Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

chosen to do so. DI Philip Hale was heading one; DI Lynley was heading the other. But until Isabelle Ardery had reached the conclusion that Barbara had been punished enough for her transgressions, Barbara knew that she was stuck with the clerk from the CPS and the witness statements that the Crown Prosecutor was intent upon verifying.
    They finished early in the afternoon two days after Barbara’s confrontation with the superintendent. She saw her chance in this, so she took it. She rang up Azhar at University College London and she told him she was heading his way. Where are you? she wanted to know. Having a conference with four graduate students in the lab, he told her. Wait for me there, she said. I’ve come up with something.
    The lab proved easy enough to find. It was a place of white coats, computers, fume cupboards, and biohazard signs, complete with impressive microscopes, petri dishes, boxes of slides, glass-fronted cabinets, refrigerators, stools, work stations, and other, more mysterious furnishings. When Barbara joined Taymullah Azhar there, he introduced her politely to the students. Their names were lost to her almost as soon as Azhar said them, mostly because of Azhar himself.
    Barbara had seen him daily since Hadiyyah’s disappearance. She’d taken him food, but she could tell he had eaten very little of it. Now he was looking worse than ever, mostly from lack of sleep, she decided. Obviously, he was maintaining himself on a diet of cigarettes and coffee. So was she.
    She asked him how soon he could get away from the lab. She added that she’d come up with the name of someone who could probably help them. He’s a private detective, she told him. Hearing this, Azhar told Barbara he could leave at once.
    On their way to Bow, Barbara told Azhar what she had managed to learn about the man towards whose office they were heading. Despite the affirmations of putative “satisfied customers,” she’d done some digging about him, and it hadn’t been tough, considering the sort of nonsense people advertised about themselves these days on the Internet. She knew Dwayne Doughty was fifty-two years old. She knew he played weekend rugby. She knew he’d been married twenty-six years and was the father of two. Considering the photos he’d posted on his Facebook page, she’d concluded it was a matter of pride to him that each generation of his family had done better than the last. His progenitors had excavated a living from the coal mines of Wigan. His children were graduates of redbrick universities. The way things were going for the Doughty clan, his grandchildren—if he had any off his kids—would take firsts at either Oxford or Cambridge. They were, in short, an ambitious family.
    The building that housed Doughty’s office, however, didn’t suggest ambition. It sat above an establishment called Bedlovers Bedding and Towels, which was closed at the moment and sheltered by a faded blue metal drop-down security door in need of having its rust seen to. Bedlovers itself was housed in a narrow building, bookshelved between the Money Shop and Bangla Halal Grocers.
    Oddly, virtually no one was out and about. Two Muslim men in traditional garb were exiting a building some thirty yards down the street, but that was it. Most of the shops were closed. It was a far cry from central London, where the pavements seemed packed both day and night.
    They gained access to Dwayne Doughty’s office through a door to the left of Bedlovers. It was unlocked, and it opened to a staircase at the foot of which was a square of speckled lino with a welcome mat upon it.
    Above stairs, there were two offices only. One bore a sign reading
Knock First Please
. The other, apparently with no need of knocking, bore a request that asked enterers not to let the cat out. They chose
Knock First Please
as being more likely. They did so and a man’s voice called, “S’okay. Enter,” with an accent that suggested the Doughtys had left Wigan for the East End many decades ago.
    Barbara had already told Azhar that she wouldn’t be identifying herself as someone from the Met. Doughty might get the wrong idea, like this was a sting operation. They didn’t want that.
    Doughty was in the middle of attempting to upload photos into a digital picture frame of the sort that altered images every ten seconds or so. He had the directions spread out on his desk along with cords, his camera, and the frame itself. He was squinting at the brochure of