Read Just One Evil Act for Free Online Page B

sleep, she decided. Obviously, he was maintaining himself on a diet of cigarettes and coffee. So was she.
    She asked him how soon he could get away from the lab. She added that she’d come up with the name of someone who could probably help them. He’s a private detective, she told him. Hearing this, Azhar told Barbara he could leave at once.
    On their way to Bow, Barbara told Azhar what she had managed to learn about the man towards whose office they were heading. Despite the affirmations of putative “satisfied customers,” she’d done some digging about him, and it hadn’t been tough, considering the sort of nonsense people advertised about themselves these days on the Internet. She knew Dwayne Doughty was fifty-two years old. She knew he played weekend rugby. She knew he’d been married twenty-six years and was the father of two. Considering the photos he’d posted on his Facebook page, she’d concluded it was a matter of pride to him that each generation of his family had done better than the last. His progenitors had excavated a living from the coal mines of Wigan. His children were graduates of redbrick universities. The way things were going for the Doughty clan, his grandchildren—if he had any off his kids—would take firsts at either Oxford or Cambridge. They were, in short, an ambitious family.
    The building that housed Doughty’s office, however, didn’t suggest ambition. It sat above an establishment called Bedlovers Bedding and Towels, which was closed at the moment and sheltered by a faded blue metal drop-down security door in need of having its rust seen to. Bedlovers itself was housed in a narrow building, bookshelved between the Money Shop and Bangla Halal Grocers.
    Oddly, virtually no one was out and about. Two Muslim men in traditional garb were exiting a building some thirty yards down the street, but that was it. Most of the shops were closed. It was a far cry from central London, where the pavements seemed packed both day and night.
    They gained access to Dwayne Doughty’s office through a door to the left of Bedlovers. It was unlocked, and it opened to a staircase at the foot of which was a square of speckled lino with a welcome mat upon it.
    Above stairs, there were two offices only. One bore a sign reading
Knock First Please
. The other, apparently with no need of knocking, bore a request that asked enterers not to let the cat out. They chose
Knock First Please
as being more likely. They did so and a man’s voice called, “S’okay. Enter,” with an accent that suggested the Doughtys had left Wigan for the East End many decades ago.
    Barbara had already told Azhar that she wouldn’t be identifying herself as someone from the Met. Doughty might get the wrong idea, like this was a sting operation. They didn’t want that.
    Doughty was in the middle of attempting to upload photos into a digital picture frame of the sort that altered images every ten seconds or so. He had the directions spread out on his desk along with cords, his camera, and the frame itself. He was squinting at the brochure of directions, one fist clenched and the other ready to crumple the directions into a ball.
    He looked up at them and said, “Written by some Chinese bloke with a bloody sadistic streak, this is. I don’t know why I bother.”
    “I hear you,” Barbara said.
    Even had she not known Doughty played amateur rugby, his nose would have told her as much. It looked as if it had been broken multiple times and his NHS doctor had finally thrown up his hands in defeat and said, “Let it do what it will.” It was certainly doing that. It headed off in one direction and then swerved in another, giving his face such an odd asymmetry that it was impossible to move one’s gaze from it. Everything else about the man was average: medium build, medium-brown hair, medium weight. Aside from his nose, he was the kind of man one wouldn’t notice on the street. But the nose made him unforgettable.
    “Miss Havers,