Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

she’d received, and she eyed Barbara before giving her the word to go on her way. She said, “I want to learn at the end that you’ve handled every aspect of this situation in a professional manner, Barbara. Anything less than that, and you and I will be having a different sort of conversation. Am I being clear?”
    As mountain spring water, Barbara thought. She said, “Yes, guv, you are. I won’t disappoint you.”
    Ardery dismissed her. She didn’t look convinced.
    BOW
    LONDON
    Barbara decided that Doughty was not the place to begin. Presented with the facts as they’d apparently been recited by Michelangelo Di Massimo in the police station in Lucca, he would doubtless be able to produce an airtight rationale for all of them. Barbara could even imagine what it would be: I hired the bloke to find her, and he swore he tried every avenue of exploration to no avail. Are you suggesting that it’s down to
me
that he found her without letting me know? That he planned her kidnapping and handed her over to God only knows who for God only knows what reason and that’s down to me as well? Look, Sergeant, Di Massimo was in a far better position than I to carry this kid off into the hinterlands or wherever the hell he carried her to. I’m supposed to know enough about Italy—where, to be frank, I have never set foot—to have made a kid disappear? And why? For money? Whose money? I don’t know these people. Do any of them even have money?
    And on and on Doughty would go, wearing her down with logic, illogic, and everything in between. So she wouldn’t begin with talking to him. Emily Cass seemed a more likely source of information.
    Barbara spent some time digging up whatever might be useful in her conversation with the young woman, who turned out to be no intellectual slouch. She held an advanced degree in economics from the University of Chicago, but since attaining that degree, she’d held a string of jobs that suggested personal unsuitability for the world of business or finance: She’d been a security consultant in Afghanistan, a bodyguard to the children of a minor branch of the Saudi royal family, a personal trainer to a Hollywood actress in need of a task master to keep her body beautiful a body beautiful, and an assistant chef on a yacht whose owner was one of the biggest names in British petroleum. She was, literally, all over the map in her employment history. How she’d ended up in the employ of a private investigator was anyone’s guess.
    Her record was clean when it came to the law, though, and she’d sprung from a solidly middle-class family whose paterfamilias was a noted ophthalmologist and whose mother was a paediatrician. With three brothers involved in the medical field as well and another a highly successful Formula One driver, she probably wouldn’t want to have her reputation sullied by any activity she might have engaged in that danced on the wrong side of the law. She was, Barbara assured herself, the better bet when it came to having a tête-à-tête with someone bearing a warrant card.
    She had no intention of bearding Em Cass in the den of Dwayne Doughty’s place of business. She didn’t want to ring the woman either. Better not to give her time to inform the private investigator that she was going to be questioned. So she positioned herself in a window of the Roman Café and Kebab a short distance from Bedlovers, whose upper floor housed Dwayne Doughty’s office. There she waited for Emily Cass to appear.
    It took four kebabs and a jacket potato topped with cheese and chili for this to happen. By that point, Barbara was practically a member of the family who ran the establishment. They were looking at her a bit askance—probably considering the nature of the eating disorder the dishevelled woman in the window was suffering from—but they nonetheless accepted her money in exchange for copious amounts of food. They smiled ingratiatingly and also enquired as to her marital status, possibly as a suitable mate for a son who hung about the place with a suspicious dribble of drool escaping from his gaping mouth. Barbara was grateful for the appearance of Em Cass at the end of an extended period within the café. She was equally grateful that Emily, who had on running clothes, set off in
her
direction and not in the opposite, which would have made it impossible—her recent gustatory history considered—for Barbara to catch her up.
    Barbara was out of the door in a flash. She was