Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

opened the manila folder and handed over two documents. They were, Barbara saw, copies of plane tickets, coming from the sort of reservations made online by millions of people every day. The flight in question departed from Heathrow. It was a one-way ticket, and its destination was Lahore.
    Barbara felt her heart slam against her chest and her mouth went dry. For the name of the first passenger was Taymullah Azhar. The name of the second was Hadiyyah Upman.
    She found that she couldn’t think for a moment. She couldn’t think what it meant, she couldn’t think why the tickets existed at all, and she couldn’t think—because she didn’t want to think—that everything she believed she knew about Azhar was about to crumble into dust.
    Doughty apparently read all this on her face, for he said, “Yes. There you have it. Tied up with a ribbon and I ought to bill you hours for doing your bleeding job for you.”
    She said, with an attempt at bravado, “What I have here is a piece of paper, Mr. Doughty. And as you and I know, anyone can generate a piece of paper, just like anyone can buy a ticket to anyplace in anyone else’s name.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, then have a look at the dates,” he advised her. “The date of the flight is interesting enough, but I think you’ll find the date of the purchase more interesting still.”
    So Barbara looked at these and then she tried to decide what the two dates were telling her about her friend. The date of the flight was the fifth of July, which one could argue spoke of Azhar’s hope that his daughter would be found alive and perfectly well. Or it spoke of a ticket purchase made months and months earlier, far in advance of Hadiyyah’s November disappearance from London. But the date of purchase changed the playing field. It was the twenty-second of March, well in advance of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping in Italy but during the time when Azhar had, ostensibly, not even known where she was. That suggested only one thing, and Barbara couldn’t bear to consider the extent to which she’d been played for a fool.
    She spent a moment searching for something to explain this information. She said, “Anyone could have—”
    “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Doughty said. “But the question is why would someone other than our friend the quiet, unassuming, and brokenhearted professor of
whatever
the hell he professes buy two one-way tickets to Pakistan?”
    “Someone who wanted him to look guilty—like yourself, for example—could have made the purchase.”
    “You think so, eh? So ask your blokes over there in Special Branch to track this thing down because you and I both know that in these days of playing at Who’s the Terrorist, anyone going to a country where people wear headscarves, towels, bedsheets, and dressing gowns in the street is going to be looked at fairly closely once you give them the word it’s got to be done.”
    “He might have—”
    “Known his kid was going to be snatched in Italy?”
    “That’s not what I was going to say.”
    “But it’s what you
know
, Sergeant Havers. Now, I think you and I c’n agree it’s game, set, and match we’re looking at here. So are you going to continue harassing me, or are you going to do something about getting that miserable excuse of a father—if he even
is
her father—to tell the cops over there where he’s stowed that poor kid?”
    BOW
    LONDON
    Barbara sat inside her rust-dappled Mini, lit a fag, and inhaled so deeply that she could have sworn the heavenly carcinogen managed to travel all the way to her ankles. She smoked the entire thing before she would even allow herself to think. Buddy Holly helped in this. A tape deck in the car that functioned only on an off-and-on basis today was leaning towards the
on
end of things, although the very idea of Buddy’s telling her that
anything
was a-getting closer was not doing much to lift her spirits.
    Doughty was right. A call to Special Branch and she’d know the truth about those tickets to Lahore. It wasn’t enough that Azhar was a respected professor of microbiology. That alone would never save him from scrutiny. When it came to travelling to a Muslim country, a man with a name like Taymullah Azhar was going to be looked at, even more so because he’d bought a one-way ticket to the place. In fact, he’d probably already been investigated by the blokes in SO12 because his purchase of that ticket—if indeed he was the person who had made the purchase—was