Just One Evil Act

call he’d received from Salvatore Lo Bianco. Her immediate response was “Christ. This becomes worse and worse, Tommy,” and she’d left her desk and begun to pace her office. On her second circuit of the room, she’d closed the door upon anyone who might wander by.

The fact that she was in mental disarray was unlike her. Lynley said nothing but merely waited for what was coming next. It was “I need some air and so do you,” to which his admonitory “Isabelle” was met with her sharp “I said air, for God’s sake. Do me the courtesy of taking me at my word until you find me passed out on this floor with a vodka bottle in my hand.”

He winced at how well she knew him. He said, “Right. Sorry,” and she accepted this with a sharp nod. Then she strode to the door that she’d just closed, and she threw it open. She said to Dorothea Harriman—always lingering nearby to be of assistance or to glean gossip—“I have my mobile,” and she headed in the general direction of the lifts.

The two of them went outside, where Isabelle stood for a moment in the vicinity of the Met’s revolving sign. She said, “At moments like this, I wish I still smoked.”

He said, “If you tell me what’s happened, I’ll let you know if I feel the same.”

“Over there.” She inclined her head towards the junction of Broadway and Victoria Street. A park lay there, its grass shaded by great London plane trees. At a far corner stood a memorial to the suffragette movement, but she didn’t move towards this immense scroll but rather to one of the trees. She leaned against it.

“So how do you propose to do this without alerting Professor Azhar?” Isabelle asked him. “Obviously, you can’t go yourself. And sending Barbara would be tantamount to shooting yourself in a crucial bodily organ. You do know that, Tommy. At least and by God, I hope you know that.”

The passion with which she said her last bit told Lynley she’d either been withholding information the last time they’d spoken or she’d received yet another damning report from DI Stewart. It turned out to be the latter.

She said, “She’s been to see both the private investigator—”

“Doughty,” he said.

“Doughty,” she agreed. “And this Bryan Smythe.”

“But we knew that, Isabelle.”

“In the company of Taymullah Azhar, Tommy,” Isabelle added. “Why wasn’t this part of her report?”

He cursed inwardly. This was something new, something more, another brick in the wall, nail in the coffin, whatever on earth one wanted to call it. He said, although he knew the answers as well as he knew his own name, “When did she see him? When did they go? And how did you—”

“That’s where she was the morning she claimed whatever she claimed—Was it a stop for petrol? Traffic? God, I can’t even remember now—about why she was late to our meeting.”

“John Stewart again, then? Christ, Isabelle, how much longer are you going to put up with his machinations? Or did you order him, at this point, to start tailing Barbara?”

“Don’t let’s make this about something other than what it is. And what it is is beginning to look like a cover- up, which as you bloody well know is far more serious than creating a story about her miserable mother falling over a stool or whatever the hell it was supposed to be in her care home.”

“I’m the first to admit she was out of order doing that.”

“Oh, let me call on the saints and angels in praise,” Isabelle said. “And now what we have is a set of behaviours on the part of Sergeant Havers that strongly suggest she’s stitching up evidence.”

“We have no UK crime,” he reminded her.

“Don’t take me for a fool. She’s over the side, Tommy. You and I both know it. I may have started out investigating arson in my career, but one thing I learned from examining fire scenes is that if my nose is picking up the scent of smoke, there’s bloody well been a fire.”

He waited for her to tell him the rest, which constituted those airline tickets to Pakistan. Still she did not. He concluded once again that, for whatever little good it did Havers, Isabelle continued not to know about the tickets. Had she known, she would have told him at this point. There was no reason to hold back that information.

She said to him, “Did you know she’d been to see Smythe and Doughty in the company of Azhar?”

He looked at her steadily as he formulated his reply: which way to go and what it would mean if he went there. He had hoped she wouldn’t ask the question, but as she said, she wasn’t a fool.

“Yes,” he told her.

She looked heavenward, crossing her arms beneath her breasts. “You’re protecting her by stitching up evidence yourself, I take it?”

“I am not,” he said.

“So what am I to think . . . ?”

“That I don’t know everything yet, Isabelle. And until I know it, I saw no reason to worry you.”

“You mean to protect her, don’t you? No matter the cost. God in heaven, what’s wrong with you, Tommy? This is your bloody career we’re talking about.” And when he didn’t answer, she said, “Never mind. It isn’t, is it? What was I thinking? The earldom awaits. Is that what they call it, by the way, an earldom? And the family pile in Cornwall is always there ready for you to decamp to if you want to throw all of this over. You don’t need to do this kind of work. It’s all a lark for you. It’s a walk in the park. It’s a bloody joke. It’s—”

“Isabelle, Isabelle.” He took a step towards her.

She held up her hand. “Don’t.”

“Then what?” he asked her.

“Can you not for one moment see where this is heading, for all of us? Can you not look beyond Barbara Havers for a bloody instant and realise the position she’s putting us in? Not only herself, but us as well.”

He had to see it because, like her, he was not a fool. But he also had to admit to himself that before this moment he hadn’t thought about the impact Barbara’s behaviour would have upon Isabelle herself should all of what she had done come out into the open. Hearing Isabelle’s voice tinged as it was with despair, he felt as if the clouds were parting and where the sun was shining was not, at this moment, upon Barbara. For Isabelle Ardery was in charge of all the officers, and the responsibility for what the members of her squad did and did not do ultimately rested upon her shoulders.

Cleaning house was what it was generally called in the aftermath of corruption’s coming to light. The rubbish got tossed to appease the public, and Isabelle Ardery stood in very good stead to be part of that rubbish.

He said to her, “This situation . . . It’s not going to come to that, Isabelle.”

“Oh, you know that, do you?”

“Look at me,” he said. And when she finally did so and when he read the fear in her eyes, he said, “I do. I won’t allow you to be damaged. I swear it.”

“You don’t have that power. No one does.”

Now as Lynley guided the Healey Elliott into Cheyne Walk, he tried to put his promise to Isabelle from his mind. There were bigger issues even than Barbara’s involvement with Taymullah Azhar, Dwayne Doughty, and Bryan Smythe, and those needed to be dealt with as soon as possible. Still, his heart was heavy as he parked the car near the top of Lawrence Street. He walked the distance back to Lordship Place and went in through the gate that led to a garden he knew as well as he knew his own.

They were in the last stages of an alfresco lunch beneath a cherry tree in magnificent bloom in the centre of the lawn: his oldest friend, that friend’s wife, and her father. They were watching an enormous grey cat slinking along an herbaceous border thick with lunaria, bellis, and campanula. They were apparently hot into a discussion on the subject of Alaska—said cat—and whether his best mousing days were over.

When they heard the squeak of the garden gate, they turned. Simon St. James said, “Ah, Tommy. Hullo.”

Deborah said, “You’re just in time to settle an argument. How are you on the subject of cats?”

“Nine lives or otherwise?”

“Otherwise.”

“Not an expert, I’m afraid.”

“Damn.”