The article followed the same pattern as so many stories featured in the daily tabloids. Their meat and potatoes had for generations consisted of destroying reputations. They built someone up one week as a hero or a sympathetic victim or a luck-struck winner of a national lottery or a grand success in the arts or an admirable self-made man . . . only to tear him down the next week when every slighted friend or colleague he had in his life crawled out of their personal rubbish tip to report “new facts” about him. Just to bring him down a few pegs, of course.
Lynley looked up when he completed his reading of the article. He wasn’t quite sure where to go with any remark he might make because he wasn’t quite sure what Isabelle knew about Barbara and Taymullah Azhar. Nor, he had to admit, was he.
She said, “What am I to make of this, Tommy?”
He took off his glasses and returned them to his jacket pocket. “It looks to me like an officer of the police coming to the aid of an adolescent boy being struck about the head by an older man.”
“Oh, I can see that. I can even tell myself that all this photo depicts is a moment in which DS Barbara Havers happened upon a conflict in the street and stepped in to sort it like the Good Samaritan we know her to be. I could do all that happily, but what prevents me is the fact that this adolescent boy is the son of Taymullah Azhar. Not to mention the fact that the older man is the father of Taymullah Azhar. I’m not to make a coincidence of that, am I, Tommy?”
“The picture could have a thousand and one interpretations, Isabelle, as can the article. Anyone reading it and looking at the picture can see that much.”
“Naturally. And one of those interpretations is that Barbara Havers may very well have a vested interest—a deeply personal and not an objective professional interest—in matters that should not concern someone involved in an investigation.”
“You can’t possibly think that Barbara—”
“I don’t know what the hell to think about Barbara,” Isabelle cut in sharply. “But I do know what I see with my eyes and I do know what I hear with my ears, and—”
“‘Hear’? From whom? What? About Barbara?” Lynley studied her for a moment before he went on. She watched him do so and she met his gaze steadily. He finally looked away from her and at the paper still spread on her desk.
Lynley knew she wasn’t a tabloid reader. He didn’t flatter himself in thinking he knew everything about her from the months they’d spent naked in each other’s beds, but he did know that much. She didn’t read tabloids. So how had this one fallen into her hands? He said, “Where did you get this?” with a gesture at the paper.
“That’s hardly as important as the ‘news’ it contains.”
Lynley glanced over his shoulder at the closed door and what lay beyond it. And then, quite simply, he knew. “John Stewart,” he said. “And now he’s waiting to see what you intend to do about her. While all along what you should be intending to do is something about John.”
“I plan to deal with John in due time, Tommy. Just now we’re dealing with the issue of Barbara.”
“There is no issue of Barbara. She may know Azhar, but as to there being the slightest indication of a romantic involvement, a physical involvement,
She considered this for a very long moment. Outside her office, the sounds of a typical day’s activities were ongoing. Someone called out for “a copy of that article on peat preservation Philip was going on about,” and a trolley rattled by. Inside her office, they engaged in a stare-down which Isabelle finally broke by speaking.
“Tommy, we all have blind spots,” she said.
“Barbara doesn’t,” he returned as firmly as he could. “Not in this matter.”
She looked infinitely sad when she dismissed him with the reply, “I’m not talking about Barbara, Inspector.”
VICTORIA
LONDON
He wasn’t as certain about Barbara Havers as his words had been. He wasn’t, in fact, certain about anything. For this reason, he read the activity reports Barbara had turned in during the time she’d worked on John Stewart’s team, and from there he went to spend ten minutes with Harry Streener in SO12. The fact that now two CID officers were interested in SO12’s concerns about one Taymullah Azhar gave Streener pause, but Lynley soothed him with a claim that loose ends were being tied up upon the request of Detective Superintendent Ardery and he was the bloke given the job of tying.
Thus Lynley discovered the airline tickets to Pakistan in very short order. Thus Lynley also discovered to his dismay that Barbara was withholding information. He didn’t particularly want to think what all of this meant: about Taymullah Azhar and the kidnapping of his daughter as well as about DS Barbara Havers. But he knew he had to speak to Barbara at once. For the reality she needed to face was simple: If he had learned she was withholding information about Taymullah Azhar, it stood to reason that John Stewart would unearth this fact sooner or later and turn it over to Isabelle. At that point Isabelle’s hands would be tied and so would his own be. He couldn’t let that happen.
He found Barbara at work at her desk, every inch of her announcing that she was nothing less than a nose- to-the-grindstone officer intent upon doing her duty. He said to her quietly, “I need a word, Barbara,” and he could see from her immediate expression of alarm that he’d perfectly telegraphed to her the seriousness of the situation.
He left her and went to the lifts. When she joined him there, he pushed for the fourth floor. He led her to Peeler’s. Some tables were occupied with the last of the lunchtime crowd, but most were empty. He selected one far away from the remaining hubbub of the place, and by the time they had reached the table, sat, and ordered coffees, he could tell that the sergeant was as rattled as he wanted her to be.
He said, “John Stewart’s given Isabelle a copy of
“I went to the school, sir,” Barbara told him hastily. “Sayyid’s comprehensive. I’d had word from Corsico that he was intent on interviewing the kid, and I knew Sayyid would spew all sorts of rubbish about Azhar. It wasn’t only about Azhar that I went to the school, though. I knew whatever
“That’s not what I want to talk to you about, Barbara,” Lynley told her. “John has his reasons for handing over the tabloid, and I expect we’ll discover what they are sooner rather than later. The point is that you’re in this too far, that fact is playing itself out in the paper, and that makes your work suspect.”
Havers said nothing as their coffee was delivered to the table. When cups and saucers had been laid before them and the coffee poured, she did her business with the milk and sugar and set the spoon aside but didn’t drink. She said, “I hate that bloke.”
“You’ve reason,” Lynley told her. “I wouldn’t waste the breath to argue otherwise. But you’ve fallen into John’s hands with the way this business of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping has played out. So if you’ve given him any other evidence of your lack of objectivity in the investigation, then I think it’s to your benefit to tell me now before he discovers it and reports it to Isabelle.”
He waited then. It was, he knew, a do-or-die moment for Havers, one that was going to define what the nature of their partnership was and what, if anything, he could do to help her out of the mess into which she seemed to have got herself. It was obvious to him that DI John Stewart had loosed the dogs of an informal investigation upon her. She had to see that, and she also had to see that only a complete display of the cards she was holding would allow him to develop a strategy on her behalf.
Come on, Barbara, was what he thought. Move yourself in the right direction.
At first, he thought she was going to do just that. She said, “Sir, I lied about my mum.” And she told him of a tale she’d spun for Isabelle in order to buy herself time from work. It was about her mother’s having taken a fall. She gave him an account of everything fictitious that had followed the ostensible fall: from the ambulance service to the private hospital and all points in between. She also told him of the use she had made of her time while she was supposed to be engaged in activities assigned to her by DI Stewart. She gave an account of her dealings with Doughty and of her confrontations with that man’s associates. On the surface, it appeared that she was telling him
