Just One Evil Act

collapse, they were streaked with one hundred years of grime and guano, and the wood of windows and doors was split and rotting. However, Barbara discovered soon enough that all of this was clever camouflage. For Bryan Smythe, as it happened, owned six of the dwellings in a row and although the curtains that hung in their windows looked like the ill wishes of an envious sibling, once inside the door everything altered.

He was prepared for her visit, of course. Emily Cass had alerted him. His first words to Barbara were “You’re the Met, I presume,” and although he took in her appearance from head to toe, his facial expression didn’t alter when he read her tee-shirt’s message of No Toads Need to Pucker Up. Barbara clocked this. He was going to be good at dissimulation, she decided. He added, “DS Barbara Havers. That’s right, isn’t it?”

She said, “Last time I looked,” and elbowed her way into his house.

The place opened up like a gallery in both directions, with various large canvases of modern art on the walls and bits of metal sculpture depicting God only knew what writhing on tables, with sparse leather furniture and tasteful rugs beneath which a hardwood floor gleamed. The man himself was nothing to look at and less to talk about: ordinary except for his dandruff, which was extraordinary and copious. One could have cross-country skied on his shoulders. He was as pale as someone who rubbed elbows regularly with the walking dead, and he appeared malnourished. Too busy hacking into people’s lives to eat, Barbara reckoned.

“Nice digs,” she told him as she looked round the place. “Business must be booming.”

“There are good times and bad,” he replied. “I offer independent technological expertise to various companies and occasionally to individuals in need. I deal in making sure their systems are secure.”

Barbara rolled her eyes. “Please. I’m not here to waste your time or mine. If you know my name, you know what’s up. So let’s get to the point: I’m more interested in Doughty than I am in you, Bryan. C’n I call you Bryan? I hope so.” She sauntered into the gallery space and stood before a canvas painted red with a single blue stripe at the bottom. It looked like a proposal for a new EU road sign. She decided her preference was to remain in ignorance when it came to the subject of modern art. She turned back to Smythe. “Obviously, I c’n bring you down, but at present, I’m not ready to play that card.”

“You can try what you want,” Smythe told her blithely. He’d shut the door behind her and he’d shot the bolt home. She reckoned this had more to do with the value of the art on the walls than her presence, though. He went on to say, “Let’s look at the facts. You shut me down, I’m back up in twenty-four hours.”

“I expect that’s true,” she admitted. “But your regular customers might not like reading the news—or hearing about it on the telly—that their ‘technological security expert’ has had his gear carted off to the techies at New Scotland Yard for a lengthy scrutiny that doesn’t bode well. I can make that happen. You can, as you say, set yourself up with a whole new system before our forensic tech blokes can unpack your belongings in some cobwebbed basement in Victoria Street. But I expect the serious hit your business will take as a result of the publicity might require a rather long recovery period.”

He eyed her. She eyed his art. She picked up a sculpture that sat on a table of solid glass and she tried to make out what the thing was. Bird? Plane? Prehistoric monster? She looked from it to him and said, “Should I know what this bloody thing is?”

“You should know enough to be careful with it.”

She made a feint at dropping it. He took a quick step forward. She winked at him. “Us rozzers, Bryan? Believe me, we are thick as shoe soles when it comes to art. We are bulls in the bloody you-know-what, especially the blokes who come to cart off one’s belongings for inspection.”

“My art has nothing to do with—”

“The job? This technological expertising you do? I expect that might be the case, but the blokes who show up with court orders in their grubby hands . . . ?” She placed the sculpture carefully on the table. “They don’t know that, do they?”

“What sort of court order do you actually expect—”

“Emily Cass gave you up. You know that, Bryan. Pushed into a corner, she did not exactly come out swinging. You’re into bank records, phone records, mobile records, travel records, credit card records, and God only knows what other records. Do you really believe the local magistrate isn’t going to want to know what’s going on when you sit down at your keyboard and get in touch with your embedded mates? Where is that keyboard, by the way? Does a magic button somewhere do the business and a wall swings aside to reveal basement stairs?”

“You’ve seen too many films.”

“For my sins,” she admitted. “So what’s it to be?”

He thought about this. He wouldn’t know that she’d already determined to talk to Azhar before she reported to Lynley or to anyone else about any of her findings. He wouldn’t know that she’d decided she had to see her Pakistani neighbour in person in order to look him squarely in the face. He wouldn’t know that she could not for a moment believe that Azhar would endanger his daughter, frighten his daughter, or do anything else to his daughter in aid of either keeping her or getting her away from her mother. But those tickets to Pakistan suggested the worst and until she spoke to him and read whatever she could read from his expression or in his eyes, Barbara’s level of desperation was such that even staying calm in the presence of this bloke Smythe was taking every resource she had.

He finally said, “Come with me. At least I can enlighten you on one thing.”

He crossed the gallery space and slid open two silent pocket doors. Beyond them, a room similar in size to the gallery looked through a bank of pricey double-glazed windows out into a garden. This was brilliant with spring flowers and defined on its boundaries by ornamental cherry trees in bloom. A perfect lawn held a white gazebo. A rectangular pond supporting lily pads lay in front of this, a fountain at its centre.

The room into which he walked was his working space, as far from the cinematic version of a computer whiz’s lair as could be imagined. In films, the hacker holed up in a basement where the only light came from the monitors of the multitude of computers that encircled him. In Bryan Smythe’s reality there was a laptop on a fine stainless steel desk that faced his garden. Next to the laptop, three memory sticks sat in a holder. Another holder held sharpened pencils; another held pens. Next to the laptop were a pristine legal pad, one expensive designer fountain pen, and a printer.

Aside from that, the room morphed into a high-end kitchen at one end and a higher-end entertainment centre at the other. Speakers in the ceiling spoke of surround sound. Everything spoke of big money.

Barbara whistled soundlessly. She said, “Nice garden,” and went to look out of the window while her mind whirled into action and she tried to decide how best to wring the information from him. “Thinking of the Chelsea Flower Show, are we?”

“I like to have something pleasant to look at,” he said, and the slight emphasis he put upon the adjective indicated that Barbara wasn’t a sight for eyes even mildly sore. “While I work, that is,” he added. “Hence the positioning of the desk.”

“Always a good idea,” she acknowledged. “I expect you’d like to keep things that way.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s decision time for you, and let me be plain in case I haven’t been so far. Doughty is the fish we’re after. We’re looking at him for a kidnapping charge, something he orchestrated to occur in Lucca, Italy. It involves a nine-year-old English girl who was snatched by her mum last November and carted off to eat copious mounds of pasta, if you get my meaning. He was hired to locate her but he did more than that. He located her, claimed he hadn’t done, and then arranged to have her snatched. And then, he had you wipe every record clean. These would be all the records having anything to do with the nine-year-old girl, the original snatching, et cetera, et cetera. Are we on the same page so far?”

His mouth made a disparaging moue. She took this for acknowledgement and charged on.

“You confirm this, and our relationship—that would be yours and mine, and believe me I’ve been chuffed by it beyond my wildest dreams—is over. You refuse to confirm . . . ?” She waggled her hand. “The local rozzers, the local magistrate, and the Met’ll be wild to make your acquaintance.”

“So are you saying,” he said, “that if I confirm your imaginative theories about this nine-year-old—and I’m not confirming anything, by the way—my name does not get handed over to the Met at once? Or to the local police? Or to anyone?”

“Bryan, you are one clever lad. That is exactly what I’m saying. So what’s it going to be? Admittedly, Doughty isn’t going to want your services after this, but you can’t blame him for that, eh? Small