Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  He shook his head. She pointed out the way, and he headed there with Birgit following. The pensione was small, so all that was needed was the sound of a conversation and in particular the sound of Hadiyyah Upman’s sweet voice. He wondered if, at nine years old, she was completely aware of what the loss of her mother meant to her now and was going to mean to her in the future.

  Taymullah Azhar saw them at once, and he put a protective hand on Hadiyyah’s shoulder. His dark eyes moved as his gaze took in Birgit first and Salvatore second. He frowned at the state of Salvatore’s appearance. “Un incidente,” Salvatore told him.

  “An accident,” Birgit translated. Her face looked as if she wanted to add “with someone’s fists,” but she didn’t do so. She told him that Ispettore Lo Bianco had some questions he wished to ask. She explained her purpose needlessly, but Salvatore didn’t stop her from doing so: Ispettore Lo Bianco, she said, had only limited English. Taymullah Azhar nodded although, of course, he knew this already.

  He said to Hadiyyah, “Khushi, I will need to talk to these people for a few minutes. If you wait for me . . . Perhaps Signora Vallera will allow you to remain in the kitchen to play with little Graziella . . . ?”

  Hadiyyah looked from his face to the face of Salvatore. She said, “Babies don’t play much, Dad.”

  “Nonetheless,” he said, and she nodded solemnly and scooted out of the room. She called out something in Italian, but Salvatore didn’t catch it. He and Birgit moved to the table on which the street plan of the city was spread out. Azhar folded the map neatly as Signora Vallera came to the door of the breakfast room. She asked if they wanted caffè and they accepted. As they waited for her to bring it to them, Salvatore enquired politely about Hadiyyah’s well-being as well as Azhar’s.

  He watched the Pakistani man carefully, the answers of little import to him. What he thought about was what he had learned about the London professor in the hours since Cinzia Ruocco had revealed what her findings were and what her thoughts were as they related to the findings. What Salvatore knew about Taymullah Azhar at that point was that he was a microbiologist of some considerable reputation. What he didn’t know was whether one of the microbes he studied was E. coli. Nor did he know how that particular bacteria might be transported. Nor did he know how, having transported it, one managed to get a single individual to ingest it without her knowledge.

  He said through Birgit, “Dottore, can you tell me about your relationship with Hadiyyah’s mamma? She left you for Signor Mura. She returned to you at some point into her relationship with Signor Mura, sì?, to soothe you into believing she’d come back. She disappeared then with Hadiyyah. You were left not knowing what had become of them, vero?”

  Unlike so many people who rely on a translation of the speaker’s words, Azhar didn’t look at Birgit as she repeated Salvatore’s statements in English. Nor would he do so for the rest of the interview. Salvatore wondered at this unnatural form of discipline in the man.

  “It was not a good relationship,” Azhar said. “How could it have been otherwise? As you have said, she took Hadiyyah from me.”

  “She had other men from time to time, vero? While you and she were together?”

  “I understand this now to be the case.”

  “You did not know this previously?”

  “While she lived with me in London? I did not know. Not until she left me for Lorenzo Mura. And even then I did not know about him. Just that it was likely there was someone, somewhere. When she returned to me, I thought she had . . . returned to me. When she left with Hadiyyah, my thought was that she had gone back to whoever it was she had left me for. To him or to someone else.”

  “Do you mean that the first time she left you, she might have left you for someone other than Signor Mura?”

  “That is what I mean,” Azhar affirmed. “We did not discuss it. When we saw each other again once Hadiyyah had been taken, there was no point to that sort of discussion.”

  “And once you reached Italy?”

  Azhar drew his eyebrows together as if to say, What about it? He didn’t answer at first as Signora Vallera came into the room with the caffè and a plate of biscotti. They were shaped like balls and covered with powdered sugar. Salvatore took one and let it melt in his mouth. Signora Vallera poured caffè from a tall crockery jug.

  When she’d departed, Azhar said, “Non capisco, Ispettore,” and waited for elucidation.

  Salvatore said, “I wonder if you carried with you the understandable anger at this woman for her sins against you.”

  “We all commit sins against each other,” Azhar said. “I have no immunity from this. But I think she and I had forgiven each other. Hadiyyah was—she is—more important than the grievances Angelina and I had.”

  “So you did hold grievances.” And when Azhar nodded, “Yet in your time here, those did not rise between you? You did not accuse? There were no recriminations?”

  Birgit stumbled a bit with the word recriminations. But after a pause to consult a pocket dictionary, she carried on. Azhar said that there had been no recriminations once Angelina understood that he had had nothing to do with their daughter’s disappearance, although it had taken him much to convince her of this, including a call upon his estranged wife and their children as well as proof of his own presence in Berlin at the time of Hadiyyah’s disappearance.

  “Ah, yes, Berlin,” Salvatore said. “A conference, vero?”

  Azhar nodded. A conference of microbiologists, he said.

  “Many of them?”

  Perhaps three hundred, Azhar told him.

  “Tell me, what does a microbiologist do? Forgive my ignorance. We policemen . . . ?” Salvatore smiled regretfully. “Our lives, they are very narrow, you see.” He put a packet of sugar into his caffè. He took another biscotto and let it melt on his tongue like the other.

  Azhar explained, although he didn’t look convinced by Salvatore’s declaration of ignorance. He spoke about the classes he taught, the graduate and postgraduate students he worked with, the studies carried out in his laboratory, and the papers he wrote as a result of those studies. He spoke of conferences and colleagues as well.

  “Dangerous things, these microbes, I would think,” Salvatore said.

  Azhar explained that microbes came in all shapes and sizes and levels of danger. Some, he said, were completely benign.

  “But one does not interest oneself with those that are benign?” Salvatore said.

  “I do not.”

  “Yet to protect yourself from the danger of exposure to them? This must be crucial, eh?”

  “When one works with dangerous microbes, there are many safeguards,” Azhar informed him. “And laboratories are differently designated according to what’s studied within them. Those that have higher biohazard levels have more safeguards built into them.”

  “Sì, sì, capisco. But let me ask: What, really, is the point of studying such dangerous little things as these microbes?”

  “To understand how they mutate,” Azhar said, “to develop a treatment should one be infected by them, to increase the response time when one is trying to locate the source. There are many reasons to study these microbes.”

  “Just as there are many types of microbes, eh?”

  “Many types of microbes,” he agreed. “As vast as the universe and mutating all the time.”

  Salvatore nodded thoughtfully. He poured more caffè into his cup from the crockery jug and held it up to both Birgit and Azhar. Birgit nodded; Azhar shook his head. He tapped his fingers against the tabletop and looked beyond Salvatore towards the door of the room. Hadiyyah’s high, excited chattering came to them. She was speaking Italian. Children, he thought, were so quick to pick up languages.

  “And in your laboratory, Dottore? What is being studied there? And is this laboratory a . . . what did you call it? A biohazard laboratory?”

  “We study the evolutionary genetics of infectious diseases,” he said.

  “Molto complesso,” Salva
tore murmured.

  This required no translation. “It is complex indeed,” Azhar said.

  “Do you favour one microbe over another in this biohazard laboratory of yours, Dottore?”

  “Streptococcus,” he said.

  “And what do you do with this Streptococcus?”

  Azhar seemed thoughtful at this. He frowned and once again his eyebrows drew together. He explained his hesitation by saying, “Forgive me. It is difficult to—forgive me—to simplify what we do for a layman’s understanding.”

  “Certo,” Salvatore acknowledged. “Ma provi, Dottore.”

  Azhar did so after another moment of thinking. He said, “Perhaps to make it simple, it’s best to say that we engage in a process that allows us to answer questions about the microbe.”

  “Questions?”

  “About its pathogenesis, emergence, evolution, virulence, transmission . . .” Azhar paused to give Birgit time to work upon the more complicated words in Italian.

  “And the reason for all this?” Salvatore asked. “I mean, the reason for all this in your laboratory?”

  “The studying of mutations and how they affect virulence,” he said.

  “In other words, how the mutation makes the microbe more deadly?”

  “This is correct.”

  “How the mutation makes the microbe more likely to kill?”

  “This is also correct.”

  Salvatore nodded thoughtfully. He observed Azhar at greater length than was called for by their conversation about his work. This obviously told the Pakistani man that something was up and, considering that he had been asked to turn his passport over to the police, what was up was obviously the death of his daughter’s mother and its possible connection to his own work.

  Azhar said with apparent great care, “You are asking me these questions for a reason, Inspector. May I know what it is?”

  Instead of replying in answer, Salvatore asked, “What happens to these microbes of yours if they are transported, Dottore? What I mean is, what happens to them if someone transports them from one place to another?”

  “It depends on how they’re transported,” Azhar said. “But I don’t understand why you ask me this, Inspector Lo Bianco.”

  “So they can indeed be transported?”

  “They can. But again, Inspector, you ask me these questions because—”

  “The kidneys of an otherwise healthy woman fail,” Salvatore cut in. “Obviously, there must be a reason for this.”

  Azhar said nothing at all in reply. He was still as a statue, as if any movement he made would tell a tale he did not wish to be told.

  “So you see, we ask you to remain in Italy for a bit of time,” Salvatore went on. “You would wish, perhaps, to have an English-speaking attorney at this point? You would wish, perhaps, to see to it that little Hadiyyah has someone to care for her in the event—”

  “I will care for Hadiyyah,” Azhar said abruptly. But he sat so stiffly in his chair that Salvatore could imagine every muscle in his body tensing as all the implications behind Salvatore’s questions, his own frank responses, and the advice about an avvocato fell upon him.

  “What I would suggest, Dottore,” Salvatore said carefully, “is your preparation for all possible outcomes to this conversation you and I are having.”

  Azhar rose then. He said quietly, “I must go to my daughter now, Inspector Lo Bianco. I have promised her that we will take flowers to her mother’s grave. I will keep that promise.”

  “As a father should,” Salvatore said.

  CHELSEA

  LONDON

  The glorious May weather made Lynley long for a convertible as he coursed along the river. There were other routes to get to Chelsea from New Scotland Yard, but none of them provided what first Millbank and then Grosvenor Road provided on this day: trees bursting forth with brilliant green leaves still untouched by the city’s dust, dirt, and pollution; the sight of runners taking exercise on the wide pavement that followed the course of the Thames; barges in the water and pleasure craft heading towards Tower Bridge or Hampton Court. Gardens were brilliant with grass renewed and with shrubbery bearing its new spring growth. It was a fine day to be alive, he thought. He breathed in life deeply and felt momentarily at peace with his world.

  That had not been the case a few minutes earlier when he’d reported to Superintendent Ardery the phone call he’d received from Salvatore Lo Bianco. Her immediate response was “Christ. This becomes worse and worse, Tommy,” and she’d left her desk and begun to pace her office. On her second circuit of the room, she’d closed the door upon anyone who might wander by.

  The fact that she was in mental disarray was unlike her. Lynley said nothing but merely waited for what was coming next. It was “I need some air and so do you,” to which his admonitory “Isabelle” was met with her sharp “I said air, for God’s sake. Do me the courtesy of taking me at my word until you find me passed out on this floor with a vodka bottle in my hand.”

  He winced at how well she knew him. He said, “Right. Sorry,” and she accepted this with a sharp nod. Then she strode to the door that she’d just closed, and she threw it open. She said to Dorothea Harriman—always lingering nearby to be of assistance or to glean gossip—“I have my mobile,” and she headed in the general direction of the lifts.

  The two of them went outside, where Isabelle stood for a moment in the vicinity of the Met’s revolving sign. She said, “At moments like this, I wish I still smoked.”

  He said, “If you tell me what’s happened, I’ll let you know if I feel the same.”

  “Over there.” She inclined her head towards the junction of Broadway and Victoria Street. A park lay there, its grass shaded by great London plane trees. At a far corner stood a memorial to the suffragette movement, but she didn’t move towards this immense scroll but rather to one of the trees. She leaned against it.

  “So how do you propose to do this without alerting Professor Azhar?” Isabelle asked him. “Obviously, you can’t go yourself. And sending Barbara would be tantamount to shooting yourself in a crucial bodily organ. You do know that, Tommy. At least and by God, I hope you know that.”

  The passion with which she said her last bit told Lynley she’d either been withholding information the last time they’d spoken or she’d received yet another damning report from DI Stewart. It turned out to be the latter.

  She said, “She’s been to see both the private investigator—”

  “Doughty,” he said.

  “Doughty,” she agreed. “And this Bryan Smythe.”

  “But we knew that, Isabelle.”

  “In the company of Taymullah Azhar, Tommy,” Isabelle added. “Why wasn’t this part of her report?”

  He cursed inwardly. This was something new, something more, another brick in the wall, nail in the coffin, whatever on earth one wanted to call it. He said, although he knew the answers as well as he knew his own name, “When did she see him? When did they go? And how did you—”

  “That’s where she was the morning she claimed whatever she claimed—Was it a stop for petrol? Traffic? God, I can’t even remember now—about why she was late to our meeting.”

  “John Stewart again, then? Christ, Isabelle, how much longer are you going to put up with his machinations? Or did you order him, at this point, to start tailing Barbara?”

  “Don’t let’s make this about something other than what it is. And what it is is beginning to look like a cover-up, which as you bloody well know is far more serious than creating a story about her miserable mother falling over a stool or whatever the hell it was supposed to be in her care home.”

  “I’m the first to admit she was out of order doing that.”

  “Oh, let me call on the saints and angels in praise,” Isabelle said. “And now what we have is a set of behaviours on the part of Sergeant Havers that strongly suggest she’s stitching up evidence.”

  “We have no UK crime,” he reminded her.

  “Don’t take m
e for a fool. She’s over the side, Tommy. You and I both know it. I may have started out investigating arson in my career, but one thing I learned from examining fire scenes is that if my nose is picking up the scent of smoke, there’s bloody well been a fire.”

  He waited for her to tell him the rest, which constituted those airline tickets to Pakistan. Still she did not. He concluded once again that, for whatever little good it did Havers, Isabelle continued not to know about the tickets. Had she known, she would have told him at this point. There was no reason to hold back that information.

  She said to him, “Did you know she’d been to see Smythe and Doughty in the company of Azhar?”

  He looked at her steadily as he formulated his reply: which way to go and what it would mean if he went there. He had hoped she wouldn’t ask the question, but as she said, she wasn’t a fool.

  “Yes,” he told her.

  She looked heavenward, crossing her arms beneath her breasts. “You’re protecting her by stitching up evidence yourself, I take it?”

  “I am not,” he said.

  “So what am I to think . . . ?”

  “That I don’t know everything yet, Isabelle. And until I know it, I saw no reason to worry you.”

  “You mean to protect her, don’t you? No matter the cost. God in heaven, what’s wrong with you, Tommy? This is your bloody career we’re talking about.” And when he didn’t answer, she said, “Never mind. It isn’t, is it? What was I thinking? The earldom awaits. Is that what they call it, by the way, an earldom? And the family pile in Cornwall is always there ready for you to decamp to if you want to throw all of this over. You don’t need to do this kind of work. It’s all a lark for you. It’s a walk in the park. It’s a bloody joke. It’s—”

  “Isabelle, Isabelle.” He took a step towards her.