Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

afternoon.”
    “Darts tournament,” she said. “After work. Down the local pub. Well, not local to my home but local to the zoo.”
    Her home was a place he had not seen. He tried to make nothing of this, but he knew better than to do so. “You plan to scour the floor with your opponents, I daresay. I recall how wily you are when it comes to darts.”
    “You fell into my scheme,” she replied lightly. “As I recall, you and I had a bet, with the loser doing the washing up after dinner. No worries in this instance, though. There’s no washing up to be done and my opponent knows we’re evenly matched.”
    He wanted to ask who her opponent was, but he couldn’t bring himself to be so pathetic. So he said, “I hope to see you when I’m back from Italy.”
    “Do ring me when you return.”
    That was that. He rang off and stood looking at the phone. He was in the drawing room of his home in Eaton Terrace, a formal room with pale-green walls and creamy woodwork, with a gilt-framed portrait of his paternal great-grandmother hanging above the fireplace. Dressed in white in an impressionistic rose garden, she stood in profile, a study in Edwardian lace and Edwardian good manners, and she seemed to gaze into a distance that she wished to encourage him to see. Look elsewhere, Thomas, she was saying to him.
    He sighed. On a table between the two windows that looked out into Eaton Terrace, his wedding picture with Helen still stood in a silver frame. In it she laughed at his side among a small group of their friends. He picked it up and saw that in it, rapt and lucky, he gazed upon her.
    He set the picture down and turned from it. Denton, he saw, was in the doorway.
    Their gazes met, held, and then Charlie looked away. He said lightly, “Got your gear out. Few things that you’ll need but you better check through it. I looked up the weather. It’ll be warm. Printed your boarding pass. Gatwick to Pisa. You’ve a car at the airport.”
    “Thank you, Charlie,” Lynley said. He headed in the direction of the stairs.
    “Anything . . .” Denton hesitated.
    “Anything?” Lynley said.
    Denton’s gaze flicked over to the table where Helen’s picture was, then back to Lynley. “Anything I should set about while you’re gone?”
    Lynley knew what Charlie Denton meant. He knew what he thought. It was the same thing everyone thought, but it was also the one thing he himself could not yet bear to address.
    He said lightly, “Not that I can think of, Charlie. Just carry on as usual.” It was, of course, what they both did best.
    BOW
    LONDON
    The private detective was Barbara’s only hope once Isabelle Ardery handed the case over to Lynley. Barbara was burning over this and burning over her failure to anticipate what Ardery’s move would be once the story hit
The Source
, but she knew there was no point in crying over the milk on the floor. The only point was Hadiyyah. Lynley would do what he could to help find her, within the parameters of Italian law and British-Italian police diplomacy. But both of these items were going to hobble him, and to expect Barbara to remain in London at the beck and call of John Stewart without doing
something
to assist in the search for the girl was lunacy on the superintendent’s part.
    So she went to the only place she reckoned help was available, and that was back to Dwayne Doughty and his androgynous assistant Em Cass. She phoned in advance this time. She made a regular appointment for the end of that day. Doughty didn’t sound like a man who was going to start laying down the palm fronds in welcome, so she made sure to add the fact that she wished him to have his retainer figured out in advance as she intended to hire him.
    He’d begun with, “Terribly sorry and all that, but I don’t know that I have the time—”
    She countered with, “Double the retainer,” which had convinced him to have another think on the topic.
    They met not in his office this time but not too far away at a rather trendy pub called the Morgan Arms in Coborn Road. There were tables outside, and at them pub-going smokers hunched in the cool evening air. Barbara would have joined them, but she found that Em Cass was the clean-living type. Apparently passive smoking and success in triathlons did not mix.
    They went inside. Barbara took out her chequebook. Doughty said, “Let’s keep the cart and the horse in their respective positions,” before he went to the bar and ordered drinks. He came back