no trace.” He waited for her nod before continuing. “I lied to you. He told me that day that he had traced her to Italy on Bathsheba’s passport. Hadiyyah’s passport was the same, of course. He found that they had landed in Pisa, but there the trail ended.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you lie?”

“He said that we—he and I—could hire an Italian detective if I wished. It would be costly, he said, for an Italian to conduct a search such as we needed, but if I wished him to carry on . . . ? This, of course, I wished. So he hired a Pisan, and the Pisan eventually found them. Mr. Doughty reported it all to me as the Pisan discovered it: Lucca, the farm in the hills, Lorenzo Mura, Angelina’s presence at his farm, Hadiyyah’s presence, the name of her school. All of it. Everything. I could tell this man was very thorough. I asked myself what was possible with so thorough a man. Could he, I wondered, discover more? What their days were like? What their lives were like? This I asked Mr. Doughty, and he made the arrangements for the Pisan detective to do more research. This the man did. He made a report of their daily movements. The markets they went to, the shops they frequented, their lives on the farm, the mercato near Porta Elisa, Angelina’s yoga class, Hadiyyah’s watching and listening to the accordion player. All of this the Pisan detective sorted out. He was very good.”

“When?” Barbara’s throat felt sore and dry, and she gulped down tea to relieve the tightness in it. “When did you know everything? Everything you just told me.”

“All of the details? In February. By the end of the month.”

“And you didn’t tell me.” Instead, he had let her agonise about his state of mind, about his daughter, about what to do and how to make things different for him, her friend. “What kind of friendship—”

“No!” He crushed out his cigarette so abruptly that he upended the ashtray and the sodden tea bags within it. Neither of them moved to alter the mess that dripped onto the table like the remains of a doused fire. “You must not think this. You must not think I valued you any less because I kept silent about this. I believed that at the end of the knowledge I had acquired about Angelina and where she’d taken my daughter was losing her completely. You must understand this. I have no rights. Not without tests, which Angelina would have denied me. And not without a case brought to court and where would that court case be held? Here? In Italy? And Angelina would fight like a tiger if it came to a court case and through all this would Hadiyyah be dragged and how could I do that to my own daughter?”

“So you did . . . what, Azhar? What the bloody hell did you do?”

“If there is a film and you have seen it, then you know what I have done.”

“You planned her kidnapping. You planned it to take place when you were in Berlin with a cast-iron alibi. You knew Angelina would turn up here. And then what, for God’s sake? You would go to Italy and play the part of the distraught father in search of his daughter till she turned up unharmed in some village God knows where after having been traumatised—” To her horror, her voice broke and she felt the swelling behind her eyes that signalled tears were on their way.

“I could see no other way,” he said. “You must understand this, Barbara. It seemed to me the lesser evil. And this man in Italy . . . he had his instructions. Tell Hadiyyah he was going to bring her to me, call her khushi so she will know it’s the truth, take her to a very safe place where she will not be frightened, and when word is sent to you, take her to a town or a village that will be named—because I myself will have gone to Italy and will have found that village and will know it is safe—and release her close to the police station there because I will have found the police station in advance. Thus she will be returned by those police to her mother at once, but I will be there as well. And having gone through this trial, having seen me there suffering as she herself will suffer, Angelina will no longer deny Hadiyyah her father because Hadiyyah will see me there in Italy and she will want her father back in her life.”

Barbara shook her head. “No. That’s not it. You could have accomplished the same bloody thing by turning up on the doorstep of that farmhouse or whatever the hell it is and saying, ‘Yoo-hoo, surprise, I’m here to collect the daughter you snatched.’ If you knew the school, you could have gone to the school. You could have shown up in the market yourself. You could have done a dozen different things, but instead—”

“You do not see. Angelina had to feel. And none of those things would have allowed her to feel. She had to see what she had done to me. She had to feel in equal measure. It was the only way. You must know this, Barbara, as you know Angelina.”

“You’ve bollocksed everything up. You must know that.”

“What I did not know was that this Italian detective would hire someone else to carry the plan off. I still do not know why he did that. But so he did, and that person was killed as he went to fetch Hadiyyah from the Alps. And then none of us knew where he had taken her. And then I saw how badly I had gone wrong with this plan. But what was I to do at that point? What would you have done? Had I told the truth . . . Have you any idea what Angelina would have done then, had she learned that Hadiyyah’s father had arranged for her kidnapping? You cannot think she would have dealt with me in a way that indicated a sudden understanding of how much I wanted and was desperate for my daughter’s return.”

“There are trails, Azhar,” Barbara said. Other than numb to her soul, she wasn’t sure what else she felt and, worse, she found herself wondering if she would ever feel anything again other than numb to her soul. “There are trails between you and Doughty. And who paid Di Massimo? You? And what about the other bloke? Who the bloody hell paid him? You can’t be thinking that all of this mess was handled without a trace of your involvement, and once the Italians sort this out—which they will, let me tell you—then how exactly are you going to commune with Hadiyyah from inside a bloody Italian prison? And how the hell is Angelina going to feel when she learns you were behind the whole thing? And what sodding court in the world is going to allow you shared custody