Just One Evil Act

“Has she contacted you?”

“I believe I just said—”

“What you said,” Barbara interrupted, “was that you have no idea where she is, where she’s going, or where she might end up. What you didn’t say was whether you’ve spoken to her. During which conversation, we can both assume, she wouldn’t necessarily have to say where she is.”

Ruth-Jane said nothing to this. Barbara thought, Bingo. But what she also thought was that there was no way in hell that Angelina Upman’s mother was going to give them a thing to go on. She might have spoken to Angelina at some point; she might have been the recipient of a telephone message, a text message, a letter, a card, or whatever else of the “I’ve left him, Mum” variety. But, no matter the case, she wasn’t about to admit that to Barbara.

“Azhar wants to know where his daughter is,” Barbara told Angelina’s mother quietly. “You can understand that, can’t you?”

She seemed completely indifferent. “Whether I understand or not makes no difference to anything. My answer remains the same. I’ve had no personal contact with Angelina.”

Barbara brought her card from the pocket of her jacket. She held it out to the woman. She said, “I’d like you to ring me if you hear from her. It being Christmastime, you may well do.”

“You might like me to do that,” Ruth-Jane Upman said. “But granting your wishes isn’t one of my powers.”

Barbara laid her card on a table nearby. She said, “You think about that, Mrs. Upman.”

Azhar looked as if he wanted to make some sort of appeal, but Barbara tilted her head towards the doorway. There was no point to further discussion with the woman. She might let them know if she heard from Angelina. She might not do so. It was not in their hands to bend her will to theirs.

They headed for the door. In the corridor leading to it, the walls bore pictures, three of them black-and- white shots of a spontaneous nature. Barbara paused to look at them. They were all, she saw, of the same subjects: two girls. In one they were at the seaside building a sand castle, in another they rode a merry-go-round with one of them on the high pony and the other on a low one, in the last they stood holding out carrots to a mare and her adorable foal. What was interesting was not the expert nature of the photographs, however. Nor was it notable how they’d been framed and mounted. What would cause any viewer to stop and give the pictures a thorough study was the girls themselves.

They would be Angelina and Bathsheba, Barbara reckoned. She wondered why no one had ever mentioned that the girls were perfectly identical twins.

20 December

ISLINGTON

LONDON

It seemed to Barbara that there was a final possibility to be explored. She did so on her lunch hour the very next day, and she didn’t tell Azhar she was going to do it. He was dispirited enough. To him, writing out a cheque to pay Dwayne Doughty was the same as saying, “Case closed.” To her, perhaps the case was closed in Doughty’s eyes, but till she’d worked every possible angle that she could think of, she couldn’t accept that Hadiyyah and her mother were permanently gone.

Barbara had been keeping her nose remarkably clean at New Scotland Yard. There was nothing she could do about the wreck she’d made of her hair, but she’d decided it behooved her to slither onto the better side of Acting Detective Superintendent Ardery, so her manner of dress had been for days if not impeccable then at least not worthy of note. She’d worn tights, and she’d polished her brogues. At Ardery’s command, she’d even begun working on a case with DI John Stewart without complaint, although most of the time what she wanted to do was crush out a burning fag on his face. As for fags, she’d refrained from smoking in the Met stairwells as well. She was on the border of making herself ill with her own wonderfulness, so she knew it was time to do a little something on the side.

She went to WARD. She had the home address of Angelina’s sister, but she reckoned Bathsheba would greet her appearance on the doorstep in a fashion not dissimilar from her parents. Going at her in her own workplace at least would give Barbara the advantage of surprise.

WARD was on Liverpool Road, conveniently close to the Business Design Centre. It was one of those achingly trendy establishments, so uncrowded with its products as to make Barbara wonder if it was, perhaps, a front for money laundering instead of what it purported to be, which was a showroom for the furniture designed by its eponymous owner. The woman herself was within. Barbara had ascertained as much with a phone call and an appointment made earlier in the day. She knew better than to make it known to Bathsheba Ward that her putative customer was actually a police officer. Instead, she offered her an airy explanation along the lines of “I’ve heard so much about you.”

In advance she’d done a bit of homework on the woman. She’d managed this while ostensibly entering a report into HOLMES for DI Stewart, who’d decided he’d play out his personal dislike of her by giving her an assignment which should have gone to a civilian typist. Instead of grousing, arguing, or banging about the incident room making her displeasure known, she’d said, “Right. Will do, sir,” and she’d offered him what passed for a congenial smile when his eyes narrowed at her quick cooperation. Thus, she’d had time to delve into Bathsheba Ward nee Upman, so when she walked into the showroom she knew that Bathsheba had eschewed university for design school after having failed to make it as a professional model because of her height and after also having failed to find her place in the cutthroat world of fashion design. With furniture, however, she’d been wildly successful: awards aplenty along with photos of the pieces which had won them. The crowning glory of a young career had been the acquisition of one of her pieces by the V&A and another by the Museum of London. These two events were especially memorialised in Bathsheba’s office by plaques and exquisitely preserved articles from glossy magazines.

Bathsheba herself was rather unnerving, Barbara found. Her resemblance to her sister was so startling that Barbara first concluded that the two women could have impersonated each other. With a closer look, however, Barbara saw that Bathsheba was the mirror image of Angelina: identifying physical marks upon each of them had been reversed, with a beauty mark at the edge of Bathsheba’s left eye which, on Angelina, was on the right, and the same situation with a dimple. Bathsheba also had none of Angelina’s light sprinkling of freckles, but this would have been owing to keeping herself out of the sun.

She also had none of Angelina’s warmth, although, Barbara reckoned, that warmth had just been a ruse to ease Barbara into not noticing the myriad ways in which Angelina had been, from the first, planning her escape with Hadiyyah. Chances were very good that both women were, by nature, as sly as anacondas hiding hungrily behind one’s sofa. She made a mental note to take care, to keep her eyes open and her wits in ready-for-anything mode.

As things turned out, she needn’t have worried. Once Barbara let it be known that she was there under false pretences, that this really wasn’t about purchasing a ?25,000 focal point for a state-of-the-art flat along the river in Wapping, Bathsheba Ward was less than pleased and didn’t try to hide it.

“I’ve been contacted already about this matter,” she said. They were at a conference table in her office where, in advance of their meeting, she’d spread out photographs of some of her work in situ. It was dead gorgeous and Barbara told her as much before she dropped the unfortunate bomb of her real reason for this call upon the furniture designer’s valuable time. “That private detective person . . . the one my sister’s whatever-he-is hired to find her . . . ? I told him I have no idea where Angelina is or with whom she might currently be cohabitating because, believe me, she will be cohabitating with someone. She might have moved in next door to me, and I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen her in years.”

“Expect you’d recognise her, though,” Barbara said sardonically.

“Being identical twins doesn’t extend to having identical thoughts, Sergeant . . .” She looked at Barbara’s card, which she held in manicured fingers. As she’d spoken, she’d moved to her desk upon which sat photographs of a beaky-faced man who was, presumably, her husband, along with photographs of two young adults—one with a toddler in arms—who were, also presumably, her stepchildren from that beaky husband’s first marriage. “. . .