Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  The only answer seemed to be food. When she arrived home, she gobbled down a double takeaway portion of haddock and chips and followed this with treacle tart and a side of Victoria sponge. She quaffed a bottle of lager as she ate and finished off her meal with a cup of instant coffee. Accompanying this, she dipped into a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps, after which a virtuous apple assured her that her arteries would be thoroughly cleansed if she munched upon it hard and long enough.

  Then, no longer could she put off the phone call to Italy without putting herself into some sort of caloric stupor. She lit a fag and punched in Azhar’s number. She’d never dreaded a phone call so much in her life. She was going to have to tell him everything: from the Love Rat Dad story to the claims made by the private investigator. In neither instance did she see that she had any choice.

  She wasn’t prepared for where she found Azhar when she rang his mobile. He was at the hospital in Lucca. Angelina, he told her, had been taken there both at the insistence of Lorenzo Mura and the advice of Inspector Lynley. She’d been ill for two days with a variety of worrying symptoms that she believed were related to the morning sickness she’d been experiencing, but her condition had worsened and both Mura and Lynley were convinced this could be an indication of something more serious.

  Barbara hated where her thoughts went immediately upon hearing this news: to how the information could best be used to appease Mitchell Corsico. A story about the mother of the kidnapped child in Italy being admitted into hospital in an emergency situation . . . possibly on the brink of losing her unborn child . . . overwrought and making herself ill because of the kidnapping of her daughter . . . desperate for the Italian police to do something—anything—to find her while all the time they were sitting round drinking copious amounts of vino . . . That story was a real gem, wasn’t it? That exposé was certain to tug at heartstrings. Of course, it depended upon the journalist and the readers of The Source having hearts in the first place, but surely it was better than a front-page piece in which Azhar answered pointed questions from Corsico and ended up throwing even more mud on his own reputation. She said, trying not to sound too hopeful, “What d’you mean, ‘not right with the pregnancy’?”

  “Her symptoms are, according to Mr. Mura, severe and worrying,” Azhar told her. “The doctors here are concerned. Dehydration, vomiting, diarrhea.”

  “Sounds like flu. Maybe a virus? Or that super-serious kind of morning sickness?”

  “She’s very weak. It was Inspector Lynley who rang me with the news. I came at once to see if there was . . . I do not know why I came.”

  Barbara knew why he’d taken himself to the hospital. He loved the woman and had always done so. Despite her sins against him and especially the sin of removing from him the daughter he lived for, there was something that remained strong between them. Barbara didn’t understand this kind of bond between people, and she reckoned she never would.

  “Have you seen her?” she asked. “Is she . . . I don’t know. Is she conscious? Is she in pain? What?”

  “I have not yet seen her. Lorenzo . . .” He paused, seemed to think, then changed tack. “She might be having tests just now. There are a few specialists she’s seeing, I believe. This could all be related to the stress of Hadiyyah as well as to the pregnancy . . . I know very little at this point, Barbara. I hope to learn more if I remain here.”

  So that was why he was there, she thought. Lynley had given him the news, but Lorenzo Mura wasn’t about to let Azhar near her. She herself had seen the Italian man’s suspicions regarding Azhar’s feelings for Angelina when they had both turned up in London trying to find Hadiyyah. He wasn’t certain of her, Lorenzo Mura. But then, with her history, who would be?

  Barbara wondered briefly about Angelina Upman’s power over men. She wondered briefly about what Angelina Upman could drive a man to do in order to keep her as his lover.

  Which brought her, of course, to the reason for her call to Azhar. There was the not insignificant matter of what she’d been told by Dwayne Doughty regarding the information that he and his cohorts had amassed during the winter, not only about the whereabouts of Angelina but also about her sister’s assistance in this disappearance. According to Doughty, every single detail concerning her disappearance had been dutifully passed along to the person who’d hired him to ascertain the whereabouts of the mother and daughter: Taymullah Azhar. But Azhar had told Barbara nothing of these details over the months. So either he was lying to her by omission or Doughty was lying to her with false information.

  Of the two, she knew she would believe Azhar. She felt enormous affection for him, and she didn’t want to believe he might trample on that affection with any kind of betrayal.

  This was no position for a police investigator to be in, and Barbara realised this. But what she needed to say to Azhar—“Doughty claims you had mountains of information in January, so what did you do with it, my friend?”—simply would not come out. Still, she needed a variation of it or she knew she couldn’t live with herself. So she said, “This whole Italy thing, Azhar . . . ?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you ever know or think or even guess she might be in Italy all along?”

  “How could I have come up with Italy?” he replied and his reply was quick, easy, and regretful. “She could have been anywhere on the planet. Had I known where to find her, I would have moved heaven and earth to bring Hadiyyah home.”

  There was that, Barbara thought. There would always be that: Hadiyyah and what she meant to her father. It was inconceivable that Azhar could have discovered the child’s whereabouts four months earlier and done nothing about it. He simply wasn’t made that way.

  But still . . . Once Doughty had raised the spectre of betrayal in Barbara’s mind, it remained on the fringes of her thoughts. Despite what she knew of Azhar and despite what she earnestly believed about him, she was going to have to check up on his Berlin alibi herself. At this point, she couldn’t trust Dwayne Doughty to tell her the truth about anything.

  BOW

  LONDON

  Dwayne Doughty headed for Victoria Park. He wanted to think, and the walk itself as well as the park—should he decide to hike over to Crown Gate East—helped him to do so. To remain in the office would have meant another tête-à-tête with Emily. Her declarations of impending doom were beginning to wear on him. He had long been a believer that—significant precautions having been taken—all was going to be well at the end of the game when they scooped up the poker chips and counted the haul. But Emily didn’t see things this way.

  Thus, the last thing he wanted her to know was that he was actually worried. She’d been well absorbed in chasing down the assignation whereabouts of a forty-five-year-old banker and his twenty-two-year-old little bit on the side, so for the most part he’d been able to avoid her. She was very well occupied and only marginally aware of his own activities. But she’d have the goods on the banker within a day or two—photos, credit card receipts, phone information, and everything else—and just as that bloke’s marriage would be kaput as a result, Dwayne’s own arrangement with Emily Cass would be at that point in danger of collapsing. He needed to produce some answers for his assistant. He couldn’t afford to lose her or her range of abilities, and he knew he would if he wasn’t able to sort out what was going on in Italy.

  This, in part, was the reason for his walk: thinking first, followed by deciding, and then acting. He began it all with the purchase of a throwaway mobile phone. If he made any dodgy calls from the office, Em would be all over him like an outbreak of smallpox.

  Things should have resolved themselves by now. Nothing about this situation had ever been rocket science. He should have had the all-clear, followed by the all’s well, soon to be tagged by an arrivederci. He had none of those and now he knew why. None of them had happened in the first place.

  “I don’t know” was the answer he received to his ques
tion of “What the hell is going on?” when he placed the call.

  “What d’you mean you ‘don’t know’?” was his subsequent demand. “You’re paid to know. You’re paid to make things happen.”

  “I set everything in motion as requested. But the plan went foul somewhere and I don’t know where.”

  “How in God’s name can you not know where?”

  There was a silence. Doughty listened intently. For a moment, he thought he’d lost the connection and he nearly rang off to redial the number. But then the other said, “I couldn’t risk it. Not the way you wanted it done. Using the mercato? I’d have been remembered.”

  “The mercato came from you, not from me, you sodding fool. It didn’t need to be the mercato. It could have been anywhere: the school, a park, on an outing, at the farm.”

  “None of that matters. What you do not understand is . . .” A pause and then, “No, you will not blame me. You wished her found, and I found her. I gave you the name. I gave you the place and its location. It was your idea to snatch her, not mine. Had you told me in advance that this was your intention, I never would have come . . . how do you say? . . . onto the train with you.”

  “You liked the idea of money well enough when I first found you, you bastard.”

  “You will think what you will think, my friend. But the fact that the police have not made progress in finding her tells me my plan was right. Giusto, we say.”

  Doughty felt a cold wind dive into his underwear when he heard my plan. There was supposed to be only one plan. His plan. Get the girl, stow her, and wait for his word to move her. That there was another plan which he’d not been told about made it nearly impossible for Doughty to speak. But he managed, “You’re after the Muras’ money, aren’t you? That’s been your scheme from the first.”

  “Pazzo” was the reply. “You listen like a jealous housewife.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means the cops have found me, sciocco. It means that had I not developed a plan different from yours, I would now be sitting in a gaol cell waiting for il Pubblico Ministero to decide how to deal with me. I am not in a gaol cell for the very reason you wish to berate me: I had a plan. You wished her taken. I arranged her taken. Capisce?”

  Doughty twigged the man’s meaning. “Someone else . . . ? Are you mad? Who took her? What did he do with her? Is it even a he or did you use some poor Italian grandmother in need of cash? How about an Albanian immigrant? Or an African? Or a bloody Romanian gypsy, for that matter? Did you even know who you were tagging to do this job? Or was it someone you picked up off the street?”

  “These insults of yours . . . They get us nowhere.”

  “I want that kid!”

  “I, too, am of the same mind, although I suspect for different reasons. I put things in motion as I told you. Something has happened, and I do not know what. She was being fetched to put an end to this matter, but the . . . the messenger sent to fetch her . . . This is what I do not know.”

  “What? Exactly what don’t you know?”

  “It was a . . . come si dice? A caution,” he said. “No. A precaution. It seemed wise for me not to know where she was being kept, so that if the police traced me—which, as I’ve told you, they did—I could give them nothing of substance no matter how long they decided to question me.”

  “So for all you know,” Doughty said, “she could be dead. This . . . this messenger of yours might have snatched her and killed her. She might have not been a cooperative victim of your garden kidnapping on the street, and she might well have raised a ruckus. He could have stuffed her into the boot of his car for all you know and she might have suffocated and there he was with a dead body on his hands.”

  “This did not happen. It would not have happened.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “My selection of . . . this messenger, let us call him . . . was carefully done. He has known from the first that complete payment for his services depends entirely on the condition of the child and on her safety at all times.”

  “So where is he? Where is she? What’s happened?”

  “This is what I’m now attempting to discover. I’ve telephoned, but so far I have heard not a word.”

  “Which means something’s gone wrong. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Sì. Sono d’accordo,” the other murmured. “I ask you to believe that I am attempting to discover exactly what this is. But even in this, I must proceed with caution because the police will be watching me.”

  “I don’t care if the bloody Swiss Guards are watching you,” Doughty said. “I want that kid found. I want her found today.”

  “I doubt that will be possible,” he admitted. “Until I find the messenger sent to fetch her, I will know nothing more than you.”

  “Then goddamn bloody find the messenger!” Doughty roared. “Because if I have to come to Italy myself, you aren’t going to be happy about it.”

  That said, he snapped the mobile phone in half. He was on the bridge that carried Gunmakers Lane over the Hertford Union Canal. He cursed and threw the broken pieces of the mobile into the murky water there. He watched them sink and hoped against hope that they weren’t a metaphor for what was going on in his life.

  28 April

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Salvatore Lo Bianco made the requisite offer of help to his mamma. As usual she refused. No one, she told him—also as usual—would ever wash and polish the marble cover of his father’s grave during what remained of the lifetime of his devoted wife. No, no, no, figlio mio, this chore will take no longer than is required for my old body to hobble round the plot itself, wielding soap and water and rags and marble polish and more rags till the stone reflects this ancient, sorrowing face of mine as well as the sky with its glorious clouds above me. You may watch, however, figlio mio, so that you will learn how to care for this stone where my poor corpse will lie with your father’s after my earthly days are done.

  Salvatore told her that perhaps he would walk, instead. He would follow the path round the perimeter of this part of the cemetery. He needed to think a bit. She could call out to him if she needed help. He would not be far away.

  Mamma gave a quintessential Italian mamma shrug. He could, of course, please himself in this matter. Sons so often did just that, didn’t they? And then she turned and said, “Ciao, Giuseppe, marito carissimo,” and told the dead man how deeply she missed him, how every moment of every day brought her closer to joining him in the ground. After this, she began her work upon the grave.

  Salvatore watched her and stifled a chuckle. There were certain moments in their life together, he thought, when his mamma was not his real mamma at all but rather a caricature of an Italian mamma. This was one of them. For the truth of the matter was that Teresa Lo Bianco had spent what Salvatore knew of her married life absolutely furious with his father. She’d been one of those breathtaking Italian beauties who married young and lost her looks to childbearing and a lifetime of household drudgery, and she’d never forgiven or forgotten that fact. Except, of course, when she came to the Cimitero Urbano di Lucca. Then, the instant that Salvatore parked in front of the great gates to the place, his mamma’s face transformed from its habitual look of pinched irritation to an expression that mixed grief and piety so superbly that had anyone other than Salvatore seen her, she would appear as a recent widow whose loss would never be assuaged.

  He smiled. He folded a piece of chewing gum into his mouth, and he began to walk. He was halfway round his first circumambulation of the quadrangle of graves decorated with saints and the Virgin and her Son when his mobile rang. He glanced at the number of whoever was placing the call.

  The Englishman, he thought. He liked this man Lynley. He’d thought the Londoner would be an irritating interloper into the Italian investigation, but this hadn’t proved to be the c
ase.

  His pronto was answered in the other detective’s careful Italian. Lynley was ringing to tell him that the mother of the kidnapped girl was in hospital. “I wasn’t sure if you’d know this,” Lynley told him. He went on to say that when he’d seen her two days earlier at the fattoria, she’d been very weak and yesterday she had grown even weaker. “Signor Mura insisted she go to hospital, for a check-over at least,” Lynley said. “I didn’t disagree.”

  Lynley told him, then, of his conversations with both Lorenzo Mura and Angelina Upman. He spoke of a man who’d been at the fattoria, purportedly to purchase a donkey foal. A thick envelope had passed between this man and Lorenzo, and this was the payment, Lorenzo had claimed. But the British detective had begun to wonder about this exchange. What was the Mura family’s financial situation? What was Lorenzo’s own? And what could that mean?

  Salvatore could see where Lynley was heading with this line of thought. For what Lorenzo Mura wished to do with his family’s old villa, vast amounts of money would be required. His extended family were fairly wealthy—they had always been so—but he himself was not. Would they leap to assist him if the young child of his lover was endangered and a ransom demand was made? Perhaps. But no ransom demand had been made, which suggested there was no involvement on Lorenzo’s part in the disappearance of Angelina’s daughter.

  “Yet there might be reasons other than money that he would wish for Hadiyyah’s removal from her mother’s life,” Lynley noted.

  “That would make the man a monster.”

  “I’ve seen monsters aplenty in my time and I expect you have as well,” Lynley said.