Just One Evil Act (9 page)

Barbara tried to take this in. Helped who do what? was what she wondered.

“Tell me where she is!” Angelina shouted. “You goddamn bloody well tell me where she is!”

“Angelina, what happened?” Barbara asked. “Listen to me. I don’t know what’s going on.”

The story came from all directions. When the constables understood that Barbara was a friend of the family and not there from the Met, they attempted to escort her from the premises, but at that point both Angelina and Azhar wanted her to stay, each for their own reasons, although those reasons went unspoken other than Angelina crying, “She needs to bloody hear this, she does,” and Azhar saying, “Barbara knows my daughter very well.”

“Your daughter, your daughter,” Angelina snarled. “You’re
no
father to a child you would treat like this.”

She’d been taken from a market in Lucca, Italy, Barbara discovered. This had happened two days previously. She’d been there with Lorenzo—the man in the flat with Angelina and obviously, to Barbara, Angelina’s new lover—as they had done their weekly shop. She was to wait where she always waited, where a musician played, but she hadn’t been there when Lorenzo arrived and he hadn’t thought to search for her.

“Why not?” Barbara asked.

“What difference does it make?” Angelina demanded. “We know what happened. We know who took her. She would never walk off with a stranger, anywhere. And no one could possibly have carried her off in the middle of a market in front of hundreds of people. She would have screamed. She would have fought. You’ve taken her, Hari, and as God is my witness, I’m going to—”

“
Cara
,” Lorenzo said, “
non devi
.” He moved to her. “
La troveremo
,” he said. “
Te lo prometto
.” At this she began to weep. Azhar took a step towards her.

“Angelina,” he said, “you must listen to me. So much depends—”

“I don’t believe you!” she cried.

“Did you phone the police in Lucca?” Barbara asked her.

“Of course I phoned them! What do you think I am? I phoned them, they came, they searched, they’re still searching. And what are they finding?
Nothing
. A nine-year-old gone without a trace. And
he
has her. Because no one else could have taken her. Make
him tell me where she
is
.” This last she directed to the constables. They looked to Barbara as if for some sort of help.

What Barbara wanted to say was, “He supposedly took her like
you
took her? Like
you
told Azhar where she was?” But instead she turned to Angelina’s companion. “Tell me exactly what happened,” she said. “Why didn’t you look for her when she wasn’t where you expected her to be?”

“Are you accusing
him
?” Angelina cried.

“If Hadiyyah’s missing—”

“
If?
What d’you think this is?”

“Angelina, please,” Barbara said. “If Hadiyyah’s missing, there’s no time to waste. I need to know what happened from start to finish.” And to Lorenzo, “Why didn’t you look for her at once?”

“Because of my sister,” he said. And when Angelina protested the fact that he was even replying when they all knew who’d taken her daughter, he said, “
Per favore, cara
,” in a gentle voice. “
Vorrei dire qualcosa, va bene?
” Then, in the limited English he possessed, he explained. “My sister live near this
mercato
.
There we go always after, to her house. When Hadiyyah I miss from this place, I think she go there. To play.”

“Why would you think that?” Barbara asked.

“
Mio nipote
 . . .” He looked to Angelina for help.

“His nephew is there,” she said. “Hadiyyah and the boy play together.”

Across the room Azhar closed his eyes. “All these months,” he said. And for the first time since his child had gone missing, Barbara saw the man’s lips struggle with the effort not to weep.

“I finish with making shop,” Lorenzo said. “I think I see Hadiyyah when I go to the house.”

“She knew how to get there?” Barbara asked.

“There she go many times to play,
sì
. Angelina come to the
mercato
then, and—”

“From where?”

“Piazzale—”

“I mean what was she doing? What were you doing, Angelina?”

“Are you now accusing
me
—”

“Of course not. Where were you? What did you see? How long were you gone?”

She was doing her yoga, as it turned out. She went regularly to a class in the town.

“She come to the
mercato
, we meet like always, we go to my sister. Hadiyyah is not there.”

They’d thought at first she’d become lost somewhere in the large market. Or, perhaps, she’d become distracted on her way to the musician and now was back there in the market waiting for them in her usual place near Porta San Jacopo. They returned, this time with Lorenzo’s sister and her husband, and the four of them had begun to search.

They searched the market. They extended the search outside the city wall, where the rest of Lucca—the modern part of the town—spread out in all directions. They walked the top of the huge wall itself with its
baluardi
, the great ramparts from which defences were long ago maintained. On these were now planted trees and lawns, and among them were places children could play. But Hadiyyah had been nowhere on the wall, nor had she been just beneath it at the playground near Porta San Donato, so close to her school as to be a natural destination for a little girl tired of waiting for her parents.

Barbara looked at Azhar when the word
parents
was spoken. He looked as if he’d taken a blow.

At that point they began to think the unthinkable and had phoned the police. But Angelina had also phoned Azhar. Gone for a few days from University College, she’d learned. Not answering his mobile, she’d then discovered. Not answering his landline here in Chalk Farm, either. And that was when she knew what had actually happened.

“Angelina,” Azhar said desperately, “I was at a conference.”

“Where?” she demanded.

“Germany. Berlin.”

“You can prove that, sir?” the constable asked.

“Of course I can prove it. It was four days long. There were many sessions. I delivered a paper and also attended—”

“You left Berlin long enough to take her, didn’t you?” Angelina said. “That would have been simple. That’s what you did. Where is she, Hari? What have you done with her? Where have you taken her?”

“You must listen,” Azhar said, and then to her companion whom he had otherwise ignored, “You must ask her to listen. I could not find you once you left me, Angelina. I tried. Yes, I tried. I hired someone many months ago. But there was no trail. Please listen to me.”

“Madam,” the constable said, “this is a matter to be handled at the source, not here. The Italian police need to instigate a wider search, beyond Lucca. They’ll also be able to make sure that his attendance at this conference—”

“Do you know how easily he could have made it for himself to leave that bloody conference?” Angelina said. “He’s taken her from Italy, don’t you see? She might be in Germany. Why in God’s name won’t you listen to me?”

“How
could I have taken her?” Azhar countered. He shot Barbara an agonised look.

She said, “Angelina, her passport. Her papers.
Think.
You took everything with you. I was here. I checked. Azhar came for me the night you left him. He couldn’t have taken her from Italy without documents of some kind.”

“Then you’re part of this,” Angelina declared. “You’ve helped him, haven’t you? You’d know how to get a false passport for her. Identity cards. Everything you need.” And saying this, she began to weep. “I want my daughter,” she cried. “I want my little girl.”

“On my life, I do not have her, Angelina,” Azhar said brokenly. “We must go to Italy at once to find her.”

ILFORD

GREATER LONDON

Neither Angelina nor her lover—a bloke whose name turned out to be Lorenzo Mura—was about to consider a return to Italy until whatever stones they’d decided needed to be turned over were turned over. Barbara learned this within a quarter hour’s conversation with them. No matter what Azhar produced in an attempt to convince his former lover that he’d been exactly where he said he’d been, no amount of paperwork—from the conference in Berlin, from the hotel in which he’d stayed, from the flight he’d taken to get there, from the restaurants in which he’d eaten—was going to persuade Angelina that time was of the essence in a kidnapping case and that time needed to be spent in Italy and not in a shouting match in Chalk Farm.

She wanted to go to Ilford, she announced. When she said this, Azhar looked so appalled that Barbara thought he might sick up on the floor. She herself said, “
Ilford?
What in God’s name has Ilford got to do with anything?” and Azhar answered with four words that spoke volumes, “My wife and parents.”

Barbara said to Angelina, “You think he’s got Hadiyyah stowed with his parents? Come on, Angelina. Have some sense. We need to—”

“Shut up!” she screamed. The two constables tried to intervene, but before they could stop her, she had gone for Azhar. “You’d do
anything
!” she cried.

Barbara grabbed her and pulled her away, and when Angelina swung on her next, she said, “All right. Ilford. We’re going to Ilford.”

“Barbara, we cannot . . .” Azhar’s voice was a separate agony from everything else.

“We’re going to have to,” Barbara told him.

The local constables, at this point, were only too happy to leave the matter in the hands of the Metropolitan police. They faded out of the flat, and the one favour they did before departing the property altogether was to disperse the neighbours. Thus, when Barbara and her companions left Azhar’s flat and headed for his car, they were able to do so in a relatively inconspicuous manner.

They rode to Ilford in silence. Barbara could hear Lorenzo murmuring something to Angelina as they went along, but he did his murmuring in Italian, and he might as well have been speaking Martian.

Azhar kept his gaze on the road and a strangling grip upon the steering wheel. From his rapid and shallow breathing, Barbara had an idea of the degree to which he was wrestling with everything going on.

Azhar’s family turned out to live directly off Green Lane, just round the corner from an establishment called Ushan’s Fruit and Veg. It was a street of terrace houses like so many other similar streets in the city where the now-lit streetlamps shone on homes distinguished only by the nature of their patch of front garden. Unlike areas closer to the centre of town, however, this particular street wasn’t lined with cars. They would be an expense most families daren’t take on.

“Which one?” Angelina said, as Azhar stopped the car midway down the street.

Lorenzo opened the car door and helped her out. He kept his hand on the small of her back. Azhar indicated the house by going to the door. When he rang the bell, a teenage boy was the one to answer. It was a terrible moment. Barbara saw the anguish of it in the very immobility of Azhar’s face. She knew he was looking at his son. She also knew he hadn’t seen him in a decade.

That the boy hadn’t a clue who this group of people was was obvious enough. He said, “Yeah?” and used the heel of his hand to move his floppy hair from his forehead. Barbara saw Azhar make a gesture as if to touch the boy, but he stopped himself short of doing so. Then he said, “Sayyid. I am your father. Will you tell these people with me that no child has been brought to this house?”

The boy’s lips parted. He seemed to tear his gaze from Azhar, and he directed it to Barbara and then to Angelina. When he finally spoke, it was clear he’d been well schooled in the family history. “Which of them is the whore?” he asked.

Azhar said, “Sayyid. Please do as I say. Tell these people that no child of nine years old—a little girl—has been brought to this house.”

“Sayyid?” A woman’s voice, then. She spoke from behind the boy, sounding as if she was in another room. “Who is there, Sayyid?”

He made no reply. He locked eyes with his father, as if challenging him to identify himself to the wife he’d deserted. When he didn’t respond, footsteps approached and Sayyid stepped away from the door. Azhar and his wife stood face-to-face. Without looking at her son, she said, “Sayyid, go to your room.”

Barbara had expected the traditional dress of
shalwar kameez
. She’d expected the scarf. What she hadn’t expected was how beautiful Azhar’s wife was because she’d thought—perhaps like most people, she reckoned—that Azhar would have left an ordinary kind of woman in order to take up life with an extraordinary one. Men being men, she’d reckoned, they’d trade up, not down, not even across. But this woman far outclassed Angelina in the beauty department: dark, sloe-eyed, with cheekbones to kill for, a sensuous mouth, an elegant long neck, and perfect skin.

Azhar said, “Nafeeza.”

Nafeeza said, “What brings you here?”

Angelina was the one to answer. “We want to search the house.”

“Please, Angelina,” Azhar said quietly. “Surely you can see . . .” And then to his wife, “Nafeeza, my apologies for this. I would not . . . If you would please tell these people that my daughter is not here.”

She wasn’t a tall woman, but she brought herself up to her full height, and when she did this, the suggestion made was one of strength running through her body. She said, “Your daughter is upstairs in her room. She is doing her school prep. She’s a very fine student.”

“I am pleased to hear that. You must be . . . She will be a source of . . . But I do not speak of . . .”

“You know who he’s talking about,” Angelina said.

Barbara took out her police ID. She could barely stand the amount of pain that seemed to be rolling off Azhar. She said to his wife, “C’n we come in, Mrs. . . .” And to her dismay she realised she hadn’t a clue what to call her. She switched to, “Madam, if we c’n come in. We’ve a missing child we’re looking for.”

“And you think this child is within my house?”

“No. Not exactly.”

Nafeeza looked them over, each of them, one at a time, and she took her time doing it. Then she stepped back from the door. They entered the house and filled a narrow corridor that was already filled by a stairway, boots, coats, rucksacks, hockey sticks, and football equipment. They crowded into a small lounge to the right.