Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

give it to Corsico. One way or another, a fire was going to be lit beneath Superintendent Ardery’s Pilates-maintained bum, and Barbara reckoned she’d come up with that way. She’d brought with her photographs that she’d snared from Azhar’s flat that morning. There was one of him. There was one of Hadiyyah. There was one of Angelina Upman. Best of all, there was one of the three of them together making at happy families in the distant past.
    Corsico spied her. He clomped through puddles in his pointy-toed boots and beneath the memorial’s roof he removed his Stetson. Barbara half expected him to say, “Howdy, ma’am,” at this, but it turned out he merely wished to remove the excess water from it, which he did. She received most of it against her legs. Good thing, she decided, that she was in trousers. Still, she brushed the water off and eyed him. He said sorry and dropped onto the bench at her side.
    “So?” he said.
    “Kidnapping.”
    “And I should be gobsmacked by this information because . . . ?”
    “Kidnapped in Italy.”
    “And kidnapped in Italy should send me scurrying for my laptop and an Internet connection why . . . ?”
    “The victim’s British.”
    Corsico gave her a look. “Okay. I’m moderately interested.”
    “She’s nine years old.”
    “I’m getting intrigued.”
    “She’s bright, personable, and pretty.”
    “Aren’t they always?”
    “Not like this.” Barbara brought out the first photo, the one of Hadiyyah. Corsico was no fool. He clocked at once that she was mixed race, and one eyebrow rose to indicate Barbara was to proceed with the titillation of his brain cells. She handed over the photo of Angelina Upman, then the one of Azhar, then the happy family together with Hadiyyah in a pushchair at two years old. Everyone, thank God, was suitably attractive.
    The Source
, Barbara knew as one of its devoted readers, was never going to go front page with anyone—kidnapped, dead, or otherwise—unless that person had a certain look. Hardened criminals with mugs like three-day-old roadkill made the front page if they were arrested for a crime that had taken the tabloid’s fancy. But an ugly kid kidnapped? An ugly woman murdered? A grief-stricken father or husband with a face like a salmon? Not going to happen.
    “Kid could be dead,” Barbara pointed out, although she despised herself for having to use the word
kid
to refer to Hadiyyah, not to mention
dead
. But Corsico couldn’t be made to know her interest in the case. If he twigged, she knew he’d not cooperate. He’d see at once that he was being used and, story or not, he would walk away. “Kid could be in a Bangkok cathouse,” she added. “Kid could be sold to someone with a cellar in the Belgian countryside. Kid could be in the US by now. Who the hell knows . . . because
we
bloody well don’t.”
    The
we
got him as she’d hope it might. The
we
meant more was in the offing. The
we
meant there was a chance for
The Source
to lead a charge against the Met, and both of them knew that when it came to news, leading charges against the Met was a close second to having a salacious scoop on a Member of Parliament or a picture of an inebriated naked prince clutching at the crown jewels as someone snapped away with a mobile’s camera.
    But still he was cautious, Mitchell Corsico. Caution in moments like these had got him where he was today, with a page-one by-line two or three times each week and every other tabloid in the country willing to offer him six figures to start digging up dirt. So he said, careful to sound noncommittal, “Why’s no other paper got this tale, then?”
    “Because none of them have the whole story, Mitch.”
    “Sordid, is it?” He meant
sordid enough
, of course.
    “Oh, I think it’s right up your alley,” she told him.

21 April
    VICTORIA
    LONDON
    D orothea Harriman was the one who gave the word that Detective Superintendent Ardery had been called over to Tower Block.
Sent for
was the actual term she used. When Barbara heard this from the departmental secretary as she herself was depositing coins into one of the vending machines to score a Fanta, she knew that the assistant commissioner was the likeliest person to have given the order for Ardery to make haste to Tower Block. This probably wasn’t good for the super, but Barbara was no mourner for that news. If she was condemned to continue working with DI Stewart as a bloody typist till Ardery saw fit to assign her elsewhere,