Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

of her clothing, or he would no doubt have pointed out that drawstring trousers and a tee-shirt reading
Celebrating 600 Years of the Bubonic Plague
weren’t exactly foxtrot material either.
    Barbara said to him, “I’m not here for a class. You’re Mr. Castro? I need a word.”
    He said, “Obviously, I’m in the middle of something.”
    “Got that in a bucket. So am I.” She heaved her shoulder bag around and dug inside it for her warrant card. She crossed the room to him and let him have as much of a look as he wanted.
    After a moment he said, “What’s this about?”
    “Angelina Upman.”
    His gaze rose from her warrant card to her face. “What about her? I haven’t seen her in ages. Has something happened to her?”
    “Funny you’d go there first,” she noted.
    “Where else am I supposed to go when the cops show up?” He didn’t, apparently, require an answer to this. Instead, he turned to his dancers and said, “Ten minutes, then we’ll go through this one more time.”
    He spoke with no appreciable accent. He sounded like someone born in Henley-on-Thames. When she asked him about this, letting him know she’d done a little looking into a background that had told her he’d been born in Mexico City, he said he’d moved to London when he was twelve, his father a diplomat and his mother a writer of children’s books. It had been important to him to assimilate into the English culture, he said. Accent was part of it as he did not wish to be marked eternally as a foreigner in this place.
    He was very good-looking. Barbara could see what the attraction had been for Angelina Upman. Indeed, she could see what the attraction would be for any woman. He smouldered in the way that Latin men often smouldered, helped along by a three-day growth of beard that made him look sexy instead of what it made most other men look, which was largely unkempt. His hair was dark and thick and so healthy-looking Barbara had to keep herself from touching it. She reckoned other women had the same reaction, and she also reckoned Esteban Castro knew it.
    When they were alone in the room, Castro indicated the folding chairs and walked over to them. He moved as one would expect of a dancer: fluidly and with perfect posture. Like the dancers he’d dismissed, he wore a leotard that went miles to define every muscle on his legs and his arse. Unlike them, he also wore a tight white muscle-man tee-shirt that did much the same for his chest. His arms were bare. So were his feet.
    He sat with his arms on his legs and his hands dangling between them. This gave Barbara a view of his package that she would have preferred not to have, so she moved her own chair to a position that kept his jewels from view. He said without preamble and without waiting to hear the reason for her call upon him, “My wife doesn’t know Angelina and I were involved. I’d like to keep it that way.”
    “I wouldn’t place money on that,” Barbara told him. “Women aren’t stupid, as a rule.”
    “She’s not quite a woman” was his reply. “That was part of the problem. Have you spoken to her?”
    “Not yet.”
    “There’s no need. I’ll tell you what you want to know. I’ll answer your questions. But leave her out of this.”
    “‘This’?” Barbara asked.
    “Whatever this is. You know what I mean.” He waited for Barbara to say something. When she gave him no assurance of any kind, he cursed and said, “Come with me.”
    He led the way out of the dance studio and across the lobby. He opened the other door and jerked his head in a way that told her she was to look inside. There she saw Dahlia Rourke with a group of some dozen little girls at the barre. She was attempting to position them gracefully, one arm curved above their heads. It looked hopeless to Barbara. Nice to know, she thought, that there appeared to be no real, natural grace in life. As for Dahlia, she was skeletally thin, more X-ray than human. Perhaps feeling she was being watched, she turned towards the door.
    “Daughter’s a potential for ballet,” Castro said to her, in reference to Barbara. “She wanted a look.”
    Dahlia nodded. Her gaze took in Barbara but it seemed to be without speculation. She gave a hesitant smile directed at them both and then went back to her work with the nation’s future ballerinas. Castro led the way back to his own studio. He closed the door and said, “Her body functions only as a ballerina’s. Nor is she interested in its