Just One Evil Act

and that’s what I gave him. End of story.”

“Not quite, mate. You’re doing nothing but trying to drop a load of cow manure on me. If you think that’s going to come close to convincing me you aren’t in this up to your eyeballs, then you’re bloody wrong. So let’s start again. And believe me, I’ve got hours to spare till we get to the truth.”

“I’ve told you—”

“Hours and hours,” she said pleasantly.

He seemed to think frantically of where to go next with his wild allegations, and he finally said with a snap of his fingers, “Khushi, then.”

Barbara drew in a deep breath.

He said it again. “Khushi, Sergeant Havers. Would I say that if I was lying to you? Professor Azhar said this to me: ‘She’ll listen to someone who calls her khushi because she’ll know the message is from me.’”

Barbara’s mouth went dry. She could feel her lips sticking to the front of her teeth. Happiness was the definition of the word khushi, but it was from the word itself that the impact came. For khushi was Azhar’s nickname for his daughter, and Barbara had heard the man say it hundreds of times in the two years that she’d known him.

She felt as if the chair she was sitting on was sinking into the floor of the room. Doughty’s face got wavy in her vision. She blinked and tried to fight off dizziness.

The bloody man, she realised, was finally telling her the truth.

BOW

LONDON

Dwayne Doughty knew there was very little time at this point. He was into this mess up to his nostrils, the sweating nerve-strung personification of the best laid plans of mice and men, et cetera. Once he was back out in the street—with his hours at the Bow Road nick just an aftertaste like burnt garlic in his mouth—he made for his office. There were things to be done and he was going to have to use every one of his skills to bring about the result he needed. Failing that, he knew that the barrel-shaped and outstandingly ill-dressed Met officer was completely right: A study of Michelangelo Di Massimo’s phone records and computer files was going to provide trails leading in more than one direction. Since Dwayne could hardly export the talented Bryan Smythe to deal with the Italian phone system and whatever went for the Pisan detective’s technology, he—Dwayne—was going to have to set up a series of offensive manoeuvres.

In the Roman Road, he pounded up the stairs to his office. He shouted, “Emily!” as he went. Her blagging expertise was going to be required. So was the superlative hacking expertise of Bryan Smythe and every one of his well-placed contacts.

Emily’s door was open. Two cardboard boxes sat outside her office in the area at the top of the stairs. They were taped and ready . . . but ready for what Dwayne didn’t know until he walked into the room that housed her operation and saw exactly what she intended.

She’d removed her tailored pinstriped jacket, her waistcoat, and her tie. They all lay across the back of her chair. This chair she’d pushed against the window, the better to access the inside of her desk, her files, her supplies, and everything else that marked her employment.

She shot him a look in the midst of dumping the contents of a drawer willy-nilly into an open box. “Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what? What’re you doing?”

“Don’t ask me what I’m doing when you can see for yourself. Or don’t play dumb. Or don’t be a fool. How about don’t put us in jeopardy? Take your pick.” She reached for the Sellotape and sealed the box. She heaved it up, heaved herself likewise, and carried the box past him in the doorway. She dumped it on top of the others and returned to her office, where, at a bulletin board, she began pulling down her map of London along with bus schedules, train schedules, a map of the Underground, and—for some reason—a poster of Montacute House and three picture postcards featuring the Cliffs of Moher, Beachy Head, and the Needles on the Isle of Wight.

“This can’t mean what I think it means,” he said.

“I don’t get paid enough to be caught up in shit like this. You do. But I don’t.”

“So you’re leaving? Just like that?”

“Your powers of observation . . . ? Incredible. No wonder you’ve been such a howling success in your chosen line of work.”

She was folding her maps and making a hash of it, paper maps always being a nightmare to put back into their original, neat form. She wasn’t following the designated folds and creases. It appeared that she couldn’t be bothered to do so, which told Dwayne Doughty how determined she was to be gone as soon as possible. And this told him how unnerved she was by what had happened: the cops showing up unexpectedly on their doorstep with the silver bracelets ready to be slapped on the wrists of two malefactors called Doughty and Cass.

He said, “You have a hell of a lot more nerve than this. For someone who pulls complete strangers in pubs —”

“Don’t even go there,” she shot at him. “If I’m not mistaken, unless things have really changed in this country, pulling strangers in pubs for anonymous sex is not going to get me hauled into the dock.”

“We’re not getting hauled into the dock,” he told her. “I’m not. You’re not. Bryan’s not. Full stop.”

“I’m not getting hauled to the nick, either. I’m not ringing up some solicitor to come hold my hand while the cops go through my life like it’s infested with bedbugs. I’m done with this, Dwayne. I told you from the first, and you wouldn’t listen because to you the bottom line is cash. Whoever pays the most is whose job we take on. Wrong side of the law? No problem, madam. We’re just who you want to take the bloody fall should everything in the case go to hell. Like it has now. So I’m out of here.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Em.” Dwayne did his best to hide his desperation. Without Em Cass at the helm of his computer system—not to mention on the phones acting the part of whatever official was needed to glean information from sources who’d be less than cooperative faced with someone with little talent for hoodwinking them—he was sunk and he knew it. “I called in the cavalry,” he told her. “I told them the truth.”

She was unimpressed. “There is no bloody cavalry. I tried to tell you that right from the first, didn’t I, but you wouldn’t listen. Oh no. You were far too clever for that.”

“Stop being dramatic. I gave them the professor. All right? Are you hearing me? I gave them the professor. Full stop. That’s what you’ve wanted, isn’t it? Well, it’s been done and you and I are on our way to being in the clear.”

“And they’re going to believe you?” she scoffed. “You name a name and that’s all there is to it?” She raised her head heavenward and spoke to some deity on the ceiling, saying, “Why didn’t I see what an idiot he is? Why didn’t I get out when this whole thing started?”

“Because you knew I’d never go into something without an exit strategy planned. And I have one for this. So d’you want to run off or do you want to unpack your boxes and help me set it in motion?”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Lynley located Taymullah Azhar in the Cathedral of San Martino, which stood enormously in a large piazza along with a palazzo and the traditional, separate battistero. It was an elaborate Romanesque building not dissimilar to a wedding cake, with a facade comprising four tiers of arches, and mounted upon it was a marble depiction of the eponymous saint performing his act of kindness with garment and sword upon a mendicant at the side of his horse. Lynley wouldn’t have thought to find Azhar inside this building. As a Muslim, he didn’t seem like a man who’d seek a Christian church in order to pray. But when Lynley rang his mobile, Azhar’s hushed voice said he was with the Holy Face inside the Duomo. Lynley wasn’t certain what this meant, but he asked the Pakistani man to wait for him there.

“You have news?” Azhar asked hopefully.

“Wait for me please” was Lynley’s reply.

Inside the cathedral, a tour was ongoing: A young woman with an official badge round her neck was shepherding some dozen or so people to stand at the foot of a Last Supper, the work of Tintoretto brightly lit to show angels above, apostles below, and the Lord in the midst of feeding a piece of bread to St. Peter as his