Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  “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 the 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 caug
ht 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 he 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.”

  So he had got to Sayyid, Barbara thought bitterly. Who bloody knew where he’d go next?

  “You’re using that kid to—”

  “He needed to vent. I let him vent. I needed a story. He gave me a story. This is a reciprocal relationship Sayyid and I have. Mutually beneficial. Just like yours and mine.”

  “You and I have no relationship.”

  “But we do. And it’s growing every day.”

  Barbara felt someone tapping skeletal fingers on her spine. “Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

  “For now it means I’m following a story. You might not love the direction it’s heading in. You might want to direct its course a bit. You might need to give me more information in order to do that and when you give me that information—”

  “If, not when.”

  “When,” he repeated, “you give me that information, I’ll be happy to take a look at it or have a listen to it and I’ll decide if it constitutes a train I can climb on. That’s how it works.”

  “How it works—” she began, but he cut in.

  “You don’t get to decide that, Barb. At first you did, but now you don’t. Like I said, our relationship is growing. Changing. Developing. This could be a marriage made in heaven. If we both play our cards right,” he added.

  The skeletal fingers felt as if they would close on her neck and choke off her breath. She said, “Watch yourself, Mitchell. Because I swear to God, if you’re threatening me, you’re going to be bloody sorry about it.”

  “Threatening you?” Corsico laughed with a complete lack of humour. “That would never happen, Barb.” Then he rang off, leaving Barbara standing in Chalk Farm Road with a copy of The Source’s latest edition in one hand, her mobile phone in the other, cars whizzing by as drivers made their way to work, and pedestrians pushing past her as they made their way to the Underground station.

  She knew she ought to join the latter group. She had barely enough time to get to work in order to avoid the baleful eye and meticulous note-taking of DI John Stewart. But she needed an immediate injection of caffeine and pastry into her body in order to be able to cope—let alone think—so she decided that DI Stewart and the assignment he would doubtless give her that day—more transcription please, Sergeant, as we’re having such a time keeping up with the action reports coming in every hour—would have to wait. She ducked into a recently opened establishment called Cuppa Joe Etc. She purchased a latte and an et cetera, which in this case was a chocolate croissant. God knew she was owed both, after the conversation with Corsico.

  When her mobile chimed the opening lines of “Peggy Sue” two bites into the chocolate croissant and three gulps of latte later, Barbara hoped it was Corsico having a change of mind rather than a change of heart since the bloke apparently didn’t own a heart. But it turned out to be Lynley. Barbara’s insides did flip-flops at the possibilities attendant to a phone call from him.

  She answered with, “Good news?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Oh God. No.”

  “No, no,” Lynley said hastily. “Neither good nor bad news. Just some intriguing information that wants checking out.”

  He told her of his meeting with Azhar and his subsequent meeting with Angelina Upman. He told her of the existence of yet another married lover of Angelina’s—in addition to Azhar, this one also in London—being left for Lorenzo Mura.

  “D’you mean she was having it off with this bloke while she and Azhar . . . I mean after she had Hadiyyah by Azhar and . . . I mean once Azhar had left his wife . . . I mean . . . Hell, I don’t bloody know what I mean.”

  Yes, Lynley said to it all. This man was a fellow dancer and choreographer in London with whom Angelina had been involved at the time she met Lorenzo Mura. And at that time, she also was the lover of Azhar and the mother of his child. The bloke was called Esteban Castro, and according to Angelina Upman, she merely disappeared from his life, giving him no word why. One day she was there in his bed, the next day she was gone, having left him—and Azhar—for Mura. His wife was a friend of hers as well. So both of these people would need to be checked out. For perhaps during the brief four months of Angelina’s putative return to Azhar, she’d taken up with Castro again as well, only to leave him another time.

  “But Barbara,” Lynley told her, “this must be done on your own time, not on the Met’s time.”
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br />   “But the guv’ll let me get onto this if you ask her, won’t she?” Barbara said. After all, Lynley and Isabelle Ardery hadn’t parted enemies from their own affair. They were both professionals, after all. DI Lynley had been sent to Italy on a case. If he rang and asked her in his most pear-shaped of I’ve-gone-to-Eton tones—

  “I did ring her,” he said. “I asked her if she might lend me you to look into this end of things in London. She won’t allow it, Barbara.”

  “Because you asked for me,” Barbara said bitterly. “’F you’d asked for Winston, she’d be all over herself to cooperate. We both know that.”

  “We didn’t go in that direction,” he said. “I could have asked for Winston but I assumed you’d prefer to do this, no matter when it had to be done.”

  There was truth in that. Barbara knew she ought to be grateful to Lynley for having recognised how important it was to her to be kept in the loop of what was going on. So she said, “I s’pose. Thanks, sir.”

  He said wryly, “Don’t overwhelm me with your gratitude, Sergeant. I’m not certain I could bear it.”

  She had to smile. “I’m tap-dancing on the tabletop here. If you could only see.”

  “Where are you?”

  She told him.

  “You’re going to be late into work,” he said. “Barbara, at some point you have to stop giving Isabelle ammunition.”

  “That’s what Winston’s been saying, more or less.”

  “And he’s correct. Having a professional death wish isn’t the best of ideas.”

  “Right,” she said. “Whatever. Point taken. Anything else?” She was about to ask him how things were going in the direction of Daidre Trahair, but she knew there was little point in this since Lynley wouldn’t tell her. There were lines between them that nothing on earth could make the bloke cross.

  “There is,” he said. “Bathsheba Ward.” He went on to tell her about the emails that Bathsheba had apparently written at the request of her twin sister, emails purportedly from Taymullah Azhar from University College to his daughter in Italy.