Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

Azhar near her. She herself had seen the Italian man’s suspicions regarding Azhar’s feelings for Angelina when they had both turned up in London trying to find Hadiyyah. He wasn’t certain of her, Lorenzo Mura. But then, with her history, who would be?
    Barbara wondered briefly about Angelina Upman’s power over men. She wondered briefly about what Angelina Upman could drive a man to do in order to keep her as his lover.
    Which brought her, of course, to the reason for her call to Azhar. There was the not insignificant matter of what she’d been told by Dwayne Doughty regarding the information that he and his cohorts had amassed during the winter, not only about the whereabouts of Angelina but also about her sister’s assistance in this disappearance. According to Doughty, every single detail concerning her disappearance had been dutifully passed along to the person who’d hired him to ascertain the whereabouts of the mother and daughter: Taymullah Azhar. But Azhar had told Barbara nothing of these details over the months. So either he was lying to her by omission or Doughty was lying to her with false information.
    Of the two, she knew she would believe Azhar. She felt enormous affection for him, and she didn’t want to believe he might trample on that affection with any kind of betrayal.
    This was no position for a police investigator to be in, and Barbara realised this. But what she needed to say to Azhar—“Doughty claims you had mountains of information in January, so what did you do with it, my friend?”—simply would not come out. Still, she needed a variation of it or she knew she couldn’t live with herself. So she said, “This whole Italy thing, Azhar . . . ?”
    “Yes?”
    “Did you ever know or think or even guess she might be in Italy all along?”
    “How could I have come up with Italy?” he replied and his reply was quick, easy, and regretful. “She could have been anywhere on the planet. Had I known where to find her, I would have moved heaven and earth to bring Hadiyyah home.”
    There was that, Barbara thought. There would always be that: Hadiyyah and what she meant to her father. It was inconceivable that Azhar could have discovered the child’s whereabouts four months earlier and done nothing about it. He simply wasn’t made that way.
    But still . . . Once Doughty had raised the spectre of betrayal in Barbara’s mind, it remained on the fringes of her thoughts. Despite what she knew of Azhar and despite what she earnestly believed about him, she was going to have to check up on his Berlin alibi herself. At this point, she couldn’t trust Dwayne Doughty to tell her the truth about anything.
    BOW
    LONDON
    Dwayne Doughty headed for Victoria Park. He wanted to think, and the walk itself as well as the park—should he decide to hike over to Crown Gate East—helped him to do so. To remain in the office would have meant another tête-à-tête with Emily. Her declarations of impending doom were beginning to wear on him. He had long been a believer that—significant precautions having been taken—all was going to be well at the end of the game when they scooped up the poker chips and counted the haul. But Emily didn’t see things this way.
    Thus, the last thing he wanted her to know was that he was actually worried. She’d been well absorbed in chasing down the assignation whereabouts of a forty-five-year-old banker and his twenty-two-year-old little bit on the side, so for the most part he’d been able to avoid her. She was very well occupied and only marginally aware of his own activities. But she’d have the goods on the banker within a day or two—photos, credit card receipts, phone information, and everything else—and just as that bloke’s marriage would be kaput as a result, Dwayne’s own arrangement with Emily Cass would be at that point in danger of collapsing. He needed to produce some answers for his assistant. He couldn’t afford to lose her or her range of abilities, and he knew he would if he wasn’t able to sort out what was going on in Italy.
    This, in part, was the reason for his walk: thinking first, followed by deciding, and then acting. He began it all with the purchase of a throwaway mobile phone. If he made any dodgy calls from the office, Em would be all over him like an outbreak of smallpox.
    Things should have resolved themselves by now. Nothing about this situation had ever been rocket science. He should have had the all-clear, followed by