Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

“John bent my ear when I got here,” he told her. “Taking that decision to put Barbara on his team, Isabelle—”
    “It was a brief enough period. It hardly killed her.”
    “Still, his antipathy for her—”
    “I hope you’re not about to tell me how to run the department. I doubt you did that with Superintendent Webberly.”
    “I did, as it happens.”
    “Then the man was a saint.”
    Before he could reply, Barbara Havers joined them. She came in in a rush. She was the personification of all business, aside from her clothing, which was, as usual, a bow to the fashion of an era that had never existed. She’d at least eschewed the cupcake socks. She’d replaced them, however, with Fred and Wilma Flintstone. They more or less made a piece with her tee-shirt: She was wearing the bones of the Natural History Museum’s T-rex across her chest.
    She said, “Here’s how it looks,” after she acknowledged the tardiness of her arrival with “Sorry. Traffic. Had to buy petrol as well.” She went on with, “Everything points to Di Massimo trying to finger Doughty for what he himself cooked up. He knows there’ll be records of communications between him and Doughty—and there are—and he reckons that as there was no ransom request, we’re going to fall into line with whatever he claims. But the link from him to Squali is what’s going to bring him down. He’s telling partial truth and partial lie, and his idea is that if he muddies the waters enough, no one is going to sort it all out.”
    “Meaning what, Barbara?” Isabelle said.
    Lynley said nothing. He merely noted that the sergeant’s colour was high and he wondered if this was due to the rush she was in or the tale she was telling.
    “Meaning Doughty hired Di Massimo to start at the airport in Pisa, which was as far as he—Doughty, that is—was able to get in working out where Angelina Upman had taken Hadiyyah. He didn’t give Azhar the information because he didn’t know where it would lead. Di Massimo’s brief was to find Angelina and report back. He was told to do whatever it took to find her because—according to Doughty’s tale—whatever it took was ultimately going to be funded by her dad. Only once Di Massimo knew where she was, it was a short journey from there to who’s-got-more-dosh and the answer to that was the extended Mura family. So he hired Squali to snatch her but what he told Doughty was that he couldn’t find her at all. Records show all communication between him and Doughty ended at the point he made his report.”
    “Which was when?”
    “December fifth.”
    “What records are we talking about, Barbara?” Lynley asked quietly.
    Another slight rush of colour to her cheeks. He reckoned that she hadn’t expected him to be sitting in Isabelle’s office as a party to this meeting. She had a few decisions to make as a result of his presence. He could only pray she made the right ones.
    “Doughty’s,” she said. “He opened them to me, sir. He’s printing up the whole lot of them and he’ll be shipping them over to the bloke in Italy who’s dealing with that end of things once we give him the name. ’Course he’ll want someone to translate, but they’ll have someone for that.” She licked her lips, and he saw her swallow. She turned back to Isabelle and went on. “What I can’t work out is the ransom request.”
    “There wasn’t one as I understand it,” Isabelle said.
    “That’s the screw in the works,” Barbara acknowledged. “What I reckon is that once Di Massimo worked out how much money the Mura family has, he planned one of those typical Italian kidnappings. Think of it: Here’s a country with a big tradition of holding people for months to get what they want. Sometimes the demand comes quickly; sometimes they like to wait till the family is ready to blow itself to bits with worry. Look at the poor Getty kid all those years ago.”
    “I doubt the Muras have pockets quite so deep as the Gettys,” Lynley said evenly, watching Barbara. Her upper lip looked damp.
    “True. But what I reckon is everything depended on what Di Massimo wanted. Was it money, land, cooperation, stock options, political influence . . . who the bloody hell knows? I mean, how much do we know about the Muras, sir? What does Di Massimo know that we don’t?”
    “You’re doing a great deal of ‘reckoning,’” Lynley said. His tone was dry and he felt, rather than saw, Isabelle glance his way.
    “I was thinking