Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  “This can’t mean what I think it means,” he said.

  “I don’t get paid enough to be caught up in shit like this. You do. But I don’t.”

  “So you’re leaving? Just like that?”

  “Your powers of observation . . . ? Incredible. No wonder you’ve been such a howling success in your chosen line of work.”

  She was folding her maps and making a hash of it, paper maps always being a nightmare to put back into their original, neat form. She wasn’t following the designated folds and creases. It appeared that she couldn’t be bothered to do so, which told Dwayne Doughty how determined she was to be gone as soon as possible. And this told him how unnerved she was by what had happened: the cops showing up unexpectedly on their doorstep with the silver bracelets ready to be slapped on the wrists of two malefactors called Doughty and Cass.

  He said, “You have a hell of a lot more nerve than this. For someone who pulls complete strangers in pubs—”

  “Don’t even go there,” she shot at him. “If I’m not mistaken, unless things have really changed in this country, pulling strangers in pubs for anonymous sex is not going to get me hauled into the dock.”

  “We’re not getting hauled into the dock,” he told her. “I’m not. You’re not. Bryan’s not. Full stop.”

  “I’m not getting hauled to the nick, either. I’m not ringing up some solicitor to come hold my hand while the cops go through my life like it’s infested with bedbugs. I’m done with this, Dwayne. I told you from the first, and you wouldn’t listen because to you the bottom line is cash. Whoever pays the most is whose job we take on. Wrong side of the law? No problem, madam. We’re just who you want to take the bloody fall should everything in the case go to hell. Like it has now. So I’m out of here.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Em.” Dwayne did his best to hide his desperation. Without Em Cass at the helm of his computer system—not to mention on the phones acting the part of whatever official was needed to glean information from sources who’d be less than cooperative faced with someone with little talent for hoodwinking them—he was sunk and he knew it. “I called in the cavalry,” he told her. “I told them the truth.”

  She was unimpressed. “There is no bloody cavalry. I tried to tell you that right from the first, didn’t I, but you wouldn’t listen. Oh no. You were far too clever for that.”

  “Stop being dramatic. I gave them the professor. All right? Are you hearing me? I gave them the professor. Full stop. That’s what you’ve wanted, isn’t it? Well, it’s been done and you and I are on our way to being in the clear.”

  “And they’re going to believe you?” she scoffed. “You name a name and that’s all there is to it?” She raised her head heavenward and spoke to some deity on the ceiling, saying, “Why didn’t I see what an idiot he is? Why didn’t I get out when this whole thing started?”

  “Because you knew I’d never go into something without an exit strategy planned. And I have one for this. So d’you want to run off or do you want to unpack your boxes and help me set it in motion?”

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Lynley located Taymullah Azhar in the Cathedral of San Martino, which stood enormously in a large piazza along with a palazzo and the traditional, separate battistero. It was an elaborate Romanesque building not dissimilar to a wedding cake, with a façade comprising four tiers of arches, and mounted upon it was a marble depiction of the eponymous saint performing his act of kindness with garment and sword upon a mendicant at the side of his horse. Lynley wouldn’t have thought to find Azhar inside this building. As a Muslim, he didn’t seem like a man who’d seek a Christian church in order to pray. But when Lynley rang his mobile, Azhar’s hushed voice said he was with the Holy Face inside the Duomo. Lynley wasn’t certain what this meant, but he asked the Pakistani man to wait for him there.

  “You have news?” Azhar asked hopefully.

  “Wait for me please” was Lynley’s reply.

  Inside the cathedral, a tour was ongoing: A young woman with an official badge round her neck was shepherding some dozen or so people to stand at the foot of a Last Supper, the work of Tintoretto brightly lit to show angels above, apostles below, and the Lord in the midst of feeding a piece of bread to St. Peter as his companions managed to look suitably impressed with the goings on. Midway down the right aisle, a partition kept unticketed visitors away from the beauties of the sacristy, while to the left an octagonal temple was the centre of attention of ten elderly women who looked like pilgrims come specifically to the spot.

  It was at this temple that Lynley found Azhar, standing respectfully back from the pilgrims but gazing upon a huge and severely stylised crucified Christ rendered in wood. The Christ had on his face an expression that looked more surprised than suffering, as if he couldn’t quite come to terms with what had put him into the position in which he found himself.

  “It’s called the Holy Face,” Azhar said to Lynley quietly as Lynley joined him next to one of the Duomo’s pillars. “It’s supposed to . . .” He cleared his throat. “Signora Vallera told me of it.”

  Lynley glanced at the other man. Here was anguish, he thought, a mental and spiritual crucifixion. He wanted to put an end to Azhar’s suffering. But there was a limit to what he could tell him while so much of what they needed to know was still floating out there, waiting to be discovered.

  “She said,” Azhar murmured, “that the Holy Face works miracles for people, but this is something I find I cannot believe. How can a piece of wood—no matter how lovingly carved—do anything for anyone, Inspector Lynley? And yet, here I am, standing in front of it, ready to ask it for my daughter. And yet unable to ask for anything because to ask such a thing of a piece of wood . . . This means to me that hope is gone.”

  “I don’t think that’s the case,” Lynley told him.

  Azhar looked at him. Lynley saw how dark the skin beneath his eyes had become, acting as a stark contrast to the whites of his eyes, which were themselves sketched with red. Every day that Lynley had been in Italy, the man had looked worse than the day before. “Which part of it?” Azhar asked him. “The wood performing a miracle or the hope?”

  “Both,” he said. “Either.”

  “You’ve learned something,” Azhar guessed. “You would not have come otherwise.”

  “I’d prefer to speak to you with Angelina.” And when he saw the momentary terror of every parent whose child is missing shoot across Azhar’s face, Lynley went on. “It’s neither good nor bad,” he said hastily. “It’s just a development. Will you come with me?”

  They set off for the hospital. It was outside the great wall of Lucca, but they went on foot as the route was not overly long and their use of the wall itself for part of the walk—sheltered by the great trees upon it—made the way both pleasant and shorter. They descended from one of the diamond-shaped baluardi, and from that point they made their way to Via dell’Ospedale.

  When they reached the hospital, they were in time to see Lorenzo Mura and Angelina Upman together leaving the place. Angelina was in a wheelchair being pushed by an attendant. Grim-faced, Lorenzo walked at her side. He caught sight of Lynley and Azhar approaching, and he spoke to the attendant, who halted.

  At least, Lynley thought, this appeared to be a piece of good news: Angelina sufficiently well to return to her home. She was very pale, but that was the extent of things.

  When she saw Lynley and Azhar approaching her together, she pressed herself back in the wheelchair as if she could stop whatever news was coming. Lynley understood at once. He and Azhar arriving as one to see her . . . She would be terrified that the worst had occurred.

  He said hastily, “It’s information only, Ms. Upman,” and he saw her swallow convulsively.

  Lorenzo was the one to speak. “She wishes it. Me, I do not.”

  For an insane moment, Lynley thought he was referring to her daughter’s death at the hands of a kidnapper. But when Lorenzo went on, his meaning became clear.

&nbs
p; “She says she is better. This I do not believe.”

  Apparently, she’d checked herself out of the hospital. She had good reason, she said. The chance of infection in a hospital was greater than the benefit of being under the care of nursing staff for what amounted to morning sickness. At least, this was Angelina’s belief, and she turned to her former lover for corroboration, saying, “Hari, will you explain to him how dangerous it is for me to stay here any longer?”

  Azhar didn’t look like a man ready to embrace a position as intermediary between the mother of his child and the father of her next child, but he was a microbiologist, after all, and he did know something about the transmission of sickness and disease. He said, “There are risks everywhere, Angelina. While there is truth in what you say—”

  “Capisci?” she cut in, speaking to Lorenzo.

  “—there is also truth in the dangers of illnesses associated with pregnancy if you don’t attend to them.”

  “Well, I have attended to them,” she said. “I’m keeping food down now—”

  “Solo minestra,” Lorenzo muttered.

  “Soup is something,” Angelina told him. “And I’ve no other symptoms any longer.”

  “She does not listen to me,” Lorenzo said to them.

  “You don’t listen to me. I have no symptoms. It was flu or a bad meal or a twenty-four-hour whatever. I’m fine now. I’m going home. You’re the one being ridiculous about this.”

  Lorenzo’s face darkened but that was the extent of his reaction. “Le donne incinte,” Lynley murmured to him. Pregnant women needed to be humoured. Things would return to normal again—at least in this matter—when Angelina was safely delivered of their child. As to the rest of their life together . . . He knew this depended on the outcome of Hadiyyah’s disappearance.

  “If we can speak for a moment?” he said to them. “Perhaps inside?” He indicated the doors of the hospital. There was a lobby within.

  They agreed to this, and they established themselves in such a way that the light was good on all of their faces, rendering them readable to Lynley as he imparted the information. A car had been found in the Apuan Alps, he said, at the scene of an accident that had apparently occurred a few days earlier, although they wouldn’t know the exact time until a forensic pathologist examined a man’s body that had been near the vehicle. He hastened to add that no child’s body had been at the accident site, but because the car in question matched the description of a car seen parked in a lay-by with a man and a young girl near it, the vehicle was being taken off for study. They would be looking for a child’s fingerprints as well as any other evidence of her presence.

  Angelina nodded numbly. She said, “Capisco, capisco,” and then, “I understand. You must need . . .” She didn’t seem able to continue.

  Lynley said, “I’m afraid we do. Her toothbrush, her hairbrush, anything to give us a DNA sample. The police will want to dust for her fingerprints, perhaps in her bedroom, so comparisons can be made.”

  “Of course.” She looked at Azhar and then away, out of the window where Italian cypresses shielded the car park from view and a fountain bubbled on a square of gravel with benches on all four of its sides. “What do you think?” she said to Lynley. “What do they think . . . the police?”

  “They’ll be checking into everything about the man whose body was there.”

  “Do they know . . . Can they tell . . . ?”

  “He had identification with him,” Lynley said. And here was the important part, their reactions when he said the name. “Roberto Squali,” he told them. “Is that name familiar to any of you?”

  But there was nothing. Just three blank faces and an exchange of looks between Lorenzo and Angelina as they asked each other nonverbally if this was a person either of them knew. As for Azhar, he repeated the name. But it seemed more an effort to commit it to memory than an attempt to appear in the dark about who this man was.

  Whatever came next, it would be from police work on the part of the Italian force, Lynley reckoned. Either that or from Barbara’s uncovering something in London.

  They would all have to wait.

  29 April

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Forse quarantotto ore.” Over the telephone Dr. Cinzia Ruocco gave Salvatore Lo Bianco the information in her usual manner when speaking to a male: on the border between rude and angry. She didn’t like men, and who could blame her? She looked like a young Sophia Loren, and because of this she’d suffered men’s lusting after her body for a good twenty-five of her thirty-eight years. Whenever Salvatore saw her, he lusted after her as well. He liked to think he was good at keeping his thoughts off his face, but the medical examiner had antennae attuned to the slightest mental image that might pop up in the head of any male who gazed upon her bounteous physical virtues. This was one of the reasons she preferred to do things by phone. Again, who could blame her?

  Forty-eight hours, Salvatore thought. Where had Roberto Squali been heading, then, forty-eight hours ago when his car had flown off the road and his life had ended? Was he drunk? he asked Cinzia Ruocco. He was not, she replied. Not drunk and, barring toxicology reports which would be weeks in coming, not impaired in any way. Except, she added, in the way of all men who think ownership of a fast sports car makes them more masculine than owning something sensible. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn this fool had possession of a motorcycle as well. Something huge, she said, to take the place of what—she was happy to report—he didn’t have in great size between his legs.

  “Sì, sì,” Salvatore said. He knew Cinzia lived with a man, but he had to wonder how the fellow put up with her general disdain for males of all species. He rang off and considered a map he’d posted on the wall of his office. There was so much in the Apuan Alps. It would take a century to work out where the dead man had been heading, if, indeed, where he’d been heading was relevant to the case.

  Salvatore had come up with a photo of Squali in better days, which was any day prior to the day on which they’d found his body. He was a handsome man, and with the picture in his possession, it was a small matter for Salvatore to reboot the tourist photographs he’d loaded onto his laptop and to verify that it was indeed Squali standing there in the crowd behind Hadiyyah, holding the card with a yellow happy face on it. Seeing this, Salvatore considered his next options.

  They had everything to do with Piero Fanucci. Il Pubblico Ministero was not going to be pleased when Salvatore revealed to him that he might be wrong about his prime suspect. In the past two days, Fanucci had invested a great deal into Carlo Casparia’s ostensible guilt, allowing more and more details of the drug addict’s “confession” to be leaked to the press. He’d even given an interview about the investigation to Prima Voce. This interview had ended up on the tabloid’s front page as well as its website, which meant it would soon enough be translated by the British media, members of which group had started to show up in Lucca. They’d made short work of figuring out that the café down the street from the questura was the best spot to pick up gossip about the case, and like their Italian counterparts, they were dogged when it came to buttonholing police officials for direct questioning.

  Because of this latter fact, when it came down to it, there was really no decision to make about whether to tell il Pubblico Ministero about the discovery of Roberto Squali, Salvatore realised. Should he not tell him, a reporter would, or—what was worse—Piero would read about it in Prima Voce. There would be hell for Salvatore to pay if that occurred. So there was nothing for it but to pay a call upon Fanucci.

  Salvatore gave the magistrato every one of the details he’d so far withheld: the red convertible, the previous sighting of a man and a girl heading into the woods, the American tourist’s photos of a man in possession of a card that—so it appeared—he seemed to have given to the missing girl, and now the accident site with that same man’s dead body forty-eight hours in the out-of-doors.

  Fanucci listened to Salvatore’s recitation from
the other side of his vast walnut desk, twirling a pen in his fingers and keeping his eyes fixed upon Salvatore’s lips. At the conclusion of Salvatore’s remarks, il Pubblico Ministero abruptly shoved his chair back, surged to his feet, and walked to his bookcases. Salvatore steeled himself for Fanucci’s rage, possibly to include the hurling of legal volumes in his direction.

  What came, however, was something else.

  “Così . . . ,” Fanucci murmured. “Così, Topo . . .”

  Salvatore waited for more. He did not have to wait long.

  “Ora capisco com’è successo,” Fanucci said thoughtfully. He did not sound the least bit concerned about the information he’d just been given.

  “Daverro?” Salvatore sought clarification. “Allora, Piero . . . ?” If Fanucci did indeed see how the kidnapping and everything related to it had happened, he—Salvatore—would be only too welcoming of the magistrate’s conclusions.

  Fanucci turned back to him with one of his inauthentic and paternal smiles, in itself a sign of worse things to come. “Questo . . . ,” he said. “You have the link you have sought. This we must now celebrate.”

  “The link,” Salvatore repeated.

  “Between our Carlo and what he did with the girl. Now it all fits together, Topo. Bravo. Hai fatto bene.” Fanucci returned to his desk and sat. He continued expansively with “I well know what you will say next. ‘So far,’ you will say, ‘there is no link to join these men Squali and Carlo Casparia, Magistrato.’ But that is because you have not yet found it. You will, however, and it will show you that Carlo’s intentions were what I have declared them to be. He did not wish this child for himself. Have I not told you that? As you can now see and as I saw the moment you told me there was a Carlo, he wished to sell the child to fund his drug habit. And this is exactly what he did.”