Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

watched her solemnly. He knew something was up. He said nothing at first.
    Then his initial statement: “Inspector Lynley will have told you the details.”
    “Most of them, yeah,” Barbara said. “I would have rung you to get the rest of them, but I reckoned you had a lot to cope with. With Hadiyyah, with Angelina and Lorenzo. With the coppers as well, I expect.” She watched his face as she said this last, but he was busying himself with the tea, much dunking of the tea bag and then a questioning look as to where he was supposed to put it. She fetched an ashtray for the bag. She fetched her fags as well. She offered him one but he demurred and she found she didn’t feel much like a smoke either.
    He said, “There was much to discuss. The nightmare has, I believe, finally ended.”
    “Which means what exactly?”
    He stirred his tea. He’d used sugar but no milk. Barbara saw to hers and waited for his answer. She found that nerves were making her suddenly ravenous. She grabbed up a Jaffa Cake and shoved it into her mouth.
    “Not that Hadiyyah is restored to me,” he said, “but that she will come to me and I may go to her—to Lucca—as often as I like. I need only ring Angelina first. I believe it took this . . . this loss of Hadiyyah to allow Angelina to see that to either parent, the loss of a child cannot be contemplated, let alone endured. I think she did not realise this, Barbara.”
    “Bollocks. She has to have known that.”
    “I think not. She wanted Hadiyyah with her. She wanted Lorenzo and the life she now is making with him. She knew no other way to achieve this. She is not, at heart, an evil woman.”
    “She’s capable of evil,” Barbara noted.
    “Perhaps we all are,” Azhar said quietly.
    It was as good an entrée as she was going to get. She said, “Where do things stand between you now, Azhar? Between you and Angelina?”
    “We have an uneasy peace. I hope that trust might develop between us in time. There has been little enough of that in the past.”
    “Trust,” she noted. “Always important in relationships, isn’t it?”
    He didn’t reply. He was looking at his tea. She said his name questioningly. He looked up then, and when their gazes met, she tried to read his dark eyes for something—anything—that would tell her he hadn’t used her in the worst possible way, putting everything she was and everything she had in jeopardy. She saw nothing. His eyes looked peculiarly flat, and she tried to tell herself their lack of depth was owing to the overhead light.
    She forged ahead. “Dwayne Doughty was someone you shouldn’t have trusted, Azhar. I’m partly responsible, I reckon, because I took you to him. I checked him out, and he seemed completely on the up-and-up. He probably
is
in a lot of ways, long as what he’s asked to do is perfectly in order and on the up-and-up as well. When it isn’t, though . . . ? When something tempts him . . . ? He protects himself. I expect you didn’t know that, did you?”
    Still he said nothing. But he reached for her packet of Players and he lit one and she could see that his hand wasn’t steady. So could he. He glanced at her as he shook the match out. He waited. Good move on his part, she thought.
    She said, “Doughty’s office is wired. Both for film and for sound. In his line of work, it’s not a bad idea when you think of it. And I
should
have thought of it. Or perhaps you should have.” She lit a cigarette herself. She saw that her own hands were none too steady. “So every meeting you and I had with him is documented, backed up, signed, sealed, and whatever. So is every meeting you had with him alone. ’Course, I don’t know how many there were—those you-and-him meetings—’cause he only showed me two. But then, two was all it took, Azhar.”
    The Pakistani man had gone as pale as someone with pecan-coloured skin could go. He said in a nearly inaudible voice, “I did not know how . . .” But he did not continue.
    She said, “How what, Azhar? How to tell me? How to get Hadiyyah back? Or how bloody wretched I was going to feel when I saw the film of you making the suggestion that you and our Dwayne find a way that she could be snatched? How
what
? You’d best tell me because the water you’re in is hot and promising to get a hell of a lot hotter now you’re back in London.”
    “I did not know what else to do, Barbara.”
    “About what? Hadiyyah? Angelina? Life? What?”
    “That day I rang you in