Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

directions, one fist clenched and the other ready to crumple the directions into a ball.
    He looked up at them and said, “Written by some Chinese bloke with a bloody sadistic streak, this is. I don’t know why I bother.”
    “I hear you,” Barbara said.
    Even had she not known Doughty played amateur rugby, his nose would have told her as much. It looked as if it had been broken multiple times and his NHS doctor had finally thrown up his hands in defeat and said, “Let it do what it will.” It was certainly doing that. It headed off in one direction and then swerved in another, giving his face such an odd asymmetry that it was impossible to move one’s gaze from it. Everything else about the man was average: medium build, medium-brown hair, medium weight. Aside from his nose, he was the kind of man one wouldn’t notice on the street. But the nose made him unforgettable.
    “Miss Havers, I take it?” He rose. Medium height as well, Barbara thought. He added, “And this is the friend you spoke of?”
    Azhar crossed the room and extended his hand. “Taymullah Azhar,” he said.
    “Is it mister?”
    “Just Azhar.”
    Hari, Barbara thought out of nowhere. Angelina called him Hari.
    “And this is about a missing child?” Doughty said. “Your child?”
    “It is.”
    “Sit, then.” Doughty indicated a chair in front of his desk. There was another, mismatched to the first, at the window—as if its use was for spying on action in the street—and Doughty placed it next to the first, carefully matching one’s angle to the other’s.
    Barbara glanced round the office as he did this. She’d half expected the place to be in the best tradition of private eyes from nearly a century of gumshoe novels. But this office looked like something inhabited by a military officer with its olive-green desk, olive-green metal filing cabinets, and olive-green bookshelves. These contained a matching set of books, neat stacks of periodicals, and university graduation photos of both of his children. There was also—on his desk—a photo of a woman near Doughty’s own age, presumably his wife.
    Everything was neatly in its place, from the maps of Greater London and the UK pinned to bulletin boards on the wall to the in-and-out boxes on the desk, to the holder for mail and the holder for business cards. Aside from the photos, there was nothing in the room suggestive of decoration beyond a dusty artificial plant atop one of the filing cabinets.
    Together, Barbara and Azhar went over the details for Dwayne Doughty. He took notes and Barbara was reassured when he asked good, sharp questions. These gave evidence to the fact that he knew the law. Unfortunately, these also gave evidence to the fact that there was very little that he could do.
    Barbara was able to tell him something more than Azhar had been able to reveal to Lynley and to her when they’d met with him on the night of his daughter’s disappearance. In what little spare time Isabelle Ardery had been allowing her, she’d managed to locate Bathsheba Ward, the sister of Angelina Upman.
    “She’s in Hoxton,” Barbara told Doughty, and she gave him the address, which he took down in block letters, all upper case. “Married to a bloke called Hugo Ward. Two kids, but they’re his, not hers. I had her on the blower, and she pretty much confirmed everything already known about Angelina and her family. The whole lot of them broke off communications about ten years ago when Angelina got together with Azhar. She claims to have no clue where she is and even less interest in finding out. Some sort of digging might be in order there. Bathsheba could be lying.”
    Doughty nodded as he wrote. “Rest of the family?”
    “The Upmans are in Dulwich,” Barbara said. She felt Azhar’s gaze on her, and she said, “I phoned one evening. Just to see if they’d had any word. Nothing. Except Bathsheba seemed to be telling the truth: no love lost.”
    “Spoke to them at length, did you?” Doughty asked, his eyes narrowing in on Barbara speculatively.
    “The dad. Not at length. Just to ask where Angelina was. Old school chum looking for her. That sort of thing. He hadn’t a clue and was happy to announce it. He could’ve been covering for her, but he didn’t seem the type to go to that much trouble.”
    Doughty gave Azhar his attention, then. He turned to a fresh page in the legal pad on which he’d been taking down the details Barbara had given him. He used the same block