Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

then whatever Ardery had to suffer was fine by her.
    It didn’t occur to Barbara that Sir David Hillier’s request for the detective superintendent might have to do with her and her machinations on the Mitchell Corsico front. She’d been ringing Corsico practically hourly since their meeting at Postman’s Park, and as far as she’d been able to gather, “working on it” was the extent to which he’d gone.
    She was at the point of gnashing her teeth with impatience to see something happen. She had heard only single words from Azhar since he’d left with Angelina and her lover. But it was always the same word, “Nothing,” and the sound of his voice was like a lump of ice in her throat, freezing off words of comfort that she might have said to him.
    That something was about to happen became clear the moment Isabelle Ardery returned from Tower Block. She barked, “
Sergeant
Havers, into my office at once,” and added, “Inspector Lynley, you as well,” in a voice only slightly less hostile. Murmurs rose from the rest of the officers bent to various tasks. Only DI Stewart looked pleased. Any dressing-down that was delivered to Barbara Havers had always been fine with him.
    Barbara shot Lynley a what’s-going-on look. He shook his head in an I-don’t-know. He led the way to Ardery’s office and stepped aside to let Barbara enter first. He did the honours with the door at Ardery’s request.
    The superintendent had thrown something on her desk. That something was a tabloid. That tabloid was
The Source
. The day of reckoning for the Met had arrived—not bad, Barbara thought, as Mitch had managed it within forty-eight hours—and finally something was going to be done about the matter of a British child’s disappearance in Italy.
    Mitch had done a fine job, from what Barbara could see.
UK Schoolgirl Kidnap!
comprised a three-inch headline,
Mitchell Corsico
comprised the by-line, and a photograph of Hadiyyah looking utterly winsome took up half the page. There was an inset of an aerial photo as well. Top of a huge wall, a paroxysm of European cobbled streets, the tops of market stalls, masses of people . . . The hold-up in the story, Barbara reckoned, had had to do with getting a decent shot of the place from which Hadiyyah had disappeared. She angled closer to see if the story made a jump from page one and, if so, where. Page three! She wanted to crow when she saw it. This signalled to one and all that the story was going to have significant legs. Those legs would have feet, those feet would be in metal-toed Doc Martens, and those Doc Martens would be stamping all over the Met from now till the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Khalidah was resolved. Hillier would have known that the moment the press office got the tabloid to him hot off the metaphorical presses. Which was, naturally, what Isabelle Ardery wished to discuss with Detective Sergeant—“And believe me, I’d kick you down to filing clerk if I could”—Barbara Havers.
    She gathered up the tabloid, threw it at Barbara, and told her to regale herself, Inspector Lynley, and Ardery as well with an oral reading of what she’d “clearly been determined to see publicised.”
    Barbara said, “Guv, I didn’t—”
    “Your jelly-covered fingers are all over this, Sergeant,” Ardery said. “Do
not
presume to believe that I’m quite so stupid.”
    “Guv,” Lynley said, and his tone spoke of an attempt at appeasement.
    She said sharply to him, “I want you to hear this as well. You need to be entirely up-to-date and
completely
in the picture, Thomas.”
    Barbara felt her first niggle of discomfort at this. It presaged something she didn’t want to consider. She cooperated with Ardery’s command to read the story aloud. When she reached each significant point—and there were many—Ardery had her stop and repeat it.
    So what they all came to learn and hear repeated was that no British police were involved in the search for a missing English child snatched from a market in Lucca, Italy; that no British police had been sent to Tuscany to be of assistance to the Italian coppers; that no British police had been assigned to liaise with the desperate family of the kidnap victim here in the UK or in Italy either. There were hints aplenty as to why this state of affairs
was
this state of affairs: The girl in question was a mixed-race child; as a result this was not a crime destined to be heavily investigated in either country, where foreigners—particularly