Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  “And your thought as to why SO12 would be onto this . . . What was the name again?” Streener said.

  Barbara spelled it out for him. “Just seemed like an i that needed to be dotted,” she told him. After a moment, she added, “Pakistan? You know what I mean. I don’t have to be PC with you, do I?”

  Streener guffawed. The last thing cops needed to be was politically correct with each other. He typed a bit. Then he read. His lips formed a whistle that he didn’t make. He nodded and said, “Yeah. He’s here. Ticket to Lahore triggered the usual alarms. One-way ticket upped the noise.”

  Barbara felt her gut clench. “C’n you tell me . . . Were you looking at him before the one-way ticket?”

  Streener glanced at her sharply. She’d tried to keep her voice intrigued by this development but not involved other than as a professional doing a job. He seemed to evaluate her question and what it might imply. He finally looked back at his screen, scrolled a bit, and said slowly, “Yes, it appears that we were.”

  “C’n you tell me why?”

  “It’s the job,” he said.

  “I know it’s your job, but—”

  “Not mine. His. Professor of microbiology? He has his own lab? You can fill in the blanks there, can’t you?”

  She could indeed. As a professor of microbiology, as a professional with his own lab . . . God only knew what tasty weapon of mass destruction he could be cooking up. As she herself had said, the magic words were Pakistani national living in London. Pakistani meant Muslim. Muslim meant suspicious. Put one and one together among this lot in SO12, and you came up with three every time. It wasn’t fair but there you had it.

  She couldn’t really blame them. To them, Taymullah Azhar was just a name just as, to them, terrorists were hiding in every garden shed. The job of SO12 was to make sure those blokes didn’t emerge from those sheds with bombs inside their shorts or, in the case of Azhar, with a Thermos filled with God only knew what, sufficient to contaminate the water supply of London.

  She said, “Have you blokes been following the kidnap situation, then?”

  Streener looked some more, then nodded slowly. “Italy,” he said. “He landed in Pisa.”

  “Any indication that Azhar’s contacted an Italian there? Michelangelo Di Massimo would be the name.”

  Streener shook his head, his eyes on the computer’s screen. “Doesn’t seem to be, but this goes back forever. Let me try . . .” He typed. He was fast, using only two fingers but getting the job done. There was nothing on a Michelangelo Di Massimo, he reported. There was nothing, in fact, in Italy at all aside from his landing in Pisa and the name and location of his B & B.

  Thank God was Barbara’s thought when she heard this. Whatever the tickets to Pakistan meant, in this one matter Azhar was clean.

  She’d taken notes throughout, and now she flipped her notebook closed. She made her thanks to Streener and got herself out of his office and into the nearest stairwell, where she lit a fag and took five deep drags. A door opened some floors below her and voices floated upward as someone began climbing. Hastily, she crushed the fag out, put the dog end in her bag, and ducked back into the corridor, where she was making for the lifts when her mobile rang.

  “Page five, Barb,” Mitchell Corsico said.

  “Page five what?”

  “That’s where you’ll find yourself and the Love Rat Dad. I tried for page one, but while Rod Aronson—that’s my editor, by the way—liked this new twist of the Love Rat Dad having it off with an officer from the Met, he wasn’t exactly impassioned by it since there’s nothing fresh on the kid’s disappearance that I c’n give him from over here. So he’s putting it inside. Page five. You got lucky this time.”

  “Mitchell, why the hell are you doing this?”

  “We had an agreement. Quarter of an hour. That was . . . how many hours ago exactly?”

  “It might interest you that I’m working, Mitchell. It might interest you to know that I’m about to break this case wide open. It might be a grand idea for you to stay on my good side because when the story’s ready for—”

  “You should have told me, Barb.”

  “I don’t report to you, in case you haven’t noticed. I report to my guv.”

  “You should have given me something. That’s how this game is played. And you know that. If you didn’t want to play, you shouldn’t have climbed into my sandbox. D’you understand?”

  “I’m going to give you . . .” The lift arrived. It was filled to capacity. She couldn’t continue the conversation. She said, “We c’n sort this out. Just tell me that there’re no dates involved, and we’re back in business.”

  “On the pictures, you mean? Are the dates removed from the pictures?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “And can I guess why that’s important to you?”

  “Oh, I expect you can work that one out. Are you going to answer me?”

  There was a moment. She was in the lift and the doors were closing and she was in terror that either he wouldn’t reply or they’d be cut off.

  But he finally said, “No dates, Barb. I gave you that much. We’ll call it a sign of good faith.”

  “Right,” she said as she rang off. They would definitely call it something.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Hadiyyah wanted Lynley to sit in the back seat of the police car with her, and he was happy to oblige. Lo Bianco phoned ahead to the hospital in Lucca, and he then notified Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar that Hadiyyah had been found at a Dominican convent in the Apuan Alps, that she was alive and well, and that she would be at the hospital within ninety minutes for a general exam. If they would be so good as to meet DI Lynley and himself at this location . . . ?

  “Niente, niente,” he murmured into the mobile, an apparent brushing off of copious expressions of gratitude from the other end. “È il mio lavoro, Signora.”

  In the back seat, Lynley kept Hadiyyah tucked next to him, which seemed to be her preference. Considering the length of time that she’d been held at Villa Rivelli, she did not appear to be the worse for the experience, at least superficially. Sister Domenica Giustina, as Hadiyyah called Domenica Medici, had taken good care of her. Up until the last few days, the child had apparently had the run of the villa’s grounds. It was only in the end that she had become frightened, Hadiyyah said. It was only when Sister Domenica Giustina took her into the cellar to that mouldy, smelly, creepy chamber with the slippery and slimy marble pool in the floor that she had known the slightest bit of terror.

  “You’re a very brave girl,” Lynley said to her. “Most girls your age—most boys as well—would have been frightened from the very start. Why weren’t you, Hadiyyah? Can you tell me? Do you remember how all of this began? What can you tell me?”

  She looked up at him. He was struck by how pretty a child she was, everything attractive in both of her parents blending together to form her innocent beauty. Her delicate eyebrows knotted as she heard his questions, though. Her eyes filled with tears, possibly at the realisation that she might well have done something wrong. Every child knew the rules, after all: Don’t go anywhere with a stranger, no matter what that stranger says to you. And both he and Hadiyyah knew that that was what she had done. He said quietly, “There’s no right or wrong here, by the way. There’s just what happened. You know I’m a policeman, of course, and I hope you know that Barbara and I are very good friends, yes?”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “Brilliant. My job is to find out what happened. That’s it. Nothing else. Can you help me, Hadiyyah?”

  She looked down at her lap, “He said my dad was waiting for me. I was in the market with Lorenzo and I was watching the accordion man near the porta and he said ‘Hadiyyah, this is from your father. He is waiting to see you beyond the city wall.’”

  “‘This is from your father’?” Lynley repeated. “Did he speak English or Italian to you?”

  “English.”

  “And wh
at was from your father?”

  “A card.”

  “Like . . . a greeting card, perhaps?” Lynley thought of the pictures they had from the tourists in the mercato, Roberto Squali with a card in his hand, then Hadiyyah with something similar in hers. “What did the card say?”

  “It said to go with the man. It said not to be afraid. It said he would bring me to him, to my dad.”

  “And was it signed?”

  “It said ‘Dad.’”

  “Was it in your father’s handwriting, Hadiyyah? D’you think you would recognise his handwriting?”

  Slowly she sucked in on her lip. She looked up at him, and her great dark eyes began to spill tears onto her cheeks. In this, Lynley had his answer. She was nine years old. How often had she even seen her father’s handwriting and why would she ever be expected to remember what it looked like? He put his arm round her and pulled her closer to him. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said again, this time pressing his lips to her hair. “I expect you’ve missed your father badly. I expect you’d very much like to see him.”

  She nodded, tears still dribbling down her face.

  “Right. Well. He’s here in Italy. He’s waiting for you. He’s been trying to find you since you went missing.”

  “Khushi,” she said against his shoulder.

  Lynley frowned. He repeated the word. He asked her what it meant and she told him happiness. It was what her father always called her.

  “He said khushi,” she told him with trembling lips. “He called me khushi.”

  “The man with the card?”

  “Dad said he’d come at Christmas hols, see, but then he didn’t.” She began to weep harder. “He kept saying ‘soon, khushi, soon’ in his emails. I thought he came as a big surprise for me and was waiting for me and the man said we had to drive to him so I got in the car. We drove and drove and drove and he took me to Sister Domenica Giustina and Dad wasn’t there.” She sobbed and Lynley comforted her as best he could, no expert in the ways of little girls. “Bad, bad, bad,” she wept. “I did bad. I made trouble for everyone. I’m bad.”

  “Not in the least,” Lynley said. “Look at how brave you’ve been from the start. You weren’t frightened and that’s a very good thing.”

  “He said Dad was on his way,” she wailed. “He said to wait and Dad would come.”

  “I see how it happened,” Lynley told her. He stroked her hair. “You did brilliantly, Hadiyyah, from beginning to end and you’re not to blame. You’ll remember that, won’t you? You are not to blame.” For at that point, Lynley thought, what else was the child to do but wait for her father? She had no idea where Squali had taken her. There was no nearby house to which she could have run. Inside the cloister, the nuns might have seen her but they assumed she was a relative of their caretaker. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary to them, for the child played on the villa’s grounds. If she acted like anything at all, what she didn’t act like was a kidnap victim.

  He fished his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it into Hadiyyah’s small hands. He met the gaze of Lo Bianco in the rearview mirror. He could see what the chief inspector was thinking: They needed to get their hands on that card Squali had given the child, and they needed to find the connection between him and anyone who knew Hadiyyah’s nickname was khushi.

  When they arrived at the hospital in Lucca, Angelina Upman rushed at the car. She flung open the rear door and grabbed her daughter, crying her name. She looked terrible, everything from her difficult pregnancy to her anxiety about her child having taken a grievous toll upon her. But at the moment, the only thing of import was Hadiyyah. Angelina cried, “Oh my God! Thank you, thank you!” and she ran frantic hands over Hadiyyah from head to toe, a desperate search for any possible injuries.

  For her part, Hadiyyah only said, “Mummy,” and “I want to go home,” and then she saw her father.

  Azhar was approaching from the hospital doors with Lorenzo Mura following him. Hadiyyah cried out, “Dad! Dad!” and the Pakistani man broke into a sprint. When he reached Angelina and his daughter, he swept both of them into his arms. They formed a tight unit of three, and Azhar bent to kiss Hadiyyah’s head. He pressed his lips to Angelina’s as well. “The best of all conclusions,” he said. And to Lynley and Lo Bianco as they got out of the car, “Thank you, thank you.”

  Lo Bianco murmured again that this was his job: to reach a successful conclusion to a bad situation. For his part, Lynley made no reply. He was, instead, watching Lorenzo Mura and trying to determine what it meant that his expression was black and his eyes mirrored fury.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Lynley was not long in the dark on this matter. While Angelina accompanied her daughter to be examined by one of the doctors in casualty, Lynley and Lo Bianco remained with Lorenzo and Azhar. They found a sheltered corner of the waiting room, where they could speak in private, and here the two police officers explained not only what had happened in the mercato on the day that Hadiyyah had disappeared but also where she had been taken and by whom and for what reason.

  “He has done this!” was Lorenzo’s reaction the moment that the police had reached the conclusion of the story. In case they didn’t know to whom he was referring, Lorenzo went on, indicating Azhar with a jerk of his head in the Pakistani man’s direction. “Can you not see he has done this?”

  Azhar’s dark eyebrows drew together. “What do you mean?”

  “You have done this to her. To Angelina. To Hadiyyah. To me. You found her and you want her suffering—”

  “Signore, Signore,” Lo Bianco said. His voice was calm and conciliatory. “Non c’è la prova di tutto ciò. Non deve—”

  “Non sa niente!” Lorenzo hissed. And what followed was Italian so rapid-fire that Lynley could follow none of it. What he did understand was Lo Bianco’s statement about proof: There was nothing to indicate that Azhar had been involved in this matter. He also understood that there might be, that the London connection between Michelangelo Di Massimo and the private investigator Dwayne Doughty did not look good. But this was a matter about which Lorenzo Mura knew nothing. At the moment he was operating on nerves alone, and God knew his had been strung out for weeks.

  Azhar was silent, his face immobile. He watched the heated conversation between Lo Bianco and Mura, and he did not ask for a translation. In part, Lynley could tell, no translation was necessary. The murderous looks Lorenzo was shooting the Pakistani man were enough indication that something accusatory was being said.

  Angelina approached them at this point, Hadiyyah’s hand in hers. Lynley could tell she took in the situation with a single glance, because she stopped and bent to her daughter. She smoothed her hair, took her to a nearby chair that was well within her sight, parked her there with a kiss on the top of her head, and came to join the men.

  “How is Hadiyyah?” Azhar asked at once.

  “Oh, he asks this now,” Lorenzo scoffed. “Vaffanculo! Mostro! Vaffanculo!”

  Angelina blanched, which was something to see as she had virtually no colour in her face to begin with. She said, “What’s going on?”

  “How is Hadiyyah?” Azhar repeated. “Angelina . . .”

  She turned to him. Her face was soft. “She’s well. There was no . . . She’s unhurt, Hari.”

  “May I . . .” He nodded at his daughter, who watched them with her great dark eyes so solemn and confused.

  “Of course you may,” Angelina said. “She’s your daughter.”

  Azhar nodded, even managing a small and formal bow. He strode across to Hadiyyah and she jumped from her chair. He swung her up and into his arms, and the child buried her face in his neck. Angelina watched this, as did everyone.

  “Serpente,” Lorenzo hissed at Angelina, indicating Azhar with a scornful jerk of his head in the Pakistani’s direction. “L’uomo è un serpente, cara.”

  She turned to him. She examined him in a way that suggested she was only seeing Lorenzo Mura for the very first time. She
said, “Renzo, my God. What are you saying?”

  “L’ha fatto,” he said. “L’ha fatto. L’ha fatto.”

  “He did what?” she asked.

  “Tutto, tutto!”

  “He did nothing. He did nothing at all. He’s been here to help find her; he’s made himself available to the police, to us; he’s suffered every bit as much as I have suffered and you cannot, Lorenzo, no matter how you feel and what you want, accuse him of anything but loving Hadiyyah. Chiaro, Lorenzo? Do you understand?”

  The Italian’s face had flooded with colour. One hand knotted into a fist. “Non è finito” was what he said.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Barbara was in the midst of planning out her next confrontation with Dwayne Doughty when the call from Lynley came. She was at her desk, she was reorganising her notes, and she was ignoring the baleful glares from John Stewart that the DI was firing at her from across the room. He’d not stopped his ceaseless observation of her despite being warned off by their guv. He seemed to be turning his mania for ruining her into a form of religion.

  “We have her, Barbara” was how Lynley began. “We’ve found her. She’s fine. You can set your mind at rest.”

  Barbara was unprepared for the explosion of emotion inside of her. She said past something that occluded her throat, “You have Hadiyyah?”

  They indeed had Hadiyyah, Lynley told her. He spoke of a place called Villa Rivelli, of a young woman who thought herself a Dominican nun, of the same young woman’s delusions about having the care of Hadiyyah placed into her hands, and of an aborted “baptism” of Hadiyyah that had frightened the child enough to raise the alarm and gain the notice of the Mother Superior inside the cloistered convent. When he was finished, all Barbara could say was “Bloody hell, bloody hell. Thank you, thank you, sir.”

  “Thanks go to Chief Inspector Lo Bianco.”

  “How’s . . .” Barbara thought how to phrase it.

  Lynley kindly intercepted her question. “Azhar’s fine. Angelina is a little worse for wear. But she and Azhar have made their peace, evidently, so all’s well that ends well, I daresay.”