Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  “Peace?” Barbara asked.

  Lynley explained the scene at Lucca’s hospital, where Hadiyyah was taken after her rescue from the convent. Post a number of accusations from Lorenzo Mura on the matter of Azhar’s putative involvement in Hadiyyah’s disappearance, Angelina and her former lover were able to reach a rapprochement with each other. For her part, Angelina had admitted to doing Azhar a grave injustice in leading him to believe she’d returned to him while all the time planning the disappearance of his daughter. For his part, Azhar asked forgiveness for having been unwilling from the first to give Angelina what she had so wanted: marriage or a sibling for their daughter. He’d said that he was wrong in this. He said he understood that it was too late for them now—for Angelina and himself—but he hoped that she could forgive him as he fully, wholeheartedly, and freely forgave her.

  “Did Mura hear all this?” Barbara asked.

  “He’d already departed in something of a temper. But I have a feeling things aren’t finished there. He indicated as much before exiting stage left. He’s convinced that Azhar’s at the bottom of everything that’s gone on. I must tell you that chances are you’ll be hearing from Chief Inspector Lo Bianco or whoever’s replaced him.”

  “Was he pulled from the case?”

  “He was, so he tells me. And Hadiyyah explained that . . .” He stopped for a moment. He spoke to someone in Italian. Barbara caught pagherò in contanti and a woman’s voice in the background saying “Grazie, Dottore.” He continued, “Hadiyyah told me that she went with a man who told her he was taking her to her father. She said he had a card—a greeting card, I think—with a message purporting to be from Azhar telling her to go with the man as he’d bring her to her father.”

  Barbara felt a frisson at this. “Have you seen the card?”

  “As yet, no. But the carabinieri have Domenica Medici in hand, which means they have the entire convent in hand. If there’s a card at Villa Rivelli and Hadiyyah kept it, it’ll turn up soon enough.”

  “It could be elsewhere,” Barbara said. “And anyone could have written that message, sir.”

  “My first thought as well, as she apparently wouldn’t recognise his writing. But then she told me something curious, Barbara. The man who took her from the market called her khushi. Have you ever heard Azhar use that term? She said it’s his nickname for her.”

  Barbara’s stomach turned to liquid. She casually repeated, “Khushi, sir?” to buy a few moments in which her thoughts jumped feverishly from one point to another, like fleas indicating directions on a map.

  “She said that’s why she went with him. Not only because of the card holding out the promise of her father, but also because he called her khushi, which meant to her that Squali had to be telling the truth, for how else would he have known the term?”

  Doughty, of course, Barbara thought. That king of rats. He would have passed the nickname on. But there were several reasons he may have done so, and offering any of them to Lynley was to take a route that led nowhere remotely helpful. So she said, “Azhar might’ve called her that round me, but I bloody well don’t remember, sir. On the other hand, if it is a nickname, I reckon Angelina knew it, too.”

  “I take it you’re suggesting a path from Angelina to Lorenzo Mura?”

  “It makes sense in a way, doesn’t it? From what you’ve said, sounds to me like Mura’s got a very wide streak of jealousy running up his spine. Also sounds to me like he hates Azhar and it doesn’t take too much of a jump to get from there to him wanting to cut the tie between Azhar and Angelina permanently in some way. Plus . . .” And here Barbara put into words what didn’t bear thinking of, “What if he’s also jealous of Angelina’s bond with Hadiyyah? What if he wants Angelina only for himself? P’rhaps the plan was to set Azhar up with a kidnap charge and to . . .” At the end, she couldn’t put it into words.

  Lynley did it for her. “Are you suggesting his intention would have been to eliminate Hadiyyah?”

  “We’ve seen nearly everything in our line of work, sir.”

  He was silent. He would, of course, know this was true.

  “What about Doughty?” Lynley asked. “What have you turned up on him?”

  Barbara didn’t want to go within fifty yards of what she’d learned about Doughty, leading as it did to his claims about Azhar. What she wanted was a chance to talk to Azhar, to ask him questions and to study his face as he gave his answers. But her brief had been to dig into Doughty’s part in Hadiyyah’s disappearance, so she had to give Lynley something and she quickly made her choice. “I’ve come up with a bloke called Bryan Smythe,” she said. “He does computer work for Doughty, the kind requiring a special touch of the hacking variety.”

  “And?”

  “Haven’t put the thumbscrews to him yet. That’s on for tomorrow. But what I hope to learn is that Doughty employed him to wipe clean all traces of communication between himself and one Michelangelo Di Massimo. Which’ll more or less confirm that Doughty’s involved.”

  Lynley said nothing. Barbara waited in a welter of anxiety for him to take the next step, which logically demanded that Barbara check for a connection between Doughty and Azhar. He said finally, “As to that . . .”

  She cut in hastily with what she hoped sounded like a conclusion. “Someone would have hired him, of course. Way I see it, it could go two directions. Either someone here hired him to execute a plan to snatch Hadiyyah—”

  “And that would be?”

  “Anyone who hated Azhar, I expect. Angelina’s relatives top that list. They knew Hadiyyah was missing from London ’cause I went to see them when she first disappeared. Azhar went as well. They hate him, sir. To do something to hurt him? Nothing they might pay for that pleasure would be too much, believe me.”

  “And the other direction?”

  “Your end. Someone in Italy setting everything up, including creating a line to a private detective in London for purposes of making someone in London look suspicious. Who does that suggest to you?”

  “We know Lorenzo Mura is probably acquainted with Di Massimo. They both play football for their cities’ teams.” He was quiet for a moment, then she heard him sigh. “I’ll pass all this on to Lo Bianco,” he finally said. “He can hand it over to his replacement.”

  “D’you still want me to—”

  “Complete your work on the Doughty end of things, Barbara. If you come up with something, we’ll send it to Italy when I get back. Everything’s in the hands of the Italians now. As liaison officer, my work is finished.”

  Barbara let out her breath, which she’d been holding as she’d waited for his reaction to the tale she’d spun. She said, “When d’you come back home, sir?”

  “I’ve a flight out in the morning. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  They rang off then, and Barbara was left at her desk with the malignant stare of DI Stewart upon her. Across the room as he was, he hadn’t been able to hear any part of her conversation with Lynley, but he had on his face the expression of a man who had no intention of letting any sleeping dog alone if there was a chance he could kick it soundly in the ribs.

  She returned his stare until he shifted in his chair and went back to wasting his time in a putative examination of paperwork on his desk. Barbara sorted through her feelings about what she had just done and not done in her phone call with Lynley.

  She was fast approaching a professional line. Should she cross it, that move would forever define her. She asked herself what was owed to the people she loved, and the only answer she could come up with was absolute loyalty at all costs. The difficulty was in choosing those people. The additional difficulty was attempting to understand the exact nature of the love she felt for them.

  1 May

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Inside the kitchen of Torre Lo Bianco, Salvatore fondly watched the interaction of his two children with their nonna. The previous night had been one of those designated for the children to spend with their father and, as i
t happened because of his current abode, with their nonna. Salvatore’s mother was taking full advantage of the presence of her nipoti.

  She’d given them a breakfast heavily reliant upon dolci, which naturally would have met with Birgit’s outraged protests. She’d made a vague bow to nutrition with cereale e latte—thanks be to God she’d at least chosen bran flakes, Salvatore thought—but after that she’d brought out the cakes and the biscotti. The children had devoured far more than was good for them and were showing the effects of so much sugar. For her part their nonna was plying them with questions.

  Were they attending Mass every Sunday? she wanted to know. Had they gone to services on Holy Thursday? Were they on their knees for three hours on Good Friday? When was the last time they’d received the Blessed Sacrament?

  To every question, Bianca answered with lowered eyes. To every question, Marco answered with an expression so solemn that Salvatore wondered where he had learned to master it. On the way to school he informed them that lying to their nonna should be Topic Number One when next they went to confession.

  Before he left them at Scuola Dante Alighieri, he told Bianca that her little friend Hadiyyah Upman had been found. He hastened to assure her that the child was well, but he also spent some moments making absolutely certain that Bianca understood—“anche tu, Marco,” he added—that she was never, ever upon her immortal soul to believe anyone who might tell her to accompany him for any reason. If that person was not her nonna, her mamma, or her papà, then she should scream for help and not stop screaming until help got to her. Chiaro?

  Hadiyyah Upman’s love for her father had been her downfall. She missed him terribly, and no false emails from her aunt purporting to be from her father had assuaged her feelings. All someone had to do to gain her trust was to promise the little girl that she’d be taken to the man. Praise God that she’d only ended up in the care of mad Domenica Medici. There were far worse fates that could have befallen her.

  Once Hadiyyah and her parents had been reunited at the hospital, Salvatore and the London detective had gone their separate ways. Lynley’s job as liaison was complete, and he did not wish to intrude further into the Italian investigation. “I’ll pass along to you the information that my colleague in London gathers,” he said. He himself would be returning to London. “Buona fortuna, amico mio,” he’d concluded. “Tutto è finito bene.”

  Salvatore tried to be philosophical about this. Things had indeed finished well for DI Lynley. They had finished far from well for himself.

  He brought il Pubblico Ministero into the picture as soon as he and Lynley had parted. Fanucci, he reasoned, would want to know that the child had been found alive and well. He also assumed that Fanucci would want to know what Hadiyyah herself had reported: about the card ostensibly in her father’s handwriting, about Roberto Squali’s use of her nickname, and most of all about what these two facts suggested about culpability for her disappearance. She had, after all, not said one word about Carlo Casparia.

  What he hadn’t reckoned on was Fanucci’s reaction to what he perceived as Chief Inspector Lo Bianco’s defiance. He’d been removed from the case, hadn’t he? He’d been told the investigation was being handed over to another officer, nevvero? So what had he been doing voyaging off into the Apuan Alps when he should have been sitting in his office, awaiting the arrival of Nicodemo Triglia, who was taking the case off his hands?

  Salvatore said, “Piero, with the safety of a child in jeopardy, surely you did not expect me to sit upon information I had as to her possible whereabouts? This was something that had to be dealt with without delay.”

  Fanucci allowed that Topo had returned the child to her parents unharmed, but that was as far as he would go in the area of congratulations. He said, “Be that as it may, everything now goes into the hands of Nicodemo, and your job is to give to him whatever it is that you have gathered.”

  “Allow me to ask you to reconsider,” Salvatore said. “Piero, we parted badly in our last conversation. For my part, I am filled with apology. I would only wish—”

  “Do not ask, Topo.”

  “—to be allowed to finish with the final details. There are curious matters concerning a greeting card, also matters concerning the use of a special name for the child . . . The lover of the girl’s mother insists that this man—the girl’s father—must be considered before he leaves the country. Let me tell you, Piero, it is not so much that I believe the lover but that I believe something more is going on here.”

  But this Fanucci did not want to hear. He said, “Basta, Topo. You must understand. I cannot allow defiance in an investigation. Now, it must please you to wait for Nicodemo’s arrival.”

  Salvatore knew Nicodemo Triglia, a man who had never missed his afternoon pisolino in his entire career. He carried a gut upon him the size of an Umbrian wild boar, and he’d never encountered a bar that he passed by without stopping in for a birra and the thirty minutes that were required for him to savour it.

  Salvatore was brooding upon this at the questura while he waited for the old stained Moka in the little kitchen to finish its coffee business for him on the two-burner stove. When it had done so, he poured himself a cup of the viscous liquid, dropped in a sugar cube, and watched it melt. He carried it to the room’s small window and looked out at a view that was limited to the parcheggio for the police vehicles. He was staring at them without really seeing them when one of his officers interrupted.

  “We have an identification,” a woman’s voice said.

  So deep into his thoughts was Salvatore that, when he turned, he did not remember the officer’s name. Just a crude joke that had been in the men’s toilet about the shape of her breasts. He’d laughed at the time, but now he felt shame. She was earnest about her work, as she had to be. It was not easy for her in this line of employment that had for so long been dominated by men.

  “What identification?” he asked her. He saw that she was carrying a photo and he tried to remember why any of his officers were showing photographs to anyone.

  She said, “Casparia, sir. He’s seen this man.”

  “Where?”

  She looked at him oddly. She said in some surprise, “Non si ricorda?” but hastily went on lest her question sound disrespectful. She looked about twenty years old, Salvatore thought, and she probably thought the antiquity of his forty-two had begun to affect his memory. She said, “Giorgio and I . . . ?”

  At which point he remembered. Officers had taken photographs to the prison for Carlo Casparia’s perusal. These comprised pictures of the soccer players on Lucca’s team as well as the fathers of the boys Lorenzo Mura coached. And Carlo Casparia had recognised someone? This was an extraordinary turn of events.

  He held out his hand for the picture. “Who is this?” he asked. Ottavia was her name, he thought. Ottavia Schwartz because her father was German, she’d been born in Trieste, and suddenly his head was filled with utterly useless information. He looked at the picture. The man looked roughly the same age as Lorenzo Mura, and with one glance Salvatore could see why the drug addict had remembered this individual. He had ears like conch shells. They stood out of his head in misshapen glory, and they transmitted light as if torches were being held behind them. This man in the company of anyone would be unforgettable. It could be, he thought, that they had just experienced a piece of luck. He repeated his question as Ottavia wet her forefinger on her tongue and flipped open a small notebook.

  She said, “Daniele Bruno. He is a midfielder on the city team.”

  “What do we know about him?”

  “Nothing yet.” And when his head rose abruptly, she went on in haste. “Giorgio’s on it. He’s compiling enough information for you to—”

  She looked startled as Salvatore stepped forward and closed the door of the tiny kitchen. She looked more startled when he spoke to her urgently in a low voice.

  “Listen to me, Ottavia, you and Giorgio . . . You give this information to no one else but myself. Capisce?”r />
  “Sì, ma . . .”

  “That is all you need to know. Whatever you have, you hand over to me.”

  For he knew where things would head should Nicodemo Triglia be given Ottavia’s information. It was already written in the stars and he had seen this on Piero Fanucci’s unfortunate features. The Big Plan was how he thought of it, and it comprised how Piero was going to save face. There was only one way for him to do it at this point since nothing that had happened to Hadiyyah Upman related in any way to Piero’s main suspect in her kidnapping. So Piero could only save face by burying information now and by biding his time until the moment that the tabloids had found other stories to pursue once the excitement of the child’s return to her parents had subsided. Then Carlo would be released very quietly to his life, and everyone else’s life—particularly Piero’s—could simply go on.

  Ottavia Schwartz frowned but asked if the chief inspector wished her to put her notes into a report for him. He told her no. Just hand them over as they are, he said, and let this conversation between us slip from your mind.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Lynley did not see Taymullah Azhar again until breakfast. The Pakistani man had gone to Fattoria di Santa Zita to be with his daughter once Hadiyyah was released from the examination she’d undergone at the hospital. As liaison officer, Lynley had no need to accompany them. But his mind was uneasy in the aftermath of Hadiyyah’s rescue and Lorenzo Mura’s accusations. On the one hand, his own work was finished. On the other hand, he had questions, and it seemed reasonable to ask them of Azhar when they stood at Signora Vallera’s breakfast buffet table, spooning cereal into their bowls.

  He began with “All’s well, I hope?”

  Azhar said, “There is no sufficient way that I can thank you, Inspector Lynley. I know that your presence is Barbara’s doing as well as your own, and there is no way I can thank her either.” And then in answer to his question, “Hadiyyah is well. Angelina is less so.”