Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

Angelina Upman would have done exactly what she
did
do in the company of Lorenzo Mura, which was to turn up on Azhar’s doorstep demanding the return of her child.
    Yet . . . there was
khushi
. Barbara tried to come up with a reason why Doughty might have known this pet name that Azhar had for his daughter. She supposed Azhar might have told the man in passing, perhaps at some point referring to Hadiyyah that way. But in all the time Barbara had known him, she’d only heard him use the word when he was speaking to Hadiyyah. He never referred to her with the term. So why would he refer to her as
khushi
when speaking to Doughty? she wondered. The answer seemed to be that he wouldn’t. But that answer begged the question: What was she going to do next, post Doughty’s allegations?
    Ringing someone seemed the only answer: ringing Lynley in order to lay before him the facts she had and to ask his advice or ringing Azhar and cleverly gleaning from him some indication that Doughty’s claims were either true or false. Barbara wanted to do the first. But she knew she had to do the second. Had Azhar been in London, she could have confronted him in order to watch his face when she spoke. But he wasn’t in London and Hadiyyah was still missing and she had no real choice in the matter of what to do next, did she?
    She waited for an opportune moment long after the morning meeting when DI Stewart was otherwise engaged. She reached Azhar on his mobile, but the connection was bad. It turned out that he was in the Alps, he told her, and for a moment she thought he’d actually gone to Switzerland for some mad reason. When she yelped, “The
Alps
?” he clarified with, “These are the Apuan Alps. They are north of Lucca,” and the connection improved as he moved into what he said was a small piazza in one of the villages tucked into those mountains.
    He was searching it, he told her. He intended to search every village he came upon as he travelled higher and higher on a road that twisted into the Alps. It was from this road that a red convertible had crashed down a cliff, the driver dying when thrown from it. And inside this convertible, Barbara—
    At this, the poor man’s voice wavered. Barbara’s hands and her feet went completely dead. She said, “What? Azhar,
what
?”
    “They think Hadiyyah was with this man,” he said. “They have gone to Angelina’s home for her fingerprints, for DNA samples, for . . . I do not know what else.”
    Barbara could tell he was trying not to weep. She said, “Azhar.”
    “I could not just remain in Lucca and wait for news. They will compare the car—what they find in it and on it—and they will then know, but I . . . To hear she might have been with him and then to know . . .” A silence, then a barely controlled gasp. Barbara knew how humiliating it would be for him to be heard weeping by anyone. He said at last, “Forgive me. This is unseemly.”
    “Bloody hell,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Azhar, this is your daughter we’re talking about. There is
no
‘I should not’ between you and me when it comes to Hadiyyah, okay?”
    This appeared to make matters worse, for then he sobbed, managing only “Thank you” and nothing more.
    She waited. She wished she were there, wherever he was in the Alps, because she would have taken him into her arms for what comfort she could offer in this situation. But it would have been a cold comfort indeed. When a child went missing, each day that passed was a day that lessened the possibility of that child’s ever being found alive.
    Azhar finally managed to give her more details as well as a name: Roberto Squali. He was at the heart of what had happened to Hadiyyah. He was the driver of the crashed car, who was dead.
    “A name is a starting place,” Barbara told him. “A name, Azhar, is a good starting place.”
    Which brought her, of course, to the pet name
khushi
and the reason for her call. But she couldn’t find it in herself to mention this to Hadiyyah’s father just now. He was already upset enough with this turn of events. Asking him about
khushi
or making insinuations about his putative Berlin alibi or requiring of him definitive proof that he wasn’t the mastermind behind the disappearance of a most beloved child as claimed by the private investigator he’d hired . . . Barbara realised she couldn’t do this to him. For the very idea that he would set off to Berlin and establish an alibi while someone he’d hired in