Just One Evil Act

25 April

LUCCA

TUSCANY

The television appeal made the story enormous. Missing children were always news in any of the Italian provinces. Missing attractive children were significant news. But missing attractive foreign children whose disappearances brought to the doorstep of the Italian police representatives from New Scotland Yard . . . This was enough to attract the attention of journalists from far and wide. Shortly after the television appeal, they set up shop in what for them was the most logical location, as close to the questura as they could get since the action in the case was most likely to occur there. They blocked traffic on the way to the train station; they blocked the pavements on both sides of the street; they generally made a nuisance of themselves.

The “action in the case” was mostly defined by the police questioning of suspects. Guided by the public minister, Prima Voce had made its selection of prime suspect. The other newspapers were going along, and the hapless Carlo Casparia was finally where Piero Fanucci wanted someone—anyone—to be: under the journalistic microscope. Prima Voce was going as far as to ask the telling question: When will someone step forward as witness and name a certain drug addict in this case of the disappeared bella bambina?

Soon enough someone did just that. An Albanian scarf vendor in the mercato experienced a jog to his memory, effected by both the television appeal with its photographs of the missing child and by Fanucci’s fiery sermon during that television appeal. This individual had, thus, phoned the questura with what he hoped was information relevant to the child’s disappearance: He had seen her pass by on her way out of the mercato, and he was certain that he had seen Carlo Casparia rise from his kneeling Ho fame position and follow the girl.

Salvatore Lo Bianco was completely unconvinced that the scarf vendor had seen anything at all, but after thinking about it for a moment, he did see how this new piece of information might be useful. So he dutifully reported it to Fanucci. Il Pubblico Ministero declared his intention to interview Carlo Casparia personally, as Salvatore had hoped he would. By the time several officers had rounded up the young man and herded him into the questura, Fanucci was waiting to grill him like the martyred St. Lawrence, and representatives from seven newspapers and three television channels were gathered in the street. They already knew Casparia was inside the questura, which told Salvatore that someone was feeding them information. He was fairly sure it was Fanucci himself since massaging his reputation for quickly bringing criminal matters to a conclusion was dear to the magistrato’s heart.

Salvatore almost hated to put the drug-addled Casparia through another interrogation. But it bought him time by keeping Fanucci occupied. And il Pubblico Ministero was very well occupied handling this new interrogation of the addict, as things turned out. He roared, he paced, he breathed garlic into Casparia’s face, he announced that the young man had been seen following this child from the mercato and it was time he told the police what he’d done with her.

Carlo, of course, denied everything. He looked at Fanucci with eyes so bright that he seemed to have light bulbs inside his head. They gave the instantaneous impression that Casparia was extraordinarily alert. The truth was he was high. It was anyone’s guess if he even remembered what child Fanucci was talking about. He asked the magistrato what he would possibly want with a little girl? Fanucci pointed out that it was not what he might have wanted with her but what he actually did with her that was the question they wanted answered.

“You handed her over to someone for money. Where? Who was this person? How was this arrangement made?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about” brought a slap on the back of the head from Fanucci as he paced behind Casparia’s chair.

“You’ve stopped begging in the mercato. Why?” was where he went next.

“Because I can’t make a move without the police pouncing on me” was Casparia’s explanation, after which he put his head in his arms and said, “Let me sleep, man. I was trying to sleep when you—”

Fanucci pulled the youth upright by his filthy bronze-coloured hair and said, “Bugiardo! Bugiardo! You no longer go to the mercato because you have no need of money. You got what you needed when you passed the girl on to another. Where is she? It’s in your interests to tell me now because the police will be going over every inch of those stables where you live. You didn’t know that, did you? Let me tell you this, you miserable stronzo, when we come up with evidence that she was held there—one of her hairs, one of her fingerprints, a shred of a garment, a hair ribbon, anything—your trouble will be bigger than anything you’ve ever imagined in that thick head of yours.”

“I didn’t take her.”

“Then why did you follow her?”

“I didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe I was just leaving the mercato.”

“Earlier than usual? Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even remember if I left at all. Maybe I was going to take a piss.”

“Maybe you were going to grab this pretty one by the arm and march her over to—”

“In your dreams, man.”

Fanucci pounded the table in front of the young man. “You’ll sit here till you tell me the truth,” he roared.

Salvatore used this moment to slip out of the room. He could see that Fanucci would be entertained for hours. He found himself oddly grateful to poor Carlo. He himself could now get something done while Fanucci concentrated on getting “the truth” out of him.

The reality was that they’d had more than one call after the television appeal. They’d had dozens of calls and dozens of putative sightings of little Hadiyyah. Now that Fanucci was absorbed with his questioning of Carlo Casparia, the police could, in peace, sort through the information that was coming in. Something within it might be worth pursuing.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Something indeed turned up one hour into Fanucci’s interrogation of the drug addict. An officer tracked down Salvatore as he was waiting for a stained Moka to finish brewing its viscous caffè over the gas flame in the coffee room. There’d been a sighting of a flashy red car in the hills above Pomezzana, he reported to Salvatore. This sighting had been memorable to the caller for several reasons.

“Perché?” Salvatore listened to the Moka’s final burbling. He reached for a marginally clean cup on the shelf above the sink, gave it a quick rinse and quick wipe, and poured the coffee. Perfetto, he thought. Bitter and coal-coloured. Just the way he liked it.

First, he was told, the convertible top on the car was down. The caller—this was a man who identified himself as Mario Germano, on his way to see his mamma in the village of Fornovolasco—saw the vehicle parked beneath some chestnut trees in a lay-by, and his first thought was that it was foolish to leave a car like that parked with its top down where anyone could come along and play mischief with it. So he’d given the car a second look as he drove by, and that brought them to the second reason Signor Germano remembered the car.

“Sì?” Salvatore sipped the coffee. He leaned against the counter and waited for more. It was soon in coming, and it made the coffee turn to bile in his mouth.

A man was leading a child away from the car and into the woods, the officer said. Signor Germano saw them and assumed that it was a father leading his child to relieve herself out of sight of the road.

“Why did he assume it was a father and child? Is he sure the child was female?” Salvatore asked.

Truth be told, Signor Germano wasn’t completely sure about the sex of the child, but he thinks it was a little girl. And he assumed it was a father and child because . . . well, what else would it have been? Why would anyone assume anything else but an innocent drive in the hills on a sunny afternoon, interrupted momentarily by a child’s need to squat in the bushes out of sight?

“This Signor Germano,” Salvatore asked, “is he certain about the sighting?”

He was indeed because he visited his mamma on a regular schedule.

“And he takes the same route every time?”

Sì, sì, sì. The route is in the Apuan Alps, and it’s the only road to get to his mamma’s village.

It was too much to hope for that Signor Germano would remember in which lay-by the red car had been parked, and he did not remember. But since he’d been on his way to his mamma’s village, the lay-by was, naturally, somewhere along the mountain road in advance of that place.

Salvatore nodded. This was progress indeed. It could be nothing at all, but he had a feeling this was not so. He dispatched two officers to fetch Signor Germano and to drive him into the Apuan Alps on the route to his mamma’s village. If his memory was jogged as to the correct lay-by, excellent. If his memory failed him, then every lay-by would have to be checked. For the point was not the lay-by itself but the shrubbery beyond it, as well as the woods and any trail leading into the woods. Salvatore didn’t want to think that the child might have been disposed of in the Alps, but every day that passed without word about a ransom and without finding her alive made that possibility ever more likely.

His order to the officers was to hold close this information about the red car in the Alps. The only people to be told would be the parents, he said. And they would be told only that a possible sighting was being looked into as there was no need to cause them further distress about a man leading a child into the woods until the police knew if this was, indeed, a relevant piece to the puzzle. Meantime, he said, he wanted an officer looking into all the car hire agencies from Pisa to Lucca. If a red convertible had been hired by someone, he wanted to know who, he wanted to know when, and he wanted to know for how long. And not a word about any of this, chiaro? he said. The last thing he wanted was Fanucci getting hold of the information and leaking it to the press.

PISA

TUSCANY

Salvatore decided that it was time to have a word with Michelangelo Di Massimo. He also decided that the presence of New Scotland Yard, in addition to his own presence, might go some distance towards rattling the man. Since he’d been in Lucca looking for Angelina Upman and her daughter, he was the best lead they had. While it was true that he rode a motorcycle—a powerful Ducati, according to the records that Salvatore had dipped into—there was nothing to stop him from borrowing a vehicle from another, nor was there anything to stop him from hiring one for a single day to take him first into Lucca and then into the Apuan Alps.

He rang DI Lynley and then fetched him at Porta di Borgo, one of the surviving gates of the internal, older walls that had once encircled the town. The London man had walked the short distance from the anfiteatro. He was waiting just outside the arch, flipping through the pages of Prima Voce. He slid into the passenger’s seat and said in his careful Italian, “The tabloids are choosing your drug addict, it seems.”

Salvatore chuckled. “They must choose someone. It is their way.”

“Or, if they don’t have a suspect, they go after the police, yes?” Lynley said.

Salvatore glanced in his direction and smiled. “They will do what they will do,” he said.

“May I ask: Is someone leaking to the papers?”

“Come un rubinetto che perde acqua,” Salvatore told him. “But this faucet’s dripping has them well occupied. Their concentration on Carlo keeps them away from what we’re doing and what we know.”

“What’s made you decide to talk to him now?” Lynley asked, in reference to Michelangelo Di Massimo.

Salvatore made the turn that would take them to Piazza Santa Maria del Borgo. It was crowded here, as usual, a combination of parcheggio for tour buses and milling tourist groups trying to orient themselves in the town as the bright sunlight fell upon their shoulders. At the piazza’s north side, Porta Santa Maria gave Salvatore access to the viale that encircled the town. They would take this roadway to navigate quickly round the wall and glide over to the autostrada.

He told Lynley about the reported sighting in the Apuan Alps: a red convertible, a child, a man, their heading into the woods together. Lynley said astutely, “And this man . . . was he blond?”

Salvatore said, “This we do not know from the sighting.”

“But it would seem . . .” Lynley looked doubtful. “With someone looking as Di Massimo looks, that would have been noticed certainly?”

“Who knows what will be remembered from one moment to the next, eh, Ispettore?” Salvatore said. “You may be right and our journey to Pisa may be for nothing, but the facts remain: He was looking for them in Lucca and he plays football for Pisa, so we have a possible connection between him and Mura. If that means something, it is time we learned what. I have a feeling about this Di Massimo.”

He didn’t tell the London man the rest of what he knew about Di Massimo just then. But there were reasons beyond the man’s ridiculous blond hair that Salvatore knew who the Pisan was.

Michelangelo Di Massimo had an office along the river in Pisa, walking distance from Campo dei Miracoli as well as from the university. There were people who found this section of the city reminiscent of Venice, but Salvatore had never been able to see it. The only things Venice and this part of Pisa had in common were water and ancient palazzi. In Pisa, the first was sluggish and unclean, and the second were uninspiring. No one, he thought, would be writing poetry about Pisa’s riverside anytime soon.

When they reached the building that held Di Massimo’s home and office—which were one and the same—there was no answer when Salvatore rang the bell. But at the tobacconist two doors away, they discovered that the Pisan was having his regular hair appointment. They would find him, they were told, in an establishment called Desiderio Dorato, not far from the university. It was a name that Di Massimo had obviously taken straight into his heart.

The man himself was enthroned within the place, enshrouded in a black plastic cape from shoulders to feet. His head was covered with whatever substance turned his hair from capelli castagni to the promised dorati. When they came upon him, he was deeply involved in reading a novel, a book whose traditional yellow cover announced it as a crime story.

Salvatore took it out of his hands as preamble to their discussion. “Michelangelo,” he said pleasantly, “are you getting some pointers, my friend?” He felt, rather than saw, Thomas Lynley glance curiously in his direction. It was time, he decided, to tell the London man exactly who Di Massimo was.

He did it by way of introduction, emphasising Lynley’s position at New Scotland Yard and revealing in a friendly fashion the London detective’s purpose in coming to Italy. No doubt, he said, Michelangelo had heard of the missing child from Lucca, non è vero? He couldn’t imagine a private investigator of Di Massimo’s stature to be uninterested in a case such as this one since, above everything else that made it intriguing, the man who stood in place of the missing child’s father was, like Di Massimo, a player of football.

Di Massimo plucked the book back from Salvatore’s hands. He was unrattled. He said, “As you have eyes, you can see I’m in the middle of something here, Chief Inspector.”

“Ah, yes, the hair,” Salvatore said. “It was what made you so distinctive to the hotels and pensioni, Miko.” He was aware of Lynley next to him adjusting to the new information. He felt a slight twinge that he hadn’t told the English detective from the first about what he knew of Michelangelo Di Massimo’s profession, but he didn’t want the information relayed to the parents of the girl and, from them, to Lorenzo Mura. The risk was too great, and he hadn’t known whether he could trust Lynley to hold his tongue.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Pisan said.

“What I’m talking about is your presence—in my city, Miko—seeking from one hotel to the next information about a woman from London and her daughter. You even had a photo of them. Does this rattle the cage bars of your memory, my friend, or will a trip to the questura be necessary to do so?”

“It seems someone hired you to find them, signore,” Lynley said. “And now one of them is missing, which doesn’t look good. For you, that is.”

“I know nothing of missing women and children,” Di Massimo said. “And the fact that someone thinks I was looking for them at one time or another . . . ? It could have been anyone. You know that.”

“Described such as yourself?” Salvatore asked. “Miko, how many men can be said to combine the physical attributes that blend in you so well?”

“Ask the parrucchiere,” the Pisan advised. “Ask anyone here. They will tell you Di Massimo isn’t the only man who chooses to alter the colour of his hair.”

“Vero,” Salvatore said. “But perhaps the number of these men who also wear black leather”—and here he toed the plastic cape to one side to reveal Di Massimo’s trousers—“and whose whiskers sprout from his face as if in a contest to grow a full beard by this evening . . . ? I would suggest, Miko, that these two details alone set you above the others. We add to that your possession of a photo of a girl and her mother. We add to that your employment. We add to that your membership on the squadra di calcio and the fact that this team will have, from time to time, played matches against the team from Lucca . . .”

“Calcio?” Di Massimo asked. “What has calcio to do with anything?”

“Lorenzo Mura. Angelina Upman. The missing child. They are all connected and something has told me that you know this.”

“You’re fishing and your bait is off the hook,” Di Massimo said.

“We shall see if that’s the case, Miko, when you stand in an identity parade and the witnesses from the hotels who have identified you have a chance to see you once again. When that happens—as I assure you it will—you might then regret your reluctance to speak to us now. Il Pubblico Ministero, by the way, will be most interested in speaking to you once those witnesses have confirmed that the man who came into their hotels in his black leather trousers and his black leather jacket with his yellow hair and his very black eyebrows—”

“Basta,” Di Massimo snapped. “I was asked to locate them, the girl and her mother. That is all. I search Pisa first: the hotels, the pensioni, even the convents that rent out rooms. Then I broaden the search.”

“Why Lucca?” Lynley asked the man.

His eyes became hooded as he considered the question and, apparently, what it would reveal if he answered it.

“Why Lucca?” Salvatore repeated. “And who hired you, Michelangelo?”

“There was a bank transaction that I was told about. It came from Lucca, so I went to Lucca. You know how it works, Chief Inspector. One thing leads to another and the investigator follows trails. That’s it.”

“A bank transaction?” Salvatore said. “Who told you about a bank transaction? What kind of bank transaction, Miko?”

“A transfer of money. That’s all I knew. The money started in Lucca. It ended in London.”

“And who hired you?” Lynley asked the man. “When were you hired?”

“In January,” Michelangelo said.

“By whom?”

“He’s called Dwayne Doughty. He hired me to find the girl. And that, Chief Inspector, is all I know. I did a job for him. I looked for a child who was supposed to be in the company of her mother. I had a photo of them, so I did what anyone searching would do: I went to the hotels and the pensioni. If that’s a crime, arrest me now. If it isn’t, let me go back to reading my book in peace.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Lynley rang Barbara Havers as he and Lo Bianco made the trip back to Lucca. He reached her deep into attempting to transcribe an action report for an officer whose cursive she was finding illegible. She sounded irritated and in need of nicotine. For the first time Lynley wouldn’t have minded her lighting up. He knew she would need to once he imparted the information he now had about Dwayne Doughty.

There was a moment of silence when he told her: The London private investigator had hired a Pisa private investigator to track down Angelina Upman and her daughter in Lucca. This investigator had begun his work for Doughty in January, four months earlier. To her “Bloody hell, he lied to me!” Lynley added that a bank account was involved, as was a transfer of money from Lucca to London. “Doughty has apparently known a great deal more than he’s been telling you, Barbara,” Lynley said.

“He’s working for me,” she fumed. “He’s bloody goddamn working for me!”

“You’ll need to have a word.”

“Oh, I bloody know that,” she barked. “When I get my hands on the sodding worm—”

“Just don’t do it now. Don’t leave the office. And if I might suggest . . . ?”

“What? Because if you think I’m handing this little matter over to someone else, you’re bleeding from your ears.”

“I wasn’t heading there,” he told her. “But you might want to take Winston with you if you’re going to confront this bloke.”

“I don’t need protection, Inspector.”

“Believe me, I know. But the cachet of authority that Winston will lend to an interview . . . ? Not to mention the implied threat of his presence . . . ? You do need that. These aren’t the most cooperative of blokes, Barbara. Doughty might need convincing in the matter of talking if he’s been hiding details from you.”

She agreed to this, and they rang off. Lynley told Lo Bianco who Doughty was and how he had fitted into the search for Hadiyyah from the previous November. Lo Bianco whistled and shot him a look. “For an Englishman to have taken the child,” he said, “this would have been an easier matter.”

“Only as to language,” Lynley pointed out. “Because if the Englishman doesn’t live in Lucca or somewhere nearby . . . Where would he have taken her?”

At the questura, they quickly learned that there was an additional development. As it happened, a tourist using a local apartment in Piazza San Alessandro as a base for her trip to Tuscany had been in the mercato on the day of Hadiyyah’s disappearance. She was an American woman travelling with her daughter, both of them students of the Italian language, neither of them fluent, but both in town to practise as much as they could. So they read the tabloids as well as the newspapers, they watched the television and tried to understand what was being said, and they talked to the cittadini of the town. They’d seen the appeal on the news, and they’d looked through the thousand or more digital photos they’d taken in Tuscany to see if there was anything among them that might be of help to the police. They’d located the photos they’d taken in the mercato on the day that the child went missing, and they’d cooperatively delivered the memory cards from their digital cameras so that the police could examine the pictures. They’d included a message along with the memory cards: Should the police wish to question the photographers themselves, they would be that day taking in the beauties of Palazzo Pfanner.

Lo Bianco sent for someone who knew what to do with memory cards from cameras, compact discs, computers, and getting the photographs onto a monitor’s screen. There turned out to be nearly two hundred that the American and her daughter had taken in the mercato. Lynley and the chief inspector began to go through them, studying each to see if Hadiyyah was featured in any, looking for the reappearance of anyone from one picture to the next. Especially they looked for Michelangelo Di Massimo. He would, after all, be unmistakable.

They found Lorenzo Mura doing his weekly shop at a bancarella featuring cheese. They found him at another featuring meat. At this one a great pig’s head on the counter looked, unappetisingly, like something directly out of Lord of the Flies, and Mura was gazing to his left in the direction, Lo Bianco said, of Porta San Jacopo and the accordion player. They scrutinised every picture that Lo Bianco identified as being in the vicinity of that musician. Finally, they came upon two in which Hadiyyah could be seen, at the front of the crowd listening to the music and watching the man’s poodle doing its dance.

The focal point of the picture was the dancing dog, not Hadiyyah, so she wasn’t entirely in focus. But it was an easy matter to enlarge the picture on the screen so that the detectives could see that it was unmistakably her. To her right stood an old woman in the black of a widow, while on her left huddled three teenage girls engaged in lighting two cigarettes from the burning tobacco of a third.

Di Massimo was nowhere. But a handsome, dark-haired man stood directly behind Hadiyyah, and although his gaze, like everyone else’s, was on the poodle and its master, he was reaching for something inside his jacket. Two pictures along they saw what it was. By enlarging it, they had a better image to deal with. It appeared to be a greeting card of some kind, on its front a depiction of the universal yellow smiley face. There was no photo showing exactly what he’d done with the card. There was, however, a picture of Hadiyyah bending to the accordion player’s basket and putting something in it with her right hand while, in her left, she held something that could have been the card from the earlier photo.

And then . . . nothing more. There were other pictures of the accordion player, of the dancing dog, and of the crowd in attendance. But Hadiyyah was not in them. Nor was the man.

“It could be nothing,” Lo Bianco said, stepping away from the monitor and going to look out of the window, which faced not only Viale Cavour but also the restless journalists gathered there.

“Do you believe that?” Lynley asked him.

Lo Bianco looked at him. “I do not,” he said.

BOW

LONDON

Winston hadn’t jumped on the rolling wagon of Barbara’s intentions immediately. She didn’t understand why until they finally reached Bow and had parked in front of Bangla Halal Grocers, where a sign offered Bangladeshi King Size Fish and two men in long white robes and tatted headgear gazed upon Barbara’s old Mini with undisguised suspicion. There, Winston didn’t unfold himself from the sagging seat at once, as Barbara had expected of him, considering the discomfort in which he’d had to ride all the way from Victoria. Instead, he said to her, “You got to be told something, Barb. He’s checkin your story.”

So caught up was she in trying to decide how she was going to make Doughty pay for his investigative crimes against her that she thought at first he meant the Bow detective. But when he went on, she understood that Winston was passing along information that had come to him via Dorothea Harriman, and this information had nothing to do with Dwayne Doughty and his questionable ethics.

“Dee says he asked her to look into where your mum was taken when she fell. She says he asked her would she do it on the sly. If no A-and-E has a record of her and no ambulance company has a record of transportin her, he’s goin to use it against you. Tha’s the story Dee had.”

Barbara swore. “Why didn’t she come to me? At least I could’ve rung Mrs. Flo to cook up a story.”

“’Spect Dee’s that worried ’bout her own job, Barb. He sees her talkin to you, he even gets word she’s talked to you, we both know what he’s goin to think. She’s bidin her time before she gets on it—the ambulance and A-and-E business—but he’s goin to be lookin for some answers soon and she’s goin to have to tell him something. And when she tells him whatever she tells him, you know ’s well as I do that he’s goin to take steps to confirm.”

Barbara thunked her head against the driver’s window. How to proceed was the question. She answered it by saying, “Hang on, then,” to Winston, and by making a phone call to Florence Magentry in Greenford. That good woman was going to have to lie for her, she was going to have to do so convincingly, and Barbara could see no way around it.

“Oh my dear, my dear,” she said hesitantly when Barbara laid out the facts for her via mobile as Winston looked on, frowning. “I will, of course, if you think I must. A fall, an ambulance, the casualty ward . . . ? Of course, of course. But, Barbara, may I say . . . ?”

Barbara girded herself for protest. She wanted to declare that she had no choice, that she had to protect herself, that if she did not do so she would not be able to keep her mother in the secure and caring place of lodging that Mrs. Flo provided because she’d be without a job. But she said, “Yeah. Go on,” and she waited for Mrs. Flo to say what she needed to say.

It was, “Sometimes, my dear, if we tempt fate this way . . . It’s not a good thing, is it? What I’m trying to say is that declaring something like this—a fall, broken bones, an ambulance, casualty—”

Barbara had never taken her mother’s carer to be superstitious, so she said, “You’re saying that wishing makes things so? Well, I’m not wishing. I’m just saying. And if I don’t ‘say’ something, I’m up to my neck . . . Look, a secretary from the Met will ring you, Mrs. Flo. Then a DI called Stewart’ll ring you as well. You just need to tell them both that yes, Mum fell, and yes, an ambulance took her to casualty, and that’s all you know since you rang me and I got onto all the rest.” That would, she thought, buy her time to sort this mess out.

Up above Bedlovers, Doughty was waiting for her, as she’d phoned him and told him that—all things related to the law considered—it was in his best interests to stay put until she and he had a little confab together. She didn’t mention Winston, and she noted with gratification that Doughty blanched slightly when the impressive black detective followed her into the room and blocked any escape from it. She introduced the two men. Winston meaningfully locked his eyeballs on to Doughty. Barbara then got down to business. The business was money transferred from Lucca to London. The business was hiring a Pisan called Michelangelo Di Massimo.

“You hired this bloke in January,” she declared. “So let’s start with how you uncovered the information about a money transfer in the first place.”

“I don’t reveal—”

“Do not attempt that rubbish with me. You’ve been playing fast and loose from the first, and if you’d like to remain a private investigator and not end up in the local nick, then you’re going to talk.”

Doughty was sitting behind his desk. He glanced at Winston, who stood at the door. He glanced at a metal filing cabinet, at the artificial plant covering its top surface. That, Barbara reckoned now, had to be where he had a camera that broadcast whatever went on in his office to his colleague in the other room.

“All right. Another bank account was uncovered,” Doughty finally said.

“Who uncovered it? How? Who’s your blagger? Because that’s how you did it, isn’t it, and I expect it’s your ‘associate’ Ms. Cass who was ringing round credit card companies and banks pretending to be Angelina. Or her sister. She looked like a bird with as many talents as pores, so sweet-talking someone—”

“I’m not saying a word about Emily Cass,” he said. “We use various means at our disposal to uncover information.”

“Computer hacking as well, I expect. That ‘computer expert’ you told us about is someone who breaks and enters computer systems as easily as tumbling locks. And he or she knows someone who knows someone who knows someone else . . . Do you know how much trouble I could put you in, Mr. Doughty?”

“I’m attempting to cooperate,” he said. “I learned there was a bank account here in London, an account held in the name Bathsheba Ward but in a branch nowhere near her home or her work. I found this curious and did a little . . . work on it. In . . . in time, let’s say, I discovered that funds had been wired from another account, this one in Lucca. I needed someone in Italy to trace that account and to see who was at the other end of this wired money.”

“Michelangelo Di Massimo was your man in Italy, then?”

“He was.” Doughty pushed back from his desk. He went to the filing cabinet, made an adjustment to the artificial plant, and opened a drawer. He riffled through some files till he found what he wanted. He handed it over. It was slim enough, but it contained a copy of the report he’d written. Barbara read this quickly to see it contained the information he’d just supplied her, along with the name, the address, and the email of the private investigator in Pisa whom DI Lynley and the Italian chief inspector had interviewed that day.

Barbara closed the file and handed it back. She had a terrible feeling about what she was going to learn if she asked the next question, but she asked it anyway. “What did you do with this information?” she said.

“I gave it to Professor Azhar,” he told her. “Sergeant, I’ve given him everything from the first.”

“But he said . . .” Barbara’s lips felt stiff. What had he said? Had she misinterpreted his words in some way? She tried to remember, but she was feeling turned round, down the rabbit hole, and out of her league. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked him.

“Because I was working for him, not for you,” Doughty said, not unreasonably. “And when I began working for you, what you asked me to uncover had to do with the professor’s trip to Berlin and nothing else.” He put the folder back and shut the drawer. He turned back to them, but he did not sit. He extended his hands in the universal gesture of look-at-me-I-have-nothing-to-hide. “Sergeant,” he said and then added Winston in his remarks by saying, “Sergeants. I’ve told you the absolute truth at this point, and if you’d care to look through my phone records and my computer files and, yes, even my hard drive, you’re more than welcome to do so. I’ve nothing to hide from you, and I’ve no interest in anything other than getting home to my wife and my dinner. Are we finished here?”

They were, Barbara said. What she didn’t say, however, was that she knew how easily Doughty could have cleared his records, his hard drive, his entire life of suspicion if any of this was in the possession of a computer tech expert with inside contacts at various institutions. And there was virtually nothing she could do about it.

She and Winston left him. They descended the stairs and went into the street, where a short distance away the Roman Café was making the seductive offer of kebabs. She said to her colleague, “At least let me buy you dinner, Winnie.”

He nodded and walked thoughtfully at her side. He was deep into something, and she didn’t ask him what it was because she had a feeling she already knew. He confirmed this as they took a table by the window and considered the menu. He looked at it briefly and then spoke to her.

“Got to ask, Barb.”

“What?”

“How well you know him.”

“Doughty? ’Course he could be lying and he probably is because he’s lied already and—”

“Don’t mean Doughty,” Winston told her. “’Spect you know that, eh?”

She did. To her sorrow and misery, she absolutely did. He was asking how well she knew Taymullah Azhar. She’d been asking herself the very same question.

BOW

LONDON

Doughty waited patiently. He knew it wouldn’t be long, and it wasn’t. Em Cass burst into his office not one minute after the cops’ departure. He could tell how much of a lather she was in from the fact that she’d removed both her waistcoat and her tie.

“From the first,” she began. “Goddamn it, Dwayne, from the—”

“It’ll all be over soon,” he cut in. “There’s nothing to worry about. Everyone will go home happy, and you and I will fade into the sunset, ride off on our ponies, whatever.”

“I think you’ve gone mad.” She paced from one side of the office to another. She slapped one hand into the palm of the other.

“Emily,” he said, “go home. Have a change of clothes and go out clubbing. Pull a new man. You’ll feel much better.”

“How can you even suggest . . . You’re an idiot! Now it’s two cops—from the Met, no less—sifting through our unwashed laundry, and you’re suggesting I entertain myself with anonymous sex?”

“It’ll take your mind off whatever your mind’s on. Which, by the way, is an unnecessary bundle of speculations taking you nowhere. We’re clean on this and we’ve been that way since Bryan diddled our computers and phone records.”

“We’re going to gaol,” she said. “If you’re depending on Bryan to hold out once the cops pay a call on him . . . especially that black bloke. Did you see how big he is? Did you bloody see that scar on his face? I know a scar from a knife fight when I see one and so do you. We’ll be in gaol five minutes after that bloke fixes his stare on Bryan Smythe.”

“They don’t know any details about Bryan, and unless you decide to tell them yourself, they won’t ever know any details about Bryan. Because I’m certainly not going to tell them. So it’ll all be down to you.”

“What’re you saying? That I can’t be trusted?”

Doughty looked at her meaningfully. It was his experience that no one could be trusted, but he did like to think otherwise of Emily. Still, he could tell she needed to be mollified in some way because, in her present state, one trip to the nick to spend an hour or so in the company of officers intent upon wringing the truth from her, and she might well crack.

He said carefully, “I trust you with my life, Em. I hope you trust me with yours as well. I hope you trust me enough to listen carefully to what I’m about to say.”

“Which is?”

“It’ll be over soon.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Things are in motion in Italy. The crime is about to be solved, and we’ll be opening the champagne soon enough.”

“Do I have to remind you that we’re not in Italy? Do I have to point out that if you’re depending on this Di Massimo bloke—a man you’ve never even bloody met, for God’s sake—to carry this off without anyone being the wiser . . .” She threw up her hands. “This is more than an Italian situation, Dwayne. It became more than an Italian situation the moment the Met got involved. Which, may I remind you, was the very first instant that woman stepped into your office with the Pakistani, pretending to be an ordinary, ill-dressed heap of a female just here to support her extraordinarily intelligent, well-spoken, nice-looking, and neatly attired male friend. God, I should have known the moment I clapped eyes on them both that the very fact they were even together—”

“You did know, as I recall,” he said mildly. “You told me she was a cop and you turned out to be correct. But none of that matters just now. Things are in hand. The girl will be found. And no crime was committed by you or by me. Which, I might add, is something you should hold close to your heart.”

“Di Massimo gave them your name,” she protested. “What’s to stop him from giving them everything else?”

He shrugged. There was some truth in what she said, but he was holding on to his confidence in money being not only the root of all evil but also the oil that kept machines rolling on. He said, “Plausible deniability, Em. That’s our watchword.”

“Plausible deniability,” she repeated. “That’s two words, Dwayne.”

“Merely an insignificant detail,” he said.