Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “Can’t or won’t?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “Be touched. Can’t or won’t be touched?”

  “Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m an independent sort. Well, I’ve had to be, coming into the middle-class world as I did.”

  She didn’t amplify, but she didn’t need to. He knew her background because she’d shown it to him: the decrepit caravan from which she and her siblings had been removed by the government from the care of their parents, the fostering system into which they’d been placed, her own adoption and her change of identity. He knew it all, and it didn’t matter a whit to him. But that was hardly the point.

  She said, “I’ll always have that part of me, and that’s what keeps me . . . untouchable, I suppose, is the word.”

  “Because your family were travellers?”

  “If they’d only been travellers, Tommy.”

  He let the name go.

  “At least there’s a culture involved with travellers. There’s a tradition, a history, families, whatever. We didn’t have that. All we had was my father’s . . . What do we want to call it? His compulsion? His mad insistence on what he was going to do with his life? That led us to where we ended up. That led us to why we were taken from him and from my mother and from that terrible place . . .” Her eyes grew brighter. She looked away from him at the empty fireplace.

  Lynley said quickly, “Daidre. It’s perfectly—”

  “No, it isn’t. It can never be. It’s part of who I am and this . . . this untouchable part of me seeks to honour it, I suppose. But it always gets in the way.”

  He said nothing. He allowed her the moment to regain her composure, sorry that he had pushed her to this point, which was always the point of departure for the two of them even though he would not have it that way.

  She looked back at him, her expression fond. “It isn’t you, you know. It isn’t who you are or how you grew up or what you owe to several hundred years of your family’s history. It’s me. And the fact that I have no family history at all. At least not one that I’m aware of or was told about. I suspect, on the other hand, that you can recite your forebears back to the time of the Tudors.”

  “Hardly.” He smiled. “The Stuarts, perhaps, but not the Tudors.”

  “You see,” she said. “You know the Stuarts. Tommy, there are actually people out there”—she waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the windows, by which she meant the outside world—“who have no idea who the Stuarts are. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “Daidre, I read history. It’s nothing more than that. And you called me Tommy again. I think you’ve begun to protest too much. And yes, yes, I know it’s Hamlet’s mother and don’t tell me it signifies anything more than people saying ‘There’s the rub’ because you and I both know that it doesn’t. And even if it did, what does it matter at the end of the day?”

  “It matters to me,” she said. “It’s what keeps me apart.”

  “From whom?”

  “From everyone. From you. And besides that . . . After what happened to you, you need—no, you deserve—someone who is one hundred percent there for you.”

  He took some wine and thought about this. She worked on her salmon for a moment. He watched her. He finally said, “That hardly sounds healthy. No one actually wants a parasite. I tend to think it’s only in films that we get the idea men and women are supposed to find—what do they call it?—soul mates with whom they march into the future, blissfully joined at the hip.”

  She smiled, it seemed, in spite of herself. “You know what I mean. You deserve someone who is willing and able to be one hundred percent for you, open to you, accepting of you . . . whatever you want to call it. I’m not that person, and I don’t think I could be.”

  Her declaration felt like the thinnest of rapiers. It slid without effort under his skin, barely felt until the bleeding began. “So what are you saying, exactly?”

  “I hardly know.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at him. He tried to read whatever he could on her face, but time and circumstance had made her guarded, and he couldn’t blame her for the walls she built. She said, “Because you’re not an easy man to walk away from, Tommy. So I’m very much aware of the necessity of walking away and the marked reluctance I feel about doing so.”

  He nodded. For a moment they ate as the sounds of the dining room rose and fell around them. Plates were removed. Other plates came. He finally said, “Let’s leave it at that, for now.”

  Later, after a shared pudding of something called chocolate death gateau followed by coffee, they left the place. Nothing had been resolved between them and yet the sense of having moved forward was something that Lynley couldn’t ignore. They walked to her car arm in arm, and before she unlocked it and prepared to drive away, she stepped easily and naturally into his arms.

  Just as easily, he kissed her. Just as easily, her lips parted to his and the kiss lingered. He felt a tremendous desire for her: partly the animal lust that drove their species, partly spiritual longing that happened when a soul recognised the immortal worth of another soul.

  The inn has rooms, he wanted to say. Climb those stairs with me, Daidre, and come to bed.

  Instead he said nothing but “Good night, dear friend.”

  “Good night, dear Tommy” was her reply.

  15 May

  CHALK FARM

  LONDON

  Barbara’s mobile rang as she was showering, trying to wash off not only her feeling of dread but also the stench of cigarette smoke. Her nerves had been raw for more than forty-eight hours now, and only one fag after another had done anything to calm them. She’d gone through four packets of Players and as a result her lungs were making her feel like a woman being tried for witchcraft: A huge stone the approximate size of the Isle of Man sat on her chest, demanding a confession of her misdeeds.

  When the mobile rang, she leapt from the shower. She grabbed it, it slipped out of her fingers, and she watched in horror as it launched towards the tiled floor, where it lost its battery and whoever had been ringing her. She cursed, grabbed a towel, rescued the mobile, and put it back together. She looked to see who the caller had been. She recognised Mitchell Corsico’s number. She rang him back at once, sitting on the loo and dripping water onto the floor.

  “What’ve you got?” she asked.

  “Good morning to you too” was his reply. “Or I s’pose I should say bone jorno.”

  “You’re in Italy?” she asked. Thank God. The next step was moulding the story he would write.

  “Let’s put it this way: Il grande formaggio—that would be Rodney Aronson over in Fleet Street, by the way—wasn’t exactly chuffed to cough up the funds to get me here, so my expense account is large enough for one slice of focaccia and a cup of espresso each day. I have to sleep on a park bench—praise God there’re dozens of them up on the city wall, at least—unless I spring for a hotel room myself. But other than that, yeah, I’m in Italy, Barb.”

  “And?” she said.

  “And the good professor spent part of yesterday at the local nick. They call it a questura here, by the way. He was there with his solicitor in the afternoon, and they left for dinner, which made me think things might not be what they seemed. But then he was back with the same bloke in tow, and in they went for another few hours. I tried to have a word with him in the afters, but he wasn’t giving.”

  “What about Hadiyyah?” Barbara asked him anxiously.

  “Who?”

  “His daughter, Mitchell. The one who was kidnapped? Where is she? What’s happened to her? He can’t have left her all alone for a day in some hotel room while he talked to the cops.”

  “P’rhaps not. But the way things are looking, Barb, he sure as hell did something and he surer as hell doesn’t want to have a chat about it with me. No one has a whisper about E. coli, by th
e way. There’s four journalists I’ve run into—these’re Italians as I’m the only Brit mad enough to be here—and they speak good English and they haven’t heard a word about E. coli. So I’m going to lay something out for you here. This E. coli business: truth or lie? I mean, I’ve had a think in the last twenty-four, and it seems to me you’re not above sending your best mate Mitchell on a wild-goose chase for your own reasons. You’re not doing that, are you? Better reassure me or things won’t look good for you.”

  “Aside from all of that being rubbish on a scone, you’ve already printed those pictures of me, Mitchell. What else can you do?”

  “Print them up with the dates on them this time round, darling. Send them off to your guv and see what happens next. Hey, you and I know you’ve been working this situation from every wrong angle because you and the professor—”

  “Don’t bloody go there,” she said. It was bad enough she’d had to go there with Lynley. She had no intention of entertaining her supposed love for Azhar as a subject with Mitch Corsico. “The E. coli story is solid. I told you that much. I had it from DI Lynley. I was sitting right at his dining room table when he got it and he got it directly from Italy from a bloke called Lo Bianco. Chief Inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco. He’s the cop who—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know who he is. Pulled from the kidnapping case for incompetence, Barb. Did Lynley tell you that? I reckon not, eh? So this Lo Bianco drops a fanciful word about E. coli as a bit of you-know-what.”

  “Revenge for being pulled from the kidnapping case? A way to muddy the waters? Don’t be stupid. And the E. coli business has nothing to do with the kidnapping anyway. It’s a separate issue. The Italians don’t want it hitting the press. That’s your story so bloody go after it. You can’t think Azhar’s been questioned for hours because of a kidnapping that everyone knows he had no part in. They have someone under arrest for the kidnapping, for the love of God. Far as I know, they’ve got two blokes under arrest for it. This is another issue and the last thing the Italians want is for the information to get out. It panics people. No one buys Italian. Their exports get held for testing and the veg rots in port and the fruit goes soft. ’F they pin the E. coli business on a single person—which, believe me, they’re intent on doing come hell or you-know-what—they don’t have to worry. They call it murder and Bob’s the rest of it. That’s your story.” So bloody well write it, she thought, so that the Italian press would pick up on it, run with it, and batter the cops till the real source of the E. coli was located. Because the one thing she could and would absolutely bet her life on was that Azhar had nothing to do with Angelina Upman’s death.

  On his end of the call, Mitch Corsico was acting thoughtful. He hadn’t got to where he was without being careful with his stories. He might be employed by a deplorable rag that was more suitable for lining rubbish bins than it was for printing valuable information, but he didn’t intend to spend his entire career at The Source, so he had a reputation for accuracy that he had to maintain. He said, “Seems to me you’re not thinking this through. Far ’s I can tell, there’s not a hint of pasta-eating lads and lasses dropping like flies because of some mass food poisoning over here unless the health officials for the whole effing country’re in on a cover-up, which, you ask me, isn’t bloody likely. So are you trying to suggest the Upman woman dipped into a plate of steaming E. coli on her own?”

  “Who knows how high the cover-up goes? For all we know, there are other E. coli victims and no one is talking about them.”

  “Bollocks. There’ll be laws about that. Reporting a potential epidemic or something. Like when someone shows up in casualty coughing blood and bloody-hell-we’ve-got-a-case-of-TB-on-our-hands. They don’t let that go. They wouldn’t let this go.”

  Barbara jammed her fingers into her wet hair. She looked round for her fags, didn’t see them, realised that she hadn’t brought them into the bathroom, remembered that she’d had a shower primarily to wash the stench of them off her, and wanted one anyway.

  She said, “Mitchell? Will you listen to me? Or at least to yourself? One way or another you’ve got a story, so why the hell don’t you bloody write it?”

  “I expect it comes down to my not quite trusting you.”

  “Christ. What more do I sodding have to tell you?”

  “Why you’re so hot to have this story hit the paper for a start.”

  “Because they should be telling their own papers about it and they’re not. They’re not warning anyone. They’re not looking for the source.”

  “Uh . . . That’s where you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. You and I both know why the professor’s been stuck in the questura. This conversation’s gone back to where it started. He was there yesterday. Chances are very good he’ll be there today, and ’f you ask me, there’s a pretty good chance they’re not talking to him about how he likes the weather in Tuscany and the farro soup in Lucca. Come on, Barb. I did a little digging on our good professor: the ins, the outs, and the whereabouts. He was rubbing elbows with his fellow bacteria lovers just last month. Berlin, this was. Now, if I know that—because it wasn’t exactly a top secret, eyes-only confab, Barb—the cops know that. They find someone among that crowd who’s studying E. coli and it’s one hell of a very short trip from that information to someone passing along a petri dish of that stuff to Azhar for use on his lover.”

  “Mitchell. Are you listening to me?”

  “Okay. His former lover, if that’s where I’ve gone wrong.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “Have you been listening? This is a story in which the Italian health services and the Italian police—”

  “Barb, you’re the one not listening. Uncle Mitchell here has colleagues there. Where you are. In London. And those colleagues have sources elsewhere, even in Berlin. And their sources in Berlin have easy access to that conference of bacteria bigwigs. And what do you think they’ve uncovered for me? In twenty-four hours, Barb, so you can rest bloody well assured that the Italian coppers will be right behind them.”

  Barbara’s throat was so tight that she could barely get the word out. “What?”

  “We’ve got a woman from University of Glasgow who’s a major player in the E. coli field. We’ve got a bloke from University of Heidelberg who’s right behind her. Both of them have serious operations going in laboratories on their home patches. And both of them were at the conference. You can connect the dots on that one if you want to.”

  No, Barbara thought. No, no, no.

  She said, and she tried to sound determined, “You’re heading in the wrong direction. This is a woman who had more than one lover at a time. She had Azhar and another bloke while she was living with Azhar here in London. And then she had Lorenzo Mura as well. Three lovers at once. She left Azhar for Lorenzo Mura and I’m telling you that it’s a fairly sure thing she picked up someone over there once the fires burnt low with Mura. That’s who she was.”

  “You’re slithering all over the map, Barb. You can’t be trying to tell me this bird had a former lover with access to E. coli and a current lover with access as well. How d’you expect that ship to get out of port? And you’re contradicting yourself anyway. This is either a grand Italian cover-up or it’s cold-blooded murder, but it isn’t both.”

  She was as out of ideas as she was out of steam. She was reduced to saying the one thing she knew had no chance at all of winning him to her thoughts. She said, “Mitchell, please.”

  He said pleasantly, “At the end of the day, this is going to be a very big story, so I s’pose I have to thank you, Barb. I give it another twenty-four hours before they arrest him. They call that indagato here. The coppers turn their eyes on you as the principal suspect and the news goes out and you’re indagato. Taking his passport was the first step. That’s the second. So you put me on to a very big story, Barb. Rod might even increase my expense account to include a plate of spaghetti Bolognese.”

 
“You’ll destroy him if you start speculating about him in the press. You know that, right? You’ve already done the Love Rat Dad piece. Wasn’t that enough? You’ve got nothing but circumstantial rubbish to build a story on.”

  “True enough,” he said. “But circumstantial rubbish is our bread and butter. You knew that when you brought me on board.”

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Barbara forced herself to eat. She even went for something with more nutritional validity than her usual fare. In place of a strawberry Pop-Tart, she opted for a soft-boiled egg and brown toast. She gave in to jam, but that was it. She felt virtuous for five minutes until she sicked up the entire mess.

  Luckily that happened before she left Chalk Farm for the Met. She was forced to change her tee-shirt and scrub her teeth and mouth three times. But none of that resulted in her being late for work, which she reckoned counted in her favour.

  She tried not to smoke en route. She failed. She tried to divert her mind with chat from Radio 4. She failed. Twice she came close to finding herself on the responsibility end of a roadway crash. She self-talked and tried to get her breath even and her heart beating normally. She failed there as well.

  She had two fags in the underground car park, the first to still her nerves and the second to build her courage. What she was attempting to come to terms with was having saved Azhar from a kidnapping charge only to have him charged with murder. In the realm of pyrrhic victories, she reckoned she’d just been crowned its bloody empress.