Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

him.
    She said, “You know that Barbara’s completion of John’s assignments isn’t the point. Nor is the when and how of her completing them. You know that what occurred just now among the three of us says it all. I
know
you know that. In what we do, there’s no place for a sin of omission, no matter who’s involved.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “I’m going to do what needs to be done.”
    He wanted to plead, which told him how far he himself had waded into the river into which Barbara Havers had dived headlong. But he did not do so. Instead he said, “Will you give me a few days to deal with this? To try to sort things out?”
    “Do you actually suppose there’s something to sort at this point? More important, do you really think there’s something exculpatory that will come out of the sorting?”
    “There probably isn’t, but I’m asking all the same.”
    She picked up the folder and tapped the papers within it neatly so that they were aligned. She handed it to him and said, “Very well. This is your copy. I’ve another. Do what you must.”
    SOUTH HACKNEY
    LONDON
    He was caught between anger and sorrow, in the land of others’ expectations of him. He asked himself what sort of person he seemed to be to other people and in particular to his longtime partner Barbara Havers. She clearly expected him to hold his tongue, to take her part, to be the breathing personification of like-a-bridge-over-troubled-water in her life, no matter what she did or how far out of order she took herself. This expectation on her part angered him: not only that she would have it but that he would have—through his own past actions—somehow schooled her into having it. And what, he wondered, did that say about him as an officer of the Met?
    More, what did the information contained within John Stewart’s report say about Barbara, and what was he to do with what it said? He needed to think about this and to consider it from every angle, and he couldn’t do so standing in the corridor at the door to Isabelle’s office, so he took himself down to the underground car park—avoiding conversation with everyone on his way—and he climbed into the Healey Elliott. There, he opened the manila folder and read every word of the damning information inside and tried like the devil to think what it meant beyond what DI Stewart wanted it to show, which was Barbara’s normal means of doing business, with her the living embodiment of going her own way whenever the inclination came upon her.
    From the first Barbara had been on the wrong end of things when it came to Hadiyyah’s disappearance in Italy. Like his personal snout inside the Met, she’d given the story to Mitchell Corsico and
The Source.
She’d done so in order to force Isabelle’s hand because she herself wanted to be in Italy, and he had to ask himself what this said about Barbara. Was it an indication of her love for Hadiyyah? Her love for Azhar? Or, more difficult to face, was it an indication of her own involvement in the child’s kidnapping for some reason that, as yet, he did not clearly see? And what in God’s name did it mean that in Isabelle’s presence she said nothing about those tickets to Pakistan? She was protecting Azhar, of course, and there could be only one reason for this, a reason that went far beyond whether Barbara loved the man or not: She was doing it because he
needed
protecting in this matter of his daughter’s kidnapping, obviously. But wasn’t the truth that he himself—Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley—had also said not a word to Isabelle about those tickets to Pakistan? So if Barbara was protecting Azhar for whatever reason, wasn’t the truth that he was protecting Barbara?
    He forced his mind away from the whys and wherefores, and he directed it to the immediate problem: Stewart’s report and the evidence it contained. Among the other information that Barbara had omitted in Isabelle’s office was her visit to South Hackney, to someone that Stewart’s man had identified as Bryan Smythe. An address was included, the time and length of her call upon him, and her call upon Dwayne Doughty in Bow immediately upon the conclusion of her dealings with Smythe. It seemed, then, that Smythe was the logical place to begin. But Lynley had to admit to himself that the thought of beginning what could well end with Barbara’s sacking from the Met produced in him such a heaviness of spirit that it invaded his body as well, making