Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  The man himself was enthroned within the place, enshrouded in a black plastic cape from shoulders to feet. His head was covered with whatever substance turned his hair from capelli castagni to the promised dorati. When they came upon him, he was deeply involved in reading a novel, a book whose traditional yellow cover announced it as a crime story.

  Salvatore took it out of his hands as preamble to their discussion. “Michelangelo,” he said pleasantly, “are you getting some pointers, my friend?” He felt, rather than saw, Thomas Lynley glance curiously in his direction. It was time, he decided, to tell the London man exactly who Di Massimo was.

  He did it by way of introduction, emphasising Lynley’s position at New Scotland Yard and revealing in a friendly fashion the London detective’s purpose in coming to Italy. No doubt, he said, Michelangelo had heard of the missing child from Lucca, non è vero? He couldn’t imagine a private investigator of Di Massimo’s stature to be uninterested in a case such as this one since, above everything else that made it intriguing, the man who stood in place of the missing child’s father was, like Di Massimo, a player of football.

  Di Massimo plucked the book back from Salvatore’s hands. He was unrattled. He said, “As you have eyes, you can see I’m in the middle of something here, Chief Inspector.”

  “Ah, yes, the hair,” Salvatore said. “It was what made you so distinctive to the hotels and pensioni, Miko.” He was aware of Lynley next to him adjusting to the new information. He felt a slight twinge that he hadn’t told the English detective from the first about what he knew of Michelangelo Di Massimo’s profession, but he didn’t want the information relayed to the parents of the girl and, from them, to Lorenzo Mura. The risk was too great, and he hadn’t known whether he could trust Lynley to hold his tongue.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Pisan said.

  “What I’m talking about is your presence—in my city, Miko—seeking from one hotel to the next information about a woman from London and her daughter. You even had a photo of them. Does this rattle the cage bars of your memory, my friend, or will a trip to the questura be necessary to do so?”

  “It seems someone hired you to find them, signore,” Lynley said. “And now one of them is missing, which doesn’t look good. For you, that is.”

  “I know nothing of missing women and children,” Di Massimo said. “And the fact that someone thinks I was looking for them at one time or another . . . ? It could have been anyone. You know that.”

  “Described such as yourself?” Salvatore asked. “Miko, how many men can be said to combine the physical attributes that blend in you so well?”

  “Ask the parrucchiere,” the Pisan advised. “Ask anyone here. They will tell you Di Massimo isn’t the only man who chooses to alter the colour of his hair.”

  “Vero,” Salvatore said. “But perhaps the number of these men who also wear black leather”—and here he toed the plastic cape to one side to reveal Di Massimo’s trousers—“and whose whiskers sprout from his face as if in a contest to grow a full beard by this evening . . . ? I would suggest, Miko, that these two details alone set you above the others. We add to that your possession of a photo of a girl and her mother. We add to that your employment. We add to that your membership on the squadra di calcio and the fact that this team will have, from time to time, played matches against the team from Lucca . . .”

  “Calcio?” Di Massimo asked. “What has calcio to do with anything?”

  “Lorenzo Mura. Angelina Upman. The missing child. They are all connected and something has told me that you know this.”

  “You’re fishing and your bait is off the hook,” Di Massimo said.

  “We shall see if that’s the case, Miko, when you stand in an identity parade and the witnesses from the hotels who have identified you have a chance to see you once again. When that happens—as I assure you it will—you might then regret your reluctance to speak to us now. Il Pubblico Ministero, by the way, will be most interested in speaking to you once those witnesses have confirmed that the man who came into their hotels in his black leather trousers and his black leather jacket with his yellow hair and his very black eyebrows—”

  “Basta,” Di Massimo snapped. “I was asked to locate them, the girl and her mother. That is all. I search Pisa first: the hotels, the pensioni, even the convents that rent out rooms. Then I broaden the search.”

  “Why Lucca?” Lynley asked the man.

  His eyes became hooded as he considered the question and, apparently, what it would reveal if he answered it.

  “Why Lucca?” Salvatore repeated. “And who hired you, Michelangelo?”

  “There was a bank transaction that I was told about. It came from Lucca, so I went to Lucca. You know how it works, Chief Inspector. One thing leads to another and the investigator follows trails. That’s it.”

  “A bank transaction?” Salvatore said. “Who told you about a bank transaction? What kind of bank transaction, Miko?”

  “A transfer of money. That’s all I knew. The money started in Lucca. It ended in London.”

  “And who hired you?” Lynley asked the man. “When were you hired?”

  “In January,” Michelangelo said.

  “By whom?”

  “He’s called Dwayne Doughty. He hired me to find the girl. And that, Chief Inspector, is all I know. I did a job for him. I looked for a child who was supposed to be in the company of her mother. I had a photo of them, so I did what anyone searching would do: I went to the hotels and the pensioni. If that’s a crime, arrest me now. If it isn’t, let me go back to reading my book in peace.”

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Lynley rang Barbara Havers as he and Lo Bianco made the trip back to Lucca. He reached her deep into attempting to transcribe an action report for an officer whose cursive she was finding illegible. She sounded irritated and in need of nicotine. For the first time Lynley wouldn’t have minded her lighting up. He knew she would need to once he imparted the information he now had about Dwayne Doughty.

  There was a moment of silence when he told her: The London private investigator had hired a Pisa private investigator to track down Angelina Upman and her daughter in Lucca. This investigator had begun his work for Doughty in January, four months earlier. To her “Bloody hell, he lied to me!” Lynley added that a bank account was involved, as was a transfer of money from Lucca to London. “Doughty has apparently known a great deal more than he’s been telling you, Barbara,” Lynley said.

  “He’s working for me,” she fumed. “He’s bloody goddamn working for me!”

  “You’ll need to have a word.”

  “Oh, I bloody know that,” she barked. “When I get my hands on the sodding worm—”

  “Just don’t do it now. Don’t leave the office. And if I might suggest . . . ?”

  “What? Because if you think I’m handing this little matter over to someone else, you’re bleeding from your ears.”

  “I wasn’t heading there,” he told her. “But you might want to take Winston with you if you’re going to confront this bloke.”

  “I don’t need protection, Inspector.”

  “Believe me, I know. But the cachet of authority that Winston will lend to an interview . . . ? Not to mention the implied threat of his presence . . . ? You do need that. These aren’t the most cooperative of blokes, Barbara. Doughty might need convincing in the matter of talking if he’s been hiding details from you.”

  She agreed to this, and they rang off. Lynley told Lo Bianco who Doughty was and how he had fitted into the search for Hadiyyah from the previous November. Lo Bianco whistled and shot him a look. “For an Englishman to have taken the child,” he said, “this would have been an easier matter.”

  “Only as to language,” Lynley pointed out. “Because if the Englishman doesn’t live in Lucca or somewhere nearby . . . Where would he have taken her?”

  At the questura, they quickly learned that there was an additional development. As it happened,
a tourist using a local apartment in Piazza San Alessandro as a base for her trip to Tuscany had been in the mercato on the day of Hadiyyah’s disappearance. She was an American woman travelling with her daughter, both of them students of the Italian language, neither of them fluent, but both in town to practise as much as they could. So they read the tabloids as well as the newspapers, they watched the television and tried to understand what was being said, and they talked to the cittadini of the town. They’d seen the appeal on the news, and they’d looked through the thousand or more digital photos they’d taken in Tuscany to see if there was anything among them that might be of help to the police. They’d located the photos they’d taken in the mercato on the day that the child went missing, and they’d cooperatively delivered the memory cards from their digital cameras so that the police could examine the pictures. They’d included a message along with the memory cards: Should the police wish to question the photographers themselves, they would be that day taking in the beauties of Palazzo Pfanner.

  Lo Bianco sent for someone who knew what to do with memory cards from cameras, compact discs, computers, and getting the photographs onto a monitor’s screen. There turned out to be nearly two hundred that the American and her daughter had taken in the mercato. Lynley and the chief inspector began to go through them, studying each to see if Hadiyyah was featured in any, looking for the reappearance of anyone from one picture to the next. Especially they looked for Michelangelo Di Massimo. He would, after all, be unmistakable.

  They found Lorenzo Mura doing his weekly shop at a bancarella featuring cheese. They found him at another featuring meat. At this one a great pig’s head on the counter looked, unappetisingly, like something directly out of Lord of the Flies, and Mura was gazing to his left in the direction, Lo Bianco said, of Porta San Jacopo and the accordion player. They scrutinised every picture that Lo Bianco identified as being in the vicinity of that musician. Finally, they came upon two in which Hadiyyah could be seen, at the front of the crowd listening to the music and watching the man’s poodle doing its dance.

  The focal point of the picture was the dancing dog, not Hadiyyah, so she wasn’t entirely in focus. But it was an easy matter to enlarge the picture on the screen so that the detectives could see that it was unmistakably her. To her right stood an old woman in the black of a widow, while on her left huddled three teenage girls engaged in lighting two cigarettes from the burning tobacco of a third.

  Di Massimo was nowhere. But a handsome, dark-haired man stood directly behind Hadiyyah, and although his gaze, like everyone else’s, was on the poodle and its master, he was reaching for something inside his jacket. Two pictures along they saw what it was. By enlarging it, they had a better image to deal with. It appeared to be a greeting card of some kind, on its front a depiction of the universal yellow smiley face. There was no photo showing exactly what he’d done with the card. There was, however, a picture of Hadiyyah bending to the accordion player’s basket and putting something in it with her right hand while, in her left, she held something that could have been the card from the earlier photo.

  And then . . . nothing more. There were other pictures of the accordion player, of the dancing dog, and of the crowd in attendance. But Hadiyyah was not in them. Nor was the man.

  “It could be nothing,” Lo Bianco said, stepping away from the monitor and going to look out of the window, which faced not only Viale Cavour but also the restless journalists gathered there.

  “Do you believe that?” Lynley asked him.

  Lo Bianco looked at him. “I do not,” he said.

  BOW

  LONDON

  Winston hadn’t jumped on the rolling wagon of Barbara’s intentions immediately. She didn’t understand why until they finally reached Bow and had parked in front of Bangla Halal Grocers, where a sign offered Bangladeshi King Size Fish and two men in long white robes and tatted headgear gazed upon Barbara’s old Mini with undisguised suspicion. There, Winston didn’t unfold himself from the sagging seat at once, as Barbara had expected of him, considering the discomfort in which he’d had to ride all the way from Victoria. Instead, he said to her, “You got to be told something, Barb. He’s checkin your story.”

  So caught up was she in trying to decide how she was going to make Doughty pay for his investigative crimes against her that she thought at first he meant the Bow detective. But when he went on, she understood that Winston was passing along information that had come to him via Dorothea Harriman, and this information had nothing to do with Dwayne Doughty and his questionable ethics.

  “Dee says he asked her to look into where your mum was taken when she fell. She says he asked her would she do it on the sly. If no A-and-E has a record of her and no ambulance company has a record of transportin her, he’s goin to use it against you. Tha’s the story Dee had.”

  Barbara swore. “Why didn’t she come to me? At least I could’ve rung Mrs. Flo to cook up a story.”

  “’Spect Dee’s that worried ’bout her own job, Barb. He sees her talkin to you, he even gets word she’s talked to you, we both know what he’s goin to think. She’s bidin her time before she gets on it—the ambulance and A-and-E business—but he’s goin to be lookin for some answers soon and she’s goin to have to tell him something. And when she tells him whatever she tells him, you know ’s well as I do that he’s goin to take steps to confirm.”

  Barbara thunked her head against the driver’s window. How to proceed was the question. She answered it by saying, “Hang on, then,” to Winston, and by making a phone call to Florence Magentry in Greenford. That good woman was going to have to lie for her, she was going to have to do so convincingly, and Barbara could see no way around it.

  “Oh my dear, my dear,” she said hesitantly when Barbara laid out the facts for her via mobile as Winston looked on, frowning. “I will, of course, if you think I must. A fall, an ambulance, the casualty ward . . . ? Of course, of course. But, Barbara, may I say . . . ?”

  Barbara girded herself for protest. She wanted to declare that she had no choice, that she had to protect herself, that if she did not do so she would not be able to keep her mother in the secure and caring place of lodging that Mrs. Flo provided because she’d be without a job. But she said, “Yeah. Go on,” and she waited for Mrs. Flo to say what she needed to say.

  It was, “Sometimes, my dear, if we tempt fate this way . . . It’s not a good thing, is it? What I’m trying to say is that declaring something like this—a fall, broken bones, an ambulance, casualty—”

  Barbara had never taken her mother’s carer to be superstitious, so she said, “You’re saying that wishing makes things so? Well, I’m not wishing. I’m just saying. And if I don’t ‘say’ something, I’m up to my neck . . . Look, a secretary from the Met will ring you, Mrs. Flo. Then a DI called Stewart’ll ring you as well. You just need to tell them both that yes, Mum fell, and yes, an ambulance took her to casualty, and that’s all you know since you rang me and I got onto all the rest.” That would, she thought, buy her time to sort this mess out.

  Up above Bedlovers, Doughty was waiting for her, as she’d phoned him and told him that—all things related to the law considered—it was in his best interests to stay put until she and he had a little confab together. She didn’t mention Winston, and she noted with gratification that Doughty blanched slightly when the impressive black detective followed her into the room and blocked any escape from it. She introduced the two men. Winston meaningfully locked his eyeballs on to Doughty. Barbara then got down to business. The business was money transferred from Lucca to London. The business was hiring a Pisan called Michelangelo Di Massimo.

  “You hired this bloke in January,” she declared. “So let’s start with how you uncovered the information about a money transfer in the first place.”

  “I don’t reveal—”

  “Do not attempt that rubbish with me. You’ve been playing fast and loose from the first, and if you’d like to remain a private investigator and not end up in the local
nick, then you’re going to talk.”

  Doughty was sitting behind his desk. He glanced at Winston, who stood at the door. He glanced at a metal filing cabinet, at the artificial plant covering its top surface. That, Barbara reckoned now, had to be where he had a camera that broadcast whatever went on in his office to his colleague in the other room.

  “All right. Another bank account was uncovered,” Doughty finally said.

  “Who uncovered it? How? Who’s your blagger? Because that’s how you did it, isn’t it, and I expect it’s your ‘associate’ Ms. Cass who was ringing round credit card companies and banks pretending to be Angelina. Or her sister. She looked like a bird with as many talents as pores, so sweet-talking someone—”

  “I’m not saying a word about Emily Cass,” he said. “We use various means at our disposal to uncover information.”

  “Computer hacking as well, I expect. That ‘computer expert’ you told us about is someone who breaks and enters computer systems as easily as tumbling locks. And he or she knows someone who knows someone who knows someone else . . . Do you know how much trouble I could put you in, Mr. Doughty?”

  “I’m attempting to cooperate,” he said. “I learned there was a bank account here in London, an account held in the name Bathsheba Ward but in a branch nowhere near her home or her work. I found this curious and did a little . . . work on it. In . . . in time, let’s say, I discovered that funds had been wired from another account, this one in Lucca. I needed someone in Italy to trace that account and to see who was at the other end of this wired money.”

  “Michelangelo Di Massimo was your man in Italy, then?”

  “He was.” Doughty pushed back from his desk. He went to the filing cabinet, made an adjustment to the artificial plant, and opened a drawer. He riffled through some files till he found what he wanted. He handed it over. It was slim enough, but it contained a copy of the report he’d written. Barbara read this quickly to see it contained the information he’d just supplied her, along with the name, the address, and the email of the private investigator in Pisa whom DI Lynley and the Italian chief inspector had interviewed that day.