Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

card—a greeting card, I think—with a message purporting to be from Azhar telling her to go with the man as he’d bring her to her father.”
    Barbara felt a frisson at this. “Have you seen the card?”
    “As yet, no. But the
carabinieri
have Domenica Medici in hand, which means they have the entire convent in hand. If there’s a card at Villa Rivelli and Hadiyyah kept it, it’ll turn up soon enough.”
    “It could be elsewhere,” Barbara said. “And anyone could have written that message, sir.”
    “My first thought as well, as she apparently wouldn’t recognise his writing. But then she told me something curious, Barbara. The man who took her from the market called her
khushi
. Have you ever heard Azhar use that term? She said it’s his nickname for her.”
    Barbara’s stomach turned to liquid. She casually repeated, “
Khushi
, sir?” to buy a few moments in which her thoughts jumped feverishly from one point to another, like fleas indicating directions on a map.
    “She said that’s why she went with him. Not only because of the card holding out the promise of her father, but also because he called her
khushi
, which meant to her that Squali had to be telling the truth, for how else would he have known the term?”
    Doughty, of course, Barbara thought. That king of rats. He would have passed the nickname on. But there were several reasons he may have done so, and offering any of them to Lynley was to take a route that led nowhere remotely helpful. So she said, “Azhar might’ve called her that round me, but I bloody well don’t remember, sir. On the other hand, if it
is
a nickname, I reckon Angelina knew it, too.”
    “I take it you’re suggesting a path from Angelina to Lorenzo Mura?”
    “It makes sense in a way, doesn’t it? From what you’ve said, sounds to me like Mura’s got a very wide streak of jealousy running up his spine. Also sounds to me like he hates Azhar and it doesn’t take too much of a jump to get from there to him wanting to cut the tie between Azhar and Angelina permanently in some way. Plus . . .” And here Barbara put into words what didn’t bear thinking of, “What if he’s also jealous of Angelina’s bond with Hadiyyah? What if he wants Angelina only for himself? P’rhaps the plan was to set Azhar up with a kidnap charge and to . . .” At the end, she couldn’t put it into words.
    Lynley did it for her. “Are you suggesting his intention would have been to eliminate Hadiyyah?”
    “We’ve seen nearly everything in our line of work, sir.”
    He was silent. He would, of course, know this was true.
    “What about Doughty?” Lynley asked. “What have you turned up on him?”
    Barbara didn’t want to go within fifty yards of what she’d learned about Doughty, leading as it did to his claims about Azhar. What she wanted was a chance to talk to Azhar, to ask him questions and to study his face as he gave his answers. But her brief had been to dig into Doughty’s part in Hadiyyah’s disappearance, so she had to give Lynley something and she quickly made her choice. “I’ve come up with a bloke called Bryan Smythe,” she said. “He does computer work for Doughty, the kind requiring a special touch of the hacking variety.”
    “And?”
    “Haven’t put the thumbscrews to him yet. That’s on for tomorrow. But what I hope to learn is that Doughty employed him to wipe clean all traces of communication between himself and one Michelangelo Di Massimo. Which’ll more or less confirm that Doughty’s involved.”
    Lynley said nothing. Barbara waited in a welter of anxiety for him to take the next step, which logically demanded that Barbara check for a connection between Doughty and Azhar. He said finally, “As to that . . .”
    She cut in hastily with what she hoped sounded like a conclusion. “Someone would have hired him, of course. Way I see it, it could go two directions. Either someone here hired him to execute a plan to snatch Hadiyyah—”
    “And that would be?”
    “Anyone who hated Azhar, I expect. Angelina’s relatives top that list. They knew Hadiyyah was missing from London ’cause I went to see them when she first disappeared. Azhar went as well. They hate him, sir. To do something to hurt him? Nothing they might pay for that pleasure would be too much, believe me.”
    “And the other direction?”
    “Your end. Someone in Italy setting everything up, including creating a line to a private detective in London for purposes of making