Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  1 May

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Inside the kitchen of Torre Lo Bianco, Salvatore fondly watched the interaction of his two children with their nonna. The previous night had been one of those designated for the children to spend with their father and, as it happened because of his current abode, with their nonna. Salvatore’s mother was taking full advantage of the presence of her nipoti.

  She’d given them a breakfast heavily reliant upon dolci, which naturally would have met with Birgit’s outraged protests. She’d made a vague bow to nutrition with cereale e latte—thanks be to God she’d at least chosen bran flakes, Salvatore thought—but after that she’d brought out the cakes and the biscotti. The children had devoured far more than was good for them and were showing the effects of so much sugar. For her part their nonna was plying them with questions.

  Were they attending Mass every Sunday? she wanted to know. Had they gone to services on Holy Thursday? Were they on their knees for three hours on Good Friday? When was the last time they’d received the Blessed Sacrament?

  To every question, Bianca answered with lowered eyes. To every question, Marco answered with an expression so solemn that Salvatore wondered where he had learned to master it. On the way to school he informed them that lying to their nonna should be Topic Number One when next they went to confession.

  Before he left them at Scuola Dante Alighieri, he told Bianca that her little friend Hadiyyah Upman had been found. He hastened to assure her that the child was well, but he also spent some moments making absolutely certain that Bianca understood—“anche tu, Marco,” he added—that she was never, ever upon her immortal soul to believe anyone who might tell her to accompany him for any reason. If that person was not her nonna, her mamma, or her papà, then she should scream for help and not stop screaming until help got to her. Chiaro?

  Hadiyyah Upman’s love for her father had been her downfall. She missed him terribly, and no false emails from her aunt purporting to be from her father had assuaged her feelings. All someone had to do to gain her trust was to promise the little girl that she’d be taken to the man. Praise God that she’d only ended up in the care of mad Domenica Medici. There were far worse fates that could have befallen her.

  Once Hadiyyah and her parents had been reunited at the hospital, Salvatore and the London detective had gone their separate ways. Lynley’s job as liaison was complete, and he did not wish to intrude further into the Italian investigation. “I’ll pass along to you the information that my colleague in London gathers,” he said. He himself would be returning to London. “Buona fortuna, amico mio,” he’d concluded. “Tutto è finito bene.”

  Salvatore tried to be philosophical about this. Things had indeed finished well for DI Lynley. They had finished far from well for himself.

  He brought il Pubblico Ministero into the picture as soon as he and Lynley had parted. Fanucci, he reasoned, would want to know that the child had been found alive and well. He also assumed that Fanucci would want to know what Hadiyyah herself had reported: about the card ostensibly in her father’s handwriting, about Roberto Squali’s use of her nickname, and most of all about what these two facts suggested about culpability for her disappearance. She had, after all, not said one word about Carlo Casparia.

  What he hadn’t reckoned on was Fanucci’s reaction to what he perceived as Chief Inspector Lo Bianco’s defiance. He’d been removed from the case, hadn’t he? He’d been told the investigation was being handed over to another officer, nevvero? So what had he been doing voyaging off into the Apuan Alps when he should have been sitting in his office, awaiting the arrival of Nicodemo Triglia, who was taking the case off his hands?

  Salvatore said, “Piero, with the safety of a child in jeopardy, surely you did not expect me to sit upon information I had as to her possible whereabouts? This was something that had to be dealt with without delay.”

  Fanucci allowed that Topo had returned the child to her parents unharmed, but that was as far as he would go in the area of congratulations. He said, “Be that as it may, everything now goes into the hands of Nicodemo, and your job is to give to him whatever it is that you have gathered.”

  “Allow me to ask you to reconsider,” Salvatore said. “Piero, we parted badly in our last conversation. For my part, I am filled with apology. I would only wish—”

  “Do not ask, Topo.”

  “—to be allowed to finish with the final details. There are curious matters concerning a greeting card, also matters concerning the use of a special name for the child . . . The lover of the girl’s mother insists that this man—the girl’s father—must be considered before he leaves the country. Let me tell you, Piero, it is not so much that I believe the lover but that I believe something more is going on here.”

  But this Fanucci did not want to hear. He said, “Basta, Topo. You must understand. I cannot allow defiance in an investigation. Now, it must please you to wait for Nicodemo’s arrival.”

  Salvatore knew Nicodemo Triglia, a man who had never missed his afternoon pisolino in his entire career. He carried a gut upon him the size of an Umbrian wild boar, and he’d never encountered a bar that he passed by without stopping in for a birra and the thirty minutes that were required for him to savour it.

  Salvatore was brooding upon this at the questura while he waited for the old stained Moka in the little kitchen to finish its coffee business for him on the two-burner stove. When it had done so, he poured himself a cup of the viscous liquid, dropped in a sugar cube, and watched it melt. He carried it to the room’s small window and looked out at a view that was limited to the parcheggio for the police vehicles. He was staring at them without really seeing them when one of his officers interrupted.

  “We have an identification,” a woman’s voice said.

  So deep into his thoughts was Salvatore that, when he turned, he did not remember the officer’s name. Just a crude joke that had been in the men’s toilet about the shape of her breasts. He’d laughed at the time, but now he felt shame. She was earnest about her work, as she had to be. It was not easy for her in this line of employment that had for so long been dominated by men.

  “What identification?” he asked her. He saw that she was carrying a photo and he tried to remember why any of his officers were showing photographs to anyone.

  She said, “Casparia, sir. He’s seen this man.”

  “Where?”

  She looked at him oddly. She said in some surprise, “Non si ricorda?” but hastily went on lest her question sound disrespectful. She looked about twenty years old, Salvatore thought, and she probably thought the antiquity of his forty-two had begun to affect his memory. She said, “Giorgio and I . . . ?”

  At which point he remembered. Officers had taken photographs to the prison for Carlo Casparia’s perusal. These comprised pictures of the soccer players on Lucca’s team as well as the fathers of the boys Lorenzo Mura coached. And Carlo Casparia had recognised someone? This was an extraordinary turn of events.

  He held out his hand for the picture. “Who is this?” he asked. Ottavia was her name, he thought. Ottavia Schwartz because her father was German, she’d been born in Trieste, and suddenly his head was filled with utterly useless information. He looked at the picture. The man looked roughly the same age as Lorenzo Mura, and with one glance Salvatore could see why the drug addict had remembered this individual. He had ears like conch shells. They stood out of his head in misshapen glory, and they transmitted light as if torches were being held behind them. This man in the company of anyone would be unforgettable. It could be, he thought, that they had just experienced a piece of luck. He repeated his question as Ottavia wet her forefinger on her tongue and flipped open a small notebook.

  She said, “Daniele Bruno. He is a midfielder on the city team.”

  “What do we know about him?”

  “Nothing yet.” And when his head rose abruptly,
she went on in haste. “Giorgio’s on it. He’s compiling enough information for you to—”

  She looked startled as Salvatore stepped forward and closed the door of the tiny kitchen. She looked more startled when he spoke to her urgently in a low voice.

  “Listen to me, Ottavia, you and Giorgio . . . You give this information to no one else but myself. Capisce?”

  “Sì, ma . . .”

  “That is all you need to know. Whatever you have, you hand over to me.”

  For he knew where things would head should Nicodemo Triglia be given Ottavia’s information. It was already written in the stars and he had seen this on Piero Fanucci’s unfortunate features. The Big Plan was how he thought of it, and it comprised how Piero was going to save face. There was only one way for him to do it at this point since nothing that had happened to Hadiyyah Upman related in any way to Piero’s main suspect in her kidnapping. So Piero could only save face by burying information now and by biding his time until the moment that the tabloids had found other stories to pursue once the excitement of the child’s return to her parents had subsided. Then Carlo would be released very quietly to his life, and everyone else’s life—particularly Piero’s—could simply go on.

  Ottavia Schwartz frowned but asked if the chief inspector wished her to put her notes into a report for him. He told her no. Just hand them over as they are, he said, and let this conversation between us slip from your mind.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Lynley did not see Taymullah Azhar again until breakfast. The Pakistani man had gone to Fattoria di Santa Zita to be with his daughter once Hadiyyah was released from the examination she’d undergone at the hospital. As liaison officer, Lynley had no need to accompany them. But his mind was uneasy in the aftermath of Hadiyyah’s rescue and Lorenzo Mura’s accusations. On the one hand, his own work was finished. On the other hand, he had questions, and it seemed reasonable to ask them of Azhar when they stood at Signora Vallera’s breakfast buffet table, spooning cereal into their bowls.

  He began with “All’s well, I hope?”

  Azhar said, “There is no sufficient way that I can thank you, Inspector Lynley. I know that your presence is Barbara’s doing as well as your own, and there is no way I can thank her either.” And then in answer to his question, “Hadiyyah is well. Angelina is less so.”

  “One hopes her condition will now improve.”

  Azhar moved towards his table and politely asked Lynley to join him. He poured coffee for them both from a white crockery jug.

  “Hadiyyah told us about a card,” Lynley said as he sat. “This was a greeting card that the man Squali handed to her in the marketplace before she left with him. She said it contained a message from you, telling her to go with him as you were waiting for her.”

  “She told me this as well,” Azhar said. “But I know nothing about such a card, Inspector Lynley. If there is one somewhere—”

  “I believe there is.” Lynley told the other man of the tourist photographs, of the particular pictures of the happy face card in the hand of Roberto Squali, and then of the photo of Hadiyyah holding what looked like the very same card.

  “Have you seen this card, Inspector?” Azhar then asked. “Was it with Hadiyyah’s belongings where she was found?”

  This was something Lynley didn’t know. If there had been a card, though, it would now be in the hands of the carabinieri who’d arrived at the convent first and who had taken Domenica Medici away. These policemen would have searched the premises for anything connected to the child who’d been held in the place.

  “Who else knew about Hadiyyah’s disappearance?” Lynley asked him. “I’m talking about her disappearance from London last November. Who else knew, aside from Barbara and myself?”

  Azhar named the individuals he’d told over the initial weeks: colleagues at University College London, friends in the field of microbiology, Angelina’s parents and her sister Bathsheba, and his own family much later, of course, once Angelina and Lorenzo had arrived in London insisting that Hadiyyah had been snatched from the Lucca marketplace by him.

  “Dwayne Doughty knew about her disappearance as well, did he not?” Lynley watched Azhar’s face closely as he said the London investigator’s name. “We’ve been told by Michelangelo Di Massimo, an investigator in Pisa, that Doughty hired him to find Hadiyyah.”

  “Mr. Doughty . . . ?” Azhar said. “But I hired this man to try to find Hadiyyah straightaway when she went missing, and he told me there was no trace of her, that Angelina had left no trail from London to . . . to anywhere. And now you are saying that . . . what? That he discovered that Angelina had gone to Pisa? Last winter he knew this? While telling me that there was no trail?”

  “When he told you there was no trace of her, what did you do?”

  “What could I do? There is no father of record on Hadiyyah’s birth certificate,” he said. “No DNA test has ever been done. Angelina could have claimed anyone was my daughter’s father, and without a court order she still could do so in the absence of such tests. So you see, to everyone who might have helped me, I had no real, legal rights. Only the rights Angelina chose to give me. And those rights she had withdrawn when she left with Hadiyyah in the first place.”

  “If that’s the case,” Lynley said quietly, reaching for a banana, which he peeled upon his plate, “then kidnapping Hadiyyah might well have been your only option if you were able to find her.”

  Azhar assessed him steadily, with no indication of protest or outrage. “And had I done such a thing and then taken her back with me to London? Do you know what that would have gained me, Inspector Lynley?” Azhar waited for no reply, going on to say, “Let me tell you what it would have gained me: Angelina’s enmity forever. Believe me, I would not have been that stupid no matter how much I wanted—and still want—my daughter home with me.”

  “Yet someone took her from the marketplace, Azhar. Someone promised her you. Someone wrote a card for her to read. Someone called her khushi. The man who took her left a trail behind him, one that led to Michelangelo Di Massimo. And Di Massimo gave us the name of Dwayne Doughty in London.”

  “Mr. Doughty told me there was no trail,” Azhar repeated. “That this was not true . . . that he might have known all along this was not true . . .” His hands shook slightly as he poured more coffee. It was the first indication that something moved within him. “In this . . . I would like to do something to this man, Inspector. But because of what he did or intended to do or tried to do, Angelina and I have finally made peace. This terrible fear that we would lose Hadiyyah . . . It brought about something good in the end.”

  Lynley wondered how a child’s kidnapping could truly result in something good, but he inclined his head for Azhar to continue.

  “We have come to agree that Hadiyyah needs both of her parents,” he said, “and that both of her parents should be in her life.”

  “How will this be effected with you in London and Angelina in Lucca?” Lynley asked. “Forgive me for saying it, but her situation at Fattoria di Santa Zita seems fixed at this point.”

  “It is. Angelina and Lorenzo will marry soon, after the birth of their child. But Angelina agrees that Hadiyyah will spend all her holidays with me in London.”

  “Will that be enough for you?”

  “It will never be enough,” he admitted. “But at least I can find peace in the arrangement. She’ll come to me the first of July.”

  SOUTH HACKNEY

  LONDON

  Barbara found Bryan Smythe’s place of business in the same location where she found his house. This was not far from Victoria Park, in a terrace that looked ready for the wrecking ball. The houses were built of the ubiquitous London brick, outstandingly unwashed in this case. Where homes weren’t looking in danger of imminent collapse, they were streaked with one hundred years of grime and guano, and the wood of windows and doors was spl
it and rotting. However, Barbara discovered soon enough that all of this was clever camouflage. For Bryan Smythe, as it happened, owned six of the dwellings in a row and although the curtains that hung in their windows looked like the ill wishes of an envious sibling, once inside the door everything altered.

  He was prepared for her visit, of course. Emily Cass had alerted him. His first words to Barbara were “You’re the Met, I presume,” and although he took in her appearance from head to toe, his facial expression didn’t alter when he read her tee-shirt’s message of No Toads Need to Pucker Up. Barbara clocked this. He was going to be good at dissimulation, she decided. He added, “DS Barbara Havers. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  She said, “Last time I looked,” and elbowed her way into his house.

  The place opened up like a gallery in both directions, with various large canvases of modern art on the walls and bits of metal sculpture depicting God only knew what writhing on tables, with sparse leather furniture and tasteful rugs beneath which a hardwood floor gleamed. The man himself was nothing to look at and less to talk about: ordinary except for his dandruff, which was extraordinary and copious. One could have cross-country skied on his shoulders. He was as pale as someone who rubbed elbows regularly with the walking dead, and he appeared malnourished. Too busy hacking into people’s lives to eat, Barbara reckoned.

  “Nice digs,” she told him as she looked round the place. “Business must be booming.”

  “There are good times and bad,” he replied. “I offer independent technological expertise to various companies and occasionally to individuals in need. I deal in making sure their systems are secure.”