“Triple promise if that will do it.”
Hadiyyah’s eyes danced along with her feet. She pushed away from the table and spun so that her hair flew round her shoulders like a cape. She said, “My brother and sister! My brother and sister! Barbara, did you know I have a brother and a sister?”
Barbara felt the smile melt from her face. She forced it back on. “A brother and sister? Really? You have a brother and a sister?”
“I do, I do,” Hadiyyah cried. “See, Dad was married once before and he didn’t like to tell me ’cause I s’pose he thought I was too young. But Mummy told me and she said it’s not such a bad thing to be married once before, is it, and I said no, of course it isn’t ’cause lots of kids have parents who aren’t married any longer and I know them from school. So Mummy said well that’s what happened with Dad only his family got so cross with him that they didn’t want him to see his children anymore. And that’s not nice, is it?”
“Well, I suppose not,” Barbara said, but she was developing a very bad feeling about where this was heading and what the possible outcome would be. And how the hell had Angelina Upman tracked these people down? she wondered.
“So …” Hadiyyah allowed a dramatic pause.
“Yes?” Barbara prompted.
“So Mummy and I are going to fetch them!” she cried. “Won’t that be a wonderful surprise! I get to meet them, and I’m ever so excited to have a brother and a sister I never knew. And Dad gets to see them next and he’ll be ever so excited as well ’cause Mummy says he’s not seen them in years and she doesn’t know how old they are, even, except she thinks that one of them is twelve and the other is fourteen. Imagine, Barbara, I got an older brother and sister. D’you think they’ll like me? I hope so ’cause I know I’ll like them.”
Barbara’s mouth had gone so dry that she could hardly move her jaw, so tightly were her cheeks adhering to her teeth. She gulped a mouthful of tepid coffee and said, “Well, well, well,” which was just about the only thing she could manage while her brain was racing with thoughts of the bloody-hell-what-should-I-do variety. Friendship demanded that she warn Azhar of the impending disaster about to befall him: Angelina Upman presenting him with a fait accompli that he would have had neither time nor opportunity to prevent. But did friendship extend that far? she asked herself. And if she told him, what would he do and what effect would whatever he did have on Hadiyyah, who was, as far as Barbara could see, the most important person involved?
Ultimately, Barbara had done nothing because she couldn’t come up with a plan that didn’t culminate in utter havoc being wrought upon too many lives. Talking to Angelina felt like a betrayal of Azhar. Talking to Azhar felt like a betrayal of Angelina. It seemed the better course to stay out of it altogether and let nature— or whatever it was— take its course. She’d have to be there to sweep up the pieces but perhaps there would be no pieces to sweep up. Hadiyyah, after all, deserved to know her brother and sister. Perhaps everything would come out of the wash of affairs smelling sweet as roses in June. Perhaps.
Thus Barbara had taken herself to work as usual. She’d made certain Superintendent Ardery got the complete eyeful of her day’s ensemble, although she’d presented herself to Dorothea Harriman for a thumbs-up first. Harriman had been copious in her praise— “Detective Sergeant Havers, your hair… your makeup… stunning…” — although when she’d gone on to talk about a new mineral-based foundation that Barbara had to try and did the detective sergeant want to pop out at lunchtime and see if they could find it locally, Barbara drew the line. She’d said thanks, made her bow to Superintendent Ardery, who’d handed her the demands from the CPS while she spoke to someone on the phone about, “What sort of cock-up is this, anyway? Are you people ever on top of things over there?” which Barbara assumed had to do with SO7 and matters pertaining to forensics. She herself got down to work with the CPS clerk and it was some time later when she was finally able to resume the work she’d been doing for Lynley.
This was easier than before since Ardery had to leave to attend to the cock-up apparently and if it was a forensics cock-up, she’d be across the river for God only knew how long. The moment Barbara learned she was out of the building— it always paid to be on friendly terms with the blokes who manned the Yard’s underground car park access— she was out of there like a cannonball and on her way to the Met’s library, excuses made to the CPS bloke, who was happy enough to take a very long lunch hour.
Barbara took her English/Spanish dictionary with her. Having gathered enough information on the first two sons of Esteban Vega y de Vasquez and Dominga Padilla y del Torres de Vasquez— the first two sons being the priest Carlos and the dentist Miguel— and having seen a good enough photo of Miguel’s wife to know that no amount of plastic surgery in the world could have turned her into Alatea Fairclough, Barbara was ready to move on to Angel, Santiago, and Diego to see what she could unearth. If none of them had a connection with Alatea, then she was going to have to look at the rest of the extended family, and from what the Spanish student had told her on the previous day, there could be hundreds of them.
As it turned out, there was very little on Angel, who, despite his name, appeared to be the black sheep of the family. Using her dictionary and moving at a pace so tedious that she thought her outrageously expensive Knightsbridge haircut might grow out before she discovered anything useful, she ultimately was able to put together the fact that he’d caused a car crash that had crippled his passenger for life. The passenger had been a fifteen-year-old girl.
Barbara followed this lead— the fifteen-year-old girl being at least the first female she’d come across aside from Miguel’s unfortunate wife— but she came up with nothing but a dead end. No photo was available of her and while there was one of Angel, he appeared to be round nineteen years old and it didn’t matter anyway because after the accident, he dropped directly off the media map. If he was North American and preferably from the United States, at that point he would either have gone into a rehab programme or discovered Jesus, but this was South America and whatever happened to him after that accident, the available media didn’t talk about it. Too small a fish, probably. They’d quickly moved on to other things.
So did she. Santiago. She found a story about the boy’s first communion. At least she reckoned it was his first communion because he was standing in a neat arrangement of children in suits (the boys) and bride getups (the girls) and either the Moonies had decided to begin marrying them off when they were round eight years old or this was a group of children who, as Catholics in Argentina, had just been elevated to worthy recipients of the Sacrament. It was rather odd that there would be a story about a group first communion, so Barbara struggled through a bit of it. She got the gist: that the church had burned down and they’d been forced to have their first communion in a city park. Or so it seemed to Barbara’s extremely limited skill with Spanish. Truth was, the church could have been destroyed by a flood. Or even an earthquake. Or perhaps they’d tented the place for termites because God, God, God this was tedious work having to translate everything a single word at a time.
She squinted at the photo of the children and looked at it one girl at a time. She brought out the Internet picture she had of Alatea Fairclough and she began to compare it to each of the girls. Their names were listed and there were only fifteen of them and certainly she could do an Internet search on each of them but that would take hours and she didn’t have hours because once Superintendent Ardery returned, if she wasn’t beavering away at the witness statements she’d been ordered to deal with at the side of the CPS clerk, there would be hell to pay.