Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out her passport. He handed it to her. She snatched it from him and grabbed her duffel.

  “Lock up when you leave” were her final words to him.

  16 May

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Salvatore Lo Bianco inspected his face in the bathroom mirror. The bruises were yellowing up nicely. He looked less beaten up and more like he was recovering from a bout with jaundice. In a matter of days, he would be able to see Bianca and Marco once again. This was good as his mamma was not happy about being denied the company of her favourite nipoti.

  He went to his car when he left the tower. It was a brisk walk in the fine spring air, and he stopped for caffè and a pastry on his way. He ate and drank quickly. He bought a copy of Prima Voce from the news vendor in Piazza dei Cocomeri. He glanced at its headline and its cover story. So far, he saw, Piero Fanucci hadn’t let the E. coli cat out of the bag.

  Relieved, he drove to Fattoria di Santa Zita, beneath an azure sky whose cloudlessness promised a day of heat on the alluvial plain where Lucca lay. Above in the hills, the trees offered great banks of shade that would keep the temperatures more pleasant, and along the dusty lane onto Lorenzo Mura’s property, the tree branches formed a pleasing, leafy tunnel. When he emerged from it, he parked near Mura’s winery. He heard voices from within the ancient stone structure. He ducked beneath the arbour’s drapery of wisteria and entered the shadowy place, where the scent of fermentation was like a fine perfume that tinctured the air.

  Lorenzo Mura and a younger foreign-looking man were beyond the tasting room and inside the bottling room. They were examining a sheaf of labels, prefatory to placing them on two or three score bottles. Chianti Santa Zita, the labels announced, but Mura didn’t seem pleased with the look of them. He was frowning as he spoke. The younger man was nodding.

  Salvatore cleared his throat. They looked up. Did the port wine birthmark that marred Mura’s otherwise handsome face grow darker? It looked so to Salvatore.

  “’Giorno,” he said. He’d heard them talking and followed the sound of their voices, he explained. He hoped that he wasn’t interfering.

  Of course, he was interfering, but Lorenzo Mura didn’t say that. Instead he spoke again to the younger man, whose pale skin and fair hair marked him as either English or, more likely, a Scandinavian who, like so many of his fellows, spoke Italian along with another two or three useful languages. The younger man—no name given and none required, Salvatore thought—listened and disappeared into the winery’s depths. For his part, Mura gestured to an open bottle near the labelling machine. Vorrebbe del vino? Hardly, Salvatore thought. It was far too early in the day for him to sip Chianti, appreciatively or otherwise. But grazie mille, all the same.

  Lorenzo apparently felt no such compunction about the hour. He’d been imbibing and so had his assistant. Two glasses stood nearby, still half-filled with wine. He picked up one of them and drained it. Then he said dully, “She’s dead. Our child dies with her. You do nothing. Why do you come?”

  “Signor Mura,” Salvatore said, “we would have these things move quickly but they can only move as fast as the process itself allows.”

  “And this means . . . ? What?”

  “This means that a case must be built. One builds it first and then moves to finish it with an arrest afterwards.”

  “She dies, she’s buried, and nothing happens,” Mura said. “And from this you tell me a ‘case’ is being built. I come to you directly when she dies. I tell you this is no natural death. But you send me away. So why are you here?”

  “I come to ask if you will allow Hadiyyah Upman to reside with you here at the fattoria until other arrangements can be made with her family in London.”

  Mura’s head jerked. “What does this mean?”

  “That I am in the midst of building a case. And when I have built it—which I must do with care—I will take the next step and I will not hesitate. But arrangements need to be made in advance and I have come to you in order to make them.”

  Mura studied his face as if trying to sift for truth or lie. Who could blame him? Salvatore thought. Nine times out of ten in the country and particularly in Tuscany hadn’t it happened that an arrest was made first and then facts were pounded into shape to fit the case afterwards? This was especially the situation when a public minister like Piero Fanucci had a range of vision that was limited to a single suspect from the moment it was decided that a crime had occurred. Mura would know that, and he would wonder why no one was arresting anyone for anything in the matter of the deaths of his lover and their child.

  Salvatore said to Mura, “The fact of murder has to be established in a death such as that of your Angelina. This has been made more difficult because she was ill in the weeks leading up to her death. We now know what caused her to die—”

  Mura took a step towards him, reaching out. Salvatore held up a hand to stop him.

  “—but this is something we are not speaking of yet.”

  “He did this. I knew it.”

  “Time will tell.”

  “How much time?”

  “This is something we cannot know. But we move forward, keeping what we learn close to our hearts. Still, that I have come to ask you about arrangements of the care of Hadiyyah . . . I would hope that this tells you how near to the end we are.”

  “He came to us, he built her trust, and when he had it . . . somehow he did this. You know it.”

  “We are speaking today, the professor and I. We have already spoken and we will also speak tomorrow. Nothing, Signor Mura, is being left unturned or going unnoticed. I assure you of that.” Salvatore inclined his head towards the door. He said in an altogether different tone, “You raise asini, no? This I have learned from the London detective. Will you show them to me?”

  Mura’s face grew cloudy. “For what reason?”

  Salvatore smiled. “For the reason of purchase. I have two children who would love such an animal to keep as a pet in the countryside where I have a small cottage. They are pets, vero?, these animals you breed? Or if they are not, they are gentle enough to become pets, no?”

  “Certo,” Lorenzo Mura said.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  In the end, Salvatore had accomplished his mission. The sight of Lorenzo Mura’s donkeys in the olive orchard had prompted his request to talk to someone who had bought one of the docile-seeming creatures most recently so that he could reassure himself that they were gentle enough to be his children’s pet at the family’s nonexistent cottage in the country. Mura had given him the name of his most recent customer, and Salvatore had taken matters from there.

  A call upon the man had eliminated him as a possible source of the E. coli that had killed Angelina Upman. Not because there would have been no bacteria on his farmland near Valpromaro but because he confirmed during their conversation that he had indeed recently purchased a foal from Signor Mura and that he had paid in cash so as to allow Signor Mura to avoid one of the myriad ways in which Italians were taxed. He gave the date of his purchase of the animal, which coincided perfectly with the presence of the man that Ispettore Lynley had reported passing an envelope of something to Mura at the fattoria.

  When he returned to the questura, it was to gather more information from Ottavia Schwartz and Giorgio Simione, still slogging their way through the congregation of scientists who’d met in Berlin in April. They’d located a scientist from the University of Glasgow who studied E. coli, Ottavia reported. It was likely that there would be others if the ispettore wished them to continue.

  He did, he told her. He wasn’t about to go Fanucci’s route. He wanted to know it all, inside and out, before he made his next move. To Salvatore, indagato meant more than just naming a suspect. Indagato meant that the investigators were certain they had their man.

  PISA

  TU
SCANY

  In the end, it turned out that flying into Pisa was the easiest. Barbara could have flown into one of the regional airports, utilising one of the many budget airlines that appeared to pop up every month or so, but she wanted the peace of mind that came with a brand-name airline unlikely to lose her limited baggage and an airport labelled with the word international.

  When she landed in Italy, she was assaulted by the foreign experience. People shouted at one another incomprehensibly, signs made announcements in a language she couldn’t read, and—once she worked her way through customs and baggage claim—scores of tour guides awaited their charges, while jostling crowds appeared to be bargaining with illegal taxi drivers offering quick trips to the Leaning Tower.

  Luckily, she didn’t need to do anything other than look for her ride to Lucca, and he was as easy to spot as an albino chimpanzee at the zoo. Despite being in Italy—the veritable home of la moda—Mitchell Corsico was garbed as usual. He’d eschewed the fringed jacket—probably because of the heat—but the rest of him was vintage Wild West. For her part, Barbara had set aside slogan-bearing tee-shirts in favour of tank tops, anticipating exactly what she found the moment they stepped from the arrivals hall: blistering heat.

  Mitch was on his mobile when Barbara glimpsed him among the hordes. He continued on his mobile as he led her to his hire car. Barbara caught only snatches of his conversation as she hauled her duffel along behind him. It was mostly along the lines of “Yeah . . . Yeah . . . The interview’s coming . . . Hey, it’s in the diary, Rod. What more can I say?” When he ended the call, he said, “Lard arse,” in apparent reference to his editor. At that point, they’d reached the side of a Lancia, and Barbara was sweating profusely.

  She squinted in the bright sunlight and muttered, “What’s the sodding temperature in this place?”

  Mitchell gave her a look. “Get a grip, Barb. It’s not even summer.”

  Their route to Lucca consisted of a terrifying drive on the autostrada, where speed limits appeared to be mere suggestions that the Italian drivers chose to ignore. Corsico seemed to be in his element. Any faster, Barbara reckoned, and they’d be airborne.

  As he drove, he informed her that the first story had run in The Source that morning, in case she hadn’t had time to pick up a copy at the airport. He’d moulded it, he said, along lines that would generate a dozen follow-up stories. He hoped she appreciated that, by the way.

  “What’s that mean, exactly?” Barbara asked him. “What sort of follow-up stories’re we talking about? How’d you write the first one?”

  He glanced at her. Someone passed them in a blur of silver. He increased the Lancia’s speed and wove round a lorry. Barbara increased her grip on the side of her seat. He said, “The usual format, Barb. ‘This E. coli situation is either a cover-up by the Italians to avoid tanking their economy while the source is being searched out among all the products they sell, or it’s a deliberate poisoning by a suspect unnamed . . . with an upcoming charge of murder in sight. Stay tuned.’”

  “As long as you keep away from Azhar.”

  He looked at her, his expression disbelieving. “I’m on a story. If he’s part of it, he’s part of it, and I’m putting him into it. Let’s get something straight, you and me, now we’re working hand in hand: You don’t climb into bed with a journalist and expect him not to want to feed the beast.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors,” she informed him. “I’d think that’s a very bad thing for a writer. Or am I stretching things to actually call you a writer? And who said we’re working hand in hand?”

  “We’re on the same side.”

  “Doesn’t sound like that to me.”

  “We both want to get to the truth. And anyway, like I said, Azhar’s name’s already come up.”

  “I made it bloody well clear—”

  “You can’t be thinking Rod Aronson would let me hang round Lucca on the strength of some pregnant Englishwoman keeling over in Tuscany. The UK reader needs a hell of a bigger hook than that.”

  “And what? Azhar’s become the hook? Goddamn it, Mitchell—”

  “He’s part of the story, like it or not, darling. For all I know, he probably is the story. Bloody hell, Barb, you should be glad I’m not going after the kid.”

  She grabbed his arm, digging her fingers into it. “You stay away from Hadiyyah.”

  He shook her off. “Quit interfering with the driver. We get in a crash and we’re the next story. And anyway, all I’ve done so far is go the route of ‘By the way, our good professor of microbiology is assisting the police with their enquiries, and we all know what that means, don’t we? Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.’ Rod wants an interview with the bloke. You’re going to be my route to that.”

  “I’ve given you what you’re getting from me,” she told him. “Azhar’s not on the table. I’ve told you that from the very first.”

  “Look. I thought you wanted me here to get to the truth.”

  “So get to the truth,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Azhar.”

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  The outskirts of Lucca made it seem like any other overdeveloped place in any other country in the world. Aside from the fact that the street signs and advertisements were in Italian, everything else was fairly standard. The streets held apartment buildings, inexpensive hotels, tourist restaurants, takeaway food shops, assorted boutiques, and pizzerias. There was a great deal of traffic and congestion. Women with pushchairs took up too much room on the pavements, and adolescents who should have been in school were instead hanging about engaged in the three activities common to adolescents nearly everywhere: texting, smoking, and chatting away on mobile phones. Their hairstyles were different—far more elaborate and excessively gelled—but other than that they were the same. It was only when the centre of the town was reached that Lucca suddenly became unique.

  Barbara had never seen anything like its wall, encircling the oldest part of the town like a medieval rampart. She’d been to York, but this was different, from the enormous grassed-in ditch that lay before it and could at one time have done duty as a moat, to the roadway atop it. Mitch Corsico drove them round it on a shady boulevard whose purpose seemed to be to show the wall to its best advantage. Half of the way round, however, he made a quarter circle in a huge piazza and turned into a short length of roadway that took them beneath and through one of the wall’s huge gates.

  Here, there was another piazza. Here, they vied with tourist buses debouching elderly people in Bermuda shorts, sun hats, sandals, and black socks. Near a shop hiring bicycles, they found a parking bay. Mitch climbed out of the car with “It’s this way,” and he left her to wrestle with her duffel once more.

  She thought she’d packed light, but as she struggled to keep up with him, Barbara gave serious thought to dumping everything in the nearest wheelie bin. There was no wheelie bin in sight, though, so she was left heaving and dragging the thing as Mitchell led her out of the piazza, past a church—“First of hundreds, believe me”—and into a throng of people who appeared to comprise tourists, students, housewives, and nuns. Lots of nuns.

  Thankfully, she wasn’t in Mitch’s wake for long on this narrow thoroughfare. Ahead of her, she saw him make a turn into another street, and when she finally got there, it was to find him leaning against the wall of a car’s-width tunnel. This tunnel, she saw, led into yet another large piazza upon which a merciless sun was blazing.

  She thought he was taking a rest in the shade or perhaps even waiting to offer her help. Instead, when she reached him with her heart pounding and sweat dribbling into her eyes, he said, “Don’t travel much, eh? Basic rule, Barb. One change of clothes.”

  He ducked through the tunnel, then, and into the piazza. It was circular, she saw, and Mitch told her it was the town’s ancient amphitheatre. Shops, cafés, and habitations formed its perimeter. In the brig
ht light of the day, Barbara wanted to head for the nearest shade to buy something very cold and very wet. In fact, that was what she thought they’d come to do until the journalist pointed to a mass of cacti and succulents displayed in neat ranks in front of a building and told her that was Azhar’s pensione.

  “Time to pay up with the interview,” he said. And when she was about to protest, he played the best card last and with considerable skill: “I’m making the rules, Barb, and maybe you need to think about that. I c’n just leave you here to sort out who speaks English and can help you out. Or you c’n be a bit more cooperative. Before you make up your mind on that one, though, I’d like to point out that the coppers here don’t speak our lingo. On the other hand, loads of the journalists do and I’m happy to give you an introduction to one or two of them. But ’f you ask for that, you owe me. Azhar is how you’re going to pay.”

  Barbara said, “No deal. I reckon I can make myself clear to anyone I want to talk to.”

  Mitch smiled. He nodded towards the pensione in question. “If that’s how you want to hang the laundry,” he said.

  That should have told her, of course. But Barbara wasn’t ready for Mitchell Corsico to be dictating the terms of their working relationship in Italy. So she marched across the piazza with her duffel weighing down her shoulder, and she rang the bell outside of Pensione Giardino. Its windows were shuttered against the heat, as were all of the windows in the piazza save one at which a housewife was hanging pink bedsheets on a line that extended across the front of her apartment. Every place else looked deserted, and Barbara was at the point of concluding this same thing about the pensione when its front door opened and a dark-haired pregnant woman with a winsome-looking child on her hip gazed out at Barbara.