Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

December,” he said. “You were in Oxford Street. You remember this. I rang to tell you that Mr. Doughty had found no trace.” He waited for her nod before continuing. “I lied to you. He told me that day that he had traced her to Italy on Bathsheba’s passport. Hadiyyah’s passport was the same, of course. He found that they had landed in Pisa, but there the trail ended.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you lie?”
    “He said that we—he and I—could hire an Italian detective if I wished. It would be costly, he said, for an Italian to conduct a search such as we needed, but if I wished him to carry on . . . ? This, of course, I wished. So he hired a Pisan, and the Pisan eventually found them. Mr. Doughty reported it all to me as the Pisan discovered it: Lucca, the farm in the hills, Lorenzo Mura, Angelina’s presence at his farm, Hadiyyah’s presence, the name of her school. All of it. Everything. I could tell this man was very thorough. I asked myself what was possible with so thorough a man. Could he, I wondered, discover more? What their days were like? What their lives were like? This I asked Mr. Doughty, and he made the arrangements for the Pisan detective to do more research. This the man did. He made a report of their daily movements. The markets they went to, the shops they frequented, their lives on the farm, the
mercato
near Porta Elisa, Angelina’s yoga class, Hadiyyah’s watching and listening to the accordion player. All of this the Pisan detective sorted out. He was very good.”
    “When?” Barbara’s throat felt sore and dry, and she gulped down tea to relieve the tightness in it. “When did you know everything? Everything you just told me.”
    “All of the details? In February. By the end of the month.”
    “And you didn’t tell me.” Instead, he had let her agonise about his state of mind, about his daughter, about what to do and how to make things different for him, her friend. “What kind of friendship—”
    “No!” He crushed out his cigarette so abruptly that he upended the ashtray and the sodden tea bags within it. Neither of them moved to alter the mess that dripped onto the table like the remains of a doused fire. “You must
not
think this. You must
not
think I valued you any less because I kept silent about this. I believed that at the end of the knowledge I had acquired about Angelina and where she’d taken my daughter was losing her completely. You must understand this. I have no rights. Not without tests, which Angelina would have denied me. And not without a case brought to court and where would that court case be held? Here? In Italy? And Angelina would fight like a tiger if it came to a court case and through all this would Hadiyyah be dragged and how could I do that to my own daughter?”
    “So you did . . . what, Azhar? What the bloody hell did you do?”
    “If there is a film and you have seen it, then you know what I have done.”
    “You planned her kidnapping. You planned it to take place when you were in Berlin with a cast-iron alibi. You knew Angelina would turn up here. And then what, for God’s sake? You would go to Italy and play the part of the distraught father in search of his daughter till she turned up unharmed in some village God knows where after having been traumatised—” To her horror, her voice broke and she felt the swelling behind her eyes that signalled tears were on their way.
    “I could see no other way,” he said. “You must understand this, Barbara. It seemed to me the lesser evil. And this man in Italy . . . he had his instructions. Tell Hadiyyah he was going to bring her to me, call her
khushi
so she will know it’s the truth, take her to a very safe place where she will
not
be frightened, and when word is sent to you, take her to a town or a village that will be named—because I myself will have gone to Italy and will have found that village and will know it is safe—and release her close to the police station there because I will have found the police station in advance. Thus she will be returned by those police to her mother at once, but I will be there as well. And having gone through this trial, having seen me there suffering as she herself will suffer, Angelina will no longer deny Hadiyyah her father because Hadiyyah will see me there in Italy and she will want her father back in her life.”
    Barbara shook her head. “No. That’s not it. You could have accomplished the same bloody thing by turning up