Just One Evil Act

17 May

ISLE OF DOGS

LONDON

Prior to going to bed, Dwayne Doughty had been able to hold things together in front of his wife because he didn’t want to worry her nor did he want to watch her China-blue eyes fill with tears at the thought of their having to flee the country one step ahead of a police enquiry. He rued the day he’d ever got involved in the Italian mess, and the effort to hide from his wife his ruing from the time he arrived home to the time he went to bed resulted in what felt like a very sharp knitting needle piercing his head.

Candace knew something was wrong. She wasn’t stupid. But he managed to fend off her questions with the stock answer of “just a bit of a head-scratcher at work, luv,” which she accepted for the evening but wasn’t likely to accept into the following day. He needed either to perfect his acting skill—a doubtful prospect when it came to facing off with Can—or he needed to work out a solution to his little problem.

He rose at half past three. In the kitchen of their semidetached, he quietly made a pot of coffee, which he began to drink, sitting at the table and mostly staring at nothing as he turned over various possibilities. He had worked his way through an entire package of fig bars—always his favourite, since childhood—but had got not much further than a mild case of heartburn and a more serious case of dietary guilt.

There had to be possibilities for him at this point, he thought, for the simple reason that there always were if one took the time and had the patience to develop them. No way in hell was he going to flush his line of employment, the years he’d spent coaxing it out of nothing, and his whole life down the loo. He’d never let anything defeat him in the past, and he sure as bloody hell wasn’t going to be defeated now. Especially was he not going to be defeated by a Scotland Yard detective with a posh public school voice and a Savile Row suit that fairly screamed, Carefully worn by a faithful retainer for two years before being donned by me. Absolutely no way was that ever going to happen. But unless something did happen to prevent it, he was a few short days away from a knock on his office door that doubtless would herald the advent of some serious difficulties in his future.

It was his own fault. From the first and with Em Cass’s insistence, he’d twigged that the woman was a cop, but that hadn’t stopped him. He’d agreed to help the professor find his kid—Christ but he had to harden his soft heart or it would finish him off in this line of work—and now look where that had led. He’d spent the past twenty years of his postmilitary life working his arse down to nothing—like his father before him—in order to take the family and its name another step up from the coal mines of Wigan. He had two kids who’d collected respectable university degrees, and he swore that their children—when they had them—would do the same from Oxford or Cambridge. He wasn’t about to miss that due to having to flee the country or because of the need to spend a stretch of time playing some sweaty yob’s wife behind prison bars . . . so what in God’s name was he going to do to avoid either prospect?

Another cup of coffee. Another four fig bars. This took him to thoughts of his associates and how much blame he could possibly assign them. He’d always been a careful man, so there was no direct link from him to all the manoeuvring and the tinkering that had gone on. Aside from the one time in Emily’s sumptuous flat in Wapping and—all right—once in Emily’s office, he never himself actually discussed business with Bryan Smythe, so the truth was that he could throw up his hands in shock and despair and throw Em to the legal wolves. She, after all, had passed along his verbal instructions to Smythe. How difficult would it be to establish that every idea skittering to every lawless act had come from her? But the question was: Could he really do that to Em after the years in which they’d worked together?

He knew the answer to that before he even got to the end of the question. He had history with Em. He also had history with Bryan. So together they had to climb out of this pit. It was his curse that he was such an ethical bloke.

The second hour into his brooding about the problem had gained him only the insight that he might be able to use this bloke Lynley’s potential attachment to DS Barbara Havers in some way to benefit himself, much as he’d used her obvious attachment to the Pakistani professor to keep her in order. The difficulty with this was that he couldn’t work his mind round to believing there was an attachment between the detective sergeant and the posh inspector. So he was left with a nut needing to be cracked and having ninety minutes more in which to crack it before Can’s alarm went off and she staggered into the kitchen completely unamused at his having devoured all the fig bars.

The thought of Can’s displeasure with regard to the fig bars stirred Dwayne to hide the evidence. He needed to make another pot of coffee, so he roused himself from the kitchen table and crumpled the wrapping of the sinful biscuits. He couldn’t put this in the rubbish. His wife would find it and a lecture about his nutritional habits would ensue. So he grabbed up a folded newspaper from the stool by the kitchen door, where others of its ilk waited for recycling, and he unfolded it on the draining board. He would, he decided, dump the coffee grounds on this and hide the fig bar wrapping beneath them. He was supposed to recycle the grounds as well—or was it compost the grounds? He could never remember all the terminology for what one did with one’s rubbish these days—but allowance could be made this once for not putting the grounds to use for a higher purpose.

He took them from the coffeemaker. He spread the fig bar wrapping neatly onto the unfolded newspaper, and he was just about to dump the coffee grounds on top of this when his hand was stayed in best biblical fashion. There before him beneath the fig wrapping lay the answer. Or at least part of it. For he’d opened the newspaper to a story whose elements he well recognised: Italy, an Englishwoman’s death, a possible cover-up, and stay tuned for more. He shoved the fig bar wrapping to one side and read, and the names leapt out at him. The problem was that he’d opened the paper to the middle of the story, and one paragraph into it the floodgates of his ability to plan and devise and ultimately triumph opened . . . but he needed the rest of the story.

He wasn’t a praying man, but he did pray that Candace hadn’t used the front of the paper to discard last night’s leftover chili con carne into. He rooted through the stack of recycling aspirants, and he found what he was looking for. This was a name, a reporter’s name. And there it was beneath the page-one headline: Mitchell Corsico. It sounded Italian to Dwayne, but Italian or not, obviously the bloke spoke English. And since he spoke English, he was the answer. He was the plan.

For Dwayne Doughty, aside from heartburn and caffeine nerves strung out like wires for a tightrope walker, all was finally well.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

What Barbara hadn’t anticipated was Hadiyyah’s desire to be with her father. She’d been so anxious to get her away from Lorenzo Mura and to protect her from whatever might occur should her foul grandparents show up to fetch her that there had been nothing else on her mind but scooping her up and dashing back to Lucca with her.

That had been enough at first. They’d had dinner in Lucca, at a multinational restaurant/cafeteria in Via Malcontenti, where upon the walls hung placemats decorated by past clientele extolling the virtues of the pizzas, the goulash, and the hummus in various languages. They’d had gelato afterwards, from a vendor near the main tourist office in Piazzale Giuseppe Verdi. Then they’d walked up from that office to a section of the ancient wall among the Italians enjoying their evening stroll. When at last they’d returned to Pensione Giardino, Hadiyyah had been more than ready just to sleep in the second bed in Barbara’s room.

Bullets were not dodged for long, though. The first was from Corsico, who rang at half past seven in the morning wanting the next story for his editor, which, he told her, needed to be along the lines of English Child’s Agony with Dad in Prison. He said he’d be happy to make it all up—“par for the course, Barb”—if Barbara just produced the kid for a picture looking soulfully out of the window of the pensione. “Missing her dad and all that rubbish, you know what I mean,” he said. Barbara foisted him off with the information that Hadiyyah was still asleep and she would ring him when the child awakened. But that put her into contact with the second bullet, which was Hadiyyah’s desire to see her father.

That, Barbara knew, was the last thing Azhar would ever want: his beloved child getting an eyeful of him in prison garb, sitting alongside the other inmates on visiting day. She wasn’t about to do that to either of them, so she told Hadiyyah that her dad was helping Inspector Lo Bianco look into a few things about her mummy’s death.