Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

Someone else ’n you back in uniform tomorrow.”
    She decided that playing dumb was her best course. She said, “What? Win, what’re you talking about?”
    “I’m talkin ’bout your job,” he said. “I’m talkin ’bout losin it. They find out you made yourself a snout for
The Source
’n you back in uniform. Worse, you done. You finished, innit. And don’t be so thick to think there i’n’t people in the department’d be happy as hell to see that happen, Barb.”
    She went for offended. “A
snout
?” she hissed. “That’s what you think? I’m a snout for
The Source
? I’m not a snout. Not theirs and not anyone’s.”
    “That so? You just gave them DI Lynley. I heard you, Barb. Now you goin to tell me you gave up Lynley to someone other than that same bloke wrote the story ’bout Hadiyyah? You think I’m stupid enough to go for that? You’re on the phone with Corsico, Barb, and one look at your mobile records’s goin to show that. Not to mention your bank account, innit.”
    “
What?
” Now she
was
offended. “You think I’m taking money to do this?”
    “I don’ know why the hell you’re doin it. I don’t care why the hell you’re doin it. And you bes’ believe me when I say no one else’s goin to care ’bout the why of it either.”
    “Look, Winnie. You and I both know that someone’s got to keep this story alive. That’s the only way
The Source
is going to send a reporter over to Italy. And only a British reporter in Italy is going to keep the pressure on the Met so that Lynley stays in place till this gets resolved. Plus a British reporter raises the stakes for the Italian reporters to keep the pressure on the Italian police. That’s how it works. Pressure gets results and you know that.”
    “What I know,” he said, and he was calmer now, so he was back to the gentle Caribbean from his mother that had always so influenced his way of talking, “is that no one’s goin to take your side, Barb. This comes out, and you’re on your own. You got to know that. You got no one here.”
    “Oh, thanks very much, Winston. It’s always good to know who one’s friends are.”
    “I mean no one with the power to step in,” Winston said.
    He meant Lynley, of course. For Lynley was the only officer who would risk stepping onto the pitch if it came down to having to defend the wicket of Barbara’s ill-conceived decision to involve
The Source
. And he was the only officer to do this not so much because he was devoted to Barbara as because he didn’t need his employment at the Met so he didn’t care about alienating their superiors.
    “So you see,” Winston said, apparently reading realisation on Barbara’s face. “You’re walkin on the wrong side in this, Barb. That bloke Corsico? He’d throw your mum under a bus ’f it meant a story. He’d throw his own mum ’f that’d help.”
    “That can’t matter,” Barbara told him. “And I c’n handle Corsico, Winston.” She tried to move past him to get to the door. He stopped her easily enough since he towered above her.
    “No one ‘handles’ a tabloid, Barb. You don’t know that now, you learn it soon enough.”
    ILFORD
    GREATER LONDON
    There were not a lot of avenues available to Barbara when it came to the chess game of managing what Mitchell Corsico wrote about. But in the case of his intention to talk to the boy Sayyid there appeared to be only one. She phoned Azhar. She reached him on a bad connection in the hills of Tuscany. They did not speak long. From him she learned what she already knew: that Lynley had arrived and that he and the inspector had spoken prior to Azhar’s making his way into the hills to continue posting pictures of Hadiyyah in the villages to the north of Lucca.
    “Sayyid’s comprehensive?” Azhar said when she asked the name of the school. “Why do you need this, Barbara?”
    She hated to tell him, but she didn’t see the alternative:
The Source
was considering the boy as just that, a source for the kind of “human interest” story so beloved to its readers.
    Azhar gave her the name of the school at once. “For his own sake . . .” His voice was urgent. “You know what the tabloid will make of him, Barbara.”
    She knew well. She knew because she read the bloody rag herself. It was like mental candyfloss and she’d been addicted to the stuff for years. She thanked Azhar and told him she would keep him in the picture of what happened with his son.
    The more difficult project was