Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

of her hand on his arm. So deep was he into his thoughts that the mobile’s ringing startled him. He realised at its sound that he’d not phoned Barbara Havers back as he’d said he would. He glanced at his watch.
    It was one a.m. Couldn’t be Havers, he thought. And in the way that the mind will go spontaneously from one thought to another, in the time it took to fish the mobile from his pocket, he thought of his mother, he thought of his brother, he thought of his sister, he thought of emergencies and how they generally did occur in the middle of the night because no one made a friendly call at this hour.
    By the time he had the mobile out, he’d decided it had to be a disaster in Cornwall, where his family home was, a heretofore unknown Mrs. Danvers in their employ having set the place alight. But then he saw it was Havers ringing again. He said into the phone hastily, “Barbara. I am so sorry.”
    “Bloody hell,” she cried. “Why didn’t you ring back? I’ve been sitting here. And he’s alone over there. And I don’t know what to do or what to tell him because the worst of it is that there’s sod all
anyone
can do to help and I know it and I lied to him and said we’d do something and I need your
help
. Because there has to be something—”
    “Barbara.” She sounded completely undone. It was so unlike her to babble like this that Lynley knew something was badly wrong. “
Barbara
. Slow down. What’s happened?”
    The story she told came out in disjointed pieces. Lynley was able to pick up very few details because she was speaking so fast. Her voice was odd. She’d either been weeping—which hardly seemed likely—or she’d been drinking. The latter made little sense, however, considering the urgency of the story she had to tell. Lynley put together what he could, just the salient details:
    The daughter of her neighbour and friend Taymullah Azhar was missing. Azhar, a science professor at University College London, had come home from work to find the family flat stripped of nearly all possessions belonging to his nine-year-old daughter as well as to her mother. Only the child’s school uniform remained, along with a stuffed animal and her laptop, all of this lying on her bed.
    “Everything else is gone,” Havers said. “I found Azhar sitting on my front step when I got home. She’d rung me, too, Angelina had done, sometime during the day. There was a message on my phone. Could I look in on him this evening? she’d asked me. ‘Hari’s going to be upset,’ she said. Oh yes, too right. Except he’s not upset. He’s destroyed. He’s wrecked, I don’t know what to do or to say, and Angelina even made Hadiyyah leave that giraffe behind and we
both
know why because it meant a time when he’d taken her to the seaside and he’d won it for her and when someone took it off her on the pleasure pier—”
    “Barbara.” Lynley spoke firmly. “
Barbara
.”
    She breathed in raggedly. “Sir?”
    “I’m on my way.”
    CHALK FARM
    LONDON
    Barbara Havers lived in north London, not far from Camden Lock Market. At one in the morning, getting there was merely a matter of knowing the route, as there was virtually no traffic. She lived in Eton Villas, where parking one’s car depended upon very good luck. There was none of that at an hour when the residents of the area were all tucked up into their beds, though, so Lynley made do with blocking the driveway.
    Barbara’s digs sat behind a conversion, a yellow Edwardian villa done into flats at some point during the late twentieth century. She herself occupied a structure behind it, a wood-framed building that had once done duty as God only knew what. It had a tiny fireplace, which suggested it had always been used as some sort of living space, but its size suggested that only a single occupant had ever lived there, and one needing very little room.
    Lynley cast a glance at the ground-floor flat inside the conversion as he made his way along the paved path towards the back of the villa. This was, he knew, the home occupied by Barbara’s friend Taymullah Azhar, and the lights within it were still blazing out onto the terrace in front of the flat’s French windows. He assumed from his conversation with Barbara that she’d been inside her own digs when he’d spoken to her, though, and when he got behind the villa, he saw the lights were on inside her bungalow as well.
    He knocked quietly. He heard a chair scraping against the floor. The door