Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

identify himself to the wife he’d deserted. When he didn’t respond, footsteps approached and Sayyid stepped away from the door. Azhar and his wife stood face-to-face. Without looking at her son, she said, “Sayyid, go to your room.”
    Barbara had expected the traditional dress of
shalwar kameez
. She’d expected the scarf. What she hadn’t expected was how beautiful Azhar’s wife was because she’d thought—perhaps like most people, she reckoned—that Azhar would have left an ordinary kind of woman in order to take up life with an extraordinary one. Men being men, she’d reckoned, they’d trade up, not down, not even across. But this woman far outclassed Angelina in the beauty department: dark, sloe-eyed, with cheekbones to kill for, a sensuous mouth, an elegant long neck, and perfect skin.
    Azhar said, “Nafeeza.”
    Nafeeza said, “What brings you here?”
    Angelina was the one to answer. “We want to search the house.”
    “Please, Angelina,” Azhar said quietly. “Surely you can see . . .” And then to his wife, “Nafeeza, my apologies for this. I would not . . . If you would please tell these people that my daughter is not here.”
    She wasn’t a tall woman, but she brought herself up to her full height, and when she did this, the suggestion made was one of strength running through her body. She said, “Your daughter is upstairs in her room. She is doing her school prep. She’s a very fine student.”
    “I am pleased to hear that. You must be . . . She will be a source of . . . But I do not speak of . . .”
    “You know who he’s talking about,” Angelina said.
    Barbara took out her police ID. She could barely stand the amount of pain that seemed to be rolling off Azhar. She said to his wife, “C’n we come in, Mrs. . . .” And to her dismay she realised she hadn’t a clue what to call her. She switched to, “Madam, if we c’n come in. We’ve a missing child we’re looking for.”
    “And you think this child is within my house?”
    “No. Not exactly.”
    Nafeeza looked them over, each of them, one at a time, and she took her time doing it. Then she stepped back from the door. They entered the house and filled a narrow corridor that was already filled by a stairway, boots, coats, rucksacks, hockey sticks, and football equipment. They crowded into a small lounge to the right.
    There, they saw that Sayyid hadn’t gone to his room. He was in the lounge, on the edge of the sofa, elbows on his thighs and hands dangling between his knees. Above him on the wall a large picture featured thousands of people on pilgrimage to Mecca. There were no other pictures or decorations aside from two small school photographs in frames on a table. Azhar went to these and picked them up. His gaze upon them was hungry. Nafeeza crossed the room and removed them from his hand. She placed them facedown on the table.
    She said to him, “There is no child here, aside from mine.”
    “I want to look,” Angelina said.
    “You must tell her that I speak the truth, husband,” Nafeeza said. “You must explain to her that I have no reason to lie about this. Whatever has happened, it is nothing to do with me or with my children.”
    “So
she’s
the one?” Sayyid put in. “She’s the whore?”
    “Sayyid,” his mother said.
    “I am sorry, Nafeeza,” Azhar said to her. “For this. For what it was. For who I was.”
    “
Sorry?
” This from Sayyid. “You c’n bloody talk to Mum about
sorry
? You’re a piece of shit and don’t think
we
think anything else. If you plan to—”
    “Enough!” his mother said. “You will wait in your room, Sayyid.”
    “While this one”—with a sneer towards Angelina—“goes through our house looking for her bastard brat?”
    Azhar looked at his son. “You may not say—”
    “You, wanker, don’t tell me what to do.” And with that, he leapt to his feet, pushed his way through all of them, and left the room. His footsteps did not go up the stairs, however, but rather into the corridor, where they could hear him making a telephone call. He spoke in Urdu. This seemed to mean something to both Azhar and Nafeeza, Barbara saw, because Azhar’s wife said to him, “It will not be long,” and he said again, “I am so sorry.”
    “You do not know sorrow.” Nafeeza then spoke to the rest of them, her gaze going from one face to the other. Her voice contained perfect dignity. “The only children in this house are the children from my own body, got off this