Just One Evil Act Page 6

  “And?” Barbara said.

  “We shall speak.” His tone told her the news wouldn’t be good.

  She made decent time back to Eton Villas, a miracle considering she had to use the miserable Northern Line. She was carrying her purchases in the direction of her bungalow when Azhar came out of the ground-floor flat. He walked across to her and politely took two of her shopping bags. She said ta, and she tried to sound cheerful in keeping with the holiday season, but she could see from his face that the conclusion she’d drawn from his tone of voice on the mobile had been correct.

  She said to him, “So what d’you want to drink, then, tea or gin? I’ve got both. It’s a little early for gin but what the hell. If we’re owed, we’re owed.”

  He offered her a smile. “Ah. If only Islam allowed me to drink.”

  “There’s always cheating,” she told him. “But I don’t want to be the one to corrupt you. Tea, then. Strong. I’ll throw in a teacake and let me tell you, I don’t do that for just anyone.”

  “You are far too good to me, Barbara,” he said, but his smile was rote. He’d always been the most courteous of men.

  Inside her small bungalow, Barbara lit the electric fire in the tiny fireplace and removed her coat, her scarf, and her gloves. She was of two minds about her knitted cap, though. Her hair had begun to grow out, but she still looked like someone who’d had recent chemo. Azhar had, from the first, been far too decent to mention the wreck she’d made of her hair. She reckoned he wasn’t about to change course now and query her on the topic of head shaving. So she thought, what the hell, and she tossed the cap along with everything else on the daybed.

  She busied herself with making the tea and popping teacakes beneath the grill in her oven. The fact that she had butter for these and milk for the tea actually made her feel like a domestic goddess. She’d even spent the morning prior to her shopping spree putting her hovel into some kind of order. This allowed Azhar to sit at her table and even gaze into the kitchen area without being assaulted by the sight of her knickers drying on a line above the kitchen sink.

  He didn’t bring her into the picture of his phone call to her till she had a pot of tea on the table, along with mugs, teacakes, and all the et ceteras. Then, maddeningly, he began with small talk about her Christmas shopping, her mother’s health, and Inspector Lynley having to face his first Christmas after the death of his wife. Finally, he told her he’d been to Bow at Dwayne Doughty’s invitation. At first he’d thought the news would be good. He reckoned that Doughty had wished to demonstrate in person how far his skills as a private investigator had taken him. But things turned out quite differently.

  “He merely wished to settle the account,” Azhar said quietly. “Payment in person was preferable to awaiting a cheque by post during the Christmas season, evidently.”

  “But what did he tell you? Anything?” Barbara also wanted to ask why Azhar hadn’t included her on this journey to the detective’s office. But she shook herself mentally and ordered her psyche to get a grip because, for God’s sake, this man’s daughter was missing and whether he took Barbara Havers with him to learn if she’d been found was hardly as important as her being found in the first place.

  Azhar said, “He’d got the maiden name of Angelina’s mother. Ruth-Jane Squire. But that was as far as he was able to go because there was no indication through any of his sources that Angelina had used the name for anything: new passport, driving licence, forged birth certificate, or whatever else one might need a false name for.”

  “And that was it?” Barbara asked. “Azhar, that doesn’t make sense. These blokes—private investigators—skate round the law all the time. They look through people’s rubbish, they hack into phones, they hack into their email accounts, they intercept their post, they use blaggers to—”

  “Blaggers?”

  “Some bugger on the payroll who’s willing to pretend he’s whoever he needs to be to get information: ring up Angelina’s GP and act like you’re her social worker or whatever and can you tell me if it’s true she’s been infected with syphilis, sir?”

  He looked startled. “The point of this being . . . ?”

  “The point of this being that people talk if you act like you’ve got a reason to ask them questions. Blaggers play on sounding more official than officials. So I’d’ve thought Doughty had a score of them available.”

  “He has an associate,” Azhar told her. “A woman. But her part was to investigate airlines, taxis, minicabs, trains, and the Underground. She discovered nothing.”

  “She was there? With Doughty? She made a report to you?”

  “He had her report. I did not meet her.” Azhar frowned. “Was this somehow important? That I meet her?” He picked up his teacake, examined it, put it back on the plate. “I see that I should have taken you with me. You would have thought of this. I am . . . I was anxious, Barbara. When he rang me and said that we needed to meet as soon as we could, that he did not wish to speak to me of his news by telephone . . .” Azhar glanced away, and Barbara could see a heaviness settle upon him. “I thought he had her. I thought I would walk into his office and there she would be and perhaps even Angelina with her so that all of us could talk together and come to an agreement.” He looked back at her. “It was foolish of me, but everything about me has been foolish for many years now.”

  “Don’t say that,” Barbara said. “Life happens, Azhar. We do things. We make decisions, they lead to consequences, and that’s how it is.”

  “This is, of course, true,” he told her. “But my first decision was both thoughtless and irrational. I saw her, you see. From across the room, I saw her.”

  “Angelina?” Barbara felt a leap of her heart, that indication of pure excitement coursing through her body. “Where?”

  “There were other places to sit that day in the food hall. I chose her table.”

  “Oh. When you met her,” Barbara said.

  “When I met her,” he agreed. “I saw her and I made that decision to ask if I might join her although I had no right to make it.” He paused, either to consider his words carefully or to consider how saying them would affect his friendship with Barbara. “I decided then and there upon an affair with her. It was—I was—so very full of my . . . my ego. And so very stupid.”

  Barbara wasn’t sure how to respond to this because she wasn’t sure how she felt about the information. It was no business of hers how the affair that had produced Hadiyyah had begun, she told herself. But just because something was in the past and not her business did not mean she was immune from speculating and from drawing conclusions. She just didn’t like her speculations. She liked even less her conclusions. And she disliked herself most of all because both of these—speculations and conclusions—had to do with her, with Barbara Havers, with thinking about what it might be like to be such a woman as Angelina Upman whom a man like Azhar looked upon and made decisions about, the sort of decisions that brought worlds to an end.

  “I’m sorry about all of it,” Barbara said. “Not about Hadiyyah, though. I don’t expect you’re sorry about her either.”

  “Of course I am not,” he said.

  “So where do things stand? You paid Doughty for his time and efforts and now what?”

  “He tells me that she will surface eventually. He tells me that in anticipation of this, it would be wise for me now to pay a call upon Angelina’s parents. He says that she will turn to them at some point in time because people rarely cut themselves off from their families permanently when there is no longer a reason to do so.”

  “That reason being you, you mean?”

  “He says that if Angelina being dead to them was predicated from the first on her affair with me and on my refusal to marry her once she was carrying my child, then I should go to the parents and I must declare my desire to marry her and all will be forgiven.”

  Barbara shook her head.
“What in God’s name is he basing that advice on? A ouija board?”

  “Her sister. He points out that, as far as the parents are concerned, there’s no she’s-dead-to-us about Bathsheba despite her having done the same as Angelina: having had an affair with a married man. He claims the reason is that the man in question married Bathsheba. His conclusion is that my own declaration of an intention to marry her will position the parents to tell me whatever they know about her disappearance. Whether they know something now or learn something in the future.”

  “What makes Doughty think they might know something now?”

  “Because no one disappears without a trace,” Azhar said. “The fact that Angelina appears to have done so indicates someone helped her do it.”

  “Her parents?”

  “The way Mr. Doughty put it was this: They’re the sort of people who turn a blind eye to adultery as long as adultery leads to the altar. He said I must use that fact. He said I must get used to using people.”

  He looked at her, half of a sad smile on his face and his eyes so tired that Barbara wanted to put her arms round the poor bloke and rock him to sleep. Using people wasn’t large in Azhar’s skill set, even in a situation in which he desperately wanted the return of his child. She wasn’t sure how he was going to manage it.

  She said, “So. What’s the plan, then?”

  “To go to Dulwich and speak to her parents.”

  “Let me go with you, then.”

  His entire face softened. “That, my friend Barbara, is what I so hoped that you might say.”

  19 December

  DULWICH VILLAGE

  LONDON

  Barbara Havers had never been to Dulwich before she went there in the company of Azhar, but the moment she clapped eyes on the place, she reckoned it was the part of town to which she ought to be aspiring. Far south of the river in the Borough of Southwark, Dulwich bore no resemblance to that part of the inner city at all. It was the embodiment of the term leafy suburb, although the trees that seemed to line every street were leafless now. Still, they grew the sort of branches that indicated the deep shade they would provide in summer and the rich colours they would offer in autumn, and they stood near pavements that were wide, spotless, and utterly devoid of the remains of chewing gum that polka-dotted the pavements in central London.

  Houses in this part of the world were distinguished: large, brick, and pricey. Shops on the high street ran the gamut from ladies’ boutiques to actual “grooming establishments” for men. Primary schools were housed in well-kept Victorian buildings, and Dulwich Park, Dulwich College, and Dulwich Picture Gallery all spoke of an environment in which the upper middle class mingled over cocktails and sent their children into the world with educations courtesy of nothing less than excessively costly boarding schools.

  Fish out of water did not do justice to how Barbara felt as she drove her ancient Mini through the streets of this place. With Azhar manning the A-Z in the passenger seat, she only hoped that when they finally found where the Upmans lived, she would have a bit of luck and discover that their home didn’t make her feel so much like a recent arrival from a war-torn country, her car a donation from a well-meaning Christian organisation.

  She had no luck in this matter. The house that matched Azhar’s quiet “This appears to be the place, Barbara” sat on the corner of Frank Dixon Close. It was neo-Georgian in style: perfectly balanced, large, brick, trimmed in white, with freshly painted black gutters, rainheads, and downspouts. A neatly trimmed and weedless lawn fronted it, broken into two sections by a flagstone path leading to the front door. On either side of this, garden lights illuminated flowerbeds. Inside the house itself, a faux candle stood in every window as acknowledgement of the holiday season.

  Barbara parked, and she and Azhar stared at the place. She finally said, “Looks like someone’s not hurting for lolly,” and she gazed round at the neighbourhood. Every house that she could see in the street suggested buckets of cash had been spent upon it. If nothing else, Frank Dixon Close was a burglar’s wet dream.

  When they knocked on the door, no one came to answer. They excavated for a bell and found it beneath a swag of holiday holly. They had more success when they pressed upon this, for within the house a voice called out, “Humphrey, can you get that, darling?” In short order a succession of deadlocks went from bolted to un-, the door swung open, and Barbara and Azhar were looking at the father of Angelina Upman.

  Azhar had told her that Humphrey Upman was managing director of a bank and his wife was a child psychologist. What he hadn’t mentioned was the fact that the man was a racist, but that became clear in very short order. His expression gave him away. It was of the order of “there goes the neighbourhood,” all flared nostrils and pursed lips, and he moved sharply to block the doorway lest Azhar launch himself inside the house with a gunny sack at the ready to clear the place of the family silver.

  When he said, “And you want . . . ?” however, it was also clear that he knew quite well who Azhar was, even if he was still in the dark as to Barbara’s identity.

  She took up the reins by bringing out her warrant card. “Conversation is what we want, Mr. Upman,” she told him as he scrutinised her identification.

  “What would the Metropolitan police have to do with me?” He handed the ID back, but he made no move to open the door any wider than the width of his own body.

  “Let us inside and I’ll be happy to tell you,” Barbara replied.

  He considered this and said, “He remains out here,” in reference to Azhar.

  “A bloody fascinating imperative, that, but it’s not the best start to our conversation.”

  “I have nothing at all to say to him.”

  “That’s good since you’re not required to.”

  Barbara was wondering how much longer she was going to have to keep up the repartee with the man when, from behind him, his wife said, “Humphrey? What’s . . .” Her voice dropped off when she looked over her husband’s shoulder and saw Azhar.

  Azhar said to her, “Angelina has disappeared. She’s been gone for a month. We are trying—”

  “We’ve been made very much aware that she’s gone,” Humphrey Upman cut in. “Let me say this so that you both will understand it perfectly: If our daughter were dead—if our daughter is dead—it could not matter less at this point.”

  Barbara wanted to ask the man if he’d always been filled with such paternal goodwill, but she didn’t have the opportunity. His wife said, “Let them in, Humphrey,” to which he replied without a glance in her direction, “Filth has no place in this house.”

  Barbara thought of the expression as it was used by villains, but she knew Upman wasn’t making reference to her. It was Azhar he intended to insult.

  She said, “Mr. Upman, if you say another word in that direction—”

  His wife interrupted. “If you’re concerned about contamination, Humphrey, then take yourself to another room. Let. Them. In.”

  Upman waited just long enough to suggest that his wife would be paying later for her remarks. Then he turned on his heel and left her to swing open the door and allow them entrance. She led the way into a living room, beautifully decorated but without a sign of personal taste other than that of an interior designer. It looked out upon the back garden of the property, and through its French windows, landscaping lights illuminated paths, a fountain, statuary, dormant flowerbeds, and lawn.

  In a corner of the room, a Christmas tree stood. It was yet to be decorated, but the fact that they’d interrupted Ruth-Jane Upman in the midst of handling this holiday chore was evident by a string of lights that had been spread on the floor and a box of ornaments sitting on the hearth of a fireplace.

  She offered neither one of them a seat. Their stay was, obviously, not meant to be long. She said, “Have you reason to believe my daughter is dead?” No emotion accompanied this question.
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br />   Barbara said, “You’ve not heard from her?”

  “Of course not. When she took up with this man”—a cursory glance at Azhar—“we ended our relationship with her. She would not see reason. So we would not see her.” She addressed Azhar then with, “Has she left you at last? Well, really, what else would you actually expect?”

  “She has left me before,” Azhar said with some dignity. “We have come to see you because it is my earnest wish to—”

  “Has she indeed? Has she left you once before? And yet you didn’t dash over here then—whenever it was—to enquire about her. What brings you now?”

  “She has my daughter.”

  “Which one would that be?” And then, reading something upon Azhar’s face, Ruth-Jane Upman added, “Yes, Mr. Azhar. We know all about you. When it comes to you, Humphrey did the homework and I graded every one of the papers.”

  Barbara said impatiently, “Angelina has taken Hadiyyah with her. I expect you know which one of Azhar’s daughters Hadiyyah is.”

  “I assume she’s the . . . one . . . Angelina gave birth to.”

  “She’s also the one,” Barbara said, “who probably misses her dad.”

  “Be that as it may, I have no interest in her. Nor have I interest in Angelina. Nor have I, frankly, interest in you. Neither her father nor I have any idea where she is, where she might be going, or where she might end up in the future. Is there anything else? Because I’d like to finish decorating my Christmas tree, if you don’t mind.”

  “Has she contacted you?”

  “I believe I just said—”

  “What you said,” Barbara interrupted, “was that you have no idea where she is, where she’s going, or where she might end up. What you didn’t say was whether you’ve spoken to her. During which conversation, we can both assume, she wouldn’t necessarily have to say where she is.”

  Ruth-Jane said nothing to this. Barbara thought, Bingo. But what she also thought was that there was no way in hell that Angelina Upman’s mother was going to give them a thing to go on. She might have spoken to Angelina at some point; she might have been the recipient of a telephone message, a text message, a letter, a card, or whatever else of the “I’ve left him, Mum” variety. But, no matter the case, she wasn’t about to admit that to Barbara.