Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

them in a well-used hand towel and tried to get by Lynley and back into the other room where the duffel awaited her.
    He was in the doorway, however. He said again, “Don’t do this. Smythe talked to me and he’ll talk to others. He’s admitted eliminating some pieces of evidence entirely and doctoring other pieces of evidence. He’s told me about the documents he’s created. He’s told me about the calls you paid upon him. He’s given up Doughty as well as the woman. He’s finished, Barbara, and his only hope is going to be emigration in advance of a lengthy and complicated police investigation that will land him in gaol for God knows how many years. That’s how it is. What you have to ask yourself is which side you’d like to be on in what’s investigated.”
    Barbara pushed past him. “You don’t understand. You’ve never understood.”
    “What I understand is that you want to protect Azhar. But what you must understand is that whatever Smythe has done, it can only be done in the most superficial way. Do you see that?”
    “I don’t know what you mean.” She shoved the toweled items into the duffel and looked round the room distractedly. He was making it impossible to think. What else did she need? Her passport, of course. That eternally unused document, which had always been intended to mark a change of direction in her life. Something new, exciting, different, edgy. Sunbathing on a Greek island beach, walking along the Great Wall of China, going nose to nose with a tortoise in the Galápagos. Who the bloody hell
cared
as long as it was different from the dismal life she led now?
    Lynley said, “Then you need to hear the truth. To do what he does, Smythe has to know people who know people who know people. That’s how it works. Someone inside whatever institution he wants to hack into slips him a password or slips someone else a password who then slips it to him. Things get doctored but not in the Gordian knot of backup systems that the institution employs. All of this gets sorted out. Arrests are made. People then talk, and all along the truth itself is buried in a backup system that no one can crack without a court order. That backup system shows everything. And you and I both know what that everything is.”
    She swung round to face him. “He didn’t do anything! You know that as well as I do. Someone wants him to take a fall. Doughty wants him to go down for a kidnapping that he himself arranged, and someone else wants him to go down for murder.”
    “For God’s sake, Barbara, who?”
    “I don’t know! Don’t you see that’s why I have to go over there? Maybe it’s Lorenzo Mura. Maybe it’s Castro, her earlier lover. Or her own dad, for disappointing his dreams. Or her sister, who’s hated her forever. I don’t bloody
know
. But what I do know is that none of us is going to turn over a stone and find the truth if we’re all sitting in London trying to do everything by the sodding book.”
    She dashed to the table next to the daybed. In its only drawer she kept her passport. She pulled the drawer open and flipped its contents onto the bed. The passport was gone.
    That did it for her. Something she couldn’t begin to identify broke inside of her, and she flung herself across the room upon Lynley. She shrieked, “Give it to me! Goddamn you to hell, give me my passport!” And to her horror, she began to cry. She sounded like a madwoman, she knew, but there was nothing left inside of her that could possibly explain to her longtime partner why she was doing what she was doing, so like a fishwife out of a Victorian novel, she cursed him and then she beat on his chest. He caught her arms and he shouted her name, but he
wouldn’t
stop her, she swore to herself. If she had to kill him to get to Italy, that was what she was going to do.
    “You have a life beyond this!” she cried. “I have nothing. Do you understand?
Will
you understand?”
    “Barbara, for the love of God—”
    “Whatever you think will happen, it doesn’t matter to me. Do you get that? What matters is
her
. I’m not leaving Hadiyyah in the hands of the Italian authorities if something happens to Azhar. I won’t do that and I don’t care about anything else.”
    She was left sobbing. He let go of her arms. He watched her and she felt the humiliation sweep through her. That he, of all people, should see her like this. Reduced in this way to the disintegrating substance of what comprised her: loneliness that