Just One Evil Act

prayed and fasted within her cell, seeking to understand God’s intention for her, her cousin Roberto had lain injured within the wreckage of his car. It came to Sister Domenica Giustina that both she and her cousin Roberto had been challenged. Have faith through suffering, their God had proclaimed. I will move in your life as I will.

It was challenge, she realised. It was all about challenge. It was about not giving up for an instant, no matter the blackness of what lay ahead.

Job had faced this. Abraham had faced this as well. In the case of that great patriarch of the Hebrews, the challenge he’d endured surpassed any other that God had ever given to man. Sacrifice your son Isaac to me, God had demanded of his servant Abraham. Take him into the mountains, build an altar of stone, and upon that altar put your sword to his throat. Let his blood flow forth. Burn his body. In this way prove your love for Me. This will not be easy, but it is what I ask. Obey your God.

Yes, yes, she understood at last. A challenge such as Abraham’s could only be a challenge if it was not easy.

BOW

LONDON

She would get it all done, Barbara told herself. But first she had to talk to Doughty. After that, she’d be back on track, heading south of the river first and then doing the north London bit at the end of the day. These things always took time. No interview went like clockwork. She would be able to smooth the rough edges of her day’s employment in such a way as to please anyone who decided to scrutinise it.

At the Bow Road station she identified herself and was in short order escorted to the interview room in which Dwayne Doughty was cooling his heels. He’d been there for more than an hour, she was told. His sole reaction so far had been the demand of “What the hell is going on, you sods?”

When she walked into the room, Doughty said, “You again?” At the narrow table, he had a plastic cup of tea with a skin of cooling milk formed on its surface. He shoved this to one side, and its contents sloshed out. “Bloody hell,” he went on. “I’ve told you everything. What more do you want from me?”

Barbara evaluated him before she spoke. He wasn’t as cool a customer as he’d been in their earlier encounters, so she reckoned this jaunt to the nick had been a very good idea. A sour smell came off him—he must have begun sweating like a glass holding a bad martini the moment uniforms had shown up in his office—and he’d loosened his necktie and unbuttoned the top of his shirt to reveal a band of oily sweat round the inside of the collar.

“What the fuck is this about?” he demanded.

She sat. She put her shoulder bag on the floor and took her time about digging out her notebook and pencil. She flipped the notebook open and then studied the detective. “Azhar’s alibi checks out,” she told him.

He exploded like an overblown balloon. “I bloody told you that!” he snapped. “I looked into it myself. You paid me to do it, I did it, I made my report to you, and if that doesn’t prove to you that I’m walking on the sodding right side of the bleeding law—”

“The only thing that’s ever going to prove that is the full truth, Dwayne. The whole A to Z of it, if you read my meaning.”

“I’ve given you the full truth. I’ve got nothing more to give. This ‘interview’ or whatever the hell you’re up to here is bloody well over. I know my rights, and one of them isn’t to sit here and have you harp on things we’ve already discussed. The cops asked me to come in for a few questions. I came in cooperatively. And now I’m leaving.” He shoved back from the table.

“They’ve made an arrest in Italy,” she told him.

That stopped him like a fist in the face. He said nothing, but he also didn’t move.

“They’re holding a bloke called Carlo Casparia,” she said. “We’re about twenty-four hours from tracing him to you. So what I’d suggest is that you come clean before we pack you up, put you on a plane, and deliver you to the cops in Lucca.”

“You can’t do that.” But he sounded rather stiff when he spoke.

“Dwayne, you’d be surprised, amazed, astonished, and gobsmacked at what we can do when our little minds get going. Now the way I see things, you have a decision to make. You can tell me everything, or you can act the leaky hosepipe like you’ve been doing from the first, giving me information in dribs and drabs.”

“I told you the truth,” he said, but his tone had definitely altered. Barbara heard no outrage in it at this point but rather intensity, and this change was a good thing. It meant his mind was working on all cylinders and her job was to oil the gears of his brain so the entire mechanism began to operate in her direction. “I gave all the information I had to Professor Azhar,” Doughty said. “I swear it. What the professor did with it, I don’t know and I have no clue. He wanted the kid back, you know that. Maybe he found someone over there to snatch her for him. What I did—and I’ve already told you this—was hire a bloke in Italy once we learned a bank account in Lucca was involved. I gave him the information, the professor. I also told him the name of the bloke who did the work for me. Michelangelo Di Massimo. Now, if Professor Azhar then hired Di Massimo to take things further . . . I had nothing to do with that.”

Barbara nodded, unimpressed. It was a nice performance verbally, but she watched the private detective’s eyes as he spoke. They were as jittery as the rest of him was. They fairly danced in his head. And his fingers were restless, tapping in unison against his thumbs.

“So you say,” she said. “But I expect this Carlo Casparia they’ve got over there is saying something else. See, he’s not going to want to take the fall for this, not completely, because no one ever does. And what I reckon is that between him and that Michelangelo bloke, someone’s not going to have your skill set when it comes to wiping hard drives, emails, and telephone records and God knows what else squeaky clean. So my guess is that in the next day or so, there’s going to be a trail uncovered that leads from Casparia to Michelangelo to you, dates and times included. And you’re going to have one bloody hell of a time trying to explain it all away. See, Dwayne, the trouble with cooking up schemes like this one to snatch Hadiyyah is that the old ‘no honour among thieves’—or in this case kidnappers—always applies. You get more than one person involved, and someone’s going to break, because when it comes to necks being saved, most people choose their own.”

Doughty was silent. He was, of course, evaluating all this for its potential to be the truth. Barbara herself didn’t know what this bloke Casparia had to do with anything, but if dropping his name and his arrest and stretching things from there was going to get her one step closer to Hadiyyah, she intended to drop it at every opportunity.

Doughty finally spoke. “All right.”

“Meaning?”

He looked away from her. He was suddenly still, and only a steadying breath moved his body. “It was Professor Azhar’s idea from the first.”

Barbara narrowed her eyes. “What was Professor Azhar’s idea?”

“To find her, to plan it all, to wait until the time was right, then to snatch her. The right time turned out to be when he was in Berlin for his conference, establishing an alibi. The kid was supposed to be snatched and held in a location until Azhar could get there and fetch her back to London.”

“Bollocks,” Barbara said.

Doughty’s gaze flew back to her. “I’m telling you the truth!”

“Oh, are you? Aside from a few little problems having to do with getting her out of Italy and into England without a passport, what was supposed to happen when Azhar got her back to London, eh? Let me tell you: What was supposed to happen is what actually happened, which is why your tale is rubbish. Hadiyyah’s mum showed up, demanding her back, because the first person she suspected of having snatched her daughter was the dad she’d stolen her from in the first place.”

“Right, right,” Doughty said. “That’s how it was supposed to play out. She’d show up, he’d prove to her that he didn’t have the girl, he’d return to Italy with the mother, and then—while he was in Italy—she’d be handed over to him. And he’s there now, isn’t he? Isn’t that proof enough for what I’m trying to tell—”

“Same problem, mate. Double problem, actually. He doesn’t have her, and even if he does or if he knows where she is and is putting on the performance of a lifetime for the Italian cops, my colleague over there, and everyone else, what’s next on the chart for him when she’s handed over? Is he supposed to bring her back to London without her mum ever knowing she’s here?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. It didn’t make any difference to me. All he wanted from me was information