Just One Evil Act by Elizabeth George Read Free Book Online Page A

the window once the woman and man had left. He waited till they departed the building that housed his office. He watched them walk towards the arch at the corner that announced one was entering the precinct of the Roman Road. They disappeared round the corner to the left. For good measure, he waited another thirty seconds. Then he left his office and went next door.
    He didn’t worry about letting the cat out. There was no cat, the sign merely a device to keep people from entering precipitately. He went inside, where a woman was sitting at a bank of three computer monitors. She was wearing a set of earphones, and she was watching a replay of the meeting Doughty had just had. He said nothing until the replay ended with a shaking of hands and with the woman—Barbara Havers—looking round his office a second time.
    He said, “What d’you reckon, Em?”
    Emily watched him, on replay, walking to the window and keeping himself from view. She reached for a plastic bag of carrot sticks and crunched one of them between her teeth. “Cop,” she said. “She could be someone from his local nick, but I’d go higher. One of the special groups. Whatever they’re called. SO and a number. I can’t keep up with the changes they keep making at the Met.”
    “What about the other?”
    “He seems legit. Just what you’d expect from someone with a daughter who’s gone missing but is with the mother. The mother doesn’t mean the kid harm, and the dad knows this. So you get despair from him but not that frantic sense of
now
when someone’s scared to death a pervert has the kid.”
    “So?” Doughty said, interested as always to see how her twenty-six-year-old mind would take the case.
    She leaned back in her chair. She yawned and energetically went at her scalp. She wore her hair in a mannish style and she dressed like a man as well. She was, in fact, often mistaken for a man and the extracurricular pursuits she chose were more manly than womanly in nature: trick skiing, snowboarding, cliff climbing, windsurfing, mountain biking. She was Doughty’s second right hand, the best tracer in the business, an even better blagger, a woman who could run twelve miles in the morning with a forty-pound pack on her back and still show up to work on time.
    “I’d say normal course of action,” Em told him. “But step lightly, watch our backs, and skate on the right side of the law.” She shoved herself away from the monitors and got to her feet. “How’d I do?”
    “I agree with everything you said,” he told her.

30 November
    BOW
    LONDON
    I t was eleven days later when a phone call from the private investigator took Barbara and Azhar back to Dwayne Doughty’s office. In the intervening time, he’d made the journey to Chalk Farm to have a look at Azhar’s flat. He’d prowled round the place, examining what little there was to examine. He’d given Hadiyyah’s school uniform a look, and he’d asked Azhar why the little girl’s stuffed giraffe might have been left behind when nearly everything else belonging to her was gone. He’d nodded thoughtfully at whatever implications there were in Azhar’s having won a different giraffe for Hadiyyah only to have it taken from her by a group of yobs on a pleasure pier, and he’d removed Hadiyyah’s laptop from the premises, saying it bore further examination by someone he employed.
    Now they sat in his office, in the same two chairs they’d occupied before. It was early evening.
    Doughty had been personally to see Bathsheba Ward, the sister. Unfortunately, he had little more to report than what Barbara had been able to unearth herself. Added to her information they now knew that Bathsheba had a furniture design business called WARD in Islington. “Posh shop and all that,” Doughty said. “Lots of dosh involved, and evidently it comes from the husband.” Twenty-three years older than Bathsheba, he told them, Hugo Ward had left his first wife and two children six months after he’d