Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

them, I’d suppose.” She smiled ghoulishly. “You do see how it could have been, I hope. None of us—her family—have seen Angelina in years. We wouldn’t know from Adam or Eve if she went missing. All I’m suggesting is what might be possible.”
    “All you’re suggesting is something ludicrous. Have you
met
Azhar?”
    “Once. Long ago. Angelina brought him to a wine bar to show him off. She was like that, my sister. Always wanting me to know what she’d managed to accomplish, what made her absolutely unique. To be frank, she hated being a twin as much as I did. Our parents shoved twinship down our throats. I daresay even today they’re not entirely sure of our names. To them, we were always ‘the twins.’ Sometimes we got lucky and became ‘the girls.’”
    Barbara hadn’t missed the past tense, and she pointed this out. Any implication made no difference to Bathsheba Ward. She said in turn that she hadn’t seen her sister since a day in a South Kensington Starbucks where they’d met in order that Angelina might triumphantly announce her pregnancy ten years earlier.
    “There was no further point after that,” Bathsheba said. “My sister would have trotted out that child or the fact of that child every time we spoke.”
    “No kids of your own?” Barbara asked shrewdly.
    “Two, as you can see from the pictures.” She indicated the frames on her desks.
    “Look a bit old to be yours.”
    “Children don’t necessarily need to be . . . how do they put it? . . . the fruit of one’s own loins.”
    Barbara wondered if women had loins. She also wondered what the bloody hell “loins” were when it came to
Homo sapiens
. But she recognised the inherent uselessness of leading their conversation in that direction. The only topic remaining to them was Bathsheba’s reference to her sister fleeing Azhar into the arms of another man. Did Bathsheba have anything she wished to offer on that front? Barbara asked. Did Bathsheba know, for example, that Angelina had left Azhar once before, spending a year away from both him and Hadiyyah in a location that they had referred to as Canada but that might, in reality, have been anywhere on the planet?
    “I’m not surprised” was Bathsheba’s airy reply.
    “Why not?”
    “I assume things between her and whatever-his-name-is became a little too tame for Angelina. So if you’re looking for her now and you’ve convinced yourself that he didn’t harm them, then look among men who are different from Angelina, in the way whatever-his-name-is is different.”
    Barbara wanted to grab Bathsheba by the throat and recite
Taymullah Azhar
into her face, forcing her to say the name till she was clear on the fact that he was actually a human being and not some sort of unmentionable social disease. But really, what would have been the point? Bathsheba would only have found another way to indicate her distaste for Azhar, probably choosing his ethnicity or his religion as likely areas for her aversion. Barbara also wanted to point out to her that Mr. Beaky Face didn’t look like such a prize if it came to that. At least her sister has chosen a handsome man, she wanted to sneer. But instead, she politely said, “Azhar. Your sister calls him Hari. That should be easy to remember, eh?”
    “Azhar. Hari. Whatever you like. My point is that Angelina was always interested only in men who were—who are—different from her.”
    “In what way?”
    “In any way. Different from her makes her distinct. She’s spent her life trying to be just that: distinct. I don’t blame her for that. Our parents expected us to be close. Devoted, capable of reading each other’s mind, whatever you like. We were dressed identically and forced into each other’s company from the day we were born. ‘Celebrate your twinship’ was how my mother put it. ‘Other people would kill to have an identical twin.’”
    Barbara wondered if other people would also kill because they had an identical twin. The street of Angelina’s potential murder ran in both directions, after all. If Azhar had supposedly disposed of his lover and their daughter, why could Bathsheba Ward not have done the same thing to her sister and niece? Stranger things had happened in the great city of London.
    “You sound fairly unworried about her,” Barbara said. “About your niece as well.”
    Bathsheba smiled with perfect insincerity. “You seem intent upon the fact that Angelina’s alive. I’m merely accepting your