He said, “Two people came to see us about a little girl whose mum had disappeared with her. A Muslim man and a rather dishevelled woman. I think the woman might have been called Something Havers. This would have been late in the year. November? December? You should have it in our files.” He nodded at her computer.
She played along, and after a moment perusing her computer’s monitor, she said, “I’ve got it here. You’re right, Dwayne . . . Taymullah Azhar was his name. A woman called Barbara Havers came with him.” She mispronounced Azhar’s name. Nice touch, Lynley thought.
Doughty corrected the pronunciation and carried on with the performance. “They did come about his daughter, as I recall. It was her mum who’d snatched her, yes?”
More reading of the monitor and Lynley allowed this. It was rather fascinating to see how they were going to play the situation, so he let them have as much rope as they wanted. After a moment, she said, “Yes. We traced them to Italy—to Pisa, as it happens—but that was as far as we went. This was last December. It says here that you advised the man—Mr. Azhar—to find an Italian detective who could assist. Or an English detective who spoke Italian. Whichever worked for them.”
“She’d gone into Pisa airport, hadn’t she? The mum?”
“That’s what it says.”
He looked intensely thoughtful for a moment while Lynley waited patiently for more, saying nothing but also giving no sign that he intended to leave them any time soon. Doughty said, “But did we . . . Em, luv, did we find a detective to recommend to them? Seems to me that we may have done.”
She did some scrolling, did some squinting at the screen, did some glancing in Doughty’s direction for a bit of unspoken direction from him, and did some nodding. “
“I’d have to check.” And to Lynley, “If you wouldn’t mind coming with me . . . ? I’ve got more records in my own office.”
“Let’s all go, shall we?” Lynley said affably.
A glance was exchanged between the other two. Doughty said, “Yes, why not?” and led the way.
His niece was packing up for her departure, a procedure that appeared to involve a magnifying mirror and a massive amount of cosmetics. Doughty made much of bidding her a fond farewell: hugs, kisses, and “best to Mum, darling,” and once she left them, he smiled and said, “Kids,” to no one’s agreement or reply.
He then said to Lynley, “I’ve got hard copies of some of my cases, so I might have something . . . One plans to write one’s memoirs at some point . . . Memorable cases and the like, if you know what I mean.”
“Certainly,” Lynley said. “It worked quite well for Dr. Watson, didn’t it?”
Doughty did not look amused. He opened a filing drawer and riffled through it. He said, “Here. I think we’re in luck,” and he brought out a slim manila folder.
He flipped from one page to another of the documents within. He pulled on his lower lip and frowned. He said, “Fairly interesting.”
“Indeed?” Lynley queried.
“Something apparently got the wind up for me. Couldn’t tell you now what it was, but I did a little looking into the woman—”
“Barbara Havers, you mean?” Lynley clarified.
“Turns out that, over time, some money passed from the Pakistani man to her and from her to Italy, to one Michelangelo Di Massimo.”
“I think that was the name, Dwayne,” Em Cass said. “That’s the Italian detective.”
Doughty glanced up from his paperwork, saying to Lynley, “It appears that a series of payments flowed from Azhar to Havers to this Di Massimo, so my guess is that she and the Pakistani employed him for quite some time.”
“Extraordinary that you should know that, Mr. Doughty,” Lynley pointed out.
“I’m merely deducing because of the payments.”
“Actually, I’m not talking about Di Massimo’s employment. I’m talking about the payments themselves, money moving from Azhar to Barbara Havers to Di Massimo. Extraordinary work on your part, in the true sense of the word. May I ask how you uncovered this information?”
Doughty waved the question aside. “Sorry. Trade secret. Perhaps of larger interest to Scotland Yard might be the fact that payments were made at all. What I can tell you about these two individuals—and this Barbara Havers in particular since she appears to be at the centre of your interest—is that they came to see me in the winter. I gave them what small help I could, I suggested they find an Italian detective, and the rest . . . Well, it is what it is.”
“And you saw these two people—Taymullah Azhar and Barbara Havers—how many times?”
He looked at Em Cass. “Was it twice, Em? Once when they came for help in locating the child and once when I had the facts to present to them. Yes?”
“As far as I know, that was it,” she confirmed.
“So you wouldn’t know, it seems,” Lynley said, “that Barbara Havers has for quite some time been followed by another detective from the Met.”
Silence on their part. Clearly, they hadn’t considered this possibility. Lynley waited, a pleasant expression on his face. They said nothing. This being the case, he removed from the breast pocket of his jacket his reading glasses and from an interior pocket, he took out a set of documents that he’d folded and placed there. He unfolded them and began to read John Stewart’s report aloud to the private investigator and his cohort. John had been thorough, in keeping with his compulsive nature and with his animosity towards Barbara Havers. So he had dates, and he had times, and he had places. Lynley read them all.
When he was finished, he glanced up at Doughty and Em Cass, over the top of his glasses. He said, “It tends to come down to trust in the end, Mr. Doughty. Trust always trumps money on the wrong side of the law.”
Doughty said, “All right. Agreed. She came to see me more than once evidently. Which, obviously, is why I decided to look into her.”
“Indeed. But I’m not talking about your trusting Barbara Havers. I’m talking about anyone trusting Di Massimo. Had he not subcontracted Hadiyyah’s kidnapping out to a bloke called Roberto Squali, had Squali not been photographed by a tourist, had he not driven an expensive convertible far too quickly up a mountain road, had he and Di Massimo not been in contact by mobile phone . . . Indeed, had the investigation in Italy not been handled by Salvatore Lo Bianco, who appears to be a shinier coin in the collection plate than the magistrate who heads the case, everything might have gone along the way you intended it to go. But those phone calls piqued Lo Bianco’s interest, and he followed the trail of them rather more quickly than you—at this end—apparently anticipated. So what he ended up with is a set of records far different from those you later provided him. And, Barbara Havers aside for the moment, that’s quite an interesting development in the kidnapping investigation.”
Silence. Lynley let it go on. Outside, down in the Roman Road, two men argued loudly in a foreign tongue. A dog barked and a dustbin’s lid clanged against the receptacle. But in the office, there was nothing.
Lynley said, “What I’m assuming is that, in the manner of similar shady characters, all of you have been double- and triple-crossing each other. One person gets a leg up on the other, then that person raises the ante and so on. Now, I’m not going to involve myself in any further questioning at the moment, as the hour is late and I’d like to get home, as I expect you would as well. But before you go, I’d like you to reflect on your neck, Ms. Cass’s neck, and the neck of your colleague Mr. Smythe. While you’re doing this reflecting, I’d like you to consider that Inspector Lo Bianco will be employing a forensic technology expert to follow all the diddling you’ve been doing with everyone’s records, and the Metropolitan police will be doing the same thing. Computers, as I expect you know, leave trails of cookie crumbs along the paths they take. To the average soul—like me, for example—these trails are impossible to find. To the expert in modern computer technology, this sort of work is a piece of cake. Or cookie, if you will.”
He gave Doughty time to look at the material Lo Bianco had sent him. Doughty did so and, as the man could read, he was fully capable of interpreting the message on the wall.
