Just One Evil Act

Havers,” Bathsheba finished, reading Barbara’s surname from the card. The card itself she tossed on the desk.

“She’s managed to disappear without leaving a trail,” Barbara told her. “All her belongings’re gone, and so far we’ve not been able to trace how she got her gear to wherever she got it, along with Hadiyyah’s.”

“Perhaps she got her ‘gear’”—Bathsheba made the word sound like cow dung —“over to Oxfam, deposited it there, and waved farewell to it. She’d hardly leave a trail of shipping slips if she’d done that, wouldn’t you say?”

“A possibility,” Barbara admitted. “But so is having someone’s assistance, along the lines of she-doesn’t- ship-it-but-someone-else-does. We’ve also not been able to find any means of her leaving Chalk Farm. Public transport, taxi, minicab. It’s like she beamed herself out of the place. Or someone else did the beaming for her.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be me,” Bathsheba said. “And if you’ve tracked no one else who helped her, perhaps you ought to be thinking something a little more ominous than you’ve been thinking.”

“Such as?”

Bathsheba pushed her chair away from her desk. Both the desk and the chair were her own pieces: sleek and modern with gorgeous bits of various unnameable woods worked into them. She herself was sleek and modern as well, with the same long and light hair as her sister, with a fashion sense that accentuated everything about her that was trim and lithe. She looked like someone who spent hours sweating in the company of a personal trainer. Even her earlobes looked as if they’d been given marching orders as to what kind of workout would keep them as youthful and vigorous as possible. She said, “I do wonder if you or that man—the detective man—might have given thought to Angelina and her daughter having been disposed of.”

It took a moment for Barbara to work out what Bathsheba meant, so casually had the remark been made. “You mean murdered? By whom, exactly? There wasn’t a single sign of violence in the flat, and she’d left a message on my answer machine that didn’t sound like someone was forcing her into pretending she was doing a runner while in reality holding a knife to her throat.”

Bathsheba raised her well-developed shoulders. “I have no explanation for that message, obviously. But I do wonder . . . Everyone seems so intent upon believing him, you see.”

“Who?”

Bathsheba’s eyes—blue and large like her sister’s—opened wider. “Surely you don’t need me to spell out . . . ?”

“Are you talking about Azhar? Doing what? Murdering Angelina and Hadiyyah—his own daughter, for God’s sake—and then putting on a BAFTA-worthy performance of grief for the past five weeks? What’d he do with their bodies, in your vision of how things happened?”

“Buried them, I’d suppose.” She smiled ghoulishly. “You do see how it could have been, I hope. None of us —her family—have seen Angelina in years. We wouldn’t know from Adam or Eve if she went missing. All I’m suggesting is what might be possible.”

“All you’re suggesting is something ludicrous. Have you met Azhar?”

“Once. Long ago. Angelina brought him to a wine bar to show him off. She was like that, my sister. Always wanting me to know what she’d managed to accomplish, what made her absolutely unique. To be frank, she hated being a twin as much as I did. Our parents shoved twinship down our throats. I daresay even today they’re not entirely sure of our names. To them, we were always ‘the twins.’ Sometimes we got lucky and became ‘the girls.’”

Barbara hadn’t missed the past tense, and she pointed this out. Any implication made no difference to Bathsheba Ward. She said in turn that she hadn’t seen her sister since a day in a South Kensington Starbucks where they’d met in order that Angelina might triumphantly announce her pregnancy ten years earlier.

“There was no further point after that,” Bathsheba said. “My sister would have trotted out that child or the fact of that child every time we spoke.”

“No kids of your own?” Barbara asked shrewdly.

“Two, as you can see from the pictures.” She indicated the frames on her desks.

“Look a bit old to be yours.”

“Children don’t necessarily need to be . . . how do they put it? . . . the fruit of one’s own loins.”

Barbara wondered if women had loins. She also wondered what the bloody hell “loins” were when it came to Homo sapiens. But she recognised the inherent uselessness of leading their conversation in that direction. The only topic remaining to them was Bathsheba’s reference to her sister fleeing Azhar into the arms of another man. Did Bathsheba have anything she wished to offer on that front? Barbara asked. Did Bathsheba know, for example, that Angelina had left Azhar once before, spending a year away from both him and Hadiyyah in a location that they had referred to as Canada but that might, in reality, have been anywhere on the planet?

“I’m not surprised” was Bathsheba’s airy reply.

“Why not?”

“I assume things between her and whatever-his-name-is became a little too tame for Angelina. So if you’re looking for her now and you’ve convinced yourself that he didn’t harm them, then look among men who are different from Angelina, in the way whatever-his-name-is is different.”

Barbara wanted to grab Bathsheba by the throat and recite Taymullah Azhar into her face, forcing her to say the name till she was clear on the fact that he was actually a human being and not some sort of unmentionable social disease. But really, what would have been the point? Bathsheba would only have found another way to indicate her distaste for Azhar, probably choosing his ethnicity or his religion as likely areas for her aversion. Barbara also wanted to point out to her that Mr. Beaky Face didn’t look like such a prize if it came to that. At least her sister has chosen a handsome man, she wanted to sneer. But instead, she politely said, “Azhar. Your sister calls him Hari. That should be easy to remember, eh?”

“Azhar. Hari. Whatever you like. My point is that Angelina was always interested only in men who were— who are—different from her.”

“In what way?”

“In any way. Different from her makes her distinct. She’s spent her life trying to be just that: distinct. I don’t blame her for that. Our parents expected us to be close. Devoted, capable of reading each other’s mind, whatever you like. We were dressed identically and forced into each other’s company from the day we were born. ‘Celebrate your twinship’ was how my mother put it. ‘Other people would kill to have an identical twin.’”

Barbara wondered if other people would also kill because they had an identical twin. The street of Angelina’s potential murder ran in both directions, after all. If Azhar had supposedly disposed of his lover and their daughter, why could Bathsheba Ward not have done the same thing to her sister and niece? Stranger things had happened in the great city of London.

“You sound fairly unworried about her,” Barbara said. “About your niece as well.”

Bathsheba smiled with perfect insincerity. “You seem intent upon the fact that Angelina’s alive. I’m merely accepting your judgement. As to my niece, I don’t know the child. And none of us intend to get to know her.”

BOW

LONDON

Dwayne Doughty was the next final stone because, Barbara had to admit, she couldn’t take no and if there was the slightest chance that she didn’t have to take no, she was going to go for that chance like Ophelia being tossed a rope from a bridge on the off chance she was having second thoughts as she floated by. So at day’s end, she drove to Bow.

The area hadn’t improved since she’d last seen it, although there were more people along the pavements. In the Roman Road, the Roman Cafe and Kebab was doing a bang-up business, and the halal grocer appeared to be bagging goods as fast as housewives in chadors managed to fling them in the vicinity of the till. The money store was closing for the day, but the door that led to Dwayne Doughty’s office was still unlocked, so Barbara helped herself. She entered and at the top of the stairs, she met Doughty in conversation with an androgynous being who turned out to be Em Cass, the woman Azhar had said Doughty employed. Em Cass and Doughty exchanged what looked to Barbara like a wary glance when they clocked Barbara’s presence. They acted a wee bit like guilty lovers, which Barbara supposed they might well have been. Until Doughty made it clear that his