Just One Evil Act: A Lynley Novel

by Elizabeth George

  Lynley nodded. He’d heard most of this already from Lo Bianco, but he could see that it gave Angelina a sense of hope being kept alive to give him the information. Across the table from him, Lo Bianco listened to this repetition of details with apparent patience. When Angelina was finished, he said to Lynley, “Con permesso . . . ?” and leaned forward to ask a few questions of his own. He did so in somewhat battered English.

  “I ask a question not to ask before, signora. How was Hadiyyah with Signor Mura? All this time away from her papà. How was she with your lover?”

  “She was fine with Lorenzo,” Angelina said. “She likes Lorenzo.”

  “This you are certain?” Lo Bianco said.

  “Of course I am,” Angelina told him. “Making certain . . . It was one of the reasons . . .” She gave a glance to Lynley, then looked back at Lo Bianco. “That’s one of the reasons my sister created the emails. I thought if Hadiyyah heard from Hari, if she thought at first that this was just a visit we were making to Italy, if over time she came to believe her father wasn’t going to come for her . . .”

  “Emails?” Lynley asked.

  Lo Bianco quickly explained in Italian: that Angelina’s sister had manufactured emails putatively from the little girl’s father. In these he promised to come to Italy. In these he broke those promises.

  “Was she able to access his email account in some way?” Lynley asked.

  “She created a new account for him, through a friend of hers at University College,” Angelina told him. “I told my sister what to say in the emails. She said it.” Angelina turned to Lo Bianco. “So Hadiyyah had no reason to dislike Lorenzo, to think that he was going to stand in place of her father and to realise from this that her life was permanently altered. I made sure of that.”

  “Still, there could be . . . It could be the daughter and Signor Mura . . .” Lo Bianco seemed to search for the word.

  “Friction?” Lynley said. “There might have been friction between them?”

  “There was no friction,” Angelina said. “There is no friction.”

  “And Signor Mura, he likes your Hadiyyah?”

  Angelina’s jaw loosened. If she could have gone paler than she already was, she would have done so. Lynley could see her taking in Lo Bianco’s question and drawing a conclusion from it. She said, “Renzo loves Hadiyyah. He would do nothing to harm her, if that’s what you’re thinking. Everything he’s done, everything I’ve done, it’s all been because of Hadiyyah. I wanted her back, I was so unhappy, I’d left Hari to be with Renzo here but I couldn’t do it without Hadiyyah, so I returned to Hari for those few months and waited and waited and Lorenzo waited, and it was all for Hadiyyah, because of Hadiyyah, so you can’t say Lorenzo . . .”

  Lo Bianco produced the Italian version of tsk, tsk, tsk. Lynley tried to follow Angelina’s story. She’d woven, it seemed, quite a web of deceit to engineer her new life in Italy. This brought up a point of interest for him, one that might have implications from the past that reached into the present.

  “When did you meet Signor Mura?” he asked her. “How did you meet him?”

  She’d met him in London, she said. She’d been without an umbrella on a day with sudden rain, so she’d ducked for protection into Starbucks.

  Lo Bianco made a noise of moderate disgust at this, and Lynley glanced at him. It was Starbucks, however, that was apparently garnering the Italian man’s disapproval and not the fact of Angelina Upman’s meeting someone inside the place.

  The coffee house was crowded with other people having the same idea. Angelina purchased a cappuccino for herself and was drinking it on her feet by the window when Lorenzo entered with the same idea in mind: to get out of the rain. They began to chat, as people sometimes do, she explained. He’d come to London for three days’ holiday and the weather was maddening to him. In Tuscany at this time of year, he said, the sun is out, the days are warm, the flowers are blooming . . . You should come to Tuscany and see for yourself, he told her.

  She could see that he looked for a wedding ring on her in that casual way that unattached people sometimes do when they meet one another. She did the same to him. She didn’t tell him about Azhar, about Hadiyyah, or about . . . other things. At the end of their time in the Starbucks when the rain had ceased, he handed her his card and said that if she ever came to Tuscany, she was to ring him and he would show her its beauties. And so, eventually, that was what she did. After a row with Hari . . . another row with Hari . . . always the nighttime rows with Hari, spoken in fierce whispers so that Hadiyyah wouldn’t know there were difficulties between her mother and father . . .

  “‘Other things’?” was Lynley’s question at the end of her story. In his peripheral vision, he saw Lo Bianco’s sharp nod of approval.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You said that at that first meeting you didn’t tell Signor Mura about Hadiyyah, Azhar, or other things. I’m wondering what those other things were?”

  Clearly, she didn’t want to go further, as her gaze moved away from Lynley and dropped to the table and the computer printouts upon it. She made a poor show of inauthentic concentration upon Lynley’s question. He finally said to her, “Every detail is important, you know,” and waited in silence. Lo Bianco did likewise. Water dripped in the enormous kitchen sink, and a clock ticked loudly. And she finally spoke.

  “At that time, I didn’t tell Lorenzo about my lover,” she said.

  Lo Bianco released a nearly silent whistle of air. Lynley glanced at him. Le donne, le donne, his expression said. Le cose che fanno.

  “D’you mean another man?” Lynley clarified. “Other than Azhar.”

  Yes, she said. One of the teachers at the dancing school where she took classes. A choreographer and an instructor. At the time of her meeting Lorenzo Mura, this man had been her lover for some years. When she left Azhar to take up life with Lorenzo, she also left this man.

  “His name?” Lynley asked.

  “He’s in London, Inspector Lynley. He’s not Italian. He doesn’t know Italy. He doesn’t know where I am. I simply . . . I mean I should have told him something. I should have told him anything. But I simply . . . stopped seeing him.”

  “That wouldn’t have prevented him from trying to find you,” Lynley pointed out. “After several years as your lover—”

  “It wasn’t serious,” she said hastily. “It was fun, a release, excitement. Between us, there was never any plan to be together permanently.”

  “In your head,” Lo Bianco pointed out. “Ma forse . . .” This was true. Perhaps in the head of her lover an entirely different idea existed. “He was married?”

  “Yes. So he wouldn’t have expected me to hang about in his life and when I left him—”

  “It works not in that way,” Lo Bianco told her. “There are men, for them marriage equals not a thing.”

  “I do need his name, Angelina,” Lynley told her. “The chief inspector’s right. While your previous lover could be completely uninvolved with what’s happened here in Italy, the fact of him in your life means that he needs to be eliminated from the enquiry. If he’s still in London, Barbara can handle this. But it has to be done.”

  “Esteban Castro,” she finally said.

  “He’s from Spain?”

  “Mexico City,” she said. “His wife is English. Another dancer.”

  “You were also . . .” Lo Bianco searched for the word, but Lynley was fairly certain where he was heading, so he cut in, saying, “You were acquainted with her?”

  Angelina dropped her gaze again. “She was a friend.”

  Before either Lynley or Lo Bianco could comment on these facts or ask further questions, Lorenzo Mura arrived at Fattoria di Santa Zita and entered as the others had done: through the ground-floor door that brought him along the dark passage and into the kitchen. He dropped an athletic bag on the tiles and came to t
he table. He kissed Angelina and asked what was going on among them. Clearly, he was fully capable of reading the atmosphere in the room. “Che cos’è successo?” he demanded.

  Neither of the detectives spoke. It was, Lynley felt, for Angelina to tell her current lover—or not to tell him—of the subject they’d been discussing. She said to them, “Lorenzo knows about Esteban Castro. We have no secrets from each other.”

  Lynley doubted that. Everyone had secrets. He was beginning to conclude that Angelina’s had deposited her into the position she occupied at the moment: mother of a missing child. He said, “And Taymullah Azhar?”

  “What about Hari?” she asked.

  “Sometimes relationships are open,” Lynley said. “Did he know about your other lover?”

  “Please don’t tell Hari,” she said quickly.

  With a grunt, Lorenzo pulled a chair from the table. He sat, grabbed a glass, and poured himself some wine. He tossed it back—no thoughtful sipping and evaluating here—and cut a wedge of cheese and a hunk of bread. He said fiercely, “Why do you protect this man?”

  “Because I’ve dropped an explosive into his life and that’s enough. I won’t have him hurt more.”

  “Merda.” Lorenzo shook his head. “This makes no sense, this . . . this care you have for this man.”

  “We have a child together,” Angelina said. “When you have a child with someone, it changes things between you. That’s how things are.”

  “Così dici.” Mura’s voice was gentler when he said this, but still he didn’t appear to be convinced that having had a child by Taymullah Azhar was significant enough a reason for Angelina to wish not to devastate the man further. And perhaps, Lynley thought, it was not enough reason. Perhaps had Azhar ended his marriage instead of merely leaving his wife, things would have been much different for Angelina Upman. And, perhaps, Lorenzo Mura knew this. No matter the situation at present or in the future, a connection existed and would always exist between Angelina and the Pakistani man. And Mura would have to come to terms with that.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  It was later than usual when Salvatore made his evening climb to the top of the tower. Mamma had had what she’d decided was an altercation in the macelleria while doing her shopping for this night’s dinner, and that altercation—apparently with a tourist woman who did not understand that when Signora Lo Bianco entered the shop, everyone else stepped back out of respect for her age—had to be discussed from every angle.

  “Sì, sì,” Salvatore murmured throughout this recitation of the woes of Mamma’s day. He shook his head and looked appropriately outraged, and at the first opportunity, he climbed to the roof to enjoy his nightly caffè corretto, the sight of evening falling upon his city with its citizens taking their daily passeggiata arm in arm in the streets, and, most important, the silence that went with all of this, high above everything.

  The silence did not last long, however. Into it, his mobile phone rang. He took it from his pocket, saw the caller, and cursed. If this involved another drive to Barga, he would refuse.

  “So?” the magistrato barked at Salvatore’s pronto. “Mi dica, Topo.”

  Salvatore knew what Fanucci wished to be told: everything that had occurred with this police detective from England. He told the public minister what he felt was sufficient to satisfy him. He added the new intriguing detail of Signora Upman’s additional lover in London: Esteban Castro. She either liked them foreign or she liked them hot-blooded, he told Fanucci.

  “Puttana” was Fanucci’s evaluation of her.

  Well, times have changed, was what Salvatore wanted to say to Fanucci. Women were not necessarily loose because they took lovers. But, indeed, were he to say this to Fanucci, the truth was that he’d be doing so only to arouse the man’s ire. For he himself did not believe that it was the way of the world today for women to string along more than one lover at a time, married or otherwise. That Angelina Upman, perhaps, made a habit of doing so was a curious new bit of information about her. Salvatore was more than willing to share this information with Fanucci because, if nothing else, it spared him from having to go in the direction of Michelangelo Di Massimo and his bleached yellow hair.

  “So, he chases her? This Esteban Castro?” Fanucci said. “He follows her to Lucca. He plans his revenge. She leaves him for another and he does not accept this and he plans how to show her suffering equal to what she has caused him, vero?”

  The idea was ludicrous, but what difference did that make? At least it wasn’t additional nonsense about the Casparia youth. Salvatore murmured, “Forse, forse, Piero.” But they must move with caution, he said. They would see soon enough because this English detective would phone London and see about tracking down this lover of Angelina Upman. He would be useful that way, Ispettore Lynley.

  There was silence as Fanucci evaluated this. Salvatore heard in the background someone speaking to Fanucci. A woman’s voice. It would not be his wife but rather the long-suffering housekeeper. Vai, Fanucci barked at her, his way of lovingly telling her that her performance between the sheets of his bed would not be necessary on this evening.

  Then, into the phone, the magistrato announced the main reason for his call to Salvatore: a special report for the telegiornale had been arranged. He, Fanucci, had made these arrangements. They would film this report at the home of the missing girl’s mother, and it would end with an appeal from this child’s parents: We love our precious little one and we want her back. Please, please return her to us.

  If the mamma wept, that would be useful, Fanucci told him. Television cameras liked weeping women in situations when children went missing, no?

  And when would this television filming occur? Salvatore enquired.

  Two days hence, Fanucci told him. He himself and not Salvatore would do the speaking for the Italian police.

  “Certo, certo,” Salvatore murmured with a sly smile at Fanucci’s eternal self-importance. The presence on television screens throughout Italy of Piero Fanucci would, of course, strike fear into the hearts of all malefactors.

  23 April

  CHALK FARM

  LONDON

  Mitchell Corsico had wasted no time. He had a reputation as a reporter who didn’t let grass grow, and this alacrity, combined with a nose for scandal, did not desert him just because Barbara had thwarted him at the secondary comprehensive that Taymullah Azhar’s son Sayyid attended. When Barbara caught sight of the front page of The Source the next day, she saw that out of what Corsico had witnessed in front of Sayyid’s school he had managed to create a stop-the-presses moment. Missing Girl Has Love Rat Dad was the headline that announced the sordid tale. Beneath this, several pictures of the deserted family offered evidence to accompany the story.

  Barbara didn’t see red when her gaze fell upon this latest edition of The Source. She saw black: in the form of her vision going absolutely dark for a moment so that, in front of her local newsagent, she had a terrible instant of thinking she might well faint directly onto the chewing gum–studded pavement of Chalk Farm Road. How Corsico had managed to get his hands on the material displayed on the front page of the tabloid hovered between mystery and miracle to her. What she reckoned, though, was that the reporter had followed Azhar’s family directly to their home and employed one of several strong-arm techniques to get someone to talk.

  These were easy enough for Barbara to envision: Corsico having a few words with neighbours and gathering information that way; Corsico shoving his card through the post slot in the door of Nafeeza’s home, telling her through this slender opening that it was a case of talk-to-me-or-let-your-neighbours-do-the-talking-for-you. He could even have found a friend of Sayyid and in this way got a message to the boy: Meet me at the pub the park the local cinema the corner grocery the railway station the bus stop. We can talk there. Here’s your chance to tell the full story. At the end of the day, what did it matter how h
e had put his sticky hands on the information? For the nasty tale was in the tabloid now, and the nasty tale named names.

  Barbara rang Corsico. “What the bloody hell are you up to?” she demanded without preamble.

  He didn’t enquire who was ringing his mobile. Obviously, he knew because his reply was “I thought this is what you wanted, Sergeant.”

  “Do not use my rank on the phone,” she hissed. “Where the hell are you?”

  “In bed, actually. Having a lie-in. And what’s the problem? Don’t want anyone to know that you and I are each other’s new best friend?”

  Barbara let that one go. “The story isn’t about Azhar. The story is about the Italian police and how they’re handling—or not handling or refusing to handle or whatever—Hadiyyah’s disappearance. It was about the Met not sending an officer to assist. Then it was supposed to be about the Met sending a certain, particular, you-want-a-story-on-him officer over to assist. And then it was about you getting your fat arse over to Italy to keep the pressure on. I gave you all the details you needed and all the bloody hell you had to do was to use them in a story and to follow them—and not something else, mind you—to the next story. You knew this, Mitchell.”

  He yawned loudly. Barbara wanted to dive into her mobile and beam herself into the louse’s bedroom, all the better to smack him silly. He said, “What I knew, as you put, is that you wanted a story. What I know is that you’ve got your story. Several, in fact, with more on the way. I’ve got some interesting pictures of yesterday’s scuffle with . . . I take it that was Granddad?”

  “You need to back off,” she told him, although the idea of pictures made her momentarily dizzy. “You need to sodding back off, Mitchell. These people in Ilford are not the story. A missing English girl in Italy is. There’s plenty of information on that and I’ll get it to you as it comes in and in the bloody meantime—”

  “Uh, Sergeant . . . ?” Corsico cut in. “You don’t tell me what the story is. You don’t tell me where the story is. I follow information wherever it leads and just now the information is leading to a house in Ilford and a very unhappy teenage boy.”