Just One Evil Act: A Lynley Novel

by Elizabeth George

  He went into the winery, where Lynley assumed he would remain in something of a temper until everyone was gone. But he was wrong. Instead, Lorenzo emerged with a tray of wineglasses containing his own Chianti, along with a plate bearing slices of cake. In what Lynley thought of as a quintessentially Italian moment, he distributed wine as well as cake to everyone there.

  “Grazie” was murmured as was “Salute.” Wine was sipped or it was tossed back in a gulp or two. Cake was eaten. People seemed meditative, their thoughts on the child and where she might be and how she might be.

  Only Azhar and Angelina neither ate nor drank, Angelina because she had been given no wine and she pushed the plate of cake aside with a shudder, and Azhar because as a Muslim he did not drink at all and the sight of the cake seemed to dishearten him.

  He glanced at the others, seemed to note the wineglasses in everyone’s hand, and moved his own to Angelina, saying to her, “Do you wish, Angelina . . . ?”

  She glanced—was it warily? Lynley wondered—at Lorenzo who, with the tray, was crossing the farmyard to Fanucci, Lo Bianco, and himself. She said, “Yes. Yes. I think I could do with some. Thank you, Hari,” and she took up the glass and drank with the others.

  Lorenzo turned. His gaze went to the table where his lover and her erstwhile lover sat. He took in the instant of Angelina’s drinking the wine and he cried out, “Angelina, smettila!” And then in English, “No! You know you must not.”

  They looked at each other across the farmyard. Angelina seemed frozen into place. Lynley sorted through what Mura had been trying to say to her: She wasn’t to drink and she knew why.

  No one said anything for a moment. Then Angelina finally spoke. She said, “One glass won’t hurt, Renzo. It’s fine.” Clearly, she was willing her lover to say nothing more. Just as clearly he wasn’t going to remain silent in the face of what she was apparently doing.

  He said, “No! During this time especially, it is bad. You know this.”

  And everything changed in that instant. Utter stillness fell among them. No one moved. Into this a rooster crowed suddenly and as if in response, a burst of pigeons took to the sky from the winery’s roof.

  Lynley looked from Lorenzo to Angelina to Azhar. During this time especially did, of course, have more than one meaning: During this time especially when your child is missing, it is bad to drink, for you need to have your wits about you. During this time especially when you can neither eat nor sleep, wine will go to your head too quickly. During this time especially in the presence of these people who will be watching every move that you make, it is best to remain completely sober. There were many possibilities here. But the expression on Angelina’s face said that the most wrenching of the possibilities was the one that had automatically brought the words to Lorenzo’s lips. He’d said them without thinking and there could be, realistically, only one reason: During this time especially when you are carrying a child, you must not drink.

  Angelina said quietly to Azhar, “You weren’t meant to know, Hari. I didn’t want you to know.” And then desperately, “Oh God, I’m so sorry about everything.”

  Azhar didn’t look at her. Nor did he look at Lorenzo. He didn’t, in fact, look at anyone. Rather he stared straight ahead, and there was no expression whatsoever on his face. That alone told Lynley more than any words would have done. No matter how she had devastated him during their relationship, the Pakistani man was unaccountably as much in love with Angelina Upman as he had ever been.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  “Castro’s a nonstarter” were Barbara Havers’s words to Lynley.

  His words to her were “She’s pregnant, Barbara.”

  To which she said, “Bloody sodding hell. How’s Azhar coping?”

  “He’s difficult to read.” Lynley was careful on this topic. There was little point, he reckoned, in causing Barbara grief should her feelings for the Pakistani man be deeper than she generally pretended. “I’d say the news is a shock.”

  “What about Mura?”

  “Obviously, he knows.”

  “I mean is he happy? Worried? Suspicious?”

  “About what, exactly?”

  She told him what she’d learned about Angelina Upman from her former lover Castro. She passed on his allusion to the fact that there might be yet another lover in Italy, beyond Lorenzo Mura. According to Castro, it was all part of the excitement she seemed to require, Barbara told him. Anyone there who might fill the bill as Angelina’s little bit on the side?

  He’d have to look into it, Lynley told her. Was there anything else he needed to know?

  She said nothing for a few moments, which told him there was something more. He said her name in a way that he knew would tell her it was in her best interests to fess up immediately since he would find out eventually. She revealed to him that The Source had generated another story, this one about Azhar’s desertion of his family in Ilford. She added, “But it’s nothing I can’t control,” which told him volumes about what she’d been up to with the tabloid, despite her protestations on the matter.

  He said, “Barbara . . .”

  She said, “I know, I know. Believe me, Winnie’s given me chapter and verse.”

  “If you persist—”

  “Well, I’ve started something now and I’ve got to stop it, sir.”

  Lynley didn’t know how she could. No one got between the sheets with The Source and emerged with their clothing still ironed. She should have known that. He cursed quietly.

  They rang off soon after, and he considered her words about Angelina Upman. He would have to look for another lover, someone who wanted her enough to punish her if she wouldn’t leave Mura for him.

  He’d taken the call from Barbara on Lucca’s great wall, where he’d gone to walk its perimeter and to think. He’d chosen a clockwise direction and was midway around it, at the point where a café stood offering refreshments to the scores of people who were also taking exercise up above the medieval town. He decided to stop for a coffee, and he moved towards the tables spread out beneath the leafy trees. He saw that Taymullah Azhar had evidently had the same idea. For the London professor was already at a table with a pot of tea next to him and a newspaper spread out before him.

  It would probably be an English-language paper, since Lynley had already seen them on sale at a kiosk in Piazza dei Cocomeri, which adjoined one of the few uncurving streets in the town. He reckoned it was a local paper for visitors, and so it seemed to be. He gave a quick look at it as he asked Azhar if he could join him. The Grapevine, it was called—more a magazine than a paper—and he saw that either Azhar or the local police had managed to get a story about Hadiyyah’s disappearance into it. Her picture was there, along with the simple headline Missing. This was good, he thought. Every avenue was being used to find her.

  He wondered if Azhar knew that, in London, The Source was exposing the story of his family situation. He said nothing to him about it. Chances were good he was going to be told by someone eventually. Lynley didn’t see the point of that someone being himself.

  Azhar folded the paper and moved his chair to accommodate Lynley’s bringing another to the table. Lynley ordered a coffee, sat, and gazed at the other man. He said, “The television appeal will turn up something. There’ll be dozens of phone calls to the police, and most of them will be rubbish. But one of them, perhaps two or three, will give us something. Meantime, Barbara is continuing to work several angles in England. There’s hope, Azhar.”

  Azhar nodded. Lynley reckoned that the other man knew how hope grew dimmer as each day passed. But that hope could be renewed in an instant. All it would take was a single person making a connection with something he’d seen or heard, without even knowing before the television appeal that he’d seen or heard it. That was the nature of an investigation. A memory got jogged along the way.

  He told all this to Hadiy
yah’s father, who nodded again. Then he said to Azhar, “None of us knew she’s pregnant. Now that we do know . . .” He hesitated.

  Azhar had no expression on his face. He said, “Yes?”

  “It’s something that has to be taken on board. Along with everything else.”

  “And the relevance . . . ?”

  Lynley looked away. The café was situated on one of the ramparts of Lucca’s wall, and beyond it a group of children kicked a football on the lawn, shoving one another and laughing, slipping in the grass, shouting out. No adult was with them. They thought they were safe. Children usually did.

  He said, “If, perhaps, it’s not Lorenzo’s child . . .”

  “Whose else would it be? She left me for him. He’s giving to her what I would not.”

  “On the surface it seems so. But because she was with Mura while she was with you, there’s a chance that now she’s with him, perhaps another man exists for her.”

  Azhar shook his head. “She would not.”

  Lynley considered what he knew of Angelina and what Azhar knew of the woman. People didn’t change their colours rapidly, he knew. Where she had strayed once for the excitement of having a secret lover, she could stray again. But he didn’t argue the point.

  Azhar said, “I should have expected this.”

  “Expected . . . ?”

  “The pregnancy. The fact that she left me. I should have understood that she would move on when I did not give her what she wanted.”

  “What was that?”

  “First that I divorce Nafeeza. When I would not, then that Hadiyyah could at least meet her siblings. When I would not allow that, then that we should have another child. To these things I said no and no and absolutely no. I should have seen what the result would be. I drove her to all of this. What else, really, was she to do? We were happy, she and I. We had each other and we had Hadiyyah. She’d said at first that marriage was something unimportant to her. But then it changed. Or she changed. Or I did. I don’t know.”

  “She might not have changed at all,” Lynley told him. “Could it be that you never really saw her well? People are sometimes blind to others. They believe what they want to believe about them because to believe something else . . . It’s far too painful.”

  “And you mean . . . ?”

  There was no choice but to tell him, Lynley thought. He said, “Azhar, she had another lover, Esteban Castro, while she was with you. She asked me not to tell you, but we’re at the point where every possible avenue needs to be travelled and her other lovers comprise one of those avenues.”

  He said stiffly, “Where? When?”

  “As I said, when she was with you.”

  Lynley saw him swallow. “Because I would not—”

  “No. I don’t think so. I think, perhaps, she preferred things this way. Having more than one man at a time. Tell me. Was she with someone else when you first met her?”

  “Yes, but she left him. For me. She left him.” But for the first time, he sounded doubtful. He glanced at Lynley. “So you’re saying that now if there’s another man, beyond Lorenzo, and if Lorenzo knows this, has discovered this . . . But what has any of this to do with Hadiyyah? That I do not see, Inspector.”

  “Nor do I, at the moment. But I’ve found over time that people do extraordinary things when their passions are deeply involved. Love, lust, jealousy, hate, the need for revenge. People do extraordinary things.”

  Azhar looked into the town beneath them. He was quiet, as if in prayer. He said simply, “I just want my daughter. The rest of this . . . I no longer care.”

  Lynley believed the first. He wasn’t sure about the second.

  25 April

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  The television appeal made the story enormous. Missing children were always news in any of the Italian provinces. Missing attractive children were significant news. But missing attractive foreign children whose disappearances brought to the doorstep of the Italian police representatives from New Scotland Yard . . . This was enough to attract the attention of journalists from far and wide. Shortly after the television appeal, they set up shop in what for them was the most logical location, as close to the questura as they could get since the action in the case was most likely to occur there. They blocked traffic on the way to the train station; they blocked the pavements on both sides of the street; they generally made a nuisance of themselves.

  The “action in the case” was mostly defined by the police questioning of suspects. Guided by the public minister, Prima Voce had made its selection of prime suspect. The other newspapers were going along, and the hapless Carlo Casparia was finally where Piero Fanucci wanted someone—anyone—to be: under the journalistic microscope. Prima Voce was going as far as to ask the telling question: When will someone step forward as witness and name a certain drug addict in this case of the disappeared bella bambina?

  Soon enough someone did just that. An Albanian scarf vendor in the mercato experienced a jog to his memory, effected by both the television appeal with its photographs of the missing child and by Fanucci’s fiery sermon during that television appeal. This individual had, thus, phoned the questura with what he hoped was information relevant to the child’s disappearance: He had seen her pass by on her way out of the mercato, and he was certain that he had seen Carlo Casparia rise from his kneeling Ho fame position and follow the girl.

  Salvatore Lo Bianco was completely unconvinced that the scarf vendor had seen anything at all, but after thinking about it for a moment, he did see how this new piece of information might be useful. So he dutifully reported it to Fanucci. Il Pubblico Ministero declared his intention to interview Carlo Casparia personally, as Salvatore had hoped he would. By the time several officers had rounded up the young man and herded him into the questura, Fanucci was waiting to grill him like the martyred St. Lawrence, and representatives from seven newspapers and three television channels were gathered in the street. They already knew Casparia was inside the questura, which told Salvatore that someone was feeding them information. He was fairly sure it was Fanucci himself since massaging his reputation for quickly bringing criminal matters to a conclusion was dear to the magistrato’s heart.

  Salvatore almost hated to put the drug-addled Casparia through another interrogation. But it bought him time by keeping Fanucci occupied. And il Pubblico Ministero was very well occupied handling this new interrogation of the addict, as things turned out. He roared, he paced, he breathed garlic into Casparia’s face, he announced that the young man had been seen following this child from the mercato and it was time he told the police what he’d done with her.

  Carlo, of course, denied everything. He looked at Fanucci with eyes so bright that he seemed to have light bulbs inside his head. They gave the instantaneous impression that Casparia was extraordinarily alert. The truth was he was high. It was anyone’s guess if he even remembered what child Fanucci was talking about. He asked the magistrato what he would possibly want with a little girl? Fanucci pointed out that it was not what he might have wanted with her but what he actually did with her that was the question they wanted answered.

  “You handed her over to someone for money. Where? Who was this person? How was this arrangement made?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about” brought a slap on the back of the head from Fanucci as he paced behind Casparia’s chair.

  “You’ve stopped begging in the mercato. Why?” was where he went next.

  “Because I can’t make a move without the police pouncing on me” was Casparia’s explanation, after which he put his head in his arms and said, “Let me sleep, man. I was trying to sleep when you—”

  Fanucci pulled the youth upright by his filthy bronze-coloured hair and said, “Bugiardo! Bugiardo! You no longer go to the mercato because you have no need of money. You got what you needed when you passed the girl on to another.
Where is she? It’s in your interests to tell me now because the police will be going over every inch of those stables where you live. You didn’t know that, did you? Let me tell you this, you miserable stronzo, when we come up with evidence that she was held there—one of her hairs, one of her fingerprints, a shred of a garment, a hair ribbon, anything—your trouble will be bigger than anything you’ve ever imagined in that thick head of yours.”

  “I didn’t take her.”

  “Then why did you follow her?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe I was just leaving the mercato.”

  “Earlier than usual? Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even remember if I left at all. Maybe I was going to take a piss.”

  “Maybe you were going to grab this pretty one by the arm and march her over to—”

  “In your dreams, man.”

  Fanucci pounded the table in front of the young man. “You’ll sit here till you tell me the truth,” he roared.

  Salvatore used this moment to slip out of the room. He could see that Fanucci would be entertained for hours. He found himself oddly grateful to poor Carlo. He himself could now get something done while Fanucci concentrated on getting “the truth” out of him.

  The reality was that they’d had more than one call after the television appeal. They’d had dozens of calls and dozens of putative sightings of little Hadiyyah. Now that Fanucci was absorbed with his questioning of Carlo Casparia, the police could, in peace, sort through the information that was coming in. Something within it might be worth pursuing.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Something indeed turned up one hour into Fanucci’s interrogation of the drug addict. An officer tracked down Salvatore as he was waiting for a stained Moka to finish brewing its viscous caffè over the gas flame in the coffee room. There’d been a sighting of a flashy red car in the hills above Pomezzana, he reported to Salvatore. This sighting had been memorable to the caller for several reasons.