Just One Evil Act

Lynley wasn’t sure what his preoccupation actually meant. He’d come into the Yard early upon Isabelle’s request, he’d been buttonholed by John Stewart for an extended and unpleasant conversation about Barbara Havers’s tendency towards insubordination, he’d finally managed to wrest himself away from the other DI, and now as he waited in Isabelle’s office, he realised that he hadn’t taken in whatever it was that Stewart had been implying about Barbara’s performance while on his team.

The reason was Daidre Trahair. They’d had a fine dinner together at her hotel, conversation flowing easily between them until the moment that he’d finally got up the nerve to ask her who Mark was—“That bloke you were speaking to on your mobile when I came into the wine bar?” he said to her when she looked utterly puzzled by the question—and he’d been unaccountably relieved to learn that Mark was her solicitor in Bristol. He would be looking over the contract that London Zoo had offered Daidre because, as she put it, “I’m hopeless when it comes to the ‘party of the first part’ and ‘pursuant to Clause One,’ and that sort of thing, Thomas. Why do you ask about Mark?”

That was certainly the question, he admitted. Why did he ask? He hadn’t been this preoccupied by a woman since before his marriage to Helen. And what was puzzling to him was that Daidre Trahair was absolutely nothing like Helen. He couldn’t quite work out what it meant: that the first woman to interest him seriously was someone completely different from his dead wife. So he had to ask himself if he was truly interested in Daidre or merely interested in making Daidre interested in him.

He’d said to her, “The answer to that question. It’s something I’m working on. Not very adeptly, I’m afraid.”

“Ah,” she said.

“Ah, indeed. Like you, I’m a bit at sixes and sevens.”

“I’m not entirely sure I want to know what you mean.”

“Believe me, I understand,” he’d said.

At the end of their meal, she walked with him through the lobby of the hotel to the front door of the place. It was a large hotel, part of an American chain, the kind of place where businessmen and -women stayed and their comings and goings went largely ignored by the staff. This meant all sorts of things, among which was the fact that when someone went to someone else’s room, no one took note of that unless observation of the CCTV films became necessary later. He found himself acutely aware of this. He felt a sudden need to get out of the place unscathed. And what did that mean? he asked himself. What was bloody wrong with him?

She walked out onto the pavement in his company. There, the night was inordinately pleasant. She said, “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

He said, “Will you tell me when you’ve decided about the job?”

“Of course I will.”

Then they looked at each other, and when he kissed her, it seemed like a natural thing to do. He fingered a piece of her sandy hair that had come loose from the slide at the back of her head, and she reached up and caught his fingers and squeezed them lightly. She said, “You’re a lovely man, Thomas. I would be every way the fool if I didn’t see that.”

He moved his hand to her cheek—he could feel her blush, although in the dim light he couldn’t see it—and he bent to kiss her. He held her briefly and breathed in the scent of her and acknowledged that her scent was not the citrus of Helen that he’d so loved and realised that this was not a bad thing. He said, “Ring me, please.”

“As you recall, I did. And will do again.”

“I’m glad of that, Daidre,” he told her and then he left.

There was no question of his going to her room. He didn’t want to. And what, he wondered, did that mean, Thomas?

“Are you listening to me, Tommy?” Isabelle asked. “Because if you are, I’d expect at some point you’d grunt or nod or look reflective or, for God’s sake, something.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Late night and not enough coffee this morning.”

“Shall I have Dee bring you a cup?”

He shook his head. “John bent my ear when I got here,” he told her. “Taking that decision to put Barbara on his team, Isabelle—”

“It was a brief enough period. It hardly killed her.”

“Still, his antipathy for her—”

“I hope you’re not about to tell me how to run the department. I doubt you did that with Superintendent Webberly.”

“I did, as it happens.”

“Then the man was a saint.”

Before he could reply, Barbara Havers joined them. She came in in a rush. She was the personification of all business, aside from her clothing, which was, as usual, a bow to the fashion of an era that had never existed. She’d at least eschewed the cupcake socks. She’d replaced them, however, with Fred and Wilma Flintstone. They more or less made a piece with her tee-shirt: She was wearing the bones of the Natural History Museum’s T-rex across her chest.

She said, “Here’s how it looks,” after she acknowledged the tardiness of her arrival with “Sorry. Traffic. Had to buy petrol as well.” She went on with, “Everything points to Di Massimo trying to finger Doughty for what he himself cooked up. He knows there’ll be records of communications between him and Doughty—and there are— and he reckons that as there was no ransom request, we’re going to fall into line with whatever he claims. But the link from him to Squali is what’s going to bring him down. He’s telling partial truth and partial lie, and his idea is that if he muddies the waters enough, no one is going to sort it all out.”

“Meaning what, Barbara?” Isabelle said.

Lynley said nothing. He merely noted that the sergeant’s colour was high and he wondered if this was due to the rush she was in or the tale she was telling.

“Meaning Doughty hired Di Massimo to start at the airport in Pisa, which was as far as he—Doughty, that is—was able to get in working out where Angelina Upman had taken Hadiyyah. He didn’t give Azhar the information because he didn’t know where it would lead. Di Massimo’s brief was to find Angelina and report back. He was told to do whatever it took to find her because—according to Doughty’s tale—whatever it took was ultimately going to be funded by her dad. Only once Di Massimo knew where she was, it was a short journey from there to who’s-got-more-dosh and the answer to that was the extended Mura family. So he hired Squali to snatch her but what he told Doughty was that he couldn’t find her at all. Records show all communication between him and Doughty ended at the point he made his report.”

“Which was when?”

“December fifth.”

“What records are we talking about, Barbara?” Lynley asked quietly.

Another slight rush of colour to her cheeks. He reckoned that she hadn’t expected him to be sitting in Isabelle’s office as a party to this meeting. She had a few decisions to make as a result of his presence. He could only pray she made the right ones.

“Doughty’s,” she said. “He opened them to me, sir. He’s printing up the whole lot of them and he’ll be shipping them over to the bloke in Italy who’s dealing with that end of things once we give him the name. ’Course he’ll want someone to translate, but they’ll have someone for that.” She licked her lips, and he saw her swallow. She turned back to Isabelle and went on. “What I can’t work out is the ransom request.”

“There wasn’t one as I understand it,” Isabelle said.

“That’s the screw in the works,” Barbara acknowledged. “What I reckon is that once Di Massimo worked out how much money the Mura family has, he planned one of those typical Italian kidnappings. Think of it: Here’s a country with a big tradition of holding people for months to get what they want. Sometimes the demand comes quickly; sometimes they like to wait till the family is ready to blow itself to bits with worry. Look at the poor Getty kid all those years ago.”

“I doubt the Muras have pockets quite so deep as the Gettys,” Lynley said evenly, watching Barbara. Her upper lip looked damp.

“True. But what I reckon is everything depended on what Di Massimo wanted. Was it money, land, cooperation, stock options, political influence . . . who the bloody hell knows? I mean, how much do we know