Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

or it would finish him off in this line of work—and now look where that had led. He’d spent the past twenty years of his postmilitary life working his arse down to nothing—like his father before him—in order to take the family and its name another step up from the coal mines of Wigan. He had two kids who’d collected respectable university degrees, and he swore that
their
children—when they had them—would do the same from Oxford or Cambridge. He wasn’t about to miss that due to having to flee the country or because of the need to spend a stretch of time playing some sweaty yob’s wife behind prison bars . . . so what in God’s name was he going to do to avoid either prospect?
    Another cup of coffee. Another four fig bars. This took him to thoughts of his associates and how much blame he could possibly assign them. He’d always been a careful man, so there was no direct link from him to all the manoeuvring and the tinkering that had gone on. Aside from the one time in Emily’s sumptuous flat in Wapping and—all right—once in Emily’s office, he never himself actually discussed business with Bryan Smythe, so the truth was that he could throw up his hands in shock and despair and throw Em to the legal wolves. She, after all, had passed along his verbal instructions to Smythe. How difficult would it be to establish that every idea skittering to every lawless act had come from her? But the question was: Could he really do that to Em after the years in which they’d worked together?
    He knew the answer to that before he even got to the end of the question. He had history with Em. He also had history with Bryan. So together they had to climb out of this pit. It was his curse that he was such an ethical bloke.
    The second hour into his brooding about the problem had gained him only the insight that he might be able to use this bloke Lynley’s potential attachment to DS Barbara Havers in some way to benefit himself, much as he’d used
her
obvious attachment to the Pakistani professor to keep her in order. The difficulty with this was that he couldn’t work his mind round to believing there
was
an attachment between the detective sergeant and the posh inspector. So he was left with a nut needing to be cracked and having ninety minutes more in which to crack it before Can’s alarm went off and she staggered into the kitchen completely unamused at his having devoured all the fig bars.
    The thought of Can’s displeasure with regard to the fig bars stirred Dwayne to hide the evidence. He needed to make another pot of coffee, so he roused himself from the kitchen table and crumpled the wrapping of the sinful biscuits. He couldn’t put this in the rubbish. His wife would find it and a lecture about his nutritional habits would ensue. So he grabbed up a folded newspaper from the stool by the kitchen door, where others of its ilk waited for recycling, and he unfolded it on the draining board. He would, he decided, dump the coffee grounds on this and hide the fig bar wrapping beneath them. He was supposed to recycle the grounds as well—or was it compost the grounds? He could never remember all the terminology for what one did with one’s rubbish these days—but allowance could be made this once for not putting the grounds to use for a higher purpose.
    He took them from the coffeemaker. He spread the fig bar wrapping neatly onto the unfolded newspaper, and he was just about to dump the coffee grounds on top of this when his hand was stayed in best biblical fashion. There before him beneath the fig wrapping lay the answer. Or at least part of it. For he’d opened the newspaper to a story whose elements he well recognised: Italy, an Englishwoman’s death, a possible cover-up, and stay tuned for more. He shoved the fig bar wrapping to one side and read, and the names leapt out at him. The problem was that he’d opened the paper to the middle of the story, and one paragraph into it the floodgates of his ability to plan and devise and ultimately triumph opened . . . but he needed the rest of the story.
    He wasn’t a praying man, but he did pray that Candace hadn’t used the front of the paper to discard last night’s leftover chili con carne into. He rooted through the stack of recycling aspirants, and he found what he was looking for. This was a name, a reporter’s name. And there it was beneath the page-one headline: Mitchell Corsico. It sounded Italian to Dwayne, but Italian or not, obviously the