Barbara. She wet her lips.
“Now my guess is that if our Dwayne has you to operate the phones and impersonate everyone from doddering old ladies to the Duchess of Cambridge, you’re not the only talent he employs. He’s not a fool. The bloke sets me a challenge called examine-every-one-of-my-records-here-if-you-don’t-believe-me, and what that suggests to me is someone else’s involvement in the whole bloody scheme, someone competent at sweeping records clean, someone who looks at that as child’s play. I want that name, Emily. I suspect it’s a bloke called Bryan that Doughty mentioned early on. I want his phone number, his email address, his street address, whatever. You give me that, and you and I part friends. Everyone else and I? Not so much. But there comes a point when common sense suggests one remove one’s neck from the noose. We’ve reached that point. What’s it going to be?”
That was it. Cards on the table. Barbara waited to see what would happen. The seconds ticked by. During them, a gust of wind blew a yellow carrier bag down the street and a Muslim cleric emerged from a narrow doorway with a crocodile of little boys in tow. Barbara watched them and thought how times had changed in London. No one looked innocent any longer. A simple outing took on multiple potential meanings. The world was becoming such a miserable place.
“Bryan Smythe,” Emily said quietly.
Barbara turned her head back to gaze at Emily. “And he does . . . ?”
“Phone records, bank records, credit card records, emails, net searches, computer trails, all the rest. Anything having to do with computer technology.”
Barbara dug out her notebook and flipped it open. She said, “Where c’n I find this stellar individual?”
Emily had to get this information from her mobile phone. She read it out—the bloke’s address and phone numbers—and shoved the mobile back into her pocket. She added, “He didn’t know what it was all in service of. He just did what Dwayne told him to do.”
“No worries there,” Barbara said. “I know Dwayne’s the big fish, Emily.” She pushed back from the table and dropped her notebook back into her shoulder bag. She got to her feet. “You might want to look for another line of employment. Between you and me, Doughty’s private investigation business is going to have a serious setback sooner rather than later.”
She left the young woman sitting in the pub. She reckoned Doughty was in his office, so that was where she took herself next. With Bryan Smythe’s name in her possession, she was now holding a rather good hand of cards.
Above Bedlovers, she gave two knocks to Doughty’s door, entering without being bidden to do so. She found the man in consultation with a middle-aged estate manager type. They were bent over Doughty’s desk, examining photos, and in the estate manager’s fingers was a handkerchief that he was in the act of crushing to bits.
Doughty looked up. “D’you mind?” he snapped. “We’re conducting business.”
“So’m I.” Barbara took out her warrant card and showed it to the poor bloke who was being presented with the cold, hard, and no doubt slimy facts of someone’s betrayal of him. “I’m going to need a word with Mr. Doughty,” she said. And with a glance at the pictures—two nude young men, as it happened, cavorting together with rather too much enthusiasm in a tree-sided pond—she added, “What’d that idiot film director say? ‘The heart wants what the heart wants’? I’m sorry.”
Doughty gathered up the pictures and said to her, “You’re a piece of work.”
“For my sins,” she agreed.
The estate manager had backed off from his perusal of the photos. He was taking a chequebook from his jacket pocket, but Barbara took him by the arm and urged him towards the door. “I expect Mr. Doughty—decent bloke that he is—wants to make this one on the house.” She bade him farewell, watched him go for the stairs with his head hanging low, and added her hope that the rest of his day was going to be more pleasant than his just- completed meeting in the office above Bedlovers had been.
Then she closed the door and turned to Doughty. He was red in the face, and it wasn’t embarrassment making him so. He said, “How bloody dare you!”
To which she replied, “Bryan Smythe, Mr. Doughty. At least Bryan Smythe on this end. On the other end is Michelangelo Di Massimo. He doesn’t have his own Bryan Smythe, as it happens. His computers won’t be as squeaky clean as yours. Same goes for his telephone records, I expect. And then there’s the small matter of his bank account and what it might show when we get our hands on it.”
“I
“Because what you didn’t tell me was that he was employed to snatch Hadiyyah, Dwayne.”
“I didn’t employ him to do that, Sergeant. I’ve told you that before and I’m going to continue telling you that. If you think otherwise, then it’s time you took a suggestion from me.”
“And that is . . . ?”
“The professor. Taymullah Azhar. It’s been him from the first, but you haven’t wanted to look at that, have you? So
“His Berlin story—”
“Bugger Berlin. This was never about Berlin. Berlin’s been a malodorous red herring from the first. Of course he was there. He was giving his paper and attending lectures and popping up all over the bloody hotel like a Pakistani jack-in-the-box. He would’ve had a convenient leg break in the lobby of the place if he’d needed to make certain his stay was memorable, but as it happens, he didn’t need to make certain of that because all his colleagues are willing to believe every word that comes out of the blighter’s mouth. As was I, as it happens. And, let’s be frank here, as are you.”
He went to one of his filing cabinets as he spoke. He jerked open the top drawer, and he brought out a manila folder. This he tossed on his desk, and he sat behind it. He said, “Oh, bloody sit down and let’s have a rational conversation for once.”
Barbara trusted the man in the same way she would have trusted a cobra sliding towards her big toe. She narrowed her eyes and observed him for anything that would allow her to read what was going on. But he looked, maddeningly, as he always looked: everything about him average save for that nose, veering in several directions before it got round to presenting his nostrils to a less-than-admiring public.
She sat. She wasn’t about to let him wrest from her the reins of the conversation, however. So she said, “Bryan Smythe’s going to confirm a phone sweep and he’s going to confirm a computer sweep as well. Put that together with the blagging on the part of Ms. Cass and—”
“You might want to take a look at these before you cha-cha any further in that direction.” Doughty opened the manila folder and handed over two documents. They were, Barbara saw, copies of plane tickets, coming from the sort of reservations made online by millions of people every day. The flight in question departed from Heathrow. It was a one-way ticket, and its destination was Lahore.
Barbara felt her heart slam against her chest and her mouth went dry. For the name of the first passenger was Taymullah Azhar. The name of the second was Hadiyyah Upman.
She found that she couldn’t think for a moment. She couldn’t think what it meant, she couldn’t think why the tickets existed at all, and she couldn’t think—because she didn’t want to think—that everything she believed she knew about Azhar was about to crumble into dust.
Doughty apparently read all this on her face, for he said, “Yes. There you have it. Tied up with a ribbon and I ought to bill you hours for doing your bleeding job for you.”
She said, with an attempt at bravado, “What I have here is a piece of paper, Mr. Doughty. And as you and I know, anyone can generate a piece of paper, just like anyone can buy a ticket to anyplace in anyone else’s name.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, then have a look at the dates,” he advised her. “The date of the flight is interesting enough, but I think you’ll find the date of the purchase more interesting still.”
So Barbara looked at these and then she tried to decide what the two dates were telling her about her friend. The date of the flight was the fifth of July, which one could argue spoke of Azhar’s hope that his daughter would be found alive and perfectly well. Or it spoke of a ticket purchase made months and months earlier, far in advance of Hadiyyah’s November disappearance from London. But the date of purchase changed the playing field. It was the twenty-second of March, well in advance of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping in Italy but during the time when
