Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

was now holding a rather good hand of cards.
    Above Bedlovers, she gave two knocks to Doughty’s door, entering without being bidden to do so. She found the man in consultation with a middle-aged estate manager type. They were bent over Doughty’s desk, examining photos, and in the estate manager’s fingers was a handkerchief that he was in the act of crushing to bits.
    Doughty looked up. “D’you mind?” he snapped. “We’re conducting business.”
    “So’m I.” Barbara took out her warrant card and showed it to the poor bloke who was being presented with the cold, hard, and no doubt slimy facts of someone’s betrayal of him. “I’m going to need a word with Mr. Doughty,” she said. And with a glance at the pictures—two nude young men, as it happened, cavorting together with rather too much enthusiasm in a tree-sided pond—she added, “What’d that idiot film director say? ‘The heart wants what the heart wants’? I’m sorry.”
    Doughty gathered up the pictures and said to her, “You’re a piece of work.”
    “For my sins,” she agreed.
    The estate manager had backed off from his perusal of the photos. He was taking a chequebook from his jacket pocket, but Barbara took him by the arm and urged him towards the door. “I expect Mr. Doughty—decent bloke that he is—wants to make this one on the house.” She bade him farewell, watched him go for the stairs with his head hanging low, and added her hope that the rest of his day was going to be more pleasant than his just-completed meeting in the office above Bedlovers had been.
    Then she closed the door and turned to Doughty. He was red in the face, and it wasn’t embarrassment making him so. He said, “How bloody dare you!”
    To which she replied, “Bryan Smythe, Mr. Doughty. At least Bryan Smythe on this end. On the other end is Michelangelo Di Massimo. He doesn’t have his own Bryan Smythe, as it happens. His computers won’t be as squeaky clean as yours. Same goes for his telephone records, I expect. And then there’s the small matter of his bank account and what it might show when we get our hands on it.”
    “I
told
you Di Massimo was employed to do some checking in Italy,” Doughty snapped. “This is fresh off the presses for what sterling reason?”
    “Because what you didn’t tell me was that he was employed to snatch Hadiyyah, Dwayne.”
    “I didn’t employ him to do that, Sergeant. I’ve told you that before and I’m going to continue telling you that. If you think otherwise, then it’s time you took a suggestion from me.”
    “And that is . . . ?”
    “The professor. Taymullah Azhar. It’s been him from the first, but you haven’t wanted to look at that, have you? So
I’ve
had to do your bloody job for you and believe me I’m not happy about that.”
    “His Berlin story—”
    “Bugger Berlin. This was never about Berlin. Berlin’s been a malodorous red herring from the first. Of course he was there. He was giving his paper and attending lectures and popping up all over the bloody hotel like a Pakistani jack-in-the-box. He would’ve had a convenient leg break in the lobby of the place if he’d needed to make certain his stay was memorable, but as it happens, he didn’t need to make certain of that because all his colleagues are willing to believe every word that comes out of the blighter’s mouth. As was I, as it happens. And, let’s be frank here, as are you.”
    He went to one of his filing cabinets as he spoke. He jerked open the top drawer, and he brought out a manila folder. This he tossed on his desk, and he sat behind it. He said, “Oh, bloody sit down and let’s have a rational conversation for once.”
    Barbara trusted the man in the same way she would have trusted a cobra sliding towards her big toe. She narrowed her eyes and observed him for anything that would allow her to read what was going on. But he looked, maddeningly, as he always looked: everything about him average save for that nose, veering in several directions before it got round to presenting his nostrils to a less-than-admiring public.
    She sat. She wasn’t about to let him wrest from her the reins of the conversation, however. So she said, “Bryan Smythe’s going to confirm a phone sweep and he’s going to confirm a computer sweep as well. Put that together with the blagging on the part of Ms. Cass and—”
    “You might want to take a look at these before you cha-cha any further in that direction.” Doughty