Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

freezing it on a single image.
    “You don’t look thick,” he said, “but I’m getting the impression that your eyesight is failing. Look at the date of the film.”
    And there it was. The seventeenth of December. Barbara said nothing, although what she felt was alarm. It shot through her arms and down into her fingers. She tried to keep her face impassive although she knew if she tried to raise her arms, she’d display the degree to which her hands were shaking.
    Doughty flipped back through a diary on his desk, a large one that displayed every hour of the workday and every individual he’d seen. “You’re a busy bird, I reckon, with a social calendar that would slay an It girl, so let me help you. Our final meeting—this would be you, the professor, and yours truly here—took place on November thirtieth. If you need the math on it, this meeting you’ve just watched between that lofty bloke and me happened seventeen days later. To be additionally helpful—since that’s the kind of individual I am—let me jog your memory about one minor detail of that final meeting the three of us had. I handed the professor my card. I invited him to get in touch if there was
any
other way I could be helpful to him. For his part? The professor got the message.”
    “Bollocks,” Barbara said. “What message?”
    “I had a feeling about our professor, Sergeant. Desperate times, measures, and you know the rest. I thought I could be of further assistance to him. If he was interested, that is. It turned out he was.” Dwayne leaned into the keyboard and made a few adjustments with the mouse as well. “Here’s how he expressed himself . . . and his interest, as it happened, two days later.”
    The setting and the characters were the same. The dialogue, though, was entirely different. In the world of critical exegesis of cinema, it would have been breathlessly described as “electrifying dialogue.” In the world of reality, it was damning evidence. Barbara watched in gut-wrenching silence as Taymullah Azhar broached the subject of kidnapping his own daughter. Could it be done? Could this previously mentioned Michelangelo Di Massimo somehow arrange it? Could the Italian get to know the movements of Lorenzo Mura, Angelina, and Hadiyyah well? If he could, was there a way to take Hadiyyah from her mother with a promise that she would be returned to her father?
    And on and on went the discussion between Azhar and Dwayne Doughty. On the film, Doughty listened sympathetically: fingers steepled at his chin, nodding when nodding was called for. The bloke was the very image of caution as, no doubt, in his head the till was ringing up how much money he was going to make if he got involved in an international kidnapping scheme.
    Doughty said on film in what bordered on religious tones, “I can only put you in touch with Mr. Di Massimo, Professor Azhar. What you and he decide between you . . . ? Obviously, my work for you is finished and I would be no part of anything from this point forward.”
    Oh, too bloody right, Barbara scoffed. When the film was over, she said, “This is a load of bollocks.”
    Dwayne wasn’t affected by this. He said pleasantly, “Alas. It is what it is. My point is this: You take me down, I take him down, Barbara. May I call you Barbara? I have a feeling we’re growing closer here.”
    She
had a feeling violence was in the offing and it would be demonstrated by her jumping over the bloke’s desk and throttling him. She said, “The whole kidnap idea is rubbish on toast. Once Hadiyyah was found by this Di Massimo bloke, all Azhar had to do was show up on Angelina’s doorstep unexpectedly and demand his rights as her father. With Hadiyyah thrilled to bits to see him, with Azhar standing on her front porch or whatever the hell they have over there, what was Angelina Upman going to do then? Run from one
fattoria
—whatever that is—to another for the rest of her life?”
    “That would have been sensible,” Doughty admitted graciously. “But haven’t you noticed—and I would think you have, in your line of work—that when passions become inflamed, good sense tends to fly right out the window?”
    “Kidnapping Hadiyyah would have gained Azhar nothing.”
    “In the normal garden kidnapping, how true. But let’s suppose—you and I, Barbara—that this wasn’t a garden kidnapping at all. Let’s suppose the professor’s brainchild was to have Hadiyyah kidnapped because he knew very well that