Just One Evil Act

22 April

VILLA RIVELLI

TUSCANY

Opposite the giardino and at the far end of the peschiera, a low wall edged the top of a hillside, still green and lush from winter’s rainfall. This hillside fell away to reveal distant villages that shimmered in the warm spring sunshine, and a road twisted up to them from the alluvial plain far below. This road was something equally visible, and because of this, Sister Domenica Giustina saw him coming from a great distance.

She and Carina had gone to feed the fish that shot through the waters of the peschiera like bits of orange flame, and they’d backed away from the pond’s edge to watch the fish gobbling at the food with their greedy mouths. When this was finished, Sister Domenica Giustina had turned the child to admire the view. “Che bella vista, nevvero?” she had murmured, and she’d begun to name the villages for Carina. Solemnly, Carina repeated each name. She was changed from that earlier day in the cellar. She was more hesitant, more watchful, perhaps more worried. But that could not be helped, Domenica decided. Some things took precedence over others.

That was when she saw the car flashing rapidly in and out of the trees far below, climbing ever higher on its way to the villa. She recognised it even at this great distance, for it was bright red and its top was down and she would, of course, have known the driver anywhere on earth. His coming, though, represented danger. For bringing Carina to her also meant he could take her away. He’d done so before, had he not?

“Vieni, vieni,” she said to the child. And lest Carina misunderstand her, she clasped her hand and scooted her along the narrow terrace and down the path. They went across the wide lawn at the back of the villa. They hurried in the direction of the cellars.

Above on the building, the thick curtains on one of the windows twitched. Sister Domenica Giustina saw this, but what was inside the villa was no worry to her. What was outside the villa presented the danger.

She could tell Carina was not happy to descend to the cellars once again. Sister Domenica Giustina had not attempted another time to bring her to the murky pool within this place, but she could tell the child was afraid that she might. There was nothing to fear in that pool, but she had no way to explain to Carina why this was the case. And now she had no intention of taking her to that part of the cellars at all. She merely wanted her to remain near the first of the old wine casks.

“Veramente, non c’è nulla da temere qui,” she murmured. Spiders, perhaps, but they were harmless. If one feared anything, one should fear the devil.

Thankfully, Carina understood at least something of what Sister Domenica Giustina said, and she seemed relieved when she apparently realised that Sister Domenica Giustina’s intentions were to take her no farther into the cellars than the second room. She hunkered between two of the ancient wine casks there, her knees pressed into the dusty floor. Still, she said in a whisper, “Non chiuda la porta. Per favore, Suor Domenica.”

She could do that much for the child, of course. There was no need to close the door as long as Carina could promise to be silent as a mouse.

Carina made that promise. “Aspetterai qui?” Sister Domenica Giustina asked.

Carina nodded. Yes, of course. She would wait.

By the time he arrived, Sister Domenica Giustina was among her vegetables. She heard the car first, its engine purring and its tyres rolling sonorously over the sassolini. She heard its engine stop, its door open and then close, and then in a moment his footsteps as he mounted the stairs to the small habitation above the barn. He called her name. She rose from the dirt, carefully wiping her hands on a rag that hung from her waist. Above, she heard two doors slam and then his footsteps coming down the stairs. Then the garden gate creaked and she lowered her head. Domenica, humble. Domenica, subservient to any wish that he might have.

“Dov’è la bambina?” he asked. “Perché non sta nel granaio?”

She said nothing. She heard him cross the garden, and she saw his feet when he stopped before her. She told herself that she had to be strong. He would not remove Carina from her care, despite the child’s not remaining above the barn as he had instructed.

“Mi senti?” he said. “Domenica, mi senti?”

She nodded, for she was not deaf and this he knew. She said to him, “La porterai via di nuovo.”

“Di nuovo?” he repeated, incredulous. Why, he seemed to be asking, would he ever remove the child from her care?

“Lei è mia,” she said.

She looked up then. He was watching her. On his face, it seemed a calculation of her words was being made. Knowledge appeared to be breaking over him, and he seemed to confirm this when he put his hand on the back of her neck, said, “Cara, cara,” and drew her closer.

The heat of his hand on her flesh was like a brand that marked her forever his. She felt it throughout her body, even to her blood.

“Cara, cara, cara,” he murmured. “Non me la riprenderò più, mai più.” He lowered his mouth to hers. His tongue probed and caressed. Then he lifted the linen shift she wore.

“L’hai nascosta?” he said against her mouth. “Perché non sta nel granaio? Te l’ho detto, no? ‘La bambina deve rimanere dentro il granaio.’ Non ti ricordi? Cara, cara?”

But how could she have kept Carina hidden within the cold stone barn as he had demanded she do? Domenica wondered. She was a child, and a child must be free.

He rained tender kisses against her neck. His fingers touched her. First here. Then there. And the flames seemed to eat at her flesh as he lowered her gently to the ground. On the ground, he entered her and he moved within her with mesmerising rhythm. She could not abhor it.

“La bambina,” he murmured into her ear. “Capisci? L’ho ritornata, tesoro. Non me la riprenderò. Allora. Dov’è? Dov’è? Dov’è?” And with each thrust, he said the words, Where is she? I brought her back to you, my treasure.

Domenica received him. She allowed the mantle of sensations to cover her until they peaked at their completion. She did not think.

Afterwards, he lay panting in her arms. But only for an instant before he rose. He adjusted his clothing. He looked down upon her, and she saw his lip move in a twist that did not speak of love. “Copriti,” he said between his teeth. “Dio mio. Copriti.”

She lowered her linen shift in compliance. She looked up at the sky. Its blue was unbroken by a single cloud. The sun shone in it, like God’s grace falling upon her face.

“Mi senti? Mi senti?”

No, she hadn’t been listening. She hadn’t been there. She’d been in the arms of her beloved but now—

He jerked her upright. “Domenica, dov’è la bambina?” He barked the words.

She scrambled to her feet. She looked to the earth where, between the rows of fresh young lettuces, the mark of her body flattened the dirt. She gazed at this in confusion. “Che cos’è successo?” she murmured, and she looked at him. She said insistently, “Roberto. Che cos’è successo qui?”

“Pazza,” he responded. “Sei sempre stata pazza.”

From this, she knew that something had indeed occurred between them. She could feel it in her body, and she could smell it in the air. They’d mated in the dirt like animals, and she’d stained her soul yet another time.

He asked again where the little girl was, and Sister Domenica Giustina felt the pain of this question like a sword piercing her side to take the last of her blood. She said to him, “Mi hai portato via la bambina già una volta. Non ti permetterò di farlo di nuovo.”

She repeated herself, insistently this time: He’d taken the child away from her once. He would not do so again.

He lit a cigarette. He tossed the match to one side. He smoked and said, “How can you trust me so little, Domenica? I was young. So were you. We are older now. You have her somewhere. You must take me to her.”

“What will you do?”

“I mean no harm. I want to know she is well. I have clothing for her. Come. I’ll show you. It’s in the car.”

“If it is, you may leave it and go your way.”

“Cara,” he murmured. “This I cannot do.” He glanced beyond them where through the magnificent camellia hedge the villa loomed, silent but watchful. “You do not wish me to remain here,” he said. “That would not be good for either of us.”

She understood what he was threatening. He would remain. There would be trouble unless she produced the child.

“Show me the clothing,” she said.

“That is my wish.” He opened the gate and held it for her. As she passed him, he smiled. His fingers lightly touched her neck, and she shuddered at the feeling of his flesh upon her own.

At the car, she saw the bags on the floor. There were two of them. He had not lied. Clothing was folded neatly within them. It was a little girl’s clothing, used but still serviceable.

She looked at him. He said, “I seek her comfort, Domenica. You must learn to trust me again.”

She nodded abruptly. She turned from the car. She said, “Vieni.”

She led him through the camellia hedge. At the cellar steps, however, she paused. She looked at her cousin. He smiled, and it was a smile she knew well. Nothing to fear, it said. Innocent, it proclaimed. She had only to believe as she once had done.

She descended. He followed. “Carina,” she called quietly. “Vieni qui. Va tutto bene, Carina,” and as if in answer, she heard the patter of the little girl’s feet as she emerged from her hiding place among the casks in the second room.

She skipped out to them. The light was dim, but in it Sister Domenica Giustina could see the cobwebs in the child’s dark hair. Her knees were marked from the filthy floor, and her shift bore the soil of generations of the cellar’s disuse.

Her face lit up when she saw who was with Sister Domenica Giustina, and completely unafraid, she danced over to him.

She spoke in English, saying, “Yes! Yes! Have you come to fetch me? Do I get to go home?”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Being called to the office of il Pubblico Ministero was only slightly less infuriating than having to make the drive to his home in Barga. The second was an insult and designed to be one. The first was merely un’eritema, like an itch on the skin that cannot be scratched. Thus, Salvatore Lo Bianco knew he should have been at least moderately grateful that Fanucci hadn’t waited until evening to direct his appearance once again into the ministerial presence among his cymbidiums. But he was not. For he’d made his daily reports as he’d been instructed, and still Piero edged closer and closer to becoming an intrusive presence in the investigation. Piero was not a stupid man, but his mind was like a prison cell: closed, locked, and with no one in possession of the key.

As a magistrate, Piero knew that the power within an investigation was his, and he liked to play with it. It was he who assigned the lead officer to a case. Thus someone assigned could just as easily be unassigned, and everyone knew it. So when he made a request for one’s presence, one had to comply. Or one had to face the consequences of failing to do so.

So Salvatore took himself to Palazzo Ducale, where Piero Fanucci had a suite of offices as impressive as local revenues could make them. He walked, as the way wasn’t long, for the palazzo stood in Piazza Grande, where a gaggle of tourists gathered near the central statue of the town’s beloved Maria Luisa di Borbone. There they snapped pictures, learned the history associated with the loathsome Elisa Bonaparte, who’d been condemned by her brother to rule in this Italian backwater, and they watched a colourful carousel on the piazza’s south side take laughing children on a trip to nowhere.

Salvatore watched this, also. He took a moment to consider what he wanted to impart to the magistrate. A piece of information had fallen into his lap from a most unexpected source: Salvatore’s own daughter. For she was enrolled in the Scuola Elementare Statale Dante Alighieri here in Lucca. And so, as it happened, was the missing child.

This wasn’t unusual. Children from the area surrounding Lucca often came into town for their education. What was unusual was the amount of information that Bianca had actually managed to glean from the girl.

He hadn’t told Bianca that Hadiyyah Upman was missing. He hadn’t wished to frighten his child. But he also hadn’t been able to prevent her from seeing the flyers that were being posted around the town, and she’d recognised her little schoolmate. Recognising her, she’d told her mother of their acquaintance. Birgit, praise God, had informed Salvatore.

Over a casual but indifferent gelato purchased from the only café on Lucca’s great wall, Salvatore had probed carefully for details. His daughter, it turned out, had assumed that Lorenzo Mura was Hadiyyah’s father, not understanding at first that had that been the case, the child’s Italian probably would have been much better. Hadiyyah had revealed to her that her father was, instead, in London. A professor, she’d said proudly, at a university. She and her mummy were in Italy visiting Mummy’s friend Lorenzo. Dad had intended to come for Christmas, but then he’d had too much work and was supposed to be there at Easter instead. But things had come up once again for him because he was so terribly busy . . . Here’s a picture of him. He’s a scientist. He sends me emails and I write to him and p’rhaps he can come for summer hols . . .

“D’you think her dad came to take her home to London?” Bianca had asked Salvatore, her great dark eyes reflecting a worry that an eight-year-old’s eyes should never reflect.

“Possibly, cara,” Salvatore had said. “Possibly indeed.”

The question now was whether he was going to share this information with Piero Fanucci. It would, he decided, all depend on how his meeting with the magistrate went.

Fanucci’s secretary was the first person Salvatore encountered when he climbed the great staircase. A long-suffering seventy-year-old, she reminded Salvatore of his own mother. Instead of black, though, she always wore red. She dyed her hair the colour of coal, and she possessed an unattractive moustache that—in the years he had known her—she’d never bothered to remove. She’d maintained her position in the magistrate’s office because she was completely unappealing to Piero, so he hadn’t once molested her. Had she been even marginally attractive to il Pubblico Ministero, she would not have lasted six months, as Fanucci’s career was littered with the spiritual and psychological corpses of the women who’d been victimised by him.

Once inside the office suite, Salvatore learned that a wait for the magistrate would be necessary. For a junior prosecutor had been taken into the presence in advance of Salvatore’s appearance, he was told. That meant someone was being dressed down. Salvatore sighed and took up a magazine. He flipped through it, noted which closeted homosexual American celebrity was currently attaching himself to a conveniently stupid supermodel twenty years his junior, and tossed this rivista idiota to one side. After five minutes he requested that Fanucci’s secretary let the magistrate know that he was waiting.

She looked shocked. Did he truly want to chance an eruption of il vulcano? she asked. He did, he assured her.

But it turned out that interrupting Fanucci was not necessary. A pale-to-the-gills young man emerged from the magistrate’s office and scuttled on his way. Salvatore strode in, unannounced and not wishing it otherwise.

Piero eyed him. His facial warts were pale excrescences against skin inflamed by whatever had gone on between him and his underling. Apparently deciding to say nothing about Salvatore’s unheralded entrance into his office, he gave a sharp and wordless nod to a television on one of his office bookshelves, and he clicked it on without preliminaries.

It was a recording of a broadcast, made that morning by England’s BBC. Salvatore spoke very little English and was thus unable to follow the rapid-fire conversation between the two presenters. They were engaged in a strange discussion about UK newspapers, it seemed, and one at a time they held them up to the camera.

Salvatore saw quickly that no translation of this broadcast was actually going to be necessary. Piero stopped the recording when the presenters reached the front page of a particular tabloid. The Source, it was called. It had the story.

This, he knew, was not a good development. One tabloid meant many. Many meant the possible incursion of British reporters into Lucca.

Fanucci clicked the recording off. He indicated that Salvatore was to take a seat. Piero himself remained standing because standing was power, and power, Salvatore thought, could be demonstrated in so many ways.

“What more have you learned from this street beggar of yours?” Fanucci asked. He meant the poor drug addict, him of the Ho fame sign. Salvatore had brought the youth once into the questura for a formal interrogation, but Fanucci was pressing for another. This would be, he’d instructed Salvatore, a more serious one, a lengthier one, one designed to “encourage” the unfortunate’s memory . . . such as it was.

Salvatore had been avoiding this. While Fanucci believed drug addicts capable of anything to support their habit, Salvatore did not. In the case of this particular drug addict, Carlo Casparia had been occupying that same spot at the entrance to Porta San Jacopo for the past six years without incident, a disgrace to his family but a menace to no one but himself.

He said, “Piero, there is nothing more to be learned from this man Carlo. Believe me, his brain is too addled to have planned a kidnapping.”

“Planned?” Fanucci repeated. “Topo, why do you say this was planned? He saw her, and he took her.”

And then? Salvatore thought. He produced an expression on his face that he hoped projected that question without having to ask it directly.

“It could be,” Fanucci said, “that we have a crime of opportunity, my friend. Can you not see that? He has told you that he saw the child, no? He was not so brain-addled that he forgot that. So why this one child in his memory, Topo? Why not another? Why did Carlo remember a child at all?”

“She gave him food, Magistrato. A banana.”

“Bah! What she gave him was a promise.”

“Come?”

“The promise of money. Must I spell it out for you what happens once he takes the child?”

“There has been no demand for ransom.”

“Why should there be ransom when so many other opportunities exist to make money off an innocent girl?” Fanucci counted them off on the fingers of his six-fingered hand. “She is bundled into the back of a car and bundled out of the country, Topo. She is sold into the sex trade somewhere. She is made into a household slave. She is handed over to a paedophile with a clever basement into which she is stuffed. She is given to a satanic worship group for sacrifice. She is made a rich Arab’s plaything.”

“All of which, Piero, would beg for planning, no?”

“None of which, Topo, we will ever learn until you question Carlo again. You must see to this without delay. I wish to read it in your next report to me. Tell me how else you intend to spend your time, little man, if not with this and in this direction?”

In answer to the insulting question, Salvatore first asked his blood to cool. Then he chose a significant detail that had arisen from the posters and handbills round the central part of town. He’d received two phone calls from two hotels in Lucca, one within the city’s wall and one from Arancio, not far from the road to Montecatini. A man had come by, in possession of a picture of the missing child in the company of a nice-looking woman, presumably her mother. The man had been looking for them, and he’d left a card with the hotel receptionists. Unfortunately, the card in both cases had been tossed away.

Fanucci swore at the stupidity of women. Salvatore didn’t bother to tell him that in both cases the receptionists had been men. What he did tell him was that this individual had been seeking the girl at least a month earlier or perhaps six weeks. That, he said, was the limit of what they knew.

“Who was this man?” Fanucci demanded. “What did he look like, at least?”

Salvatore shook his head. Trying to get a local receptionist to remember what someone looked like a month or six weeks or eight weeks after having seen the individual only once and probably for less than a minute . . . ? He extended his hands, palms up, empty. It could have been anyone, Magistrato.

“And this is all you know? This is all you have?” Fanucci demanded.

“With regard to this person seeking the woman and the girl, purtroppo, it is,” Salvatore lied. And when Fanucci would have begun a tedious lecture about Salvatore’s general incompetence or a diatribe ending with a threat to replace him, Salvatore threw the magistrate a bone.

He shared the fact of the emails that had gone from the child Hadiyyah and her father. “He’s here in Lucca now,” Salvatore said. “This is something that must be explored.”

“A London father who writes emails to his daughter residing in Italy?” Fanucci scoffed. “How is this important?”

“There are broken promises about visits he intended to make here,” Salvatore said. “Broken visits, broken hearts, and runaway children. It is a possibility that must be explored.” He looked at his watch. “I meet with these people—the parents together—in forty minutes.”

“After which you’ll report . . . ”

“Sempre,” Salvatore said. He would report something, he told himself. Just enough to keep il Pubblico Ministero satisfied that things were moving along under his idiotic direction. “So, my friend, if there is nothing else . . . ?” He got to his feet.

“As it happens, we are not finished,” Fanucci said. A smile touched his mouth without touching his eyes. Power still lay within his hands, and Salvatore saw he’d been outmanoeuvred again.

He sat. He looked as unruffled as he could. “E allora?” he said.

“The British embassy has phoned,” Fanucci told him. There was a tinge of pleasure in the tone he used, and Salvatore knew at once that the infuriating man had saved the best for last. He said nothing in reply. It was the least he could do to attain revenge. “The English police are sending a Scotland Yard detective.” Piero jerked his head at the television, at the recording they’d watched. “It seems they have no choice after the publicity.”

Salvatore swore. This was not a development he’d anticipated. Nor was it a development he liked.

“He’ll stay out of the way,” Fanucci told him. “His purpose, I’m told, will be to liaise between the investigation and the girl’s mother.”

Salvatore swore again. Not only would he now have to attend to the demands of il Pubblico Ministero but he’d also have to do the same for a Scotland Yard officer. More exasperating calls upon his time.

“Who is this officer?” he asked in resignation.

“Thomas Lynley is his name. That’s all I know. Except for one detail you should keep in mind.” Fanucci paused for dramatic effect and, as their encounter had gone on quite long enough, Salvatore played along with him for once.

“What’s the detail?” he asked wearily.

“He speaks Italian,” Fanucci said.

“How well?”

“Well enough, I understand. Stai attento, Topo.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Salvatore chose Café di Simo as their meeting place. In other circumstances, he might have met the parents of the missing child in the questura, but his preference generally was to save the questura for purposes of intimidation. He wished to see the parents as much at ease as he could possibly make them, and requiring them to come to the questura with its hustle, bustle, and inescapable police presence would not effect the degree of calm he wanted in them. Café di Simo, on the other hand, was rich in history, atmosphere, and delectable items from its pasticceria. It spoke not of suspicion but of comfort: a cappuccino or caffè macchiato for each of them, a plate of cantucci to be shared among all of them, and a quiet chat in the soothing side room with its panelled walls, small tables, and bright white floor.

They did not come together, the mother and the father. She arrived alone, without her partner Lorenzo Mura, and the professor arrived three minutes later. Salvatore placed the order for their drinks at the bar and, piatto di biscotti in hand, led them to the back of the café, where a doorway gave onto the interior room and where, conveniently, no one else was sitting at present. Salvatore intended to keep things that way.

“Signor Mura?” was how he politely asked about the signora’s partner. Odd, he thought, that Mura was not with her. In their earlier meetings, he’d hovered about like the woman’s guardian angel.

“Verrà,” she said. He would be coming. She added, “Sta giocando a calcio,” with a sad little smile. Obviously, Angelina Upman knew how it looked that her lover was off at a football match instead of at her side. She added, “Lo aiuta,” as if to clarify.

Salvatore wondered at this. It didn’t seem likely that football—either played or watched or coached—would do much to help anyone in the situation, as she claimed. But perhaps an hour or two of the sport took Mura’s mind off things. Or perhaps it merely got him away from his partner’s understandable, unceasing, and probably frenzied worry about her daughter.

She did not, however, appear frenzied now. She appeared deadened. She looked quite ill. The girl’s father—the Pakistani from London—did not look much better. Both of them were raw nerve endings and twisted stomachs. And who could blame them?

He noted how the professor held out a chair for the signora before taking a seat himself. He noted how the signora’s hands shook when she put the zucchero into her espresso. He noted how the professor offered her the plate of biscotti although Salvatore had gently pushed it in his own direction. He noted the signora’s use of Hari in speaking to the father of her child. He noted the father wince when he heard her use this name.

Every detail of every interaction between these two people was important to Salvatore. He had not spent twenty years of his life as a policeman only to escape knowing that family came under suspicion first when tragedy fell upon a member of it.

Using a combination of his wretched English and the signora’s moderately decent Italian, Salvatore brought them as up-to-date as he wished them to be. The airports had all been checked, he told them. So had the train stations. So had the buses. The net of their search for the child had been cast and was still in place: not only in Lucca but outward into the surrounding towns. So far, purtroppo, there was nothing to report.

He waited for the signora to make a slow translation for the father of her child. Her serviceable Italian got the main points across to the dark-skinned man.

“None of this is as . . . as simple as it used to be,” he said when she was finished. “Before EU, the borders were, of course, a different thing. Now?” He made a what-you-will gesture, not to show indifference but rather to indicate the difficulties they faced. “It has been a good thing for criminals, this lack of strong borders. Here in Italy”—with an apologetic smile—“with EU we gain a system of money that is no longer mad, eh? But as for everything else, as for policing . . . tracing movements is much more difficult now. And if the motorway is used to access the border . . . These things can be checked, but it takes much time.”

“And the ports?” The child’s father asked the question. The mother translated, unnecessarily in this case.

“Ports are being checked.” He didn’t tell them what anyone with a basic knowledge of geography knew. How many ports and accessible beaches were there in a narrow country with a coastline of thousands of kilometres? If someone had smuggled the child out of Italy via the sea, she was lost to them. “But there is a chance—every chance—that your Hadiyyah is still in Italy,” he told them. “Possibly she is still in the province. This is how you must think, please.”

The signora’s eyes shone with tears, but she blinked quickly and did not shed them. She said, “How many days is it usually, Inspector, before . . . something . . . some kind of clue? . . . is found.” She did not, of course, wish to say “before a body is found.” None of them wished to say that despite all of them probably thinking it.

He explained to her as best he could the complexity of the area in which they lived. Not only were the Tuscan hills nearby, but beyond them the Apuan Alps rose like threats. Within both these places were hundreds of villages, hamlets, villas, farms, cottages, retreats, caves, churches, convents, monasteries, and grottoes. The child could be literally anywhere, he told them. Until they had a sighting, a clue, a memory shaken from someone’s busy life, they were playing a waiting game.

Angelina Upman’s tears fell then. She accompanied them with not the slightest drama. They merely leaked out of her eyes and down her cheeks, and she did nothing to blot them away. The professor moved his chair closer to hers. He put his hand on her arm.

Salvatore told them about Carlo Casparia to give them a small hope to hold on to. The drug addict had been questioned and would be questioned again, he said. They were still trying to excavate something from the wasteland that was his brain. At first he had seemed a possible candidate to have orchestrated an abduction, Salvatore explained. But as there was no ransom demanded by anyone . . . ? He paused questioningly.

“Sì, no ransom,” Angelina Upman affirmed in a whisper.

. . . Then they had to assume he was not involved. He could, of course, have taken the child and handed her over to someone else for payment. But this suggested a degree of planning and an ability to go unnoticed in the mercato that did not seem possible for Carlo. He was as well known as the accordion player to whom their daughter had given money. Had he led the child off somewhere, one of the venditori would have seen this.

Into this explanation that Salvatore was giving, Lorenzo Mura finally arrived. He deposited an athletic bag on the floor and brought a chair to the table. His eyes took in the proximity of the London professor to the signora. His glance lingered on the other man’s hand, still on the signora’s arm. Taymullah Azhar removed it, but he did not change the position of his chair. Mura said, “Cara,” to Angelina Upman and kissed the top of her head.

Salvatore did not like the fact that Mura’s practice, coaching, or game of calcio had taken precedence over this meeting. Thus, he merely went on. Should Lorenzo Mura wish to be updated at this point, someone else was going to have to do it. He said, “So this, you see, would have been out of character in Carlo. We seek someone for whom the taking of a child is in character. This has led us to the paedophiles we have under surveillance and to those we suspect of being paedophiles.”

“So?” Lorenzo was the one to ask the question. He did it abruptly, the way one would expect of someone from such a distinguished family. They would assume the police would jump to their bidding in the manner in which the police had done during the years of their immense wealth. Salvatore did not like this, but he understood it. Nonetheless, he did not intend to be cowed.

He ignored Mura’s question and said to the parents of the missing girl, “As it happens, my daughter is acquainted with your Hadiyyah, although I did not know this until my Bianca saw the posters in town. They attend the Dante Alighieri school together. They have, it seems, spoken many times since your daughter joined Bianca’s class. She told me something that has caused me to wonder if perhaps it is not an abduction that we are looking upon.”

The parents said nothing. Mura frowned. They were, clearly, all thinking the same thing. If the police weren’t considering the child’s disappearance an abduction, then the police were considering it a runaway. Or a murder. There was no other alternative.

“Your little one told my Bianca much about you,” Salvatore said, this time to the professor alone. He waited patiently for the signora to translate. “She said that you had written in emails that you would visit her at Christmas and then at Easter.”

The professor’s strangled cry stopped Salvatore from going on. The signora raised a hand to her mouth. Mura looked from his lover to the father of her child, his eyes narrowing in speculation, as the professor said, “I did not . . . Emails?” and the situation became immediately more complex.

Salvatore said, “Sì. You wrote no emails to Hadiyyah?”

The professor, stricken, said, “I did not know . . . When Angelina left me, there was no word where they had gone. I had no way to . . . Her laptop was left behind. I had no idea . . .” He spoke with such difficulty that Salvatore knew every word he said was the absolute truth. “Angelina . . .” The professor looked at her. “Angelina . . .” It seemed the only thing he could say.

“I had to.” She breathed the words rather than said them. “Hari. You would have . . . I didn’t know how else . . . If she’d had no word from you, she would have wanted . . . She would have wondered. She adores you and it was the only way . . .”

Salvatore sat back in his chair and examined the signora. His English was just good enough to pick up the gist. He examined the professor. He looked at Mura. He could see that Mura was in the dark about this matter, but he—Salvatore—was quickly putting together pieces that he did not like. “There were no real emails,” he clarified. “These emails that Hadiyyah received . . . You wrote them, Signora?”

She shook her head. She lowered it so her face was partially obscured by her hair, and she said, “My sister. I told her what to say.”

“Bathsheba?” the professor asked. “Bathsheba wrote emails, Angelina? Pretending? And yet when we spoke to her . . . when we spoke to your parents . . . all of them said . . .” One of his two hands clenched into a fist. “Hadiyyah believed the emails, didn’t she? You set the address to be authentically English. So she would have no doubt, no questions,” he finally said. “So she would think I wrote to her, making promises that I did not keep.”

“Hari, I’m sorry.” The signora’s tears fell copiously now. A broken story came from her lips. This story was about her sister, the aversion she felt—and the family felt—for this man from Pakistan, her willingness to assist Angelina in escaping and hiding away from him, the communication between the two women, how everything from last November until this moment had come to pass, except, of course, the abduction of the child.

The signora’s head was in her hands as she spoke. “I’m so sorry” was her conclusion.

The professor looked at her long. To Salvatore, it seemed that he went inside himself to find some inner quality that would allow him to bring forth what, in the same position, Salvatore could not possibly have produced. “It’s done, Angelina,” the professor said. He spoke with astounding dignity. “I cannot pretend to understand. I never will understand. Your hatred of me? This . . . what you have done . . . Hadiyyah’s safety is what is important now.”

“I don’t hate you!” the signora wept. “It’s that you don’t understand me, that you never understood me, that I tried and tried and couldn’t make you see—”

The professor put his hand on her arm once again. “Perhaps we failed each other,” he said. “But that is of no importance now. Only Hadiyyah. Angelina, hear me. Only Hadiyyah.”

Sudden movement from Lorenzo Mura caused Salvatore to glance his way. The man’s port wine birthmark would always make the rest of his skin look pale by comparison, but Salvatore did not miss the angry flush that climbed from his neck and the muscle in his jaw that moved as he ground his teeth together. He leaned forward quickly. Just as quickly—perhaps sensing Salvatore’s gaze upon him—he returned to his original position. Salvatore noted this. There were things about this man, he thought, that bore looking into as well.

He said to the parents, “You will want to know that the British police have become involved in this matter. A Scotland Yard detective arrives today.”

“Barbara Havers?” The professor said the name in such hope that Salvatore was loath to disappoint him.

“It is a man,” he said. “Thomas Lynley is his name.”

The professor touched his former partner’s shoulder. He left it there. “I know this man, Angelina,” he said. “He will help find Hadiyyah. This is very good news.”

Salvatore doubted that. He thought it best to tell them that the detective’s purpose would only be to keep them informed of what was happening with the investigation. But before he had a chance to say this, Lorenzo Mura was on his feet.

“Andiamo,” he said abruptly to Angelina, jerking her chair away from the table. He nodded a farewell to Salvatore. The professor he ignored altogether.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Lynley made the drive from Pisa to Lucca with no trouble, well prepared by Charlie Denton with directions, Internet maps, satellite depictions of the town, and car parks marked with mighty red P’s both inside and outside of the city’s huge wall. Charlie had gone so far as to indicate the location of the questura as well, and on the satellite photo he’d pointed out with arrows the Roman amphitheatre where Lynley would find his pensione. He’d booked himself into the same B & B that Taymullah Azhar was using. This, he reckoned, would simplify matters when he needed to speak to the London professor.

He’d been to Italy innumerable times—in childhood, adolescence, and as an adult—but somehow he’d never been to Lucca. So he was unprepared for the sight of the perfectly kept wall that had long protected the town’s medieval interior, both from marauders and from the occasional floods that its position on the alluvial plain of the River Serchio exposed it to. In many ways Lucca resembled numerous towns and villages he’d seen in Tuscany from his childhood on: with their narrow cobbled streets, their piazzas dominated by churches, and their fountains bubbling with fresh spring water. But in three ways it was different: in its number of churches, its remaining towers, and most of all its distinguishing wall.

He had to drive around this wall twice before he found the car park Denton had identified as being closest to the amphitheatre, so he was able to take in the towering trees upon it, as well as the statues, the military bulwarks, the parks, and the people on bikes, on rollerblades, in running clothes, and guiding pushchairs. A police car drove at a snail’s pace through them. Another stood parked above one of the many gates that gave access into the oldest part of the town.

He himself gained entrance through Porta Santa Maria. There he parked, and from there it was a short walk only to reach Piazza dell’ Anfiteatro, an ovoid marking upon the campestral landscape of the town. Lynley had to walk half the circumference of the repurposed amphitheatre to find one of the tunnel-like gallerie that allowed him access to the interior of the place, and once within its precinct, he paused and blinked in the bright sunlight that fell upon the yellow and white buildings inside and upon the stones that constituted the foundation of the piazza. Here there were tourist shops, cafés, apartments, and pensioni. His own was called Pensione Giardino although he suspected the garden of its name comprised only the impressive display of cacti, succulents, and shrubbery arranged in terracotta pots on various surfaces in front of the establishment.

It took a brief few minutes for Lynley to acquaint himself with the proprietor of the place. She was a young, heavily pregnant woman who introduced herself breathlessly as Cristina Grazia Vallera before she handed him his key, pointed out a claustrophobic breakfast room, and gave him the hours of colazione. That taken care of, she disappeared towards the back of the building, from which the crying of a small child emanated along with the welcome scent of baking bread, leaving him to find his room on his own.

He had no difficulty with this. He climbed the stairs, saw there were four rooms only, and located his at the front of the building, number three. It was warm within, so he opened the metal shutters over the window, then the window itself. He looked out at the piazza below him, where, at its centre, a group of students had positioned themselves in a large circle, facing outward. They were each sketching their own views of the piazza as their teacher moved among them. Thus, he saw Taymullah Azhar the moment the London man came through the galleria and headed for the pensione.

Lynley watched his progress. He had nothing with him but his devastation, and Lynley knew this feeling, its every nuance. He watched—one step back from the window—until Azhar disappeared beneath him into their shared accommodation.

Lynley removed his jacket and placed his suitcase upon the bed. In a moment, he heard footsteps on the tiles in the corridor, so he went to the door. When he opened it, Azhar was at the door to his own room, which was next to Lynley’s. He glanced over—as one would do—and Lynley was struck, even in the dim light of the corridor, by how contained the man was, even in his wretchedness.

“The chief inspector told us you were coming,” Taymullah Azhar said to Lynley, walking over to shake his hand. “I am, Inspector Lynley, so very grateful that you are here. I know how busy a man you are.”

“Barbara wanted to be sent,” Lynley told him. “Our guv wouldn’t allow it.”

“I know she must walk a very fine line in all of this.” Azhar used a thin hand to indicate the pensione, but Lynley knew he meant the situation of Hadiyyah’s disappearance. He also knew that the “she” in Azhar’s remarks did not refer to Isabelle Ardery.

“She does,” he told the London professor.

“I wish she would not. To have her on my conscience . . . what might happen to her . . . to her employment with the police . . . I do not wish this,” Azhar said frankly.

“Let go of that burden,” Lynley said. “Over a long acquaintance, I’ve found that Barbara goes her own way in matters that are important to her. Frankly? I wish she wouldn’t. Her heart’s always in the right place, but her wisdom—especially her political wisdom—often takes an ill-advised back seat to her heart.”

“This I have come to understand.”

Lynley explained to Azhar what his own position in the investigation would be as long as he remained in Lucca. He was in all respects an outsider, and how much he would be able to assist the Italian police was going to depend entirely upon them and upon the public minister. This man—a magistrate—directed the investigation, Lynley told Azhar. That was how Italian policing was structured.

“My job is to be a conduit for information.” Lynley went on to tell Azhar how it had come about that the Metropolitan police had decided to send a liaison officer to Lucca at all: because of The Source and what appeared to be Barbara Havers’s leaking information to that rag. “This has made her less than popular with Superintendent Ardery, as you can imagine. Nothing can be proved, of course, as to whether she actually gave them the story. But I have to say that I’m hoping my presence here will also keep Barbara out of any further trouble in London.”

Azhar took this in, quiet for a moment. “I will hope . . .” But he did not conclude the thought. Instead, he said, “The tabloids here are following the story, as well. I myself do what I can to keep it alive. Because with the tabloids involved . . .” He shrugged sadly.

“I understand,” Lynley told him. Pressure upon the police was pressure upon the police. No matter where it came from, it produced results.

Azhar went on to tell him that he was also carrying handbills to the nearby towns and villages. Rather than endure the agony of waiting for word of anything, he instead had been going out each day and posting these handbills in an ever-widening circumference around Lucca. He brought them from his room and handed one to Lynley. Mostly it comprised a large and very good picture of the little girl, with her name and the word MISSING written in Italian, German, English, and French beneath the photo along with a phone number that Lynley took to be that of the police.

Lynley was struck by the innocence of Hadiyyah’s expression in the handbill’s photograph and by how much of a child she still was. In the way of the modern world, children were growing up at a younger and younger age, so Hadiyyah could have looked like a miniature Bollywood film star despite her age. Instead, though, the photo showed a little girl with plaited hair tied off in small bows. She wore a crisp school uniform, and she had lively brown eyes and an impish grin. She looked quite small for a nine-year-old, which Azhar confirmed that indeed she was. This meant, of course, that she could have been mistaken for a younger child. Excellent pickings for a paedophile, Lynley thought grimly.

“This immediate area is not so difficult to canvass with the pictures,” Azhar said as Lynley gave the handbill back to him. “But as I move farther away from Lucca and as the towns rise up into the hills . . . Things are more difficult then.”

From his room’s chest of drawers, he took a map. He explained that he was about to set out for the rest of the day to continue canvassing the area with Hadiyyah’s picture. If Inspector Lynley had the time, he would show him where he had gone so far. Lynley nodded and they descended the stairs. They went out into the piazza, where, across from the pensione, a café offered a handful of small tables and, more important, shade. There they sat and ordered Coca-Cola, after which Azhar opened his map.

Lynley saw that he’d circled the towns he’d so far visited, and although he himself was familiar with the Tuscan landscape, he allowed Azhar to explain the difficulties he was encountering just going from one point to another in the nearby hills. Lynley could tell Azhar’s mere act of speaking about what he was doing acted to assuage what had to be tremendous anxiety, so he nodded, looked over the map with him, and noted how assiduous Azhar was being in his search for his daughter.

Finally, though, the London professor ran out of words. So he said what he no doubt had been trying to avoid saying from the first. “It’s been a week, Inspector.” And when Lynley said nothing but merely nodded, Azhar went on. “What do you think? Please tell me the truth. I know how reluctant you might be, but I wish to hear it.”

Lynley did Azhar the honour of believing that he meant what he said. He looked away from him for a moment, seeing the students at work on their drawings around the piazza, noting the ubiquitous green, shuttered windows protecting interiors of Italian apartments from the sun. A dog barked from somewhere within one of these apartments. From another the sound of piano music drifted. Lynley thought of how to approach the truth. There seemed no other way but to tell it directly.

“This is different from the kidnapping of a very small child,” he said quietly to Hadiyyah’s father. “A toddler snatched from a pushchair or a baby from its pram? That kind of kidnapping with no request for ransom suggests an intention to keep the child or to pass her along for a purpose that doesn’t involve harming her. An illegal ‘adoption’ perhaps, effected by money. Or just handing the child over to relatives desperate for a little one of their own. But to take a child Hadiyyah’s age—nine years old—suggests something else.”

Azhar asked no questions. His hands, folded on his map, gripped each other tightly. “There has,” he said quietly, “been no sign of . . . There has been no indication . . .”

No body was what he meant. “Which is a very good sign.” Lynley did not add how easily hidden in the Tuscan hills or in the Apuan Alps beyond them a body could be. Instead he said, “From this, we can conclude she’s well. Perhaps frightened, but well. We can also conclude that if someone’s intention is to pass Hadiyyah along to someone else, she would have to be hidden away for a time first.”

“Why is this?”

Lynley sipped his Coke and poured more from the can into the glass where three ice cubes did their limited best to keep it cold. He said, “It’s not likely a nine-year-old is going to forget her parents, is it? So she has to be held for a period of time until she becomes docile, used to her captivity, and reconciled to it and to her situation. She’s in a foreign country; her ability to speak the language is, perhaps, limited. Within time and in order to survive, she needs to learn to see her captors as her saviours. She needs to learn to depend upon them. But all of this works to our benefit. It puts time on our side and not on theirs.”

“Yet if she is not to be handed to another family for purposes of adoption,” Azhar pointed out, “then I do not see—”

Lynley cut him off quickly, to spare him speculations. “She’s young enough to be schooled in any number of things a child might be wanted for, but the point isn’t what those things are so much as it’s she’s alive and must be kept safe and well.” He didn’t add the more horrifying kind of scenario that was possible in this situation of Hadiyyah’s potential imprisonment, however. He didn’t point out that she was the perfect age to be held prisoner for a paedophile’s pleasure: in a basement, in a house with a carefully hidden and even more carefully soundproofed room, in a cellar, in an abandoned building high in the hills. For someone to have taken her so successfully from a market in the middle of the day, someone had to have prepared the abduction. Preparation for abduction also indicated preparation for use. Nothing could have been left to chance. So while time was on their side, the truth of the matter was that circumstances were not.

Yet there was one hope which could be to their benefit, and it came from Hadiyyah herself. For not everyone behaved as human psychology otherwise indicated she would behave. And there was a relatively simple way to ascertain if Hadiyyah was, potentially, among those people who acted differently from what might otherwise be expected of them in similar circumstances.

“May I ask,” Lynley said, “how likely is it that Hadiyyah would fight her situation?”

“What do you mean?”

“Children are often extremely resourceful. Might she raise a ruckus at an opportune moment? Might she draw attention to herself in some way?”

“In what way?”

“Behaving other than she’s told to behave. Trying to escape her captivity. Throwing herself into an attack on her captors. Producing a convenient tantrum. Setting a fire. Slashing a vehicle’s tyres. Anything other than being docile.” Anything other, Lynley didn’t add, than being a little girl.

Azhar seemed to go within himself to find a reply. Church bells rang somewhere in the town, joined by other church bells echoing off the narrow Lucchese streets. A flock of pigeons circled overhead, domesticated homing birds by the close formation they kept in the sky.

Azhar cleared his throat. “None of those things,” he said to Lynley. “She has not been brought up to be a trouble to anyone. I have—God forgive me—been very careful about that.”

Lynley nodded. It was, unfortunately, the way of the world. So often little girls—no matter their culture—were taught by their parents and by society to be pliant and sweet. It was little boys who were taught to use their wits and their fists.

“Inspector Lo Bianco,” Azhar added, “seems to feel there is . . . despite a week . . . there is hope . . . ?”

“And I agree,” Lynley said. But what he didn’t point out to the other man was that, with no word from kidnappers or anyone else, the hope he was clinging to was fading ever faster.

VICTORIA

LONDON

Barbara Havers put it off as long as possible. Indeed, she tried to restrain herself altogether. But by early afternoon she could no longer wait for her first report from DI Lynley. So she rang his mobile.

She knew he was unhappy with her. Any other officer would have kissed her feet for having bulldogged the circumstances of Hadiyyah’s disappearance in such a way that he ended up getting sent to Italy as a liaison officer for the girl’s family. But Lynley had other matters on his mind that went far beyond travelling to Italy at the expense of the Met. He had roller derby matches to attend and Daidre Trahair to . . . to whatever he was attempting to do with the large animal vet.

When Lynley answered with a single word—“Barbara”—she said in a rush, “I know you’re cheesed off. I’m bloody sorry, sir. You’ve got things on your . . . on your mind or whatever and I’ve put a spanner and I know that.”

He said, “Ah. As I suspected.”

She said, “I’m not admitting to anything. But how could anyone who knows her—and her dad and her mum—not want to do something? You see that, don’t you?”

“Does it actually matter what I see?”

“I’m sorry. But things’ll wait, won’t it? She’ll wait, won’t she?”

There was silence. Then he said in that maddening, well-bred fashion of his, “‘Things’? ‘She’?”

Barbara realised she was heading in the absolutely wrong direction. She said hastily, “Never mind. Not my business at all. Can’t think why I even said . . . except I’m worn out with worry and I can see it’s best that you’re there and I’m here and if I only knew how—”

“Barbara.”

“Yeah? What? I mean I know I’m babbling and it’s only because I know you’re cheesed off and you’ve a right to be because I bollocksed things properly this time but it was only because—”

“Barbara.” He waited on his end for her silence. Then he said, “There’s nothing to report. When there is, I’ll ring you.”

“Is he . . . ? Are they . . . ?”

“I’ve not met Angelina Upman. I’ve spoken to Azhar. He’s as well as he can be, under the circumstances.”

“What’s next? Who d’you talk to? Where d’you go? Are the cops there handling things? Are they letting you—”

“Do my job?” he interrupted pointedly. “Such as it is, yes. And, believe me, it’s going to be limited. Now is there anything else?”

“S’pose not,” she said.

“Then we’ll speak later,” he told her and rang off, leaving her to wonder if he actually meant it.

She shoved her mobile in her bag. She’d made the call from the Met canteen, where the only option to keep her nerves in check had been consuming a muffin the size of Gibraltar. She’d gobbled it down like a stray dog keeping a handout secret from the rest of the pack. She’d washed it on its way with huge gulps of tepid coffee. When this didn’t work to calm her savage breast—she should have tried music, she admitted—then she’d given in to phoning Italy. But there was no satisfaction available from Lynley, she realised. So she faced either eating a second muffin or coming up with something else to soothe herself.

She hadn’t heard from Dwayne Doughty. She told herself that the reason for this had to do with her having employed him for less than twenty-four hours. But a voice within her demanded to know how long it could possibly take for the man to make certain Taymullah Azhar had indeed been in Berlin during the time his daughter had gone missing from Lucca. She herself could have done it in an hour or two of tracing his movements and confirming all reports of his presence. And she would have done it, using the Met’s resources, had she wished to risk another blot on her copybook. But with Superintendent Ardery’s eyes upon her and DI Stewart doubtless making daily reports on the level of her cooperation as part of his team, she had to be careful. Whatever she did, she had to do it on her time and without the resources of the Met.

Luckily her mobile phone wasn’t one of the Met’s resources. She couldn’t be faulted for using it while taking a break. Nor, she reckoned, could she be faulted for using it while making a visit to the ladies’ in order to answer a pressing call from nature.

She went there next. Carefully, she checked to see all the stalls were empty. She punched in Mitchell Corsico’s number.

“Brilliant job” was what she told him when he barked his greeting with a harried “Corsico,” designed to illustrate how busy a man he was down there in the journalistic gutters.

“Who’s this?” he asked.

“Postman’s Park,” she told him. “Watts Memorial. I wore fuchsia, you wore Stetson. Are you going to Italy?”

“I wish.”

“What? The story’s not big enough for you lot?”

“Well, she isn’t dead, is she?”

“Bloody hell! You lot are a sodding group of—”

“Save it. It’s not me making this decision. What d’you think? I have that kind of power? So unless you’ve got something more to give me . . . I mean aside from the Ilford end of things, which the higher-ups are beginning to like for a few more front pages.”

Barbara went icy. “What Ilford business? What’re you on about, Mitch?”

“What I’m ‘on about’ is the other dimensions of the story. What I’m ‘on about’ is your convenient failure to mention your own involvement in what’s going on.”

“What the hell? What kind of involvement?”

“The kind that ended up with you in a street brawl with Professor Azhar’s parents. Let me tell you, mate, this whole ‘abandoned second family in Ilford’ part of the story has given it legs over here.”

Barbara’s iciness rendered her nearly incapable of rational thought. All she was able to say in reply to this was “You can’t go that way. There’s a kid. Her life’s on the line. You have to—”

“That,” Corsico told her, “would be your part of the equation. My part is the story. My part is readership. So while the kidnapping of a cute kid sells papers—you won’t get an argument from me on that score—the kidnapping of a cute kid whose dad has a secret second family willing to talk—”

“They’re not a secret. And they won’t be willing.”

“Tell that to the kid. Sayyid.”

Barbara thought frantically. She had to keep him from thrusting upon Azhar the humiliation of a public exposé of his tortuous personal life. She could only imagine how it would play out in The Source should Mitchell Corsico score an interview with Azhar’s son. It was unthinkable that this might happen, not only because of Azhar himself but also because of Hadiyyah. Focus needed to be maintained on her, on her abduction, on the search, on the Italians themselves, on whatever was going on in Italy.

She said, “All right. I see your point. But there’s something you might want to know about our end of things. I mean the Met’s end of things.”

“And that would be what?”

“That would be DI Lynley.” She hated to do it, but she had no other choice that she could see. “DI Lynley’s gone over. He’s the liaison officer.”

Silence at Mitchell Corsico’s end. Barbara could almost hear the wheels turning in his mind. He’d been angling for an interview with the inspector since the moment Lynley’s wife had been murdered on the front steps of their home. Pregnant, just returned from shopping, looking for her keys to unlock her front door. Accosted by a kid with a gun who’d shot her for the fun of it and rendered her brain-dead. With the inspector left in the position of having to decide to take her off the machines keeping their baby alive. If Corsico wanted a story that would go the distance, Lynley was the story. Both of them knew it.

She said, “The press office here’ll be making the announcement, but you can make it in advance, if you want. And you know what this means, I expect. He’ll be liaising with the parents, but he’ll have to talk to the press and answer their questions. The press means you. And answering questions means an interview. The interview, Mitch.”

“I see where you’re heading. I won’t lie about it, Barb. Lynley’s a bloody decent angle and he always will be. But the fish I’m frying—”

“Lynley is the story.” Barbara heard her voice rise with impatience and urgency. “Mention Lynley’s name to your higher-ups and you’re on the next plane to Italy.” Which, she added, was where she needed him: pursuing the story there, feeding details to his editor here, whipping up in the UK reading public a frenzy about what was being done to find an appealing little British girl.

“And I will,” Corsico said. “No worries on that score. But first things first, and the first is the kid.”

“That’s what I’m trying to—”

“I don’t mean the kid Hadiyyah,” he cut in. “I mean the other. Sayyid.”

“Mitch, don’t—”

“Thanks for the tip on Lynley, though.” He ended the call.

VICTORIA

LONDON

Barbara cursed and headed for the door. She had to stop Corsico from getting to Azhar’s family in Ilford, and there weren’t a lot of options jumping into her mind on how to do this. She reckoned Nafeeza would remain mute on all matters concerning her husband. But his son, Sayyid, was a wild card in the family deck.

She swung the door open, her mind febrile. She walked directly into Winston Nkata. The black man didn’t pretend he was just passing by. Instead, he jerked his head towards the interior of the ladies’ toilet. In case she was dim on his intentions, he stepped past her, grabbing her arm on the way inside.

She said, “Whoops. You lost? Gents is just down the corridor, Winnie.”

Nkata was not amused. She could tell by the manner in which his enunciation altered from careful Africa-via-the-Caribbean to South-Brixton-on-the-street.

He said in a harsh whisper, “You gone off your nut? Bloody lucky Stewart tole me to follow you, innit. Someone else ’n you back in uniform tomorrow.”

She decided that playing dumb was her best course. She said, “What? Win, what’re you talking about?”

“I’m talkin ’bout your job,” he said. “I’m talkin ’bout losin it. They find out you made yourself a snout for The Source ’n you back in uniform. Worse, you done. You finished, innit. And don’t be so thick to think there i’n’t people in the department’d be happy as hell to see that happen, Barb.”

She went for offended. “A snout?” she hissed. “That’s what you think? I’m a snout for The Source? I’m not a snout. Not theirs and not anyone’s.”

“That so? You just gave them DI Lynley. I heard you, Barb. Now you goin to tell me you gave up Lynley to someone other than that same bloke wrote the story ’bout Hadiyyah? You think I’m stupid enough to go for that? You’re on the phone with Corsico, Barb, and one look at your mobile records’s goin to show that. Not to mention your bank account, innit.”

“What?” Now she was offended. “You think I’m taking money to do this?”

“I don’ know why the hell you’re doin it. I don’t care why the hell you’re doin it. And you bes’ believe me when I say no one else’s goin to care ’bout the why of it either.”

“Look, Winnie. You and I both know that someone’s got to keep this story alive. That’s the only way The Source is going to send a reporter over to Italy. And only a British reporter in Italy is going to keep the pressure on the Met so that Lynley stays in place till this gets resolved. Plus a British reporter raises the stakes for the Italian reporters to keep the pressure on the Italian police. That’s how it works. Pressure gets results and you know that.”

“What I know,” he said, and he was calmer now, so he was back to the gentle Caribbean from his mother that had always so influenced his way of talking, “is that no one’s goin to take your side, Barb. This comes out, and you’re on your own. You got to know that. You got no one here.”

“Oh, thanks very much, Winston. It’s always good to know who one’s friends are.”

“I mean no one with the power to step in,” Winston said.

He meant Lynley, of course. For Lynley was the only officer who would risk stepping onto the pitch if it came down to having to defend the wicket of Barbara’s ill-conceived decision to involve The Source. And he was the only officer to do this not so much because he was devoted to Barbara as because he didn’t need his employment at the Met so he didn’t care about alienating their superiors.

“So you see,” Winston said, apparently reading realisation on Barbara’s face. “You’re walkin on the wrong side in this, Barb. That bloke Corsico? He’d throw your mum under a bus ’f it meant a story. He’d throw his own mum ’f that’d help.”

“That can’t matter,” Barbara told him. “And I c’n handle Corsico, Winston.” She tried to move past him to get to the door. He stopped her easily enough since he towered above her.

“No one ‘handles’ a tabloid, Barb. You don’t know that now, you learn it soon enough.”

ILFORD

GREATER LONDON

There were not a lot of avenues available to Barbara when it came to the chess game of managing what Mitchell Corsico wrote about. But in the case of his intention to talk to the boy Sayyid there appeared to be only one. She phoned Azhar. She reached him on a bad connection in the hills of Tuscany. They did not speak long. From him she learned what she already knew: that Lynley had arrived and that he and the inspector had spoken prior to Azhar’s making his way into the hills to continue posting pictures of Hadiyyah in the villages to the north of Lucca.

“Sayyid’s comprehensive?” Azhar said when she asked the name of the school. “Why do you need this, Barbara?”

She hated to tell him, but she didn’t see the alternative: The Source was considering the boy as just that, a source for the kind of “human interest” story so beloved to its readers.

Azhar gave her the name of the school at once. “For his own sake . . .” His voice was urgent. “You know what the tabloid will make of him, Barbara.”

She knew well. She knew because she read the bloody rag herself. It was like mental candyfloss and she’d been addicted to the stuff for years. She thanked Azhar and told him she would keep him in the picture of what happened with his son.

The more difficult project was getting away from the Met. She couldn’t risk waiting for the end of her workday. Knowing Corsico, by the time that arrived, he would already have buttonholed the boy and given him the outlet he was looking for to unload his grievances against his father. She had to leave Victoria, and she had to do it now. She merely needed a decent excuse. Her mum provided it.

Barbara went to DI Stewart. On the whiteboard, he was jotting brief notations about the day’s actions. She didn’t bother to look for her own. She knew Stewart. No matter her expertise in anything, he’d keep her there in the building and under his thumb transcribing reports, just to drive her as mad as possible.

“Sir,” she said, although the word felt like a rock on her tongue. “I’ve just had a call from Greenford.” She tried to sound anxiety-ridden about it, which wasn’t too far from the truth. She was anxious. Just not about her mum.

Stewart didn’t look away from the whiteboard. He was, it appeared, giving crucial attention to the legibility of his cursive. “Have you indeed?” he said in a tone that demonstrated the extent of his ennui when it came to all things Barbara Havers. She wanted to bite his ears off.

“My mum’s taken a fall. She’s in casualty, sir. I’m going to need to—”

“Where, exactly?”

“In the home where she—”

“I mean casualty, Sergeant. Which hospital? Where is she?”

Barbara knew the game on that one. If she named a hospital, he’d ring the casualty department and make sure her mother was there. She said, “Don’t know yet, sir. I was planning to ring from the car.”

“Ring whom?”

“Lady who runs the home. She phoned me after nine-nine-nine. She didn’t know yet where they were going to take her.”

DI Stewart seemed to measure this on his potential-for-bollocks meter. He looked at her. “I’ll want to know,” he said. “The department will, of course, wish to send flowers.”

“Let you know soon ’s I find out,” she told him. She grabbed her shoulder bag, said, “Ta, sir,” and avoided looking at Winston Nkata. He avoided looking at her as well. He didn’t need a potential-for-bollocks meter. But at least he said nothing. He would be her friend in this one matter.

It was a long drive to Ilford, but she made it before the end of the school day. She found the secondary comprehensive, and she had a quick look round the immediate area to make sure Mitchell Corsico wasn’t hiding in a wheelie bin ready to spring out the moment he saw her. The coast appeared relatively clear aside from an ancient woman pushing a nicked shopping trolley along the pavement, so Barbara sprinted inside the building. Her Metropolitan Police ID got her into the head teacher’s office with virtually no delay.

She told the head teacher—a woman with the unfortunate name of Mrs. Ida Croak, if her desk’s nameplate was to be believed—the truth. A tabloid journalist was on his way to attempt an interview with one of her pupils on the topic of his father’s desertion of the family for another woman. She gave Sayyid’s name. She added, “It’s a smear piece that this bloke has in mind. You know what I mean, I expect: something pretending to be a human interest story while all the time dragging everyone through the mud. I want to stop it from happening, for Sayyid’s own sake, for his mum’s sake, and for the family’s sake.”

The head teacher looked appropriately concerned but also, it had to be admitted, appropriately confused by Barbara’s advent to her office. She asked the reasonable question. “Why are the Metropolitan police involved?”

That was, of course, the crux of the matter. Certainly, the Met had no love for The Source, but sending officers out to stop stories from being gathered was hardly within its purview. She said, “It’s a personal favour to the family. You c’n ring Sayyid’s mum and ask her if she’d like me to carry the boy past the journalist and bring him home to keep him from getting accosted.”

“The journalist’s here?” She said it as if the Grim Reaper was waiting outside the front doors, scythe at the ready.

“He will be. I didn’t see him on my way in, but I expect he’ll show up at any moment. He knows I mean to stop him if I can.”

Mrs. Croak hadn’t climbed to her position as head teacher for nothing. She said, “I’ll need to phone,” and she asked Barbara to wait outside her office.

Barbara knew that this could also mean Mrs. Croak was phoning the Met as well, checking up on the validity of her warrant card as if she’d come with the intention of snatching Sayyid in order to have her way with him. She could only pray this wasn’t the case. All she needed was Mrs. Croak being rung through to John Stewart or, worse, to Superintendent Ardery. Her nerves were on edge till the head teacher emerged from her office and motioned Barbara to rejoin her within.

“The mother’s on her way,” she said. “She doesn’t drive, so she’s bringing the boy’s grandfather. They’ll take him home at once.”

Barbara’s head filled with a mental Oh no!, like the thought balloon of the cartoon character she felt she was fast becoming. Her intention had been to warn Sayyid not to talk to the tabloids—to any tabloids—but after her previous encounter with Azhar’s father, she knew very well that he might turn out to be a most cooperative interviewee only too happy to rubbish Azhar from London to Lahore and back again. She was going to have to reason with him as best she could. That, she knew, was going to be dicey since the last time she’d encountered the man was in the midst of a brawl in front of his own home.

Barbara said, “D’you mind if I wait, then? I’d like a word . . .”

Of course, the sergeant could do as she wished, Mrs. Croak told her. If she wouldn’t mind waiting elsewhere, however . . . as one’s schedule was quite busy . . . as one would want to have a private word with Sayyid’s mother upon her arrival . . .

Barbara minded not in the least. Her intention was to grab Nafeeza and paint a proper picture for her about Mitch Corsico’s intentions just in case Mrs. Croak hadn’t done so. She had to be made to understand that, no matter how appealing it might sound to unburden oneself and one’s grievances in a public forum, The Source could not that forum be. “No tabloid journalist is your friend,” she would say.

So she waited outside. Thus she was in position when Nafeeza and Azhar’s father showed up. Thus she was in position when Mitch Corsico showed up as well.

Luckily Nafeeza arrived at the school first. She and Azhar’s father came hustling towards the main doors, and they saw Barbara simultaneously. Nafeeza said with great dignity, “Thank you, Sergeant. We are in your debt,” and Azhar’s father nodded at her.

“Don’t let anyone get to him,” Barbara said as they went inside. “It’ll turn out bad. Try to explain this to him.”

“We understand. We will.”

Then they were gone. Then Corsico arrived.

Barbara saw him take up a lurking position across the street from the school at a newsagent’s shop. He clocked her at once, cocked his ridiculous Stetson at her, and crossed his arms on his chest beneath the digital camera that hung round his neck. His expression said that she’d checked his king but shouldn’t feel exactly triumphant about it.

Barbara looked away from him. All she needed to do was to get Sayyid, his mum, and his granddad to their car. All she needed to do was to have a word with the boy in order to underscore the dangers he faced if he gave in to his inclination to abuse his dad in the press. The fact that Sayyid wouldn’t see the opportunity as dangerous had to be dealt with. Barbara doubted that it was going to be enough for his mum and his grandfather merely to instruct him to hold his tongue.

After ten minutes of waiting, the main door to the comprehensive opened once again. Barbara had been lingering near the pavement, at the side of an urn planted with a sad-looking holly bush. She came forward as the three others approached. In her peripheral vision, she saw Corsico take a step into the quiet street.

She said quickly, “Nafeeza, the reporter’s just there in the cowboy get-up. He’s got a camera. Sayyid, that’s who you need to keep clear of. He means to—”

“You!” Sayyid snarled. And to his mother, “You didn’t say that his whore . . . You didn’t tell me that his whore was the one—”

“Sayyid!” his mother said. “This woman is not your father’s—”

“You’re so bloody stupid! Both of you are stupid!”

His grandfather grabbed onto him and said something in Urdu. He began to strong-arm him towards a battered Golf.

“I’ll talk to whoever I want to talk to!” Sayyid declared. “You,” to Barbara, “you fucking whore. You keep away from me. Keep away from us. Go back to my father’s bed and suck his cock like you want to.”

Nafeeza slapped him so hard his head snapped to one side. He began to shout. “I’ll talk to anyone I want! I’ll tell the truth. About her. About him. About what they do when they’re alone because I know, I know, I know what he’s like and what she’s like and—”

His grandfather punched him. He began to roar in Urdu. Over his roaring, Nafeeza cried out and grabbed onto him. He shook her off and hit Sayyid again. Blood spurted from the boy’s nose to speckle the front of his neat white shirt.

“Bloody hell,” Barbara said. She dashed forward to free the teenager from his grandfather’s clutches.

Dog’s dinner was what she thought about the mess. What Corsico thought she reckoned she’d be seeing sooner or later on the front page of The Source.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Lynley went to the questura once he and Taymullah Azhar parted at Pensione Giardino. This police building sat outside the city wall, not far from Porta San Pietro, an easy walk from anywhere within the medieval centre of the town. The colour of apricots, it was an imposing Romanesque building given to sobriety and solidity, located a short distance from the train station. Police and other judicial officials came and went from it, and while Lynley’s entrance garnered him curious looks, he was taken quickly enough to Chief Inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco’s office.

Salvatore Lo Bianco had been brought fully into the picture about Lynley’s assignment to the case, he discovered. Clearly, the Italian wasn’t pleased about this. A stiff smile of welcome indicated where he stood on the matter of a Scotland Yard copper showing up on his patch, but he was far too polite to let anything other than perfectly—and rather cool—good manners indicate his displeasure.

He was quite a small man, Lynley topping him by at least ten inches. His salt-and-pepper hair was thinning at the crown, and he was swarthy of complexion with the scars of adolescent acne pitting his cheeks. But he was a man who’d obviously learned to make the most of his physical assets, for he was trim, athletic-looking, and beautifully suited. His hands looked as if they were manicured weekly.

“Piacere,” he said to Lynley, although Lynley doubted the other man was at all pleased to make his acquaintance and he couldn’t blame him. “Parla italiano, sì?”

Lynley said yes, as long as the person speaking to him didn’t talk like someone describing the action at a horse race. To this, Lo Bianco smiled. He gestured to a chair.

He offered caffè . . . macchiato? americano? Lynley demurred. He then offered tè caldo. After all, Lynley was a mad Englishman, no?, and everyone knew the English drank tea by the gallon. Lynley smiled and said he required nothing. He went on to tell Lo Bianco he’d met Taymullah Azhar at the pensione where they both were staying. He had yet to meet with the missing girl’s mother. He hoped the chief inspector would facilitate that.

Lo Bianco nodded. He eyed Lynley and seemed to take the measure of him. Lynley hadn’t failed to note that while he was seated, Lo Bianco had remained standing. He wasn’t bothered by this. He was in foreign territory in more ways than one, and both of them knew it.

“This thing that you do,” Lo Bianco said in Italian from in front of a filing cabinet where he had positioned himself. “This liaison with the family. It suggests to us—especially to the public minister, I must tell you—that the British police think we do not work well here in Italy. As police, I mean.”

Lynley hastened to reassure the chief inspector. His presence, he told him, was largely a political move on the part of the Met. The UK tabloids had begun to cover the story of the little girl’s disappearance. In particular, a rather base tabloid—if the chief inspector knew what he meant—was giving the Met a proper caning about the matter. Tabloids in general were not so much interested in the regulations of policing between countries as they were in stirring up trouble. To avoid this, he had been sent to Italy, but it was not his intention to get in Chief Inspector Lo Bianco’s way. If he could be of assistance, of course, he would be happy to offer himself in the investigation. But the chief inspector should be assured that his sole purpose was to serve the family in whatever way he could.

“As it happens, I’m acquainted with the child’s father,” he said. He didn’t add that one of his colleagues was more than merely acquainted with Taymullah Azhar.

Lo Bianco watched him closely as he spoke. He nodded and seemed appeased by all of this. He said knowingly, “Ah, your UK tabloids,” in a fashion that indicated Italy did not itself suffer from the same sort of gutter journalism that went on in England, but then he relented and said, “Here, too,” and he went to his desk, where, from a briefcase, he brought out a paper called Prima Voce. Its front page, Lynley saw, bore the headline Dov’è la bambina? It also featured a picture of a man kneeling in the street somewhere in Lucca, his head bent and a hand-lettered sign reading Ho fame in his hands. For a crazy moment, Lynley thought this was a form of strange Italian punishment akin to being held in the stocks for public ridicule. But the man turned out to be the only person of interest the police had come up with: an inveterate drug user called Carlo Casparia who had seen Hadiyyah on the morning of her disappearance. He’d been in for questioning twice, the second time at the request of il Pubblico Ministero himself. This man, Piero Fanucci, had become convinced that Carlo was involved in the child’s disappearance.

“Perché?”

“At first because of the drugs themselves and his need to purchase more. Now because he has not been in the mercato to beg since the girl disappeared.” Lo Bianco produced a philosophical expression. “Il Pubblico Ministero? He thinks this is an indication of guilt.”

“And you?”

Lo Bianco smiled, seeming pleased at having been read by his fellow detective. “I think Carlo does not wish to be further harassed by the police and, until this matter is settled, will not return to the mercato where he can be easily picked up for more questions. But you see, it is an important matter to the magistrato—and to the public—that progress be made. And this questioning of Carlo, it looks like progress. You will see that for yourself, I think.”

What he meant by this last statement became clear when Lo Bianco suggested Lynley meet the public minister. He was in Piazza Napoleone—“Piazza Grande, we call it,” he said—which was not far, but they would drive. “The privilege of the police,” he said, for few vehicles were allowed within the city’s wall, where most people either walked, rode bicycles, or took the tiny buses that scooted along with virtually no sound.

In Piazza Grande, they entered an enormous palazzo converted—like the vast majority of such buildings in Italy—into a use far removed from its original one. They climbed a wide stairway to the offices of Piero Fanucci. They were shown into his office without ado by a secretary whose surprised “Di nuovo, Salvatore?” indicated this was not Lo Bianco’s first visit to the magistrate that day.

Piero Fanucci, the public minister in charge of the investigation and, as was customary in Italy, the man who would ultimately prosecute the case, did not look up from the work upon which he was intent when Lo Bianco and Lynley entered. Lynley recognised this move for what it was, and when Lo Bianco shot him a look, he lifted one shoulder an inch. It was not necessary, this gesture told Lo Bianco, that he be welcomed to Italy with open arms.

“Magistrato,” Lo Bianco said, “this is the Scotland Yard officer, Thomas Lynley.”

Fanucci made a noise somewhere between his nose and his throat. He shuffled papers. He signed two documents. He punched a button on his phone and barked at his secretary. In a moment she entered and removed from in front of him several manila folders, replacing them with others. He began to look through them. Lo Bianco bristled.

“Basta, Piero,” Lo Bianco said. “Sono occupato, eh?”

At this declaration, Piero Fanucci looked up. Clearly, he was not in a mood to care particularly about how busy the chief inspector might be. He said, “Anch’io, Topo,” and in response Lynley saw the chief inspector’s jaw set, either at being called “mouse” by the public minister or at the man’s lack of cooperation. Then Fanucci directed his gaze at Lynley. He was ugly beyond measure, and he spoke without the slightest attempt to ensure that Lynley understood his Italian, which was heavily accented, dropping endings off the words in the manner of the southern part of the country. Lynley picked up the gist more by the man’s tone than anything else. Either because he felt it or because he found it useful, outrage was what Fanucci projected.

“So the British police believe we need a liaison with the missing girl’s family,” he said, more or less. “This is absurd. We are keeping the family fully informed. We have a suspect. It is a matter of one or two more interrogations before he directs us to this child.”

Lynley said, as he had said to Lo Bianco, “It’s merely a matter of public pressure in England, generated by our press. The relationship between our police and our journalists is an uneasy one, Signor Fanucci. Mistakes have been made in the past: unsafe convictions, overturned imprisonments based on poor investigations, revelations of officers selling information . . . Oftentimes when the tabloids speak, the higher-ups react. That’s the case here, I’m afraid.”

Fanucci steepled his fingers beneath his chin. He had, Lynley saw, an adventitious finger on his right hand. It was hard not to look at, considering the position in which the public minister—doubtless deliberately—had placed them. “We have not that situation here,” Fanucci declared. “Our journalists do not determine our movements.”

“You’re very lucky in this,” Lynley said with all seriousness. “Were that only the case at home.”

Fanucci scrutinised Lynley, taking in everything from the cut of his clothes to the cut of his hair to the adolescent scar that marred his upper lip. “You will, I hope, remain out of our way in this matter,” he said. “We do things differently here in Italy. Here il Pubblico Ministero from the first involves himself in the investigation. He does not depend solely upon the police to present him with a case tied in ribbons.”

Lynley didn’t comment on the oddity of a system that, on the surface, appeared to have no checks and balances. He merely told the public minister that he understood how things proceeded and, if necessary, he would make certain that the parents of the missing girl also understood since they would, perforce, be used to a rather different system of law and justice.

“Good.” Fanucci waved his hand in an off-with-you-then motion that gave the advantage to his sixth finger. They were being dismissed but not before he said to Lo Bianco, “What more do you have on this business of the hotels, Topo?”

“Nothing as yet,” Lo Bianco said.

“Get something today,” Fanucci instructed him.

“Centamente” was Lo Bianco’s evenly spoken reply, but once again that tightening of his jaw demonstrated how he felt about being so directed. He made no further remarks until they were out of the palazzo and standing in the enormous piazza. Chestnut trees newly in leaf lined two sides of this, and in its centre a group of boys were elbowing each other, shouting to one another as they kicked a football in the direction of a carousel.

Lynley said to him, “Interesting gentleman, il Pubblico Ministero.”

Lo Bianco snorted. “He is who he is.”

“May I ask: What did he mean about the hotels?”

Lo Bianco shot him a look but then explained: a stranger coming to enquire about this same missing girl and her mother.

“Before her disappearance or after?” Lynley asked.

“Before.” It was, Lo Bianco told him, six or eight weeks earlier. When the girl disappeared and her photo was shown in the newspapers and on posters round Lucca, a few hotels and pensioni reported a man who had been seeking either her or her mother. He had, Lo Bianco said, pictures of them both. The receptionists and the pensioni owners all agreed upon that. They all, interestingly enough, agreed upon the man himself. Indeed, they remembered him quite clearly and were able to provide Lo Bianco with an adequate description of the fellow.

“From eight weeks ago?” Lynley asked. “Why are their memories so clear?”

“Because of who it was who came to ask about this child.”

“You know? They knew?”

“Not his name, of course. They did not know his name. But his description? That would not be so easy to forget. His name is Michelangelo Di Massimo, and he comes from Pisa.”

“Why was someone from Pisa looking for Hadiyyah and her mother?” Lynley asked, more of himself than of Lo Bianco.

“That is a most interesting question, no?” Lo Bianco said. “I am working on an answer to it. When I have it, then it will be time to have some words with Signor Di Massimo. Until then, I know where he is.” Lo Bianco shot him a look, shot another look at the palazzo behind them, and smiled briefly.

Lynley read in both the smile and those glances something that told him much about the man. “You haven’t told Signor Fanucci this, have you?” he said. “Why not?”

“Because the magistrato would have him dragged from Pisa to our questura. He would grill him for six or seven hours, a day, three days, four. He would threaten him, not feed him, give him no water, give him no sleep, and then ask him to ‘imagine, if he would’ how this abduction of the child occurred. And then he would charge him based on what it was he ‘imagined.’”

“Charge him with what?” Lynley asked.

“Chissà?” he said. Who knows. “Anything to keep the journalists supplied with details showing the case is well in hand. Despite his words to you, this is often his way.” He began walking towards the police car and he said over his shoulder to Lynley, “Would you like to have a look at this man, this Michelangelo Di Massimo, Ispettore?”

“I would indeed,” Lynley told him.

PISA

TUSCANY

Lynley hadn’t known that catching a glimpse of Michelangelo Di Massimo was going to involve a lengthy drive to Pisa. When it became obvious by their entrance onto the autostrada that this was the case, he wondered about Lo Bianco’s motives.

Lo Bianco took them to a playing field on the north side of il centro. There, a training session of football was going on. At least three dozen men were on the field, engaged in dribbling towards a goal.

At the edge of the field, Lo Bianco stopped the police car. He got out, as did Lynley, but he did not approach the players. Instead, he leaned against the car and removed from his jacket pocket a packet of cigarettes. He offered one to Lynley, to which Lynley demurred. He took one himself, keeping his gaze fixed on the players on the field as he lit up. He watched the action, but said nothing at all. Clearly, he was waiting for some sort of reaction from Lynley, something that would indicate that the English policeman had passed a test which had nothing at all to do with his knowledge of the rules of football.

Lynley gave his own attention to the field and the players upon it. In the way of many things Italian, on the surface the practice session appeared to be a largely disorganised affair. But as he watched, matters began to take on more clarity, especially when he noted a single individual who appeared to be attempting to direct a lot of the action.

This man was difficult not to notice. For his hair was bleached to a colour somewhere on the spectrum between yellow and orange, and it presented a stark contrast to the rest of him, upon which black hair grew like a pelt. Chest, back, arms, and legs. A five o’clock shadow that doubtless appeared at one in the afternoon. Given this and the general swarthiness of his complexion, it was hardly credible that he’d bleached the hair on his head, but this fact certainly went a long way to explain why several hotels and pensioni had remembered him as the person who’d come asking about Hadiyyah and her mother.

Lynley said, “Ah. I see. Michelangelo Di Massimo, no?”

“Ecco l’uomo,” Lo Bianco acknowledged. This said, he jerked his head at the police car. They began the journey back to Lucca.

Lynley wondered why the chief inspector had gone to this trouble of driving all the way to Pisa. Surely, a brief search on a computer at the questura would have produced an adequate photo of Di Massimo. That Lo Bianco had chosen not to use the Internet for this purpose suggested that there was more than one reason he wished Lynley to see Di Massimo in person and that reason had only partly to do with having an opportunity to observe the startling contrast between the hair on his body and the hair on his head.

Things became clear when their route back to Lucca did not take them at once to the questura but rather to the boulevard that followed the course of Lucca’s great wall on the outside of it. From this viale, they accessed another street that led out of the town and, as it turned out, gave them access to a lane leading into the Parco Fluviale. This was a long but rather narrow community park—a place for walking, running, cycling—that followed the course of the River Serchio. Perhaps a quarter of a mile along the way, an area of gravel offered parking for no more than three cars, with two picnic tables sitting beneath great holm oaks and a tiny skateboard park just beyond. There was an open space of grass as well, largely triangular in shape and marked on its boundaries by juvenile poplars. In this small campo, a group of young boys round ten years old were kicking footballs towards temporary goalposts.

Here in the gravel area, Lo Bianco stopped his car. He gazed out at this makeshift practice field. Lynley followed his gaze and saw that among the children, a man stood to one side, dressed in athletic clothes, a whistle round his neck. This he blew upon and then he shouted. He stopped the action. He started it once again.

Rather than merely watch what was happening on the playing field, however, this time Lo Bianco honked the car’s horn twice before opening his door. The man on the field looked in their direction. He said something to the boys and then jogged across to the police car as Lo Bianco and Lynley got out of it.

He, too, was a man whose appearance would be difficult to forget, Lynley noted. Not because of his hair, however, but because of a port wine birthmark on his face. It wasn’t overly large, comprising an area of flesh from his ear into his cheek the approximate size and shape of a child’s fist, but it was enough to make him remarkable, especially as the birthmark marred what otherwise would have been a startlingly handsome face.

“Salve.” He nodded at Lo Bianco. “Che cos’è successo?” He sounded anxious as he no doubt would be. The sudden appearance of the police at his football practice session would indicate to him that something had occurred.

But Lo Bianco shook his head. He introduced the man to Lynley. This was Lorenzo Mura, Lynley discovered. He recognised the name as being that of the lover of Angelina Upman.

Lo Bianco made very quick work of telling Mura that Lynley spoke Italian fairly well, which of course could have been code for “watch what you say in front of him.” He went on to explain Lynley’s purpose in being sent to Italy, which, apparently, he’d already revealed to Mura. “The liaison officer we have been expecting” was how he put it. “He will want to meet Signora Upman as soon as possible.”

Mura didn’t seem over the moon about either the prospect of Lynley’s meeting Angelina or the fact of Lynley’s assignment as a liaison between the parents of the child—which, of course, would include Taymullah Azhar—and the police. He gave a curt nod and stood waiting for more. When more did not come, he said in English to Lynley, “She has been not well. She remains so. You will make a care in your actions with her, yes? This man, to her he causes grief and upset.”

Lynley glanced at Lo Bianco, at first thinking that “this man” referred to the chief inspector and whatever his investigation was doing to provoke even more anxiety in a woman who had already suffered her only child abducted. But when Mura continued, Lynley saw he wasn’t speaking of his fellow officer but rather of Taymullah Azhar, for he said, “It was not my wish he come to Italy. He is of the past.”

“Yet doubtless deeply worried about his child,” Lynley said.

“Forse,” Lorenzo Mura muttered, either in reference to Azhar’s paternity or to his putative concern.

Mura said to Lo Bianco, “Devo ritornare . . .” with a glance afterwards at the children waiting for him on the field.

“Vada,” Lo Bianco said and watched Mura jog back to the players.

Mura called for a ball to be kicked in his direction and expertly dribbled it in the direction of the goal while the boys tried to block him. They failed at this and the goalie also failed to block the ball as it soared into the net. Clearly, when it came to football, Lorenzo Mura knew what he was about.

Lynley also knew, then, why he and Lo Bianco had first gone to Pisa for a glimpse of Michelangelo Di Massimo. He said to the chief inspector, “Ah. I see.”

“Interesting, no?” Lo Bianco said. “Our Lorenzo, he plays football for a team here in Lucca as well as gives this private coaching to boys. Me, I find this fascinating.” He reached in his jacket and brought out his cigarettes again. “There’s a connection, Inspector,” he said as he politely offered them to Lynley. “Me, I intend to find it.”

FATTORIA DI SANTA ZITA

TUSCANY

Salvatore had been prepared to dislike this British policeman. He knew that the British police held their counterparts in Italy in low esteem. There were reasons for this. They began with what was seen by many as the police failure to control the Camorra in Naples and the Mafia in Palermo. They continued, more locally, with the decades in which il Mostro di Firenze had managed to murder young lovers without being apprehended. They reached an international apex, however, with the absolute hash that had been made of the murder of a young British student in Perugia. Indeed, as a result the UK police saw the Mediterraneans as indolent, stupid, and eminently bribable. So when Salvatore had first been told that a British policeman would arrive and, perhaps, monitor his investigation into the disappearance of this little English girl, he had expected to feel upon himself the evaluative eyes of Inspector Lynley’s constant speculation, leading to his equally constant assessments and judgement. Instead, however, Salvatore was seeing that either the man was doing no assessing or judging at the moment—which was hardly likely—or he was capable of masking any conclusions he was drawing, whether they be premature or not. Reluctantly, Salvatore liked this about Lynley. He also liked that the Englishman’s questions were intelligent, his ability to listen was impressive, and his talent for putting facts together quickly was worthy of note. These three characteristics alone nearly made Salvatore forgive the UK officer for being many centimetres taller than he and dressing in an elegantly rumpled and casual manner that suggested mounds of money and self-confidence.

When they left the calcio practice, they also left the immediate environs of Lucca, heading in the direction of the nearby hills. It was not a long drive to reach the ancient summer home of the Mura family, for the Tuscan hills began to undulate across the landscape not far north of the Parco Fluviale. Salvatore drove them up into these hills. At this time of year, the land was lush with midspring’s abundant vegetation. Trees bore new leaves the colour of limes, and along the verges wildflowers grew.

The road shot in and out of the sunlight of late afternoon. When they had followed it for some nine kilometres, they reached the dirt lane into Fattoria di Santa Zita, marked by a sign that announced the place and also showed upon it the various functions of the farm by means of depictions of grapes, olive branches hung with fruit, and both a donkey and a cow looking more like those who’d watched over the birth of Jesus than the everyday farm animals that were raised on the Mura land.

Salvatore glanced at Lynley as they rumbled down the lane towards the farm buildings whose terracotta roofs were visible through the trees. He could see the Englishman taking in the environment and evaluating it.

He said, “The Muras, Ispettore, they are an ancient family here in Lucca. They were merchants of silk, very rich, and this place in the hills was their summer home. It has been theirs—the summer home of the Mura family—for . . . I would say three hundred years, perhaps? The older brother of Lorenzo did not wish to have it pass to him. He lives in Milano and practises psychiatry there and for him this place was a burden. The sister of Lorenzo lives within the city wall of Lucca and she, too, found the old place a burden. So it fell to Lorenzo to keep it, to sell it, or to make something of it . . .” Salvatore indicated the land and its emerging buildings. “You will see,” he said. “I think it is not so much different in your own country with these ancient places.”

They swung past a barn that Lorenzo had converted into a winery and tasting room. Here, he bottled both the complex Chianti and the simpler Sangiovese for which the fattoria was known. Beyond it, a farmhouse was undergoing reconstruction for its future as an accommodation for travellers interested in staying in an agriturismo. And then, beyond this, two rusting gates stood open in an enormous and wildly overgrown hedge. Salvatore drove through these gates, a route that took them up to the villa that had long been part of the Mura family’s history. This building, too, was undergoing work. Scaffolding was being constructed on its sides.

He allowed Lynley a moment to take the villa in, idling the police car on the gravel driveway that swept up to the structure. It was an impressive sight, especially if one did not look too closely at all the spots in which the poor place was about to crumble into pieces. Two sets of stairs—perfectly proportioned on the front of the building—led up to a loggia where a jumble of outdoor furniture stood scattered about as if someone kept moving it to follow the sunlight. A door—its panels painted in faded depictions of the cinghiali that roamed the hills—was set at the precise centre of the loggia, and on either side of it old sculptures depicted the seasons in human form, with Inverno, unfortunately, having lost his poor head and the basket of flowers carried by Primavera having been chopped in half at some time in the past. There were three floors to the villa and a cellar as well, and there were rows of windows, all of them shuttered.

After a moment of looking all this over, Inspector Lynley nodded. He glanced at Salvatore and said, “As you said, in England, we have places not unlike this: old distinguished homes belonging to old, distinguished families. They are at once a burden and a privilege. It is easy to understand why Signor Mura would wish to save this place.”

Salvatore took the inspector at his word. He himself knew there were great houses aplenty in Lynley’s country. Whether Lynley himself actually understood the passion of the Italians for their family homes . . . ? That was another matter, of course.

He drove them along the lawn on the gravel that encircled it. He parked near the steps up to the first floor of the place. Between these two sets of stairs, wisteria grew abundantly on the front of the building, nearly hiding another doorway, this one leading into the piano terra of the home. As they got out of the car, this smaller doorway opened, and Angelina Upman came out from what Salvatore knew was the part of the house where the kitchen and the other quotidian rooms were situated. She looked far worse than she had looked earlier that day. Lorenzo had not been exaggerating the truth of the matter. She was very thin, and beneath her eyes the flesh looked bruised.

At once, she became emotional at the sight of the English policeman. Her eyes altered from dull to luminous with tears. She said in English, “Thank you, thank you for coming, Inspector Lynley.” To Salvatore she said in Italian, “I must speak English with this man, for my own Italian is not quite . . . It will be easier for me. You understand why I must speak English, Chief Inspector?”

“Certo,” Salvatore said. His own English was somewhat serviceable, as she knew. If they spoke slowly, he would be able to follow what they said.

“Grazie,” she said to him. “Please come inside.”

So they entered into the bowels of the place where the light was dim and the atmosphere sombre. It was odd to Salvatore that she had chosen to lead them here. The soggiorno on the primo piano would have been more pleasant. The loggia outside also would have been welcoming. But she seemed to prefer the darkness and the shadows, which would make her less easy to read, of course.

Another interesting detail, Salvatore thought. Indeed, in this matter of the missing child, there were interesting details aplenty.

FATTORIA DI SANTA ZITA

TUSCANY

Angelina took them into a cavernous kitchen within the villa, a room that was hovering between centuries. It was outfitted with both the conveniences of a cooker and refrigerator and the curiosities of an enormous wood-burning oven, a vast fireplace, and a large stone sink in which one could bathe two Alsatians simultaneously. At the room’s centre, a scarred table held a pile of newspapers, magazines, daily crockery, and faded kitchen linens, and at this table Lynley and Lo Bianco sat while Angelina brought to them a bottle of the wine produced there on the farm, along with cheese, fruit, Italian meats, and some freshly baked bread. She poured them each a glass of Chianti but had none herself, choosing water instead.

When she sat, she took up one of the linen table napkins and held it like a form of talisman. She repeated what she had said upon greeting Lynley: “Thank you so much for coming, Inspector.”

“It’s mostly Barbara’s doing,” Lynley told her. “Frankly, she may have gone a bit too far this time to get her way in matters, but that remains to be seen. Hadiyyah’s quite important to her.”

Angelina pressed her lips together for a moment. “I did a terrible thing. I know that. But what I can’t accept is that this—what’s happened to Hadiyyah—is to be my punishment. Because if that’s the case . . .” Her fingers tightened on the piece of linen she held.

Lo Bianco made a noise in his throat that seemed to indicate his understanding of the concept: that there was always a connection between the forms of temporal punishment one suffered and the crimes of the heart one committed against other people. To Lynley’s way of thinking, this was a less than useful way of looking at what had happened.

He said, “I’d try not to think like that. It’s normal—believe me, I do understand—but it’s not helpful.” He smiled at her kindly and added, “‘That way madness lies’ is a good way to put it. Madness—clouded thinking, if you will—isn’t useful to anyone just now.”

“It’s been a week,” she said. “Can you tell me what it means that it’s been a week without a sign or a word? There’s been no request for a ransom and Renzo’s family would pay. I know they would. And people are kidnapped for ransoms in this country. All over the world they’re kidnapped for ransoms. Aren’t they? Isn’t it true? I’ve been trying to discover how many children are kidnapped in Italy every year. See—” Here she dug into the pile of newspapers and magazines and brought out information she’d printed from the Internet. “I’ve been looking and searching and trying to see how long it usually is before kidnappers . . . before there’s something to tell the parents . . .” She fell into silence. In this silence, tears tracked down her cheeks.

Lynley glanced at Lo Bianco. As police they both knew that Angelina was grasping at straws, that in this day kidnapping for ransom was far less likely than kidnapping for sale, for sex, for sick recreational murder, especially when it came to the disappearance of a child. Lo Bianco’s fingers rose and fell against the base of his wineglass. It was a gesture saying, Tell her what you will at this point as it is important only to give her a moment’s peace of mind.

“I wouldn’t disagree,” Lynley told her carefully. “But the more important point now is to go back and consider what happened on the day she disappeared: where you were, where Signor Mura was, where Hadiyyah was, who was around her, who might have seen something but as of yet not come forward because they’re not even aware that they did see something . . .”

“We were all doing what we always do,” Angelina murmured numbly.

“Which is, you see, an important detail,” Lynley reassured her. “It tells the police that, if you’re creatures of habit, someone could have seen this over time and planned how and where to abduct her. It tells the police that, perhaps, this was no crime of opportunity but something considered from every angle. It also explains why no one might have noticed anything because what would have been taken into account by Hadiyyah’s abductor would be exactly that: how to carry this child off without anyone noticing.”

Angelina pressed the table napkin beneath her eyes. She nodded and said, “I see that. I do,” and she rapidly told Lynley how they’d organised the day on which Hadiyyah had disappeared: She had gone to her yoga class, Lorenzo and Hadiyyah had gone into the street market, Hadiyyah had skipped ahead as always to look at the colourful stalls and eventually to listen to the accordion player, and it was there that they all would meet to walk to the home of Lorenzo’s sister for lunch. They did this without variation on their market day in Lucca. Anyone who knew them—or who watched them and waited for an opportunity—would have learned this.

Lynley nodded. He’d heard most of this already from Lo Bianco, but he could see that it gave Angelina a sense of hope being kept alive to give him the information. Across the table from him, Lo Bianco listened to this repetition of details with apparent patience. When Angelina was finished, he said to Lynley, “Con permesso . . . ?” and leaned forward to ask a few questions of his own. He did so in somewhat battered English.

“I ask a question not to ask before, signora. How was Hadiyyah with Signor Mura? All this time away from her papà. How was she with your lover?”

“She was fine with Lorenzo,” Angelina said. “She likes Lorenzo.”

“This you are certain?” Lo Bianco said.

“Of course I am,” Angelina told him. “Making certain . . . It was one of the reasons . . .” She gave a glance to Lynley, then looked back at Lo Bianco. “That’s one of the reasons my sister created the emails. I thought if Hadiyyah heard from Hari, if she thought at first that this was just a visit we were making to Italy, if over time she came to believe her father wasn’t going to come for her . . .”

“Emails?” Lynley asked.

Lo Bianco quickly explained in Italian: that Angelina’s sister had manufactured emails putatively from the little girl’s father. In these he promised to come to Italy. In these he broke those promises.

“Was she able to access his email account in some way?” Lynley asked.

“She created a new account for him, through a friend of hers at University College,” Angelina told him. “I told my sister what to say in the emails. She said it.” Angelina turned to Lo Bianco. “So Hadiyyah had no reason to dislike Lorenzo, to think that he was going to stand in place of her father and to realise from this that her life was permanently altered. I made sure of that.”

“Still, there could be . . . It could be the daughter and Signor Mura . . .” Lo Bianco seemed to search for the word.

“Friction?” Lynley said. “There might have been friction between them?”

“There was no friction,” Angelina said. “There is no friction.”

“And Signor Mura, he likes your Hadiyyah?”

Angelina’s jaw loosened. If she could have gone paler than she already was, she would have done so. Lynley could see her taking in Lo Bianco’s question and drawing a conclusion from it. She said, “Renzo loves Hadiyyah. He would do nothing to harm her, if that’s what you’re thinking. Everything he’s done, everything I’ve done, it’s all been because of Hadiyyah. I wanted her back, I was so unhappy, I’d left Hari to be with Renzo here but I couldn’t do it without Hadiyyah, so I returned to Hari for those few months and waited and waited and Lorenzo waited, and it was all for Hadiyyah, because of Hadiyyah, so you can’t say Lorenzo . . .”

Lo Bianco produced the Italian version of tsk, tsk, tsk. Lynley tried to follow Angelina’s story. She’d woven, it seemed, quite a web of deceit to engineer her new life in Italy. This brought up a point of interest for him, one that might have implications from the past that reached into the present.

“When did you meet Signor Mura?” he asked her. “How did you meet him?”

She’d met him in London, she said. She’d been without an umbrella on a day with sudden rain, so she’d ducked for protection into Starbucks.

Lo Bianco made a noise of moderate disgust at this, and Lynley glanced at him. It was Starbucks, however, that was apparently garnering the Italian man’s disapproval and not the fact of Angelina Upman’s meeting someone inside the place.

The coffee house was crowded with other people having the same idea. Angelina purchased a cappuccino for herself and was drinking it on her feet by the window when Lorenzo entered with the same idea in mind: to get out of the rain. They began to chat, as people sometimes do, she explained. He’d come to London for three days’ holiday and the weather was maddening to him. In Tuscany at this time of year, he said, the sun is out, the days are warm, the flowers are blooming . . . You should come to Tuscany and see for yourself, he told her.

She could see that he looked for a wedding ring on her in that casual way that unattached people sometimes do when they meet one another. She did the same to him. She didn’t tell him about Azhar, about Hadiyyah, or about . . . other things. At the end of their time in the Starbucks when the rain had ceased, he handed her his card and said that if she ever came to Tuscany, she was to ring him and he would show her its beauties. And so, eventually, that was what she did. After a row with Hari . . . another row with Hari . . . always the nighttime rows with Hari, spoken in fierce whispers so that Hadiyyah wouldn’t know there were difficulties between her mother and father . . .

“‘Other things’?” was Lynley’s question at the end of her story. In his peripheral vision, he saw Lo Bianco’s sharp nod of approval.

“What?” she asked.

“You said that at that first meeting you didn’t tell Signor Mura about Hadiyyah, Azhar, or other things. I’m wondering what those other things were?”

Clearly, she didn’t want to go further, as her gaze moved away from Lynley and dropped to the table and the computer printouts upon it. She made a poor show of inauthentic concentration upon Lynley’s question. He finally said to her, “Every detail is important, you know,” and waited in silence. Lo Bianco did likewise. Water dripped in the enormous kitchen sink, and a clock ticked loudly. And she finally spoke.

“At that time, I didn’t tell Lorenzo about my lover,” she said.

Lo Bianco released a nearly silent whistle of air. Lynley glanced at him. Le donne, le donne, his expression said. Le cose che fanno.

“D’you mean another man?” Lynley clarified. “Other than Azhar.”

Yes, she said. One of the teachers at the dancing school where she took classes. A choreographer and an instructor. At the time of her meeting Lorenzo Mura, this man had been her lover for some years. When she left Azhar to take up life with Lorenzo, she also left this man.

“His name?” Lynley asked.

“He’s in London, Inspector Lynley. He’s not Italian. He doesn’t know Italy. He doesn’t know where I am. I simply . . . I mean I should have told him something. I should have told him anything. But I simply . . . stopped seeing him.”

“That wouldn’t have prevented him from trying to find you,” Lynley pointed out. “After several years as your lover—”

“It wasn’t serious,” she said hastily. “It was fun, a release, excitement. Between us, there was never any plan to be together permanently.”

“In your head,” Lo Bianco pointed out. “Ma forse . . .” This was true. Perhaps in the head of her lover an entirely different idea existed. “He was married?”

“Yes. So he wouldn’t have expected me to hang about in his life and when I left him—”

“It works not in that way,” Lo Bianco told her. “There are men, for them marriage equals not a thing.”

“I do need his name, Angelina,” Lynley told her. “The chief inspector’s right. While your previous lover could be completely uninvolved with what’s happened here in Italy, the fact of him in your life means that he needs to be eliminated from the enquiry. If he’s still in London, Barbara can handle this. But it has to be done.”

“Esteban Castro,” she finally said.

“He’s from Spain?”

“Mexico City,” she said. “His wife is English. Another dancer.”

“You were also . . .” Lo Bianco searched for the word, but Lynley was fairly certain where he was heading, so he cut in, saying, “You were acquainted with her?”

Angelina dropped her gaze again. “She was a friend.”

Before either Lynley or Lo Bianco could comment on these facts or ask further questions, Lorenzo Mura arrived at Fattoria di Santa Zita and entered as the others had done: through the ground-floor door that brought him along the dark passage and into the kitchen. He dropped an athletic bag on the tiles and came to the table. He kissed Angelina and asked what was going on among them. Clearly, he was fully capable of reading the atmosphere in the room. “Che cos’è successo?” he demanded.

Neither of the detectives spoke. It was, Lynley felt, for Angelina to tell her current lover—or not to tell him—of the subject they’d been discussing. She said to them, “Lorenzo knows about Esteban Castro. We have no secrets from each other.”

Lynley doubted that. Everyone had secrets. He was beginning to conclude that Angelina’s had deposited her into the position she occupied at the moment: mother of a missing child. He said, “And Taymullah Azhar?”

“What about Hari?” she asked.

“Sometimes relationships are open,” Lynley said. “Did he know about your other lover?”

“Please don’t tell Hari,” she said quickly.

With a grunt, Lorenzo pulled a chair from the table. He sat, grabbed a glass, and poured himself some wine. He tossed it back—no thoughtful sipping and evaluating here—and cut a wedge of cheese and a hunk of bread. He said fiercely, “Why do you protect this man?”

“Because I’ve dropped an explosive into his life and that’s enough. I won’t have him hurt more.”

“Merda.” Lorenzo shook his head. “This makes no sense, this . . . this care you have for this man.”

“We have a child together,” Angelina said. “When you have a child with someone, it changes things between you. That’s how things are.”

“Così dici.” Mura’s voice was gentler when he said this, but still he didn’t appear to be convinced that having had a child by Taymullah Azhar was significant enough a reason for Angelina to wish not to devastate the man further. And perhaps, Lynley thought, it was not enough reason. Perhaps had Azhar ended his marriage instead of merely leaving his wife, things would have been much different for Angelina Upman. And, perhaps, Lorenzo Mura knew this. No matter the situation at present or in the future, a connection existed and would always exist between Angelina and the Pakistani man. And Mura would have to come to terms with that.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

It was later than usual when Salvatore made his evening climb to the top of the tower. Mamma had had what she’d decided was an altercation in the macelleria while doing her shopping for this night’s dinner, and that altercation—apparently with a tourist woman who did not understand that when Signora Lo Bianco entered the shop, everyone else stepped back out of respect for her age—had to be discussed from every angle.

“Sì, sì,” Salvatore murmured throughout this recitation of the woes of Mamma’s day. He shook his head and looked appropriately outraged, and at the first opportunity, he climbed to the roof to enjoy his nightly caffè corretto, the sight of evening falling upon his city with its citizens taking their daily passeggiata arm in arm in the streets, and, most important, the silence that went with all of this, high above everything.

The silence did not last long, however. Into it, his mobile phone rang. He took it from his pocket, saw the caller, and cursed. If this involved another drive to Barga, he would refuse.

“So?” the magistrato barked at Salvatore’s pronto. “Mi dica, Topo.”

Salvatore knew what Fanucci wished to be told: everything that had occurred with this police detective from England. He told the public minister what he felt was sufficient to satisfy him. He added the new intriguing detail of Signora Upman’s additional lover in London: Esteban Castro. She either liked them foreign or she liked them hot-blooded, he told Fanucci.

“Puttana” was Fanucci’s evaluation of her.

Well, times have changed, was what Salvatore wanted to say to Fanucci. Women were not necessarily loose because they took lovers. But, indeed, were he to say this to Fanucci, the truth was that he’d be doing so only to arouse the man’s ire. For he himself did not believe that it was the way of the world today for women to string along more than one lover at a time, married or otherwise. That Angelina Upman, perhaps, made a habit of doing so was a curious new bit of information about her. Salvatore was more than willing to share this information with Fanucci because, if nothing else, it spared him from having to go in the direction of Michelangelo Di Massimo and his bleached yellow hair.

“So, he chases her? This Esteban Castro?” Fanucci said. “He follows her to Lucca. He plans his revenge. She leaves him for another and he does not accept this and he plans how to show her suffering equal to what she has caused him, vero?”

The idea was ludicrous, but what difference did that make? At least it wasn’t additional nonsense about the Casparia youth. Salvatore murmured, “Forse, forse, Piero.” But they must move with caution, he said. They would see soon enough because this English detective would phone London and see about tracking down this lover of Angelina Upman. He would be useful that way, Ispettore Lynley.

There was silence as Fanucci evaluated this. Salvatore heard in the background someone speaking to Fanucci. A woman’s voice. It would not be his wife but rather the long-suffering housekeeper. Vai, Fanucci barked at her, his way of lovingly telling her that her performance between the sheets of his bed would not be necessary on this evening.

Then, into the phone, the magistrato announced the main reason for his call to Salvatore: a special report for the telegiornale had been arranged. He, Fanucci, had made these arrangements. They would film this report at the home of the missing girl’s mother, and it would end with an appeal from this child’s parents: We love our precious little one and we want her back. Please, please return her to us.

If the mamma wept, that would be useful, Fanucci told him. Television cameras liked weeping women in situations when children went missing, no?

And when would this television filming occur? Salvatore enquired.

Two days hence, Fanucci told him. He himself and not Salvatore would do the speaking for the Italian police.

“Certo, certo,” Salvatore murmured with a sly smile at Fanucci’s eternal self-importance. The presence on television screens throughout Italy of Piero Fanucci would, of course, strike fear into the hearts of all malefactors.