Just One Evil Act

LONDON

Who the higher-ups were that Bryan Smythe was referring to, Barbara didn’t know. But when she left his house in South Hackney and strode to her car at the end of the street, she learned. Where before she’d been too caught up in her plans, her next steps, and her machinations to be both aware and wary, now she had her eyes open for anything out of place, and she saw it easily enough.

Clive Cratty, newly minted as a detective constable and eager to prove himself to his immediate supervisor, tried to dodge out of sight behind a white Ford Transit some ten houses along the terrace on the opposite side of the street. But Barbara clocked him and she instantly knew that John Stewart had placed someone on her tail.

She was furious about this, but she had no time to deal with Stewart or his minions. He was going to do what he was going to do. She had to get herself to Italy.

Her passport was at home, she needed to throw a few things into a duffel, and she needed a ticket. For this last, she could phone and beg the mercy of an airline, or she could grab her things, head to one of the airports, and hope for the best.

Since it was still working hours, there was plenty of parking when she reached her home. Even the driveway of the big house was empty, so she made use of it and charged to the back of the old villa to her bungalow. She hustled inside, threw her shoulder bag on what went for the kitchen table, and began to tear her clean knickers from a line above the sink. She balled them up, then turned to go to the wardrobe. That was when she saw Lynley sitting in the armchair next to her daybed. She shrieked and dropped her knickers to the floor.

“Bloody goddamn hell!” she cried. “How’d you get in?”

He held up the extra key to her front door. “You need to be more creative with your emergency key,” he said. “That is, if you don’t want to come home sometime and find someone less friendly than I sitting here waiting for you.”

She gathered her thoughts and her wits along with her knickers, which she scooped from the floor. She said, “I reckoned that under the doormat was too obvious to be obvious. Who would really expect to find a key there?”

“I don’t think your everyday housebreaker goes in for reverse psychology, Barbara.”

“You obviously didn’t.” She kept her voice light as she crossed the room.

“Isabelle knows everything,” he said. “Smythe, Doughty, what you were up to, what they were up to, intimate talks between you and Mitchell Corsico. Everything, Barbara. She rang Hillier before I left her office. She made an appointment to see him. She knows about the tickets to Pakistan as well, so she’s ending this. There was nothing I could do to stop her. I’m sorry.”

Barbara opened the wardrobe. Stuffed high on a shelf was her duffel, and she pulled this out. She grabbed up clothing without much thought as to the Italian climate, the appropriateness of her choices, or anything else save the haste she needed to employ to get out of England and into Italy as soon as she could. She could feel Lynley watching her, and she waited for him to tell her she was giving in to a foolhardy madness.

But all he said was, “Don’t do this. Listen to me. Everything you’ve attempted in this business of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping and Angelina’s death has fallen apart. Smythe has admitted it all to me.”

“There was nothing for that bloke to admit.” But she didn’t feel as confident as she tried to sound.

“Barbara.” Lynley rose from the chair. He was quite a tall man, over six feet by several inches, and he seemed in that moment to fill the room.

She tried to ignore him but that was impossible. Still, she continued her chaotic packing. She went to the bathroom and grabbed up everything she thought she might need, from shampoo to deodorant and all points in between. She had no sponge bag for these goodies, so she wrapped them in a well-used hand towel and tried to get by Lynley and back into the other room where the duffel awaited her.

He was in the doorway, however. He said again, “Don’t do this. Smythe talked to me and he’ll talk to others. He’s admitted eliminating some pieces of evidence entirely and doctoring other pieces of evidence. He’s told me about the documents he’s created. He’s told me about the calls you paid upon him. He’s given up Doughty as well as the woman. He’s finished, Barbara, and his only hope is going to be emigration in advance of a lengthy and complicated police investigation that will land him in gaol for God knows how many years. That’s how it is. What you have to ask yourself is which side you’d like to be on in what’s investigated.”

Barbara pushed past him. “You don’t understand. You’ve never understood.”

“What I understand is that you want to protect Azhar. But what you must understand is that whatever Smythe has done, it can only be done in the most superficial way. Do you see that?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She shoved the toweled items into the duffel and looked round the room distractedly. He was making it impossible to think. What else did she need? Her passport, of course. That eternally unused document, which had always been intended to mark a change of direction in her life. Something new, exciting, different, edgy. Sunbathing on a Greek island beach, walking along the Great Wall of China, going nose to nose with a tortoise in the Galapagos. Who the bloody hell cared as long as it was different from the dismal life she led now?

Lynley said, “Then you need to hear the truth. To do what he does, Smythe has to know people who know people who know people. That’s how it works. Someone inside whatever institution he wants to hack into slips him a password or slips someone else a password who then slips it to him. Things get doctored but not in the Gordian knot of backup systems that the institution employs. All of this gets sorted out. Arrests are made. People then talk, and all along the truth itself is buried in a backup system that no one can crack without a court order. That backup system shows everything. And you and I both know what that everything is.”

She swung round to face him. “He didn’t do anything! You know that as well as I do. Someone wants him to take a fall. Doughty wants him to go down for a kidnapping that he himself arranged, and someone else wants him to go down for murder.”

“For God’s sake, Barbara, who?”

“I don’t know! Don’t you see that’s why I have to go over there? Maybe it’s Lorenzo Mura. Maybe it’s Castro, her earlier lover. Or her own dad, for disappointing his dreams. Or her sister, who’s hated her forever. I don’t bloody know. But what I do know is that none of us is going to turn over a stone and find the truth if we’re all sitting in London trying to do everything by the sodding book.”

She dashed to the table next to the daybed. In its only drawer she kept her passport. She pulled the drawer open and flipped its contents onto the bed. The passport was gone.

That did it for her. Something she couldn’t begin to identify broke inside of her, and she flung herself across the room upon Lynley. She shrieked, “Give it to me! Goddamn you to hell, give me my passport!” And to her horror, she began to cry. She sounded like a madwoman, she knew, but there was nothing left inside of her that could possibly explain to her longtime partner why she was doing what she was doing, so like a fishwife out of a Victorian novel, she cursed him and then she beat on his chest. He caught her arms and he shouted her name, but he wouldn’t stop her, she swore to herself. If she had to kill him to get to Italy, that was what she was going to do.

“You have a life beyond this!” she cried. “I have nothing. Do you understand? Will you understand?”

“Barbara, for the love of God—”

“Whatever you think will happen, it doesn’t matter to me. Do you get that? What matters is her. I’m not leaving Hadiyyah in the hands of the Italian authorities if something happens to Azhar. I won’t do that and I don’t care about anything else.”

She was left sobbing. He let go of her arms. He watched her and she felt the humiliation sweep through her. That he, of all people, should see her like this. Reduced in this way to the disintegrating substance of what comprised her: loneliness that he had never known, misery that he had seldom felt, a future stretching out in front of her that contained her job and nothing else. She hated him in that moment for what he’d brought her to. Her anger finally superseded her tears.

He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out her passport. He handed it to her. She snatched it from him and grabbed her duffel.

“Lock up when you leave” were her final words to him.