Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

Underground instead of her car, and she made her way over to Chalk Farm Road. This would allow her to stop at her local newsagent. She needed to know the worst in advance of having to deal with her superiors’ reaction to it.
    Inside the place, it was airless as usual, its temperature a nod to the proprietor’s homeland. It was a shop just marginally wider than a corridor, with one wall devoted to magazines, broadsheets, and tabloids and the other to every kind of sweet and savoury known to humanity. What she wanted, though, was not going to be among what was on offer that morning. So she worked her way past three uniformed schoolgirls in earnest discussion of the health benefits of pretzels over crisps and a woman with a toddler attempting to escape his pushchair. At the till she asked Mr. Mudali if he had any remaining copies of yesterday’s edition of
The Source
. He responded with the assurance that indeed he had. He brought forth a bundled square of what had not sold from among the newspapers on the previous day. It was a simple matter to hand over
The Source
—she was lucky, he said, as there was only one left—and although he refused to take money for a day-old newspaper, she pressed it on him anyway. She also purchased a packet of Players and one of Juicy Fruit before she left the place.
    She didn’t open
The Source
until she was on the Northern Line, where most unusually, she actually was able to secure a seat among the commuters heading for central London. For a moment she hoped against all reason that Mitchell had not made good his threat, but a simple glance at
Kidnap Dad Behind It All
told the tale.
    Her very soul felt heavy. She folded the paper without reading the story. Then, two stops farther along, she reckoned she needed to prepare herself. The many phone calls from Lynley that she’d ignored spoke of the Met’s knowledge of her participation in everything concerning Hadiyyah’s kidnapping. No matter that she had not known of Azhar’s plan. She was complicit from the moment she’d involved Mitchell Corsico in manipulating New Scotland Yard into sending Lynley to Italy in the first place. Perhaps, she thought, she could come up with some sort of defence. The only way to do it was going to be to forearm herself through reading Mitch’s story.
    So she unfolded the paper and did so. It was damning, of course. Names, dates, places, exchanges of cash . . . the whole rotten business. There was only one thing missing from the article. Nowhere in it was she herself mentioned.
    Mitchell had deleted every reference to her before he’d sent the piece to his editor. She had no idea if this was mercy or a Machiavellian preparation for worse to come. There were, she knew, two ways to find out. She could wait for the future to unfold or she could ring the journalist himself. She chose the latter when she reached St. James’s Park Station. Walking along Broadway in the direction of the heavily secured front entrance to the Met, she rang the man on his mobile.
    He was, she found, still in Italy, hot on every part of the
E. coli
story and the arrest of Lorenzo Mura. Had Barbara seen his piece this morning? he asked. It was another front-pager and he was dining out on the information he was supplying his cohorts in Italy who, alas, did not have his sources. By which, of course, he meant Barbara herself.
    She said, “You changed the story.”
    He said, “Eh?”
    “The one you showed me. The one you were holding over me. The one . . . Mitchell, you took out my name.”
    “Oh. Right. Well, what can I say? Old times’ sake, Barb. That and the goose.”
    “I’m not the goose, there are no eggs, and we have no old times,” she told him.
    He laughed outright at this. “But we will, Barb. Believe me. We will.”
    She rang off. She passed a rubbish bin and tossed the day-old edition of
The Source
on top of a half-eaten takeaway egg salad croissant and a banana peel. She followed the line of people going through the Yard’s enhanced security system. She was safe from one kind of judgement, she reckoned. But she certainly wasn’t safe from others.
    Winston Nkata was the one to tell her. Odd for him, she would think later, since Winston wasn’t given to gossip. But that something big was going on was evident the moment she stepped out of the lift. Three detective constables were earnestly talking at the black detective while a buzz of conversation in the air spoke of changes having nothing to do with a