Just One Evil Act

story. You knew this, Mitchell.”

He yawned loudly. Barbara wanted to dive into her mobile and beam herself into the louse’s bedroom, all the better to smack him silly. He said, “What I knew, as you put, is that you wanted a story. What I know is that you’ve got your story. Several, in fact, with more on the way. I’ve got some interesting pictures of yesterday’s scuffle with . . . I take it that was Granddad?”

“You need to back off,” she told him, although the idea of pictures made her momentarily dizzy. “You need to sodding back off, Mitchell. These people in Ilford are not the story. A missing English girl in Italy is. There’s plenty of information on that and I’ll get it to you as it comes in and in the bloody meantime—”

“Uh, Sergeant . . . ?” Corsico cut in. “You don’t tell me what the story is. You don’t tell me where the story is. I follow information wherever it leads and just now the information is leading to a house in Ilford and a very unhappy teenage boy.”

So he had got to Sayyid, Barbara thought bitterly. Who bloody knew where he’d go next?

“You’re using that kid to—”

“He needed to vent. I let him vent. I needed a story. He gave me a story. This is a reciprocal relationship Sayyid and I have. Mutually beneficial. Just like yours and mine.”

“You and I have no relationship.”

“But we do. And it’s growing every day.”

Barbara felt someone tapping skeletal fingers on her spine. “Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

“For now it means I’m following a story. You might not love the direction it’s heading in. You might want to direct its course a bit. You might need to give me more information in order to do that and when you give me that information—”

“If, not when.”

“When,” he repeated, “you give me that information, I’ll be happy to take a look at it or have a listen to it and I’ll decide if it constitutes a train I can climb on. That’s how it works.”

“How it works—” she began, but he cut in.

“You don’t get to decide that, Barb. At first you did, but now you don’t. Like I said, our relationship is growing. Changing. Developing. This could be a marriage made in heaven. If we both play our cards right,” he added.

The skeletal fingers felt as if they would close on her neck and choke off her breath. She said, “Watch yourself, Mitchell. Because I swear to God, if you’re threatening me, you’re going to be bloody sorry about it.”

“Threatening you?” Corsico laughed with a complete lack of humour. “That would never happen, Barb.” Then he rang off, leaving Barbara standing in Chalk Farm Road with a copy of The Source’s latest edition in one hand, her mobile phone in the other, cars whizzing by as drivers made their way to work, and pedestrians pushing past her as they made their way to the Underground station.

She knew she ought to join the latter group. She had barely enough time to get to work in order to avoid the baleful eye and meticulous note-taking of DI John Stewart. But she needed an immediate injection of caffeine and pastry into her body in order to be able to cope—let alone think—so she decided that DI Stewart and the assignment he would doubtless give her that day—more transcription please, Sergeant, as we’re having such a time keeping up with the action reports coming in every hour—would have to wait. She ducked into a recently opened establishment called Cuppa Joe Etc. She purchased a latte and an et cetera, which in this case was a chocolate croissant. God knew she was owed both, after the conversation with Corsico.

When her mobile chimed the opening lines of “Peggy Sue” two bites into the chocolate croissant and three gulps of latte later, Barbara hoped it was Corsico having a change of mind rather than a change of heart since the bloke apparently didn’t own a heart. But it turned out to be Lynley. Barbara’s insides did flip-flops at the possibilities attendant to a phone call from him.

She answered with, “Good news?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Oh God. No.”

“No, no,” Lynley said hastily. “Neither good nor bad news. Just some intriguing information that wants checking out.”

He told her of his meeting with Azhar and his subsequent meeting with Angelina Upman. He told her of the existence of yet another married lover of Angelina’s—in addition to Azhar, this one also in London—being left for Lorenzo Mura.

“D’you mean she was having it off with this bloke while she and Azhar . . . I mean after she had Hadiyyah by Azhar and . . . I mean once Azhar had left his wife . . . I mean . . . Hell, I don’t bloody know what I mean.”

Yes, Lynley said to it all. This man was a fellow dancer and choreographer in London with whom Angelina had been involved at the time she met Lorenzo Mura. And at that time, she also was the lover of Azhar and the mother of his child. The bloke was called Esteban Castro, and according to Angelina Upman, she merely disappeared from his life, giving him no word why. One day she was there in his bed, the next day she was gone, having left him—and Azhar—for Mura. His wife was a friend of hers as well. So both of these people would need to be checked out. For perhaps during the brief four months of Angelina’s putative return to Azhar, she’d taken up with Castro again as well, only to leave him another time.

“But Barbara,” Lynley told her, “this must be done on your own time, not on the Met’s time.”

“But the guv’ll let me get onto this if you ask her, won’t she?” Barbara said. After all, Lynley and Isabelle Ardery hadn’t parted enemies from their own affair. They were both professionals, after all. DI Lynley had been sent to Italy on a case. If he rang and asked her in his most pear-shaped of I’ve-gone-to-Eton tones—

“I did ring her,” he said. “I asked her if she might lend me you to look into this end of things in London. She won’t allow it, Barbara.”

“Because you asked for me,” Barbara said bitterly. “’F you’d asked for Winston, she’d be all over herself to cooperate. We both know that.”

“We didn’t go in that direction,” he said. “I could have asked for Winston but I assumed you’d prefer to do this, no matter when it had to be done.”

There was truth in that. Barbara knew she ought to be grateful to Lynley for having recognised how important it was to her to be kept in the loop of what was going on. So she said, “I s’pose. Thanks, sir.”

He said wryly, “Don’t overwhelm me with your gratitude, Sergeant. I’m not certain I could bear it.”

She had to smile. “I’m tap-dancing on the tabletop here. If you could only see.”

“Where are you?”

She told him.

“You’re going to be late into work,” he said. “Barbara, at some point you have to stop giving Isabelle ammunition.”

“That’s what Winston’s been saying, more or less.”

“And he’s correct. Having a professional death wish isn’t the best of ideas.”

“Right,” she said. “Whatever. Point taken. Anything else?” She was about to ask him how things were going in the direction of Daidre Trahair, but she knew there was little point in this since Lynley wouldn’t tell her. There were lines between them that nothing on earth could make the bloke cross.

“There is,” he said. “Bathsheba Ward.” He went on to tell her about the emails that Bathsheba had apparently written at the request of her twin sister, emails purportedly from Taymullah Azhar from University College to his daughter in Italy.

“That bloody cow lied to me!” Barbara cried in outrage. “She knew all along where Angelina was!”

“It appears that way,” Lynley told her. “So there’s a chance she might know something more about what’s going on now.”

Barbara considered this but she couldn’t come up with a way that Bathsheba Ward might be involved in Hadiyyah’s disappearance, much less a reason for it. Unless Angelina herself was involved.

She said, “How’s Angelina coping, then?”

“Distraught, as you might imagine. Not well physically either, it seems.”