Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  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 Hadiyyah’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.

  “Perché?” Salvatore listened to the Moka’s final burbling. He reached for a marginally clean cup on the shelf above the sink, gave it a quick rinse and quick wipe, and poured the coffee. Perfetto, he thought. Bitter and coal-coloured. Just the way he liked it.

  First, he was told, the convertible top on the car was down. The caller—this was a man who identified himself as Mario Germano, on his way to see his mamma in the village of Fornovolasco—saw the vehicle parked beneath some chestnut trees in a lay-by, and his first thought was that it was foolish to leave a car like that parked with its top down where anyone could come along and play mischief with it. So he’d given the car a second look as he drove by, and that brought them to the second reason Signor Germano remembered the car.

  “Sì?” Salvatore sipped the coffee. He leaned against the counter and waited for more. It was soon in coming, and it made the coffee turn to bile in his mouth.

  A man was leading a child away from the car and into the woods, the officer said. Signor Germano saw them and assumed that it was a father leading his child to relieve herself out of sight of the road.

  “Why did he assume it was a father and child? Is he sure the child was female?” Salvatore asked.

  Truth be told, Signor Germano wasn’t completely sure about the sex of the child, but he thinks it was a little girl. And he assumed it was a father and child because . . . well, what else would it have been? Why would anyone assume anything else but an innocent drive in the hills on a sunny afternoon, interrupted momentarily by a child’s need to squat in the bushes out of sight?

  “This Signor Germano,” Salvatore asked, “is he certain about the sighting?”

  He was indeed because he visited his mamma on a regular schedule.

  “And he takes the same route every time?”

  Sì, sì, sì. The route is in the Apuan Alps, and it’s the only road to get to his mamma’s village.

  It was too much to hope for that Signor Germano would remember in which lay-by the red car had been parked, and he did not remember. But since he’d been on his way to his mamma’s village, the lay-by was, naturally, somewhere along the mountain road in advance of that place.

  Salvatore nodded. This was progress indeed. It could be nothing at all, but he had a feeling this was not so. He dispatched two officers to fetch Signor Germano and to drive him into the Apuan Alps on the route to his mamma’s village. If his memory was jogged as to the correct lay-by, excellent. If his memory failed him, then every lay-by would have to be checked. For the point was not the lay-by itself but the shrubbery beyond it, as well as the woods and any trail leading into the woods. Salvatore didn’t want to think that the child might have been disposed of in the Alps, but every day that passed without word about a ransom and without finding her alive made that possibility ever more likely.

  His order to the officers was to hold close this information about the red car in the Alps. The only people to be told would be the parents, he said. And they would be told only that a possible sighting was being looked into as there was no need to cause them further distress about a man leading a child into the woods until the police knew if this was, indeed, a relevant piece to the puzzle. Meantime, he said, he wanted an officer looking into all the car hire agencies from Pisa to Lucca. If a red convertible had been hired by someone, he wanted to know who, he wanted to know when, and he wanted to know for how long. And not a word about any of this, chiaro? he said. The last thing he wanted was Fanucci getting hold of the information and leaking it to the press.

  PISA

  TUSCANY

  Salvatore decided that it was time to have a word with Michelangelo Di Massimo. He also decided that the presence of New Scotland Yard, in addition to his own presence, might go some distance towards rattling the man. Since he’d been in Lucca looking for Angelina Upman and her daughter, he was the best lead they had. While it was true that he rode a motorcycle—a powerful Ducati, according to the records that Salvatore had dipped into—there was nothing to stop him from borrowing a vehicle from another, nor was there anything to stop him from hiring one for a single day to take him first into Lucca and then into the Apuan Alps.

  He rang DI Lynley and then fetched him at Porta di Borgo, one of the surviving gates of the internal, older walls that had once encircled the town. The London man had walked the short distance from the anfiteatro. He was waiting just outside the arch, flipping through the pages of Prima Voce. He slid into the passenger’s seat and said in his careful Italian, “The tabloids are choosing your drug addict, it seems.”

  Salvatore chuckled. “They must choose someone. It is their way.”

  “Or, if they don’t have a suspect, they go after the police, yes?” Lynley said.

  Salvatore glanced in his direction and smiled. “They will do what they will do,” he said.

  “May I ask: Is someone leaking to the papers?”

  “Come un rubinetto che perde acqua,” Salvatore told him. “But this faucet’s dripping has them well occupied. Their concentration on Carlo keeps them away from what we’re doing and what we know.”

  “What’s made you decide to talk to him now?” Lynley asked, in reference to Michelangelo Di Massimo.

  Salvatore made the turn that would take them to Piazza Santa Maria del Borgo. It was crowded here, as usual, a combination of parcheggio for tour buses and milling tourist groups trying to orient themselves in the town as the bright sunlight fell upon their shoulders. At the piazza’s north side, Porta Santa Maria gave Salvatore access to the viale that encircled the town. They would take this roadway to navigate quickly round the wall and glide over to the autostrada.

  He told Lynley about the reported sig
hting in the Apuan Alps: a red convertible, a child, a man, their heading into the woods together. Lynley said astutely, “And this man . . . was he blond?”

  Salvatore said, “This we do not know from the sighting.”

  “But it would seem . . .” Lynley looked doubtful. “With someone looking as Di Massimo looks, that would have been noticed certainly?”

  “Who knows what will be remembered from one moment to the next, eh, Ispettore?” Salvatore said. “You may be right and our journey to Pisa may be for nothing, but the facts remain: He was looking for them in Lucca and he plays football for Pisa, so we have a possible connection between him and Mura. If that means something, it is time we learned what. I have a feeling about this Di Massimo.”

  He didn’t tell the London man the rest of what he knew about Di Massimo just then. But there were reasons beyond the man’s ridiculous blond hair that Salvatore knew who the Pisan was.

  Michelangelo Di Massimo had an office along the river in Pisa, walking distance from Campo dei Miracoli as well as from the university. There were people who found this section of the city reminiscent of Venice, but Salvatore had never been able to see it. The only things Venice and this part of Pisa had in common were water and ancient palazzi. In Pisa, the first was sluggish and unclean, and the second were uninspiring. No one, he thought, would be writing poetry about Pisa’s riverside anytime soon.

  When they reached the building that held Di Massimo’s home and office—which were one and the same—there was no answer when Salvatore rang the bell. But at the tobacconist two doors away, they discovered that the Pisan was having his regular hair appointment. They would find him, they were told, in an establishment called Desiderio Dorato, not far from the university. It was a name that Di Massimo had obviously taken straight into his heart.