Just One Evil Act

When Barbara walked into Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery’s office, she knew something had gone wrong with the master plan of lies that she’d come up with to get away from the Met’s offices five days earlier in order to attempt to deal with the Sayyid crisis. She reckoned that at the eleventh hour, Mrs. Flo had developed feet of ice in the matter of confirming the “fall” taken by one of the residents of her care home in Greenford. But as it turned out, that good woman had taken the decision that only an elaboration of the story of the fall would do to persuade Barbara’s superior officers that everything was on the complete up-and-up regarding Barbara’s absence from beneath DI John Stewart’s spatulate thumb.

Stewart was in the super’s office as well. He sat on one of the two chairs in front of Ardery’s desk, and he turned to give Barbara a barely disguised contemptuous once-over when she joined them. The superintendent herself was standing, looking trim, fit, and well turned out as always. Beyond her shoulders, the windows offered a grey day promising more rain to confirm what that poet had said about the month of April.

Isabelle Ardery nodded as Barbara entered. She said, “Sit,” and Barbara gave idle thought to barking doglike in response. But she did as she was told. Ardery then said, “Tell her, John,” and she placed both manicured hands on the windowsill, leaning against it and listening as Stewart recited what Barbara quickly saw was her likely professional epitaph.

“My flowers for your mother were undeliverable, as it happens,” Stewart said. And didn’t the bloody bastard look pleased about this, Barbara thought. “The hospital in question had no record of a patient with her name. I’m wondering, Sergeant . . . Has she an alias, perhaps?”

“What’re you yapping on about?” Barbara asked him tiredly, although her mind started energetically darting round possibilities like a pinball scoring a multitude of points.

For the purposes of dramatic effect, Stewart had brought a notebook along, and he flipped it open in his palm. “Mrs. Florence Magentry,” he announced. “An ambulance company called St. John’s, she thinks, although it could have been St. Julian’s, St. James’s, St. Judith’s, or any number of sanctified names beginning with J. At any rate, it was Saint Somebody, or so she claims despite the fact that, as it happens, there is no such creature. Next: Accident and Emergency at the local hospital and a broken hip that wasn’t a broken hip at all but seemed to be so, so she was only in for an hour or a day or two or three but who really knows because the fact of the bloody matter is that she never had a sodding fall at all.” He snapped the notebook closed. “Do you want to explain what the hell you’re up to when no one’s given you leave to—?”

“That’ll do, John,” Ardery said.

Taking the offensive was her only option. Barbara said to Stewart “What is it with you? You’ve got a robbery and murder case on, and you’re using your time to decide whether my poor mum . . . ? You’re outrageous, you are. As it happens, she was taken by a private ambulance to a private clinic because she has her own private insurance, and if you’d decided to sodding ask me about it instead of creeping round in the background like a third-rate housebreaker—”

“And that’ll do as well,” Ardery said.

But Barbara’s heart was pounding. No matter what she said, Stewart was going to be able to check her story, and her only hope was to make him look worse for his compulsion to put the thumbscrews to her than she looked doing a scarper from work because she’d had to deal with that damn louse Mitch Corsico and his determination to speak to Azhar’s son, Sayyid.

She said to Ardery, “He’s been like this since you assigned me to him, guv. He’s got me under some bloody microscope like I’m an amoeba he wants to study. And he’s using me as a sodding typist.”

“Are you actually trying to put the spotlight on me?” Stewart demanded. “You’re out of order, and you damn well know it.”

“You deserve the sodding spotlight on you and you’ve needed it on you since your wife walked out and you decided to punish every female on earth because of it. And who the hell could blame the poor woman? Life with you would make anyone prefer life on the street with a dog.”

“I want her written up for this,” Stewart said to Ardery. “I want it in her file and then I want a CIB1—”

“Both of you are out of order,” Ardery snapped. She walked to her desk, jerked the chair out, and sank into it, looking from Stewart to Barbara to Stewart again. “I’ve had enough of whatever it is between the two of you. It stops here, in this office, this very minute or you’re both facing disciplinary action. Now get back to work. And if I hear anything more about you”—this to Barbara—“acting in any way that appears remotely dodgy, you’ll be facing not only disciplinary action but what follows it. Got it?”

Stewart’s thin lips creased themselves into a smile. But it vanished soon enough when Ardery went on. “And you,” she said to him, “are an officer in charge of a robbery and murder enquiry so act like an officer in charge of a robbery and murder enquiry. Which, I’d like to remind you, John, means that you assign your people in a manner that utilises their talents and does not appease your need for . . . for whatever the hell it is that you apparently need. Am I being clear?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She picked up the phone, punched in a few numbers, and said in dismissal, “Now for God’s sake get out of here and get back to work.”

They did the first but paused short of the second. In the corridor, DI Stewart grabbed Barbara’s arm. At his touch, she felt a surge of outrage steam through her veins and she was moments from applying her knee to a place on his body where he’d long remember the encounter. She said, “You bloody get your hand off me or I’ll have you charged with—”

“You listen to me, you bleeding bovine,” he whispered. “Your move in there was clever as hell. But I’m holding cards you don’t even know about, and when I want to use them, I will. Understand that and act at your own peril, Sergeant Havers.”

“Oh my God, you knot up my knickers,” Barbara said.

She walked away, but her mind was like an arguing Greek chorus in her head. Part of it was shrieking to beware, to take heed, to walk the straight and narrow before it was too late. The other part was planning her next move and that part was quickly subdividing itself into the half dozen next moves that were possible.

Into this mental embroilment, Dorothea Harriman called Barbara’s name. Barbara turned to see the departmental secretary cradling a telephone receiver in her hand. She said, “You’re wanted at once down below.”

Barbara cursed quietly. What now? she thought. Down below meant Reception. She had a visitor and was intended to go fetch him. She said, “Who the hell . . . ?” to Dorothea.

“Reception says it’s someone in a costume.”

“A costume?”

“Dressed like a cowboy?” Then Dorothea seemed to twig because Mitchell Corsico had been inside the Met offices before. Her cornflower-blue eyes got round as she said, “Detective Sergeant, it must be that bloke who was embedded—” But Barbara stopped her as fast as she could.

“I’m on it,” she told Dorothea, and with a nod at the phone, “Tell them I’m on my way down, okay?”

Dorothea nodded, but Barbara had no intention of heading down to Reception to be seen in the company of Mitchell Corsico. So she ducked into the stairwell a short distance down the corridor, and she took out her mobile and punched in Corsico’s number. When he answered, she was brevity itself. “Get out of here. You and I are finished.”

“I’ve rung you eight or nine times” was his response. “No reply, no reply? Tsk, tsk, tsk, Barb. I thought a personal appearance in Victoria Street was in order.”

“What’s in order is for you to sod off,” Barbara hissed.

“You and I need a word.”

“Not going to happen.”

“I think it is. So I can remain down here and ask every Tom, Dick, and Sherlock who passes by to fetch you—introducing myself to them along the way, of course—or you can come down and we can have a quick chat. What’s it going to be?”

Barbara shut her eyes hard, in the hope that this would allow her to think. She had to get rid of the journalist, she couldn’t be seen with him, she was a bloody fool for having used him in the first place, if anyone knew she’d been his snout in this matter of Hadiyyah and her family . . . So she had to get him clear away from