Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

Barbara took to mean Azhar was to get his arse inside. When he’d cleared the doorway, the guard stepped within and closed the door. Barbara gave a silent curse when she saw this, but she understood. She was not his solicitor, so she could claim no privilege.
    Azhar spoke first. He did not sit. “You should not have come, Barbara,” he said futilely.
    She said, “Sit,” and gestured to a chair. She told him the lie she had prepared. “This isn’t about you. I’ve been sent by the Met because of Hadiyyah.”
    That, at least, prompted him to do as she said. He dropped into a chair and clasped his hands on the table. They were slender hands, lovely hands for a man. She’d always thought so, but now what she thought was that those hands would not serve him well in prison.
    She said to him quietly, very nearly in a whisper, “And how could I not have come, Azhar, once I heard about this?” She gestured to the room, to the prison.
    He matched the barely audible tone she employed. “You have done too much already to try to help me. There is no help for what has happened now.”
    “Oh, really? Why’s that? Did you actually do what they think you’ve done? Did you manage to get Angelina to down a dose of
E. coli
? What did you put it in, her morning oatmeal?”
    “Of course not,” he said.
    “Then, believe me, there’s help. But it’s time for you to start being straight with me. From A to Z. A’s the kidnapping, so let’s start there. I need to know everything.”
    “I’ve told you everything.”
    She shook her head bleakly. “That’s where you go wrong every time. You went wrong in December and you’ve gone wrong ever since. Why can’t you see that if you’re still lying about the kidnapping—”
    “What do you mean? There’s nothing that I—”
    “You wrote her a card, Azhar. Something for her kidnapper to hand to her so she would know for certain you were behind the snatching. You had him call her
khushi
and then give her a card, and in that card you told her to go with the man because he would bring her to you. Does this sound familiar?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She hissed, “Now, when in hell’re you going to stop lying to me? And
how
in hell d’you expect me to help you if you won’t start telling me the truth? About
everything
. DI Lynley gave me a copy of that card, by the way. And you can wager everything you’ve ever owned that the Lucca coppers are having the handwriting verified by an expert even as we speak. What the bloody hell were you thinking? Why did you take that risk?”
    His reply was nearly inaudible. “I had to make sure she went with him. I told him to call her
khushi
, but how could I know that would be enough? I was desperate, Barbara. Can you not understand that? I had not seen my child in five months. What if she hadn’t gone with someone who merely called her
khushi
? What if instead she had told Angelina that a stranger had approached her in the market, trying to lure her beyond the walls? Angelina would have made it impossible for
anyone
to get near her after that. Hadiyyah would have been lost to me forever.”
    “Well, that’s been taken care of, hasn’t it?”
    He looked at her in horror. “I did not—”
    “Do you see how it looks? How everything looks? You hire a detective to find her, then you kidnap her, then you come over here playing at Concerned Dad,
and
you’ve got tickets to Pakistan. Hadiyyah gets found, hugs and kisses all round, and in very short order Angelina dies. And what she dies of is a microorganism and you’re a bloody microbiologist. Are you following me? This is how a case is built, Azhar. And if you don’t start being straight with me about what you know and what you’ve done and how you’ve done it, then I can’t help you and, more important, I can’t help Hadiyyah. Full stop.”
    “I did not,” he murmured brokenly.
    “Yeah? Well, someone bloody did,” she whispered fiercely. “Lo Bianco’s onto a bloke passing you a petri dish of
E. coli
when you were in Berlin. Or posting it to you afterwards. Someone called von Lohmann, from Heidelberg. Meantime,
The Source
has dug up a woman from Glasgow who studies
E. coli
and who was
also
at this bloody conference. You were on a panel with the Heidelberg bloke, and for all I know you played hide-the-salami with the Glasgow woman when the sun went down, all the better to get her ready to hand over a vial of bacteria when you needed it.”
    He flinched. He said