Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

fooled me for months. She fooled Azhar. She fooled her own daughter. But maybe she wasn’t fooling at all. Maybe she never intended to leave. Maybe they came for her out of the blue and they’ve taken her somewhere and she had to leave that message and they forced her to sound—”
    “You can’t have it both ways,” Lynley said, although his voice was kind.
    “He is right,” Azhar said. “If she was forced to make a phone call, if she was taken from here—she and Hadiyyah—against her will, she would have said something in that phone call to you. She would have left a sign. There would be some indication, but there is not. There is nothing. And what she did leave—Hadiyyah’s school uniform, her laptop, that little giraffe—this was to tell me that they are not returning.” His eyes grew red-rimmed.
    Barbara swung to Lynley. He was, she had long known, the most compassionate cop on the force and quite possibly the most compassionate man she’d ever met. But she could see upon his face that what he felt—beyond sympathy for Azhar—was knowledge of the truth in front of them. She said to him, “Sir.
Sir
.”
    He said, “Aside from checking with the families, Barbara . . . She’s the mother. She’s broken no law. There’s no divorce with a judge’s decree and a custody ruling that she’s defying.”
    “A private enquiry, then,” Barbara said. “If we can do nothing, then a private detective can.”
    “Where am I to find such a person?” Azhar asked her.
    “I can be that person,” Barbara told him.

16 November
    VICTORIA
    LONDON
    A bsolutely not” was how Acting Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery greeted Barbara’s request for time off. She went on from this to demand an immediate explanation for the headgear Barbara happened to be wearing. This was a knitted cap of the sort skiers wore, complete with pompom on the top. On the fashion side of things, it scored a zero. On the police side of things, it was into negative numbers. For prior to its ruin, Barbara’s hair had been cut and styled upon the strongest recommendation of the acting detective superintendent herself, and since her strongest recommendation was first cousin to an order, Barbara had complied. Thus, its ruin smacked of defiance, which was exactly how Isabelle Ardery was going to see it.
    “Take off that hat,” Ardery said.
    “As to time off, guv . . .”
    “I’d like to remind you that you’ve just had time off,” the superintendent snapped. “How many days were you at the beck and call of Inspector Lynley while he was on his little sojourn up in Cumbria?”
    Barbara couldn’t deny this. She had just finished assisting Lynley in a private endeavour in which he’d been engaged. He’d been tapped by Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier for a hush-hush matter near Lake Windermere, and Isabelle Ardery had discovered Barbara’s involvement in the matter. She’d not been pleased. Thus, she was going to embrace the idea of Detective Sergeant Havers having more time off to engage in an extracurricular round of policing with all the enthusiasm of a woman being asked to dance the Viennese waltz with a porcupine.
    “Take off the hat,” Isabelle repeated. “Now.”
    Barbara knew that way would lead to a very dark place. So she said, “Guv, this is an emergency. This is personal. This is family.”
    “What part of your family would ‘this’ be? As I understand matters, you have one member to your family, Sergeant, and she’s in a nursing home in Greenford. You can’t be saying your mother wants some policing done for her, can you?”
    “It’s not a nursing home. It’s a private residence.”
    “Is there a carer present? And does she require care?”
    “Of course there is and of course she does,” Barbara told her. “Obviously, you know that.”
    “So the policing matter involving your mother is what, exactly?”
    “All right.” Barbara sighed. “So it’s not my mother.”
    “You said a family matter?”
    “All right. It’s not my family either. It’s a friend, and he’s in trouble.”
    “As are you. Now am I going to have to ask you again to remove that ridiculous hat?”
    There was nothing for it. Barbara pulled the ski cap from her head.
    Isabelle stared. She raised a hand as if to ward off an apocalyptic vision. “What,” she said tersely, “am I to make of this? A momentary slip of the scissors leading to a fatal disaster? Or an unspoken message to your superior officer, in this