Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  He said to Lorenzo, “I’d like a few minutes alone with Angelina, if you don’t mind, Signor Mura.”

  Mura apparently did mind. He said, “We have no secrets from each other, Angelina and I. What you say to her can be said to me.”

  “I understand that,” Lynley said. “But because of our previous conversation—yours and mine . . . ?” Let the man think that what he had to say to Angelina Upman involved her health and getting her to town to see a doctor, Lynley thought. Anything to have the Italian man remove himself for a few minutes of conversation that, he suspected, would only be entirely honest if Mura absented himself from it.

  He did so, although with marked reluctance. He bent to Angelina first, and he kissed the top of her head. He said, “Cara,” quietly and then he left the loggia. He headed in the direction of the gates to the drive and the work that was going on beyond the tall hedge that marked off the old villa’s immediate grounds from the rest of the fattoria.

  Angelina turned her head to him by rolling it his way on the headrest of the chaise longue. She said, “What is it, Inspector Lynley? Is it about Hari? I know you can see . . . Renzo has no reason to be jealous of him. I give him no reason, and he has no reason. But the fact that Hari and I have a child . . . It’s created a bond where he’d prefer there be none.”

  “I daresay that’s normal,” Lynley said. “He’s uneasy, unsure of where he stands with you.”

  “I try to make it clear to him. He’s the one. He’s the . . . the endgame for me. But culturally . . . my past with other men . . . I think that’s what makes it difficult.”

  “I have to ask this,” Lynley said, moving his wicker chair closer to her. “I hope you understand. Every avenue regarding Hadiyyah’s disappearance has to be explored, and this is one of them.”

  She looked alarmed when she said, “What is it?”

  “Your other lovers.”

  “What other lovers?”

  “Here, in Italy.”

  “There are no—”

  “Forgive me. It’s a question of the past being a form of prologue, if you understand. My concern is that if you were involved with Esteban Castro while you were also seeing Lorenzo and still living with Azhar . . . I hope you can see how that leads to the assumption that there might be others that you’ve been unwilling to mention in front of Lorenzo.”

  Her cheeks flushed with the first colour he’d seen upon them since mounting the steps to the loggia. “What’s this to do with Hadiyyah, Inspector?”

  “I think it has more to do with how a man might act to wound you if he discovered he wasn’t your only lover. And that has everything to do with Hadiyyah.”

  She met his gaze for a moment so that, he assumed, he could read her face as she spoke. “There are no other lovers, Inspector Lynley. And if you want me to swear to it, I’m happy to do so. There is only Lorenzo.”

  He evaluated her statements: the words themselves and the way she spoke them. Her body language suggested she was telling the truth, but a woman accomplished at balancing relationships with three men at once would have to be a skilled actress to do so. That in addition to the fact that when a horse had spots, it was generally impossible to get rid of them, prompted him to say, “What would have changed you, if I may ask?”

  “I don’t really know,” she said. “A desire not to repeat the past? A step into adulthood?” She looked down at the blanket that covered her, fingering the well-worn satin that edged it. She said, “Before, I was always searching for something that was out of my reach. Now, I think my reach and my grasp have become the same.”

  “What were you reaching for?”

  She considered this, her delicate eyebrows drawn together. “A way to be my own person. And I kept expecting this distinct form of me to arrive in the hands of a man. When it didn’t—for how could it possibly?—I found another man. And then another. Two before Hari. Then Hari himself, along with Esteban, and, yes, even Renzo.” She looked at him. “I’ve hurt many people through the years, especially Hari. It’s not something I’m proud of. But it’s who I was.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m making a life with Renzo. We’re becoming a family. He wants to marry and I want that as well. I wasn’t sure at first, but now I am.”

  Lynley considered this: Angelina’s initial uncertainty about Mura and what that uncertainty could have meant to the man and what the man might have done to alter things. He said, “At what point did you become sure of him?”

  “I don’t think I understand what you mean.”

  “I suppose I mean: Was there a single moment when everything altered for you, when it became clear to you that what you have with Signor Mura was, perhaps, more important than seeking out other men to build—as you’ve said—an identity for you?”

  She shook her head slowly, but when she spoke, Lynley saw that she was adept at connecting the dots among his questions. She said, “Renzo loves Hadiyyah and he loves me. And you can’t sit there thinking that he might have arranged something . . . something horrible like this so that he could prove to me . . . or make me certain about him . . . And that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Inspector? How could you think it? How could you begin to believe that he would do something to devastate me like this?”

  Because it was possible and it was his job, Lynley thought. But more than that, because it would so obviously work to engage her entirely in Mura’s life if Hadiyyah should end up permanently absent.

  VILLA RIVELLI

  TUSCANY

  Sister Domenica Giustina allowed Carina into the giardino. The day was hotter than normal, and the fountains in the garden were enticing to the child. Had she not embraced God’s punishment for her sin of fornication, Sister Domenica Giustina might even have joined the little girl. For with her green cotton trousers rolled up to her knees, Carina was thoroughly enjoying herself. She waded in the largest of the pools, dodged laughing beneath the spray from its fountain, and splashed water in the air to form rainbows all round them. She called out to Sister Domenica Giustina, “Venga! Fa troppo caldo oggi.” But although the day was too hot, Sister Domenica Giustina knew that her suffering could not be lessened even for five minutes in the cool, pleasant water.

  Forty days of punishment were necessary for what she and her cousin Roberto had done. During this period she would wear the same garments—rank though they were with the smell of him, of her, and of their mating—and she would remove them only to add thorns to the swaddling in which she wrapped her body. Nightly she would examine the wounds, for they had begun to suppurate. But this was good as the leaking pus said that her reparation was acceptable to God. God would inform her when she had done enough, and until He did so through the means of the pus’s disappearance, she must continue on the path she’d chosen to illustrate the depth of her sorrow for her sins against Him.

  “Suor Domenica!” the little girl cried, falling to her knees in the water so that it rose up to her waist. “Deve venire! Possiamo pescare. Vuole pescare? Le piace pescare? Venga!”

  There were no fish in the water of this fountain, and she was being far too loud. Sister Domenica Giustina recognised this, but she could hardly bear to stifle the child’s pleasure. Still, she understood it was necessary so she said, “Carina, fai troppo rumore,” and held a finger to her lips. She looked towards the great villa to the east of the sunken giardino and this look was to tell the little girl that her noise must not reach the villa’s inhabitants. There were dangers everywhere.

  She’d been told from the first to keep the child inside the great stone barn, and she’d disobeyed. When she’d taken him to the villa’s cellar to see the little girl, he’d smiled and spoken kindly to Carina, but Sister Domenica Giustina knew him better than he knew himself and she could see round his eyes that he hadn’t been pleased.

  He’d made this clear to her before he left. “What stupid game are you playing at?” he’d hissed. “Keep her inside till I tell you otherwise. Can you get that into your thick skull,
Domenica?” And he’d poked at her head sharply to indicate just how thick her skull was. He’d added, “God’s grace, after what you’ve done to me, I would think . . . Cristo, I should leave you to rot.”

  She’d tried to explain. The sun and the air were good for children. Carina needed to be out of the damp, dank rooms above the barn, and had she been told to stay inside, she wouldn’t have done so. No child would. Besides, there was no one about in this remote place and even if there had been someone, wasn’t it time they told the world that Carina was theirs?

  “Sciocca, sciocca!” had been his reply. He cupped her chin in his hand. His fingers increased the pressure till her whole jaw ached, and finally he threw her to one side. “She stays inside. Do you understand me? No vegetable garden, no cellar, no fish pond, no lawn. She stays inside.”

  Domenica said that she understood. But the day was hot and the fountains at the villa were so inviting and the child was so young. It could not hurt, Sister Domenica Giustina decided, to give her an hour to enjoy herself.

  Still, she looked about nervously. She decided it would be best to stand guard from above at the edge of the peschiera, so she climbed the stone steps from the sunken garden to the fish pond and she made certain that she and Carina were still alone.

  She walked to the spot from which the hillside fell to expose through the trees and the shrubbery the road that twisted into the hills from the valley below. Thus, she saw him. As before he raced up the road in his bright red car. She could hear, even at this distance, the roar from its engine as he changed down gears. He was going too fast, as he always did. There was a distant squeal from his tyres as he took one of the hairpin turns too sharply. He needed to slow, but he never would. He liked the speed.

  Between where she stood and where he drove, the air seemed to shimmer in the heat. It made her feel indolent, and although she knew she had to get Carina out of the sunken garden, up to the rooms above the barn, and into dry clothes before his arrival, somehow she couldn’t make herself move.

  So it was that she saw it all when it happened. He missed a sudden hairpin turn in the road. Engine roaring and gears changing frantically, he shot through the insubstantial crash barrier. He hung there in the sky for a moment. Then the car disappeared as it dropped and dropped down the side of a cliff into whatever lay below: boulders, gnarled trees, a dried riverbed, another villa tucked away from sight. She did not know. She only saw that he was there one moment, charging into the hills, and then in the next moment he was gone.

  She stood there unmoving, waiting for what would come next: perhaps the sound of impact or a fireball shooting into the sky. But nothing happened. It was as if the hand of God had struck her cousin down in an instant, his soul being called into the presence of the Almighty to account, finally, for his sin.

  She returned to the sunken garden, standing above it and watching the child below. The sunlight glinted off her lovely hair, and through the spray from the fountain, she looked like someone behind a veil. Seeing her thus, joyful and open and trusting, it was difficult to believe that she, too, bore the stain of sin. But so she did and so that sin had to be dealt with.

  27 April

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  When Barbara walked into Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery’s office, she knew something had gone wrong with the master plan of lies that she’d come up with to get away from the Met’s offices five days earlier in order to attempt to deal with the Sayyid crisis. She reckoned that at the eleventh hour, Mrs. Flo had developed feet of ice in the matter of confirming the “fall” taken by one of the residents of her care home in Greenford. But as it turned out, that good woman had taken the decision that only an elaboration of the story of the fall would do to persuade Barbara’s superior officers that everything was on the complete up-and-up regarding Barbara’s absence from beneath DI John Stewart’s spatulate thumb.

  Stewart was in the super’s office as well. He sat on one of the two chairs in front of Ardery’s desk, and he turned to give Barbara a barely disguised contemptuous once-over when she joined them. The superintendent herself was standing, looking trim, fit, and well turned out as always. Beyond her shoulders, the windows offered a grey day promising more rain to confirm what that poet had said about the month of April.

  Isabelle Ardery nodded as Barbara entered. She said, “Sit,” and Barbara gave idle thought to barking doglike in response. But she did as she was told. Ardery then said, “Tell her, John,” and she placed both manicured hands on the windowsill, leaning against it and listening as Stewart recited what Barbara quickly saw was her likely professional epitaph.

  “My flowers for your mother were undeliverable, as it happens,” Stewart said. And didn’t the bloody bastard look pleased about this, Barbara thought. “The hospital in question had no record of a patient with her name. I’m wondering, Sergeant . . . Has she an alias, perhaps?”

  “What’re you yapping on about?” Barbara asked him tiredly, although her mind started energetically darting round possibilities like a pinball scoring a multitude of points.

  For the purposes of dramatic effect, Stewart had brought a notebook along, and he flipped it open in his palm. “Mrs. Florence Magentry,” he announced. “An ambulance company called St. John’s, she thinks, although it could have been St. Julian’s, St. James’s, St. Judith’s, or any number of sanctified names beginning with J. At any rate, it was Saint Somebody, or so she claims despite the fact that, as it happens, there is no such creature. Next: Accident and Emergency at the local hospital and a broken hip that wasn’t a broken hip at all but seemed to be so, so she was only in for an hour or a day or two or three but who really knows because the fact of the bloody matter is that she never had a sodding fall at all.” He snapped the notebook closed. “Do you want to explain what the hell you’re up to when no one’s given you leave to—?”

  “That’ll do, John,” Ardery said.

  Taking the offensive was her only option. Barbara said to Stewart “What is it with you? You’ve got a robbery and murder case on, and you’re using your time to decide whether my poor mum . . . ? You’re outrageous, you are. As it happens, she was taken by a private ambulance to a private clinic because she has her own private insurance, and if you’d decided to sodding ask me about it instead of creeping round in the background like a third-rate housebreaker—”

  “And that’ll do as well,” Ardery said.

  But Barbara’s heart was pounding. No matter what she said, Stewart was going to be able to check her story, and her only hope was to make him look worse for his compulsion to put the thumbscrews to her than she looked doing a scarper from work because she’d had to deal with that damn louse Mitch Corsico and his determination to speak to Azhar’s son, Sayyid.

  She said to Ardery, “He’s been like this since you assigned me to him, guv. He’s got me under some bloody microscope like I’m an amoeba he wants to study. And he’s using me as a sodding typist.”

  “Are you actually trying to put the spotlight on me?” Stewart demanded. “You’re out of order, and you damn well know it.”

  “You deserve the sodding spotlight on you and you’ve needed it on you since your wife walked out and you decided to punish every female on earth because of it. And who the hell could blame the poor woman? Life with you would make anyone prefer life on the street with a dog.”

  “I want her written up for this,” Stewart said to Ardery. “I want it in her file and then I want a CIB1—”

  “Both of you are out of order,” Ardery snapped. She walked to her desk, jerked the chair out, and sank into it, looking from Stewart to Barbara to Stewart again. “I’ve had enough of whatever it is between the two of you. It stops here, in this office, this very minute or you’re both facing disciplinary action. Now get back to work. And if I hear anything more about you”—this to Barbara—“acting in any way that appears remotely dodgy, you’ll be facing not only disciplinary action but what follows it. Got it?”

  Stewar
t’s thin lips creased themselves into a smile. But it vanished soon enough when Ardery went on. “And you,” she said to him, “are an officer in charge of a robbery and murder enquiry so act like an officer in charge of a robbery and murder enquiry. Which, I’d like to remind you, John, means that you assign your people in a manner that utilises their talents and does not appease your need for . . . for whatever the hell it is that you apparently need. Am I being clear?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She picked up the phone, punched in a few numbers, and said in dismissal, “Now for God’s sake get out of here and get back to work.”

  They did the first but paused short of the second. In the corridor, DI Stewart grabbed Barbara’s arm. At his touch, she felt a surge of outrage steam through her veins and she was moments from applying her knee to a place on his body where he’d long remember the encounter. She said, “You bloody get your hand off me or I’ll have you charged with—”

  “You listen to me, you bleeding bovine,” he whispered. “Your move in there was clever as hell. But I’m holding cards you don’t even know about, and when I want to use them, I will. Understand that and act at your own peril, Sergeant Havers.”

  “Oh my God, you knot up my knickers,” Barbara said.

  She walked away, but her mind was like an arguing Greek chorus in her head. Part of it was shrieking to beware, to take heed, to walk the straight and narrow before it was too late. The other part was planning her next move and that part was quickly subdividing itself into the half dozen next moves that were possible.

  Into this mental embroilment, Dorothea Harriman called Barbara’s name. Barbara turned to see the departmental secretary cradling a telephone receiver in her hand. She said, “You’re wanted at once down below.”

  Barbara cursed quietly. What now? she thought. Down below meant Reception. She had a visitor and was intended to go fetch him. She said, “Who the hell . . . ?” to Dorothea.