Just One Evil Act

information is your business. We seem to have come full circle in our conversation and what’s left is for me to repeat the obvious: Gathering information appears to be paying you quite well. From that and the look of your home, I expect what you’re doing can lead you to trouble.”

“You’ve said this.”

“As I noted. But your world, Mr. Smythe”—he glanced round the large room—“is about to undergo a seismic shift. Unlike Barbara Havers, I’m not here on my own behest. I’ve been sent, and I expect you can put the pieces together and come up with the reason why. You’re on the Met’s radar. You’re not going to be happy to be there. To use an analogy that I’m certain you’ll understand, you’re living in a house of cards and the wind has now begun to blow.”

“You’re investigating her, aren’t you?” he said, with dawning understanding. “Not me, not Doughty, but her.”

Lynley didn’t reply.

“So if I tell you—”

Lynley interrupted him. “I’m not here to make deals.”

“So why should I bloody—”

“You can do as you like.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“The simple truth.”

“The truth’s not simple.”

Lynley smiled. “As Oscar himself once said. But let me make it simple. At your own admission you look for trails and create ‘maps’ of them for Dwayne Doughty and, I expect, for others. As this pays you extraordinarily well by the look of your home, I’m going to assume you also ‘uncreate’ maps by removing those trails, an activity for which you charge rather more. Since Barbara Havers was here, I suspect—due to some glaring omissions in her reports to me—that she’s employing you to engage in uncreating and removing. What I need from you is confirmation of this fact. A simple nod of your head.”

“Or?”

“‘Or’?”

“There’s always an or,” he said angrily. “Spit it out for God’s sake.”

“I’ve mentioned the wind. I think that’s sufficient.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“I’ve said—”

“No! No! There’s always something bloody more with you lot. First it was her and I cooperated. Then it was her and him and I still cooperated. Now it’s you and where the hell is it going to end?”

“‘Him’?”

“The bloody Paki, all right? She came alone first. Then she brought him. Now you’re here and for all I know, the bloody Prime Minister is going to show up next.”

“She was here with Azhar.” That wasn’t in the report and how, Lynley wondered, had John Stewart missed that?

“Of course she was bloody here with Azhar.”

“When?”

“This morning. When d’you think?”

“What did she want?”

“My backup system. Every record, all my work. You name it, she wanted it.”

“That’s all?”

He looked away. He walked to one of his paintings—this one largely red with a blue stripe at the bottom that bled almost imperceptibly into a purple haze. Smythe gazed on it as if evaluating what would become of it once the appropriate Met officers started swarming round the place. “As I said,” he explained to the painting rather than to Lynley, “she wanted to hire me as well. One job only.”

“Its nature?”

“Complicated. I’ve not even done it yet. I’ve not even begun.”

“So its revelation should present no . . . no moral or ethical dilemma for you.”

Still, Smythe kept his gaze on the painting. Lynley wondered what he saw there, what anyone saw when they tried to interpret someone else’s intentions. Smythe finally said with a sigh, “It involves altering bank records and phone records. It involves a date change.”

“What sort of date change?”

“On an airline ticket. On two airline tickets.”

“Not their elimination?”

“No. Just the date. That and making them round-trip.”

Which would, Lynley thought, explain why Barbara had said nothing to Isabelle about those tickets to Pakistan that SO12 had uncovered. Altering them would remove suspicion from Azhar entirely, especially if the change involved the date of purchase. So he said, “Purchase date or flight date?” and he waited for what, at heart, he knew Smythe would say.

“Purchase,” he said.

“Are we talking about the airline’s records, Mr. Smythe, or something else?”

“We’re talking about SO12,” he said.

SOUTH HACKNEY

LONDON

He’d given up smoking long before he and Helen had married. But as Lynley stood with the key to the Healey Elliott in his hand, he longed for a cigarette. Mostly, it was for something to do other than what needed doing. But he had no cigarettes, so he got into the car, rolled down the window, and gazed sightlessly at the London street.

He understood why Barbara’s call upon Smythe with Taymullah Azhar in tow had not been part of John Stewart’s report. It had only occurred that morning, itself the reason she’d arrived late at the Yard. But he had no doubt that it would be included as an addendum that Stewart would hand over to Isabelle at the appropriate moment. The only question was when and what, if anything, he himself was going to do about it. Obviously, there was no stopping Stewart. There was only preparing Isabelle in advance.

In this, he saw that he had two options. He could either manufacture a reason that Barbara had paid a call on Bryan Smythe. Or he could report to Isabelle what he’d discovered and let matters develop from there. He’d asked the guv for time to sort all of this out but what, really, was there to sort at this point? The only saving grace that he could see was that his own call upon Smythe had obviated any tinkering the hacker might have been about to do inside the records of SO12, if he could, indeed, even get inside them in the first place. At least that blot on the copybook of Barbara’s career would not be present. As to everything else . . . The truth was that he didn’t know how far she was steeped in the sin of this mess and there was only one way to find out and he didn’t want to do it.

He’d never been a coward when it came to confrontations, so he had to ask himself why he was feeling such cowardice now. The answer seemed to be in his longtime partnership with Barbara. The truth was that she’d apparently gone bad, but his years working with her told him that, in spite of everything, her heart was good. And what in God’s name was he supposed to do about that? he asked himself.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Salvatore’s removal from the kidnapping investigation put him in the position of ship-without-harbour. This left him daily slinking by the morning meeting of Nicodemo and his team, a displaced policeman trying to catch a word here and there that would allow him to know where the investigation stood. No matter that the child had been returned to her parents unharmed. There were things going on here that needed understanding. Unfortunately, Nicodemo Triglia was not the person to sort through them.

Salvatore caught the eye of Ottavia Schwartz on his fifth morning venture by the meeting. He went on his