Even had she not known Doughty played amateur rugby, his nose would have told her as much. It looked as if it had been broken multiple times and his NHS doctor had finally thrown up his hands in defeat and said, “Let it do what it will.” It was certainly doing that. It headed off in one direction and then swerved in another, giving his face such an odd asymmetry that it was impossible to move one’s gaze from it. Everything else about the man was average: medium build, medium-brown hair, medium weight. Aside from his nose, he was the kind of man one wouldn’t notice on the street. But the nose made him unforgettable.
“Miss Havers, I take it?” He rose. Medium height as well, Barbara thought. He added, “And this is the friend you spoke of?”
Azhar crossed the room and extended his hand. “Taymullah Azhar,” he said.
“Is it mister?”
“Just Azhar.”
Hari, Barbara thought out of nowhere. Angelina called him Hari.
“And this is about a missing child?” Doughty said. “Your child?”
“It is.”
“Sit, then.” Doughty indicated a chair in front of his desk. There was another, mismatched to the first, at the window—as if its use was for spying on action in the street—and Doughty placed it next to the first, carefully matching one’s angle to the other’s.
Barbara glanced round the office as he did this. She’d half expected the place to be in the best tradition of private eyes from nearly a century of gumshoe novels. But this office looked like something inhabited by a military officer with its olive-green desk, olive-green metal filing cabinets, and olive-green bookshelves. These contained a matching set of books, neat stacks of periodicals, and university graduation photos of both of his children. There was also—on his desk—a photo of a woman near Doughty’s own age, presumably his wife.
Everything was neatly in its place, from the maps of Greater London and the UK pinned to bulletin boards on the wall to the in-and-out boxes on the desk, to the holder for mail and the holder for business cards. Aside from the photos, there was nothing in the room suggestive of decoration beyond a dusty artificial plant atop one of the filing cabinets.
Together, Barbara and Azhar went over the details for Dwayne Doughty. He took notes and Barbara was reassured when he asked good, sharp questions. These gave evidence to the fact that he knew the law. Unfortunately, these also gave evidence to the fact that there was very little that he could do.
Barbara was able to tell him something more than Azhar had been able to reveal to Lynley and to her when they’d met with him on the night of his daughter’s disappearance. In what little spare time Isabelle Ardery had been allowing her, she’d managed to locate Bathsheba Ward, the sister of Angelina Upman.
“She’s in Hoxton,” Barbara told Doughty, and she gave him the address, which he took down in block letters, all upper case. “Married to a bloke called Hugo Ward. Two kids, but they’re his, not hers. I had her on the blower, and she pretty much confirmed everything already known about Angelina and her family. The whole lot of them broke off communications about ten years ago when Angelina got together with Azhar. She claims to have no clue where she is and even less interest in finding out. Some sort of digging might be in order there. Bathsheba could be lying.”
Doughty nodded as he wrote. “Rest of the family?”
“The Upmans are in Dulwich,” Barbara said. She felt Azhar’s gaze on her, and she said, “I phoned one evening. Just to see if they’d had any word. Nothing. Except Bathsheba seemed to be telling the truth: no love lost.”
“Spoke to them at length, did you?” Doughty asked, his eyes narrowing in on Barbara speculatively.
“The dad. Not at length. Just to ask where Angelina was. Old school chum looking for her. That sort of thing. He hadn’t a clue and was happy to announce it. He could’ve been covering for her, but he didn’t seem the type to go to that much trouble.”
Doughty gave Azhar his attention, then. He turned to a fresh page in the legal pad on which he’d been taking down the details Barbara had given him. He used the same block printing to put
BOW
LONDON
Dwayne Doughty stood at the window once the woman and man had left. He waited till they departed the building that housed his office. He watched them walk towards the arch at the corner that announced one was entering the precinct of the Roman Road. They disappeared round the corner to the left. For good measure, he waited another thirty seconds. Then he left his office and went next door.
He didn’t worry about letting the cat out. There was no cat, the sign merely a device to keep people from entering precipitately. He went inside, where a woman was sitting at a bank of three computer monitors. She was wearing a set of earphones, and she was watching a replay of the meeting Doughty had just had. He said nothing until the replay ended with a shaking of hands and with the woman—Barbara Havers—looking round his office a second time.
He said, “What d’you reckon, Em?”
Emily watched him, on replay, walking to the window and keeping himself from view. She reached for a plastic bag of carrot sticks and crunched one of them between her teeth. “Cop,” she said. “She could be someone from his local nick, but I’d go higher. One of the special groups. Whatever they’re called. SO and a number. I can’t keep up with the changes they keep making at the Met.”
“What about the other?”
“He seems legit. Just what you’d expect from someone with a daughter who’s gone missing but is with the mother. The mother doesn’t mean the kid harm, and the dad knows this. So you get despair from him but not that frantic sense of
“So?” Doughty said, interested as always to see how her twenty-six-year-old mind would take the case.
She leaned back in her chair. She yawned and energetically went at her scalp. She wore her hair in a mannish style and she dressed like a man as well. She was, in fact, often mistaken for a man and the extracurricular pursuits she chose were more manly than womanly in nature: trick skiing, snowboarding, cliff climbing, windsurfing, mountain biking. She was Doughty’s second right hand, the best tracer in the business, an even better blagger, a woman who could run twelve miles in the morning with a forty-pound pack on her back and still show up to work on time.
“I’d say normal course of action,” Em told him. “But step lightly, watch our backs, and skate on the right side of the law.” She shoved herself away from the monitors and got to her feet. “How’d I do?”
“I agree with everything you said,” he told her.
30 November
BOW
LONDON
It was eleven days later when a phone call from the private investigator took Barbara and Azhar back to Dwayne Doughty’s office. In the intervening time, he’d made the journey to Chalk Farm to have a look at Azhar’s flat. He’d prowled round the place, examining what little there was to examine. He’d given Hadiyyah’s school uniform a look, and he’d asked Azhar why the little girl’s stuffed giraffe might have been left behind when nearly everything else belonging to her was gone. He’d nodded thoughtfully at whatever implications there were in Azhar’s having won a different giraffe for Hadiyyah only to have it taken from her by a group of yobs on a pleasure pier, and he’d removed Hadiyyah’s laptop from the premises, saying it bore further examination by someone he employed.
Now they sat in his office, in the same two chairs they’d occupied before. It was early evening.
