Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

onto Azhar, by the way. He’s clean.”
    “SO12?” Lynley and Isabelle said simultaneously. Isabelle continued. “What have SO12 to do with things, Sergeant?”
    Havers explained that she’d been intent on exploring every single avenue and—“Let’s admit it, guv, since you just brought him up, one of those avenues was Azhar”—she’d had a talk with Chief Inspector Harry Streener to see if his team had been looking into Azhar for any reason. Azhar had been in Berlin at the time of the kidnapping, and that didn’t look good, so she had figured if there was anything questionable going on, SO12 would have found it. “Azhar’s a microbiologist, guv. Azhar’s Muslim. Azhar’s Pakistani. To the SO12 blokes . . . You know how they are. I reckoned if there was anything to be turned up about him, they would have done the spadework.”
    But there had been nothing, Havers said. Her conclusion was the same as DI Lynley’s. This entire mess was better left in the hands of the Italian police.
    “Get me your final written report then, Barbara,” Isabelle said. “You as well, Thomas.” And she signalled an end to their meeting by gesturing towards the door.
    Before Lynley could follow Barbara through it, though, Isabelle said his name once again. He turned and she lifted a finger that told him to stay where he was. A nod instructed him to shut the door.
    He returned to the seat he’d taken. He watched the detective superintendent. He’d come to know how expert she was at hiding things—particularly the workings of her mind and her heart—so he waited to hear what she wished to say, knowing how unlikely was the possibility that he could guess it in advance.
    She pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk. He took a sharp breath. Isabelle was a drinker, and she knew he knew this. She believed she had the problem under control. He did not. She was aware of his belief, but she was also aware of the tacit understanding between them: He would not betray her as long as she kept her drinking away from Victoria Street and away from the job should the job take her elsewhere. He could see the slight tremor in her hands, however, and he said her name.
    She shot him a look. “I’m not entirely stupid, Tommy. I have things under control” was her expected remark. Instead of a bottle, she brought out of the drawer a folded tabloid, which she opened, smoothed, and began to flip through.
    He could see it was
The Source
, the most scurrilous of the London rags. He felt wary when he considered the implications behind Isabelle’s having stowed it in her desk as well as her dismissal of Barbara Havers and her indication that she wished to speak to him alone. These were unfortunate signs. They transformed themselves into ill realities when she found what she was looking for and turned the paper towards him so that he could see for himself what was causing her concern.
    He reached in his jacket for his reading glasses, although the truth was that he didn’t need them, at least for the headline of the story:
Love Rat Dad’s Ties to the Met
spread across the top of pages four and five. Accompanying this was a photograph of Taymullah Azhar inset onto another, larger photograph of some sort of brouhaha in a London street. This involved a shouting teenage boy in a school uniform, an enraged man who appeared to be in his late sixties, a frightened-looking woman in a
shalwar kameez
and headscarf, and Barbara Havers. Havers was in the act of attempting to get the old man to release his hold on the boy; the headscarf woman was in the act of attempting to get the boy away from the man. The man himself was in the act of trying to stuff the boy into a car, its back door open and waiting for him.
    Lynley scanned the story, which was typical of
The Source
. It bore a by-line that he knew only too well:
Mitchell Corsico
. It contained the breathless sort of writing that was
The Source
’s stock-in-trade. This was of the hot-breaking-news variety in which the named reporter had uncovered a close connection between a detective sergeant from the Met and the Love Rat Dad whose daughter had recently been kidnapped in Italy. This female officer from the Met would be, gentle readers, a presence in the life of the Love Rat Dad in addition to the deserted wife in Ilford
and
the lover who had borne the man’s child. They live cheek by jowl, as it happens, in a north London neighbourhood where they keep separate residences on the very same property