Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “Capisci?” she cut in, speaking to Lorenzo.

  “—there is also truth in the dangers of illnesses associated with pregnancy if you don’t attend to them.”

  “Well, I have attended to them,” she said. “I’m keeping food down now—”

  “Solo minestra,” Lorenzo muttered.

  “Soup is something,” Angelina told him. “And I’ve no other symptoms any longer.”

  “She does not listen to me,” Lorenzo said to them.

  “You don’t listen to me. I have no symptoms. It was flu or a bad meal or a twenty-four-hour whatever. I’m fine now. I’m going home. You’re the one being ridiculous about this.”

  Lorenzo’s face darkened but that was the extent of his reaction. “Le donne incinte,” Lynley murmured to him. Pregnant women needed to be humoured. Things would return to normal again—at least in this matter—when Angelina was safely delivered of their child. As to the rest of their life together . . . He knew this depended on the outcome of Hadiyyah’s disappearance.

  “If we can speak for a moment?” he said to them. “Perhaps inside?” He indicated the doors of the hospital. There was a lobby within.

  They agreed to this, and they established themselves in such a way that the light was good on all of their faces, rendering them readable to Lynley as he imparted the information. A car had been found in the Apuan Alps, he said, at the scene of an accident that had apparently occurred a few days earlier, although they wouldn’t know the exact time until a forensic pathologist examined a man’s body that had been near the vehicle. He hastened to add that no child’s body had been at the accident site, but because the car in question matched the description of a car seen parked in a lay-by with a man and a young girl near it, the vehicle was being taken off for study. They would be looking for a child’s fingerprints as well as any other evidence of her presence.

  Angelina nodded numbly. She said, “Capisco, capisco,” and then, “I understand. You must need . . .” She didn’t seem able to continue.

  Lynley said, “I’m afraid we do. Her toothbrush, her hairbrush, anything to give us a DNA sample. The police will want to dust for her fingerprints, perhaps in her bedroom, so comparisons can be made.”

  “Of course.” She looked at Azhar and then away, out of the window where Italian cypresses shielded the car park from view and a fountain bubbled on a square of gravel with benches on all four of its sides. “What do you think?” she said to Lynley. “What do they think . . . the police?”

  “They’ll be checking into everything about the man whose body was there.”

  “Do they know . . . Can they tell . . . ?”

  “He had identification with him,” Lynley said. And here was the important part, their reactions when he said the name. “Roberto Squali,” he told them. “Is that name familiar to any of you?”

  But there was nothing. Just three blank faces and an exchange of looks between Lorenzo and Angelina as they asked each other nonverbally if this was a person either of them knew. As for Azhar, he repeated the name. But it seemed more an effort to commit it to memory than an attempt to appear in the dark about who this man was.

  Whatever came next, it would be from police work on the part of the Italian force, Lynley reckoned. Either that or from Barbara’s uncovering something in London.

  They would all have to wait.

  29 April

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Forse quarantotto ore.” Over the telephone Dr. Cinzia Ruocco gave Salvatore Lo Bianco the information in her usual manner when speaking to a male: on the border between rude and angry. She didn’t like men, and who could blame her? She looked like a young Sophia Loren, and because of this she’d suffered men’s lusting after her body for a good twenty-five of her thirty-eight years. Whenever Salvatore saw her, he lusted after her as well. He liked to think he was good at keeping his thoughts off his face, but the medical examiner had antennae attuned to the slightest mental image that might pop up in the head of any male who gazed upon her bounteous physical virtues. This was one of the reasons she preferred to do things by phone. Again, who could blame her?

  Forty-eight hours, Salvatore thought. Where had Roberto Squali been heading, then, forty-eight hours ago when his car had flown off the road and his life had ended? Was he drunk? he asked Cinzia Ruocco. He was not, she replied. Not drunk and, barring toxicology reports which would be weeks in coming, not impaired in any way. Except, she added, in the way of all men who think ownership of a fast sports car makes them more masculine than owning something sensible. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn this fool had possession of a motorcycle as well. Something huge, she said, to take the place of what—she was happy to report—he didn’t have in great size between his legs.

  “Sì, sì,” Salvatore said. He knew Cinzia lived with a man, but he had to wonder how the fellow put up with her general disdain for males of all species. He rang off and considered a map he’d posted on the wall of his office. There was so much in the Apuan Alps. It would take a century to work out where the dead man had been heading, if, indeed, where he’d been heading was relevant to the case.

  Salvatore had come up with a photo of Squali in better days, which was any day prior to the day on which they’d found his body. He was a handsome man, and with the picture in his possession, it was a small matter for Salvatore to reboot the tourist photographs he’d loaded onto his laptop and to verify that it was indeed Squali standing there in the crowd behind Hadiyyah, holding the card with a yellow happy face on it. Seeing this, Salvatore considered his next options.

  They had everything to do with Piero Fanucci. Il Pubblico Ministero was not going to be pleased when Salvatore revealed to him that he might be wrong about his prime suspect. In the past two days, Fanucci had invested a great deal into Carlo Casparia’s ostensible guilt, allowing more and more details of the drug addict’s “confession” to be leaked to the press. He’d even given an interview about the investigation to Prima Voce. This interview had ended up on the tabloid’s front page as well as its website, which meant it would soon enough be translated by the British media, members of which group had started to show up in Lucca. They’d made short work of figuring out that the café down the street from the questura was the best spot to pick up gossip about the case, and like their Italian counterparts, they were dogged when it came to buttonholing police officials for direct questioning.

  Because of this latter fact, when it came down to it, there was really no decision to make about whether to tell il Pubblico Ministero about the discovery of Roberto Squali, Salvatore realised. Should he not tell him, a reporter would, or—what was worse—Piero would read about it in Prima Voce. There would be hell for Salvatore to pay if that occurred. So there was nothing for it but to pay a call upon Fanucci.

  Salvatore gave the magistrato every one of the details he’d so far withheld: the red convertible, the previous sighting of a man and a girl heading into the woods, the American tourist’s photos of a man in possession of a card that—so it appeared—he seemed to have given to the missing girl, and now the accident site with that same man’s dead body forty-eight hours in the out-of-doors.

  Fanucci listened to Salvatore’s recitation from the other side of his vast walnut desk, twirling a pen in his fingers and keeping his eyes fixed upon Salvatore’s lips. At the conclusion of Salvatore’s remarks, il Pubblico Ministero abruptly shoved his chair back, surged to his feet, and walked to his bookcases. Salvatore steeled himself for Fanucci’s rage, possibly to include the hurling of legal volumes in his direction.

  What came, however, was something else.

  “Così . . . ,” Fanucci murmured. “Così, Topo . . .”

  Salvatore waited for more. He did not have to wait long.

  “Ora capisco com’è successo,” Fanucci said thoughtfully. He did not sound the least bit concerned about the information he’d just been given.<
br />
  “Daverro?” Salvatore sought clarification. “Allora, Piero . . . ?” If Fanucci did indeed see how the kidnapping and everything related to it had happened, he—Salvatore—would be only too welcoming of the magistrate’s conclusions.

  Fanucci turned back to him with one of his inauthentic and paternal smiles, in itself a sign of worse things to come. “Questo . . . ,” he said. “You have the link you have sought. This we must now celebrate.”

  “The link,” Salvatore repeated.

  “Between our Carlo and what he did with the girl. Now it all fits together, Topo. Bravo. Hai fatto bene.” Fanucci returned to his desk and sat. He continued expansively with “I well know what you will say next. ‘So far,’ you will say, ‘there is no link to join these men Squali and Carlo Casparia, Magistrato.’ But that is because you have not yet found it. You will, however, and it will show you that Carlo’s intentions were what I have declared them to be. He did not wish this child for himself. Have I not told you that? As you can now see and as I saw the moment you told me there was a Carlo, he wished to sell the child to fund his drug habit. And this is exactly what he did.”

  “To make sure I understand, Magistrato,” Salvatore said carefully. “You mean that you believe Carlo sold the little girl to Roberto Squali?”

  “Certo. And Squali is the direction you are to head in: to find the point in the chain where the link exists leading you from him to Carlo.”

  “But Piero, what you suggest . . . A simple comparison with the tourist’s photographs shows that Carlo is not likely to be involved at all.”

  Fanucci’s eyes narrowed but his smile did not falter. “And your reason is . . . ?”

  “My reason is that one of the photos shows this man Squali with a card that, in a picture that follows, appears to be in the hand of the girl. Does this not suggest that he and not Carlo followed her from the mercato on the day she went missing?”

  “Bah!” was Fanucci’s reply. “This man Squali . . . He is in the mercato how often, Topo? This one time? While Carlo and the girl are there weekly, sì? So what I’m telling you is that Carlo knew this man, Carlo knew what he wanted, Carlo saw this girl, and Carlo laid his plan, based on the girl’s movements that he and not Roberto Squali had studied. So we will talk to Carlo again, my friend. And from him we will learn this Squali’s intentions. Prior to this he has not mentioned the name Roberto Squali to me. But when instead I say it to him . . . ? Aspetta, aspetta.”

  Salvatore could see how it would play out, now that Fanucci had a name to use in another interrogation of Casparia. He’d pull him out of custody and back into an interview room for another eighteen or twenty or twenty-five hours without food or drink, just enough time for Carlo to begin “imagining” how he and Roberto Squali came to be best friends, intent upon kidnapping a nine-year-old girl for reasons that would be invented on the spot.

  “Piero, for God’s sake,” Salvatore said. “You know in your heart that Carlo is not involved in this. And what I’m telling you now, with these details about Roberto Squali—”

  “Salvatore,” il Pubblico Ministero said in a pleasant tone, “I know in my heart nothing of the sort. Carlo Casparia has confessed. He has signed his confession without coercion. This, I assure you, people do not do if they are innocent. And Carlo is not an innocent man.”

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Barbara Havers sat through the morning’s meeting in the incident room with her mind in turmoil, although she managed to keep her expression attentive to DI John Stewart’s endless droning. She also kept her wits about her when he required from her an oral presentation of what she’d gleaned from her three interviews on the previous day. Never mind that she’d been at the Yard past ten o’clock at night, dutifully putting her reports in order for the man’s perusal. Stewart was obviously still on his mission to trip her in her tracks.

  Sorry to disappoint you, mate, was Barbara’s thought as she made her report. Still, it gave her little enough satisfaction to prove the DI wrong about her. For most of her was in a decided twist over what she’d heard from Dwayne Doughty when she’d spoken to him at the Bow Road nick.

  Khushi had given her a very bad night. Khushi had insisted that she ring Taymullah Azhar in Italy and demand a few answers. What stopped her from doing this was a basic tenet about police work: You don’t give away the game when you’re in the middle of it, and you sure as bloody hell do not clue in a suspect that he is a suspect when he doesn’t think he’s a suspect at all.

  Yet the idea of Azhar as a suspect felt like a hot coal lodged in her throat even now, in the midst of the morning meeting. Azhar was, after all, her friend. Azhar was, after all, a man whom Barbara thought she knew well. The idea of Azhar being in reality someone who could orchestrate the kidnap of his own daughter was unthinkable. For no matter how she looked at the matter, the same facts that she’d delivered to Dwayne Doughty remained at the core of what the private detective was alleging about Azhar: His work and his life were in London, so even if he had somehow arranged the snatching of his daughter, how the hell was he supposed to have put his mitts on her passport, eh? And even if he’d somehow managed to produce another passport for her, he would have then returned with her to London and Angelina Upman would have done exactly what she did do in the company of Lorenzo Mura, which was to turn up on Azhar’s doorstep demanding the return of her child.

  Yet . . . there was khushi. Barbara tried to come up with a reason why Doughty might have known this pet name that Azhar had for his daughter. She supposed Azhar might have told the man in passing, perhaps at some point referring to Hadiyyah that way. But in all the time Barbara had known him, she’d only heard him use the word when he was speaking to Hadiyyah. He never referred to her with the term. So why would he refer to her as khushi when speaking to Doughty? she wondered. The answer seemed to be that he wouldn’t. But that answer begged the question: What was she going to do next, post Doughty’s allegations?

  Ringing someone seemed the only answer: ringing Lynley in order to lay before him the facts she had and to ask his advice or ringing Azhar and cleverly gleaning from him some indication that Doughty’s claims were either true or false. Barbara wanted to do the first. But she knew she had to do the second. Had Azhar been in London, she could have confronted him in order to watch his face when she spoke. But he wasn’t in London and Hadiyyah was still missing and she had no real choice in the matter of what to do next, did she?

  She waited for an opportune moment long after the morning meeting when DI Stewart was otherwise engaged. She reached Azhar on his mobile, but the connection was bad. It turned out that he was in the Alps, he told her, and for a moment she thought he’d actually gone to Switzerland for some mad reason. When she yelped, “The Alps?” he clarified with, “These are the Apuan Alps. They are north of Lucca,” and the connection improved as he moved into what he said was a small piazza in one of the villages tucked into those mountains.

  He was searching it, he told her. He intended to search every village he came upon as he travelled higher and higher on a road that twisted into the Alps. It was from this road that a red convertible had crashed down a cliff, the driver dying when thrown from it. And inside this convertible, Barbara—

  At this, the poor man’s voice wavered. Barbara’s hands and her feet went completely dead. She said, “What? Azhar, what?”

  “They think Hadiyyah was with this man,” he said. “They have gone to Angelina’s home for her fingerprints, for DNA samples, for . . . I do not know what else.”

  Barbara could tell he was trying not to weep. She said, “Azhar.”

  “I could not just remain in Lucca and wait for news. They will compare the car—what they find in it and on it—and they will then know, but I . . . To hear she might have been with him and then to know . . .” A silence, then a barely controlled gasp. Barbara knew how humiliating it would be for him to be heard weeping by anyone
. He said at last, “Forgive me. This is unseemly.”

  “Bloody hell,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Azhar, this is your daughter we’re talking about. There is no ‘I should not’ between you and me when it comes to Hadiyyah, okay?”

  This appeared to make matters worse, for then he sobbed, managing only “Thank you” and nothing more.

  She waited. She wished she were there, wherever he was in the Alps, because she would have taken him into her arms for what comfort she could offer in this situation. But it would have been a cold comfort indeed. When a child went missing, each day that passed was a day that lessened the possibility of that child’s ever being found alive.

  Azhar finally managed to give her more details as well as a name: Roberto Squali. He was at the heart of what had happened to Hadiyyah. He was the driver of the crashed car, who was dead.

  “A name is a starting place,” Barbara told him. “A name, Azhar, is a good starting place.”

  Which brought her, of course, to the pet name khushi and the reason for her call. But she couldn’t find it in herself to mention this to Hadiyyah’s father just now. He was already upset enough with this turn of events. Asking him about khushi or making insinuations about his putative Berlin alibi or requiring of him definitive proof that he wasn’t the mastermind behind the disappearance of a most beloved child as claimed by the private investigator he’d hired . . . Barbara realised she couldn’t do this to him. For the very idea that he would set off to Berlin and establish an alibi while someone he’d hired in Italy was snatching his daughter from a public market . . . It didn’t make sense. Not when one put Angelina Upman into the picture. Unless, of course, the plan was to hold Hadiyyah somewhere until her mother came to believe she was dead. But what mother of a missing child ever gave up hope? And even if this was the plan and Azhar intended somehow to spirit his daughter back to England sans passport at some point six or eight or ten months from now, what was Hadiyyah supposed to do then? Never contact her mother again?