Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

said. “I asked her if she might lend me you to look into this end of things in London. She won’t allow it, Barbara.”
    “Because you asked for me,” Barbara said bitterly. “’F you’d asked for Winston, she’d be all over herself to cooperate. We both know that.”
    “We didn’t go in that direction,” he said. “I could have asked for Winston but I assumed you’d prefer to do this, no matter when it had to be done.”
    There was truth in that. Barbara knew she ought to be grateful to Lynley for having recognised how important it was to her to be kept in the loop of what was going on. So she said, “I s’pose. Thanks, sir.”
    He said wryly, “Don’t overwhelm me with your gratitude, Sergeant. I’m not certain I could bear it.”
    She had to smile. “I’m tap-dancing on the tabletop here. If you could only see.”
    “Where are you?”
    She told him.
    “You’re going to be late into work,” he said. “Barbara, at some point you have to stop giving Isabelle ammunition.”
    “That’s what Winston’s been saying, more or less.”
    “And he’s correct. Having a professional death wish isn’t the best of ideas.”
    “Right,” she said. “Whatever. Point taken. Anything else?” She was about to ask him how things were going in the direction of Daidre Trahair, but she knew there was little point in this since Lynley wouldn’t tell her. There were lines between them that nothing on earth could make the bloke cross.
    “There is,” he said. “Bathsheba Ward.” He went on to tell her about the emails that Bathsheba had apparently written at the request of her twin sister, emails purportedly from Taymullah Azhar from University College to his daughter in Italy.
    “That bloody cow lied to me!” Barbara cried in outrage. “She knew all along where Angelina was!”
    “It appears that way,” Lynley told her. “So there’s a chance she might know something more about what’s going on now.”
    Barbara considered this but she couldn’t come up with a way that Bathsheba Ward might be involved in Hadiyyah’s disappearance, much less a reason for it. Unless Angelina herself was involved.
    She said, “How’s Angelina coping, then?”
    “Distraught, as you might imagine. Not well physically either, it seems.”
    “What about Azhar?”
    “Equally so, although far more self-contained.”
    “That sounds like him. I wonder how he’s holding it together. He’s been going through hell since last November.”
    Lynley told her what the Pakistani man was doing with the handbills of his daughter throughout the town and into the villages that surrounded it. “I think it’s giving him a purpose, more than anything else,” Lynley concluded. “To have to sit and wait while your child is missing . . . That’s intolerable for any parent.”
    “Yes. Well. Intolerable describes how it’s been for Azhar.”
    “As to that . . .” Lynley hesitated on his end of the conversation.
    “What?” Barbara asked, feeling trepidation.
    “I know you’re close to him but I do have to ask this. Do we know where he was when Hadiyyah disappeared?”
    “At a conference in Berlin.”
    “Are we certain of that?”
    “Bloody hell, sir, you can’t think—”
    “Barbara. Just as everything having to do with Angelina wants looking into, so does everything having to do with Azhar. And with everyone else remotely connected to what’s going on here, so obviously that means Bathsheba Ward as well. Because something
is
going on here, Barbara. A child doesn’t disappear from the middle of a crowded marketplace with no one knowing a thing about it, with no one seeing anything unusual, with no one—”
    “All right, all right,” Barbara said, and she told him about Dwayne Doughty in Bow and to what end she was employing him. They were in the process of eliminating Azhar as a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance. She’d put him onto Esteban Castro next, the man’s wife, and Bathsheba Ward as well, but only if she couldn’t get to these others on her own because she vastly preferred to have her own fingers on the pulse of an enquiry and not be relying on someone else’s.
    “Sometimes we have to rely on others” was Lynley’s concluding remark.
    Barbara wanted to scoff, but she didn’t. The fact was that of all the officers whom she knew at the Met, relying on others was a characteristic that applied to Lynley least of all.
    VICTORIA
    LONDON
    Barbara passed the day being at the completely