Just One Evil Act

30 April

VICTORIA

LONDON

A heads-up is always nice, I reckon, so you’re getting one.”

Barbara Havers didn’t need Mitchell Corsico to identify himself. At this point his tenor tones had become a permanent echo inside her skull. Had he rung her on her mobile, she could have avoided the call. As it was, he’d rung her at work, claimed to have information on “the situation DS Havers is investigating,” and the bluff had proved perfectly efficacious. The call had come through, Barbara had picked it up, she’d barked, “DS Havers,” and there he was.

She said, “What? What?”

“As my sainted mum would say, ‘Don’t take that tone with me,’” he returned. “She’s out of hospital.”

“Who? Your mum? So you should celebrate, shouldn’t you? I’d tipple back one or two with you, but I’ve work to do.”

“Don’t try to be amusing, Barb. There’s no story over here, and I expect you bloody well knew that. Do you have any idea what position this puts me in with my editor? Do you?”

He was in Italy at last. Barbara thanked her stars. “If she’s out of hospital, I expect that confirms that she was in hospital,” she replied. “It’s not down to me that she’s been released. What I gave you, I gave you in good faith.”

“I’m going with the Love Rat Dad and Officer of the Met,” he said. “Complete with pictures. Expect it tomorrow. I’ve already written it, it’s attached to my breathless email on the topic of what-hot-information-I’ve-just-managed-to-uncover-dear-editor, and I’m about to hit send. Do you want that to happen or not?”

“What I want—” Barbara looked up as someone came to stand in front of her desk. It was Dorothea Harriman, so she said to Corsico, “Hang on,” and then to Dorothea, “Something up?”

“You’re wanted, Detective Sergeant Havers.” She tilted her perfectly coiffed blond head in the general direction of Isabelle Ardery’s office. Barbara sighed.

“Right,” she said, and then to Corsico, “We’ll have to have this conversation later.”

“Are you completely mad?” he demanded. “Do you think I’m bluffing? The only way for you to stop this is to give me either Lynley or Azhar. You can get me access that no one else has and I swear to God, Barb, if you don’t get off the bleeding fence on this one—”

“I’ll speak to Inspector Lynley directly,” she lied. “That satisfy you? Now, Superintendent Ardery is asking to see me and while I’d love to continue this bloody well stimulating discussion with you, I’ve got to ring off.”

“As long as you know that I’m holding off on this other story for a quarter hour, Barb. That time passes and I hit send and you look for it in tomorrow’s paper.”

“As always, my timbers are shivering,” she said. She banged down the phone and said to Dorothea, “What’s her nibs want with me? Any idea?”

“Detective Inspector Stewart is with her.” She sounded regretful. This wasn’t good.

Barbara thought of fortifying herself with a fag in the stairwell, but she decided that keeping Isabelle Ardery waiting when she had been summoned wasn’t a particularly wise move. So she followed Dorothea to the superintendent’s office, and there she found Ardery in conversation with John Stewart, who’d brought a pile of manila folders with him for some reason that probably wasn’t going to be good.

Barbara joined them. She glanced from Stewart to Ardery to Stewart. She nodded but made no other greeting. Her brain went into high gear, however. She didn’t see how Stewart could have known that she’d been to see Dwayne Doughty in advance of jumping to do his bidding and conducting the interviews he’d assigned to her. And even if he had made that discovery, she’d got the bloody interviews done. What more did the sodding bloke want of her?

As it happened, Stewart wanted nothing of her. He’d apparently been summoned into Isabelle Ardery’s office as well, and just like Barbara, he was in the dark about why the superintendent had called him in to a meeting.

Ardery didn’t waste time to bring them both into the picture. She said, “John, I’m reassigning Barbara for a few days. There’s a branch of the investigation in—”

“What?” Stewart looked like someone whose balloon had just got popped. He was staring, outraged, at Ardery as if she’d been the person wielding the pin that had popped it.

The superintendent took a moment. She let his tone act like an echo in the room. Then she said carefully, “I’d no idea your hearing was undergoing a change. As I said, I’m reassigning Barbara to another investigation.”

“What bloody other investigation?” he demanded.

Ardery’s spine underwent a minute adjustment. “I’m not certain you require that knowledge,” she pointed out.

“You put her on my team,” he countered. “And that’s where she stays: on my team.”

“I beg your pardon?” Ardery had been sitting behind her desk with Stewart in front of it, the manila folders still in a neat pile on his lap. She rose now and leaned her height of six feet in his direction, her well-groomed fingertips on a set of reports. “I don’t think you’re in a position to make those kinds of declarations,” she pointed out. “Perhaps you need a moment to sort yourself? I’d take that moment, if I were you.”

“Where’re you putting her?” he demanded. “Every team’s got enough manpower on it. If this is a power play you’ve decided to engage in, it’s not on.”

“You’re out of order.”

“Oh, I’m always out of order with you. D’you know what I’ve got here? Right here in these folders?” He lifted one and shook it at her. Barbara felt her arms go limp.

“I’m not the least interested in what you’ve got there unless it’s the documentation for an arrest in one of the cases you’ve been handling.”

“Oh, too right,” Stewart said. “You’re not the least interested in anything other than—” He stopped himself directly on the brink. He said, “Just forget it. All right. She’s reassigned. Have her. We all know who she’s going to be working with—as he’s the only person who ever wants her on his team—and all of us know why you’re only too happy to hand her to him.”

Barbara drew in a sharp breath. She waited to see what the superintendent would do with this one.

Ardery said steadily, “What are you implying, John?”

“I think you know.”

“And I think you’d be wise to reconsider the route you’re taking. As it happens, Barbara will be working directly for me on a matter involving another police officer. And that, John, concludes what you need to know about why I require her. Are we absolutely clear on this or do we need to take our discussion to a higher level?”

Stewart stared at Ardery. She held his gaze. Her face was rigid and his was florid and Barbara knew that they were both enraged. One of them had to take a step away from the other, but she knew it wasn’t going to be the superintendent. Whether it would be Stewart remained to be seen. Misogyny had been driving his behaviour for so many years, it was difficult to know if he could get it under control long enough to get himself out of the superintendent’s office and back to work before she had his head on a platter.

He finally rose. “I take your meaning,” he said. He turned and left the superintendent’s office without a glance in Barbara’s direction. She wondered what he had in those folders of his, though. She reckoned it wasn’t good.

With Stewart gone, the superintendent gestured Barbara to take one of the two chairs in front of her desk. Barbara chose the one Stewart hadn’t been sitting on, all the better not to besmirch her trousers with any of his essence. She waited for clarification, which was quick in coming.

“This situation in Italy has a tentacle reaching to London,” she said. “I had a phone call from DI Lynley early this morning. He needs someone on the case at this end.”

So it was Lynley, Barbara thought. Stewart, for all his odious and thinly veiled accusations, had not been very far off the mark. She blessed Lynley for his efforts to get her onto his team. He knew how deep was her concern about Hadiyyah and Azhar, he recognised the nature of her friendship with both of them, and more than anything, he understood how unwelcome it was to her ever to have to work with John Stewart. Bless him, bless him, bless him, Barbara thought. She owed him, she would repay him, she would be tireless in getting to the bottom of—

“I want to make something clear to you, Barbara,” the superintendent said. “DI Lynley asked for Winston. He’s the obvious choice as, let’s be frank, he has a good track record of obeying orders while that’s not exactly the case for you. But I’d like to give you the opportunity to prove to me directly that you can do the same. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about your time on John Stewart’s team before you and I move along to what the inspector needs you to do for him?”

Here was the moment to fess up, Barbara thought. But she couldn’t risk telling the superintendent that she’d gone her own way more than once in the past few days. Ardery might well pull her off the assignment she’d just put her on. So she said, “It’s not anyone’s secret that John Stewart and I don’t get along, guv. I try. P’rhaps he tries as well. But we’re chalk and cheese.”

Ardery evaluated this, her gaze evenly on Barbara’s. She finally said, “Right,” in a slow and thoughtful drawl. Then she turned and picked up the topmost report on her desk and handed it over.

“The police in Italy have traced the kidnapping of your friend’s little girl back to London.”

“Dwayne Doughty, right?” Barbara said.

Ardery nodded. “They’ve brought in a bloke in Italy who was evidently operating on Doughty’s direction. He appears to have found the child without apparent difficulty but instead of giving the word to her father, Doughty came up with a scheme to kidnap her. What’s been done with her, the Italian doesn’t know. He claims he was given instructions in bits and pieces: It was, he says, a case of ‘Snatch her and I’ll tell you what happens next.’”

“Bloody pig,” Barbara said. “I took Azhar to meet this bloke, guv, when Hadiyyah’s mum disappeared with her. He seemed to be on the up-and-up. He worked a bit on looking for her, and he finally told us there was no bloody trail and I’m-dead-sorry-I-am and that was that.” Barbara didn’t add anything about Azhar: the Berlin alibi, khushi, or anything else. Least of all did she add the claims Doughty had made when she’d seen him in the Bow Road nick since the superintendent didn’t know she’d seen him in the Bow Road nick, and she didn’t need to know.

Ardery said, “Yes. Well. He’s involved in some way that DI Lynley needs sorted. I’ve been told that there was never a ransom demanded for the child, so my guess is that someone else beyond Doughty is also involved. Phone the inspector if you have more questions.”

“I will,” Barbara said.

Ardery handed over the report she’d received, and she eyed Barbara before giving her the word to go on her way. She said, “I want to learn at the end that you’ve handled every aspect of this situation in a professional manner, Barbara. Anything less than that, and you and I will be having a different sort of conversation. Am I being clear?”

As mountain spring water, Barbara thought. She said, “Yes, guv, you are. I won’t disappoint you.”

Ardery dismissed her. She didn’t look convinced.

BOW

LONDON

Barbara decided that Doughty was not the place to begin. Presented with the facts as they’d apparently been recited by Michelangelo Di Massimo in the police station in Lucca, he would doubtless be able to produce an airtight rationale for all of them. Barbara could even imagine what it would be: I hired the bloke to find her, and he swore he tried every avenue of exploration to no avail. Are you suggesting that it’s down to me that he found her without letting me know? That he planned her kidnapping and handed her over to God only knows who for God only knows what reason and that’s down to me as well? Look, Sergeant, Di Massimo was in a far better position than I to carry this kid off into the hinterlands or wherever the hell he carried her to. I’m supposed to know enough about Italy—where, to be frank, I have never set foot—to have made a kid disappear? And why? For money? Whose money? I don’t know these people. Do any of them even have money?

And on and on Doughty would go, wearing her down with logic, illogic, and everything in between. So she wouldn’t begin with talking to him. Emily Cass seemed a more likely source of information.

Barbara spent some time digging up whatever might be useful in her conversation with the young woman, who turned out to be no intellectual slouch. She held an advanced degree in economics from the University of Chicago, but since attaining that degree, she’d held a string of jobs that suggested personal unsuitability for the world of business or finance: She’d been a security consultant in Afghanistan, a bodyguard to the children of a minor branch of the Saudi royal family, a personal trainer to a Hollywood actress in need of a task master to keep her body beautiful a body beautiful, and an assistant chef on a yacht whose owner was one of the biggest names in British petroleum. She was, literally, all over the map in her employment history. How she’d ended up in the employ of a private investigator was anyone’s guess.

Her record was clean when it came to the law, though, and she’d sprung from a solidly middle-class family whose paterfamilias was a noted ophthalmologist and whose mother was a paediatrician. With three brothers involved in the medical field as well and another a highly successful Formula One driver, she probably wouldn’t want to have her reputation sullied by any activity she might have engaged in that danced on the wrong side of the law. She was, Barbara assured herself, the better bet when it came to having a tête-à-tête with someone bearing a warrant card.

She had no intention of bearding Em Cass in the den of Dwayne Doughty’s place of business. She didn’t want to ring the woman either. Better not to give her time to inform the private investigator that she was going to be questioned. So she positioned herself in a window of the Roman Café and Kebab a short distance from Bedlovers, whose upper floor housed Dwayne Doughty’s office. There she waited for Emily Cass to appear.

It took four kebabs and a jacket potato topped with cheese and chili for this to happen. By that point, Barbara was practically a member of the family who ran the establishment. They were looking at her a bit askance—probably considering the nature of the eating disorder the dishevelled woman in the window was suffering from—but they nonetheless accepted her money in exchange for copious amounts of food. They smiled ingratiatingly and also enquired as to her marital status, possibly as a suitable mate for a son who hung about the place with a suspicious dribble of drool escaping from his gaping mouth. Barbara was grateful for the appearance of Em Cass at the end of an extended period within the café. She was equally grateful that Emily, who had on running clothes, set off in her direction and not in the opposite, which would have made it impossible—her recent gustatory history considered—for Barbara to catch her up.

Barbara was out of the door in a flash. She was planted on the pavement directly in Emily’s path before the young woman knew what was happening. She was saying, “You and I need to talk” and clamping onto her arm before Emily could either run off or dash back to the office. Barbara hustled her across the street and into the Albert pub—vaguely wondering why there appeared to be a pub called the Albert in every neighbourhood of the capital—where she strong-armed her to a table near a fruit machine with Out of Order hanging prominently upon it.

“Here’s what you need to know,” she told her. “Michelangelo Di Massimo has given you lot up to the Italian police. Now, this might not be a major problem for you since, extradition being what it is, you could be a grandmother before you found yourself standing in front of an Italian magistrate. But—and I like to think of this as the nice bit, Emily—a senior officer from the Met is over there acting as liaison for the family. One more word from him—aside from the several words that sent me here to have this little natter with you—and you’re in trouble of the I-appear-to-need-a-solicitor variety. D’you receive my meaning here, or do I have to spell things out more clearly?”

Emily Cass seemed to make an effort at swallowing. Barbara could hear the gulp from across the table. She idly thought about getting the woman a lager, but she reckoned she wouldn’t need to go to the expense if she gave her a little time to dwell upon the significance of what she intended to say to her next.

“I expect you were more of an adjunct player in what went on. You did your bit of blagging on the phone to get information—it’s what you excel in, and who can blame you for using your talents, eh?—but you did it on someone else’s orders and we both know who that someone else is.”

Emily had been gazing at her steadily, but she allowed her glance to go to the street and then back to Barbara. She wet her lips.

“Now my guess is that if our Dwayne has you to operate the phones and impersonate everyone from doddering old ladies to the Duchess of Cambridge, you’re not the only talent he employs. He’s not a fool. The bloke sets me a challenge called examine-every-one-of-my-records-here-if-you-don’t-believe-me, and what that suggests to me is someone else’s involvement in the whole bloody scheme, someone competent at sweeping records clean, someone who looks at that as child’s play. I want that name, Emily. I suspect it’s a bloke called Bryan that Doughty mentioned early on. I want his phone number, his email address, his street address, whatever. You give me that, and you and I part friends. Everyone else and I? Not so much. But there comes a point when common sense suggests one remove one’s neck from the noose. We’ve reached that point. What’s it going to be?”

That was it. Cards on the table. Barbara waited to see what would happen. The seconds ticked by. During them, a gust of wind blew a yellow carrier bag down the street and a Muslim cleric emerged from a narrow doorway with a crocodile of little boys in tow. Barbara watched them and thought how times had changed in London. No one looked innocent any longer. A simple outing took on multiple potential meanings. The world was becoming such a miserable place.

“Bryan Smythe,” Emily said quietly.

Barbara turned her head back to gaze at Emily. “And he does . . . ?”

“Phone records, bank records, credit card records, emails, net searches, computer trails, all the rest. Anything having to do with computer technology.”

Barbara dug out her notebook and flipped it open. She said, “Where c’n I find this stellar individual?”

Emily had to get this information from her mobile phone. She read it out—the bloke’s address and phone numbers—and shoved the mobile back into her pocket. She added, “He didn’t know what it was all in service of. He just did what Dwayne told him to do.”

“No worries there,” Barbara said. “I know Dwayne’s the big fish, Emily.” She pushed back from the table and dropped her notebook back into her shoulder bag. She got to her feet. “You might want to look for another line of employment. Between you and me, Doughty’s private investigation business is going to have a serious setback sooner rather than later.”

She left the young woman sitting in the pub. She reckoned Doughty was in his office, so that was where she took herself next. With Bryan Smythe’s name in her possession, she was now holding a rather good hand of cards.

Above Bedlovers, she gave two knocks to Doughty’s door, entering without being bidden to do so. She found the man in consultation with a middle-aged estate manager type. They were bent over Doughty’s desk, examining photos, and in the estate manager’s fingers was a handkerchief that he was in the act of crushing to bits.

Doughty looked up. “D’you mind?” he snapped. “We’re conducting business.”

“So’m I.” Barbara took out her warrant card and showed it to the poor bloke who was being presented with the cold, hard, and no doubt slimy facts of someone’s betrayal of him. “I’m going to need a word with Mr. Doughty,” she said. And with a glance at the pictures—two nude young men, as it happened, cavorting together with rather too much enthusiasm in a tree-sided pond—she added, “What’d that idiot film director say? ‘The heart wants what the heart wants’? I’m sorry.”

Doughty gathered up the pictures and said to her, “You’re a piece of work.”

“For my sins,” she agreed.

The estate manager had backed off from his perusal of the photos. He was taking a chequebook from his jacket pocket, but Barbara took him by the arm and urged him towards the door. “I expect Mr. Doughty—decent bloke that he is—wants to make this one on the house.” She bade him farewell, watched him go for the stairs with his head hanging low, and added her hope that the rest of his day was going to be more pleasant than his just-completed meeting in the office above Bedlovers had been.

Then she closed the door and turned to Doughty. He was red in the face, and it wasn’t embarrassment making him so. He said, “How bloody dare you!”

To which she replied, “Bryan Smythe, Mr. Doughty. At least Bryan Smythe on this end. On the other end is Michelangelo Di Massimo. He doesn’t have his own Bryan Smythe, as it happens. His computers won’t be as squeaky clean as yours. Same goes for his telephone records, I expect. And then there’s the small matter of his bank account and what it might show when we get our hands on it.”

“I told you Di Massimo was employed to do some checking in Italy,” Doughty snapped. “This is fresh off the presses for what sterling reason?”

“Because what you didn’t tell me was that he was employed to snatch Hadiyyah, Dwayne.”

“I didn’t employ him to do that, Sergeant. I’ve told you that before and I’m going to continue telling you that. If you think otherwise, then it’s time you took a suggestion from me.”

“And that is . . . ?”

“The professor. Taymullah Azhar. It’s been him from the first, but you haven’t wanted to look at that, have you? So I’ve had to do your bloody job for you and believe me I’m not happy about that.”

“His Berlin story—”

“Bugger Berlin. This was never about Berlin. Berlin’s been a malodorous red herring from the first. Of course he was there. He was giving his paper and attending lectures and popping up all over the bloody hotel like a Pakistani jack-in-the-box. He would’ve had a convenient leg break in the lobby of the place if he’d needed to make certain his stay was memorable, but as it happens, he didn’t need to make certain of that because all his colleagues are willing to believe every word that comes out of the blighter’s mouth. As was I, as it happens. And, let’s be frank here, as are you.”

He went to one of his filing cabinets as he spoke. He jerked open the top drawer, and he brought out a manila folder. This he tossed on his desk, and he sat behind it. He said, “Oh, bloody sit down and let’s have a rational conversation for once.”

Barbara trusted the man in the same way she would have trusted a cobra sliding towards her big toe. She narrowed her eyes and observed him for anything that would allow her to read what was going on. But he looked, maddeningly, as he always looked: everything about him average save for that nose, veering in several directions before it got round to presenting his nostrils to a less-than-admiring public.

She sat. She wasn’t about to let him wrest from her the reins of the conversation, however. So she said, “Bryan Smythe’s going to confirm a phone sweep and he’s going to confirm a computer sweep as well. Put that together with the blagging on the part of Ms. Cass and—”

“You might want to take a look at these before you cha-cha any further in that direction.” Doughty opened the manila folder and handed over two documents. They were, Barbara saw, copies of plane tickets, coming from the sort of reservations made online by millions of people every day. The flight in question departed from Heathrow. It was a one-way ticket, and its destination was Lahore.

Barbara felt her heart slam against her chest and her mouth went dry. For the name of the first passenger was Taymullah Azhar. The name of the second was Hadiyyah Upman.

She found that she couldn’t think for a moment. She couldn’t think what it meant, she couldn’t think why the tickets existed at all, and she couldn’t think—because she didn’t want to think—that everything she believed she knew about Azhar was about to crumble into dust.

Doughty apparently read all this on her face, for he said, “Yes. There you have it. Tied up with a ribbon and I ought to bill you hours for doing your bleeding job for you.”

She said, with an attempt at bravado, “What I have here is a piece of paper, Mr. Doughty. And as you and I know, anyone can generate a piece of paper, just like anyone can buy a ticket to anyplace in anyone else’s name.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, then have a look at the dates,” he advised her. “The date of the flight is interesting enough, but I think you’ll find the date of the purchase more interesting still.”

So Barbara looked at these and then she tried to decide what the two dates were telling her about her friend. The date of the flight was the fifth of July, which one could argue spoke of Azhar’s hope that his daughter would be found alive and perfectly well. Or it spoke of a ticket purchase made months and months earlier, far in advance of Hadiyyah’s November disappearance from London. But the date of purchase changed the playing field. It was the twenty-second of March, well in advance of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping in Italy but during the time when Azhar had, ostensibly, not even known where she was. That suggested only one thing, and Barbara couldn’t bear to consider the extent to which she’d been played for a fool.

She spent a moment searching for something to explain this information. She said, “Anyone could have—”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Doughty said. “But the question is why would someone other than our friend the quiet, unassuming, and brokenhearted professor of whatever the hell he professes buy two one-way tickets to Pakistan?”

“Someone who wanted him to look guilty—like yourself, for example—could have made the purchase.”

“You think so, eh? So ask your blokes over there in Special Branch to track this thing down because you and I both know that in these days of playing at Who’s the Terrorist, anyone going to a country where people wear headscarves, towels, bedsheets, and dressing gowns in the street is going to be looked at fairly closely once you give them the word it’s got to be done.”

“He might have—”

“Known his kid was going to be snatched in Italy?”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“But it’s what you know, Sergeant Havers. Now, I think you and I c’n agree it’s game, set, and match we’re looking at here. So are you going to continue harassing me, or are you going to do something about getting that miserable excuse of a father—if he even is her father—to tell the cops over there where he’s stowed that poor kid?”

BOW

LONDON

Barbara sat inside her rust-dappled Mini, lit a fag, and inhaled so deeply that she could have sworn the heavenly carcinogen managed to travel all the way to her ankles. She smoked the entire thing before she would even allow herself to think. Buddy Holly helped in this. A tape deck in the car that functioned only on an off-and-on basis today was leaning towards the on end of things, although the very idea of Buddy’s telling her that anything was a-getting closer was not doing much to lift her spirits.

Doughty was right. A call to Special Branch and she’d know the truth about those tickets to Lahore. It wasn’t enough that Azhar was a respected professor of microbiology. That alone would never save him from scrutiny. When it came to travelling to a Muslim country, a man with a name like Taymullah Azhar was going to be looked at, even more so because he’d bought a one-way ticket to the place. In fact, he’d probably already been investigated by the blokes in SO12 because his purchase of that ticket—if indeed he was the person who had made the purchase—was going to light up the roadside flares. All she had to do was dig out her mobile, place a call to the Met, and hear the worst. Or hear the best, she thought. Pray God in his heaven that it was the best.

Barbara considered what she knew once she’d smoked the fag down to a dog-end the size of her little finger’s nail. She flicked this into the street—apologies to the litter patrol, but her ashtray was teeming with six months of Players smoked down to various lengths and crushed therein—and she tried desperately to reason everything out. From Lynley she knew that Di Massimo was pointing every finger he had and all of his toes at Dwayne Doughty in London. Emily Cass appeared to be doing the same. Doughty had everything to lose if culpability came down to him. He knew that better than he knew anything, which was why, of course, he’d have ordered every indication that he’d been in contact with anyone in Italy wiped from the records.

Bryan Smythe could confirm this. Back him into a corner, guarantee that no visit from the Bill was going to occur if he spilled his beans onto a porcelain plate, and Bob was, let’s face it, going to be your uncle. Barbara knew that she probably didn’t even need to visit the bloke. These computer types? In her experience their bravado was limited to what they could accomplish behind closed doors, in a darkened room, with the glow of a computer monitor shining in their eyes. Hearing that the cops were onto him, he’d cave in an instant. He’d tell everything he knew, just as fast as his vocal cords could vibrate. Barbara just wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that everything was.

Truth was, he was going to confirm, and she bloody well knew it. Emily Cass wouldn’t have given her the bloke’s name if there was any doubt in the matter. Barbara told herself that this was probably because Emily would have put him in the picture the moment Barbara and she had parted ways. And following up on that, Dwayne Doughty would have rung the bloke and given him the word. The private investigator would have concluded instantly that Emily Cass was the person who had named Smythe to Barbara, for there was no one else to do the naming. He’d deal with her later, but upon Barbara’s departure from his office, Smythe would have been his very next move. Ring him and say, “There’s a cop coming. She can’t prove a damn thing so hold your tongue in this business and there’s a bonus coming your way.”

So he would hold his tongue. Or he would break and spill. Or he would run for cover. Or he would head for Scotland, Dubai, the Seychelles. Who the bloody hell knew what Smythe would do because Barbara’s head was spinning, so she lit another fag.

Reality in a tablespoon? She knew what her next step was. It involved ringing Lynley with the information she had and giving him everything. But God, God, God, how could she ever do that? For surely there was an explanation somewhere and all she really had to do was to find it.

She could give Lynley Bryan Smythe’s name. That wore the guise of progress being made. He’d tell her to haul Smythe into the nick for a proper go at him—or he would ask her why she hadn’t already done so—but in any case that would buy her time. The only question was: What was she going to do with time bought? And once she admitted to herself what it was, she set her course upon doing it.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Salvatore had no choice once Michelangelo Di Massimo named the man in London. His next encounter with Piero Fanucci wasn’t going to be pleasant, but it had to be got through. Once that was taken care of, he was intent upon the Apuan Alps and that convent at which Domenica Medici was the caretaker. It was the only lead they had as to the location of the missing little English girl and, Piero Fanucci or not, Salvatore intended to follow it.

He spoke to il Pubblico Ministero by phone. In advance he’d done what little there was to be done to prove to Fanucci that no connection appeared to exist between Carlo Casparia and anyone else they had discovered having ties to the kidnapping case. Piero snapped that he hadn’t been looking closely enough. Get back to that at once, Fanucci ordered. At this, Salvatore bridled. At this, he made a crucial error. Patiently, he said, “Piero, capisco. I know that you are heavily invested in the guilt of this Carlo—” At which point Fanucci morphed into il drago and Salvatore felt that dragon’s wrath.

He listened to Piero’s roaring and railing. Il Pubblico Ministero called into question everything from Salvatore’s capabilities as a member of the police force to the various reasons—most of them having to do with Salvatore’s masculinity—for the breakdown of the chief inspector’s marriage. The peroration of il drago’s diatribe was the unsurprising information that Piero was replacing him as head of the investigation into the girl’s disappearance. Someone who could follow the directions of the magistrate in charge of the investigation would be taking over, and Salvatore was to hand to this person every bit of information he had.

“Don’t do this, Piero,” Salvatore said. His blood had long since boiled, especially when il Pubblico Ministero had ventured into the area of his marriage. Indeed, Salvatore felt he had no blood left, just the burnt-copper scent of it in his body. “You have decided upon the guilt of this man based upon your fantasy. You have decided that Carlo saw an easy way to make money by following a child, grabbing her from a public market, and selling her to . . . Who, Piero? Allow me to ask you this: Is it even reasonable for you to conclude that anyone would go into the business of buying a child from a person like Carlo? A drug addict who is likely to tell the tale of such a sale to the first person willing to offer him the money for another purchase of whatever it is he is shooting into his body? Piero, please listen to me. I know that you are compromised in this investigation. I know that your use of Prima Voce to make a case for—”

That mentioning of the tabloid had done it.

“Basta!” Piero Fanucci roared. “È finito, Salvatore! Capisci? È finito tutto!”

Il Pubblico Ministero had slammed the phone down at his end. At least, Salvatore thought wryly, he would have no need of informing the magistrato about the convent in the Apuan Alps since Piero’s poor phone would now probably be out of order. He would also have no need of telling him that more details had been amassed about one Lorenzo Mura, his fellow players on Lucca’s squadra di calcio, and his private coaching of young giocatori in the Parco Fluviale.

His officers had been busy. He had photographs now of all the other city team players, which had admittedly been easy enough to come by. Less easy had been the gathering of photographs of all the parents of young boys coached by Lorenzo Mura. Getting the names of those parents had been difficult enough. Asking for them had aroused Lorenzo’s suspicions and had prompted the man to demand what the parents of his football students had to do with little Hadiyyah’s disappearance. Salvatore had told him the truth of the matter: Everyone whose life touched even remotely upon Hadiyyah’s had to be looked at. Perhaps the parent of a child he coached was unhappy with him and felt he needed to be taught a lesson, dealt with in some way, put in his place . . . ? One never knew, Signor Mura, so every avenue had to be explored.

With pictures of those parents and the Lucchese players in hand, officers were even now on their way to the prison to show these to Carlo Casparia in the hope that what went for his memory after years of drug use might be stimulated. He had, after all, remembered a man meeting Lorenzo Mura at the place of his coaching in the Parco Fluviale. There was a slight chance that he would be able to pick this person out of the pictures with which he would be presented. And then they would have another avenue to explore.

Salvatore didn’t have much time for this manoeuvre, though. He knew that Piero Fanucci would be quick about assigning this case to another. Purtroppo, Chief Inspector Lo Bianco would be out of his office when that individual showed up to go over the finer details of the investigation. He would be high in the Apuan Alps.

His decision to take the Englishman with him had to do with language. If by the slightest chance on earth this English girl had been taken into the Alps to that convent by Roberto Squali, then the liaison officer who spoke her own language was going to be helpful in communicating with her. If, on the other, more horrible hand, what developed from this was the news that the worst had happened and the little girl was dead, then Lynley’s presence would allow him to gather information on the spot and to discuss with Salvatore in advance what details the child’s parents needed to know about her death.

He fetched Lynley from their regular luogo di incontro by Porta di Borgo. To the Englishman’s “Che cosa succede?” he tersely explained where they were with the collection of photos, with Lorenzo Mura, and with the need for swiftness. He spoke of this latter matter by using terms that dealt with “concerns of il Pubblico Ministero.” What he didn’t tell him was that he had been officially removed from the investigation.

He didn’t seem to need to, as things turned out. The Englishman’s brown eyes observed him steadily as he parted with those details he had. He even suggested politely that perhaps a siren would speed their journey . . . ? It would assist in bringing matters to a swift conclusion for you, Ispettore, he pointed out.

So it was with the siren blaring and the lights flashing that Salvatore and Lynley left the city. They shared little conversation as they stormed in the direction of the Alps and a convent hidden high among them.

It was called Villa Rivelli, he’d discovered. It housed a cloistered order of Dominican nuns. It was situated northwest of the point at which the unfortunate Roberto Squali had met his end, and the road that Squali had been driving upon was the single route to get to the place.

There was virtually nothing nearby, as they found when they reached the area, just a cluster of houses perhaps two kilometres in advance of the turnoff. At one time long ago these houses would have served the needs of whoever had lived within the great villa. Now they were the shuttered vacation homes of foreigners and of wealthy Italians who came to the mountains from cities like Milano and Bologna, to escape urban bustle and summer heat. It was early in the season yet, so the likelihood of anyone within the houses seeing Roberto Squali pass by several weeks ago with a child in his car was too remote to be considered. Wisdom would have dictated that Squali make his move with the child in midafternoon anyway. At that time of day, no one stirred in a place like this. People moved from pranzo directly to letto for a nap. They would have noticed nothing, even if they’d been at their houses this time of year.

When they reached the lane that led to Villa Rivelli, Salvatore nearly missed it altogether, so sheltered was it by looming oaks and Aleppo pines and so untravelled it appeared. Only a small wooden sign topped with a cross saved him from passing it by altogether. It was carved with V Rivelli upon it, but the letters were worn and the wood was lichenous.

The lane was narrow, cluttered with the woodland debris of a hundred winters. It had never been paved, so they lurched their way down it. They came to a great iron gate that stood open far enough to allow a car’s passage. When he’d eased the car past the ornate wrought iron, he followed the driveway to the left, along a tall hedge from which birds burst, past a few decrepit outbuildings, a huge woodpile, and a ruspa that was more rust than steel.

The silence was complete. As the lane climbed upward, nothing broke into the stillness. So it was with some surprise that Salvatore turned into a car’s-width opening perhaps a kilometre from the road below and saw, beyond the hedge, a great lawn at the other side of which stood the baroque beauty of the Villa Rivelli. Aside from the fact that it was completely abandoned in appearance, it didn’t seem like a dwelling for an order of cloistered nuns. For the front of the building was fashioned with tall niches in which marble statues stood, and a single glance at them told the tale of the identities, which had more to do with Roman gods and goddesses than with saints of the Roman Catholic Church. But these were not what surprised Salvatore. It was the presence of three cars from the carabinieri that caused him to glance at Lynley and to worry that they might be too late.

The arrival of police at a cloistered convent was not a simple matter of knocking on the door and gaining admittance. The women within did not see visitors. Chances were better than good that if the carabinieri were present, it was because the carabinieri had been summoned. It was with this in mind that Salvatore and Lynley approached two armed officers who were gazing at them expressionlessly through very dark glasses.

It was, Salvatore discovered, much as he’d thought. A telephone call from the convent had brought them to this remote villa. Captain Mirenda had been admitted, and she was presumably speaking to whoever had made the call. As for the rest of them . . . ? They were having a look round the grounds. It was a beautiful spot on a beautiful day, eh? Such a pity that the ladies who lived here never got to enjoy what it had to offer. Giardini, fontane, stagni, un bosco . . . The officer shook his head at the waste of such pleasures.

“Dov’è l’ingresso?” Salvatore asked him. For it didn’t seem conceivable that access to the convent was gained by merely knocking upon the two great front doors. In this, he was right. The superior officer of the two carabinieri had gone round the side of the building. Salvatore and Lynley did the same. They found yet another officer stationed outside of a plain door set down a few steps. To him, they showed their identification.

The police were notoriously territorial in this part of the world. Because there were so many divisions of them, turf wars were common when it came to an investigation. Often the first branch of polizia on the scene was the branch that wrested control of an investigation, and this was particularly the case when it came to the polizia di stato and the carabinieri. But things were much different on this day, Salvatore found. After examining their identification and gazing at them both as if their faces held secret information for him, the officer stepped away from the door. When it came to entering the convent, they could suit themselves.

They went in through a vast kitchen, which was completely deserted. They climbed a stone stairway, their footsteps echoing between the plastered walls. The stairway took them into a corridor, which was also deserted. This they followed and finally arrived in a chapel, where a candle lit for the Sacrament was the first indication of life in the building since someone from within would have had to light it unless Captain Mirenda had done the honours.

Four separate corridors led from the chapel, each of them at a corner of the room and one of which they’d just travelled. Salvatore was trying to decide which of the remaining three might lead them to a human presence, when he heard the sound of women’s voices, just a quiet murmur in what otherwise would have been a place of silence and contemplation. Footsteps accompanied these voices. Someone said, “Certo, certo. Non si preoccupi. Ha fatto bene.”

Two women emerged from behind a wooden lattice that served to cover the doorway of the corridor nearest the chapel’s altar. One of them wore the habit of a Dominican nun. The other wore the uniform of a carabinieri captain. The nun halted abruptly, the first of them to catch sight of the two men—both in the clothing of civilians—standing in the convent chapel. She looked behind her for a moment, as if to retreat to safety behind the lattice, and Captain Mirenda spoke sharply.

“Chi sono?” This was, she told them, a cloistered convent. How had they gained entrance?

Salvatore identified himself and explained who Lynley was. They were there, he said, on the matter of the English girl who had vanished from Lucca, and he felt confident that Captain Mirenda was aware of that case.

She was, of course. How could she be otherwise since, unlike the nun who’d stepped into the shadows, she did not live in a protected world. But it seemed that she had either been summoned to the convent on another matter entirely, or she had not connected the reason she’d been summoned to anything that had gone before this moment, especially in a mercato in Lucca.

The nun murmured something. In the shadows, her face was hidden.

Salvatore explained that he and his companion were going to have to speak to the Mother Superior. He went on to say that he knew it was irregular for any of the nuns to meet with an outsider—particularly if that outsider was male—but there was an urgent need since a direct relationship existed between a young woman of the name of Domenica Medici and a man who had taken the little girl from Lucca.

Captain Mirenda glanced at the other woman. She said, “Che cosa vorrebbe fare?”

Salvatore wanted to tell her that it was not a matter of what the nun wished to do at this point. This was a police matter, and the traditions of the cloister were going to have to be set aside. Where, he enquired, was Domenica Medici? Her parents had indicated she lived in this place. Roberto Squali had died on his way here. Evidence in his car proved the child had been a passenger at some point.

Captain Mirenda told them to wait in the chapel. Salvatore didn’t like this, but he decided a compromise was in order. The carabinieri had sent a woman for obvious reasons, and if it was down to her to open doors in this place, he could live with that.

She took the arm of the nun, and together they disappeared behind the lattice from which they’d emerged. In a few minutes, though, the captain was back. With her was a different nun altogether, and she didn’t shrink from their presence as had the other. This was Mother Superior, Captain Mirenda told them. It was she who had summoned the carabinieri to Villa Rivelli.

“Your wish is to see Domenica Medici?” Mother Superior was tall and stately, appearing ageless in her black-and-white habit. She wore the rimless spectacles that Salvatore remembered on the nuns of his youth. Then those glasses had seemed quirky, an antique fashion long out of vogue. Now they seemed trendy, striking an odd note of modernity out of keeping with the rest of Mother Superior’s attire. Behind the glasses, she fixed upon him a gaze that he remembered only too well from the classroom. It demanded truth, and it suggested that anything less would be quickly uncovered.

He recounted what he’d learned from the parents of Domenica Medici: that she lived on the grounds of Villa Rivelli and that she served as a caretaker. He added to this what he’d already told Captain Mirenda. This was a matter of some importance, he concluded. A child’s disappearance was involved.

It was Captain Mirenda who spoke. “Domenica Medici is here on the grounds,” she said. “And there is no child within the convent walls.”

“You have made a search?” Salvatore said.

“I have not needed to,” Captain Mirenda said.

For a moment, Salvatore thought she meant that the word of Mother Superior was good enough, and he could tell that Lynley thought the same, for the other man stirred next to him and said quietly, “Strano,” in a low voice.

Strange indeed, Salvatore thought. But Mother Superior clarified. There was a child, she said. From within the convent, she herself had both seen and heard her. She had assumed the girl was a relative come to stay for a time with Domenica. The reason for this was that she’d been delivered to the place by Domenica’s cousin. She played on the grounds of the villa and helped Domenica with her work. That she might not have been a member of Domenica’s family had not occurred to anyone in the convent.

“They have no contact here with the outside world,” Captain Mirenda said. “They did not know that a child has gone missing from Lucca.”

Salvatore very nearly didn’t want to ask why the carabinieri had been sent for, then. This was of no import, however, since DI Lynley did the asking himself.

Because of the screaming, Mother Superior told them quietly. And because of the tale Domenica had told when she’d been sent for by the nun and questioned about it.

“Lei crede che la bambina sia sua,” Captain Mirenda interjected abruptly.

Her own child? Salvatore thought. “Perché?” he asked.

“È pazza” was the captain’s answer.

Salvatore knew from speaking to Domenica’s parents that the girl was, perhaps, not right in the head. But for her to believe that the child brought here by her cousin was her own daughter took things in a direction so strange that it suggested the girl was, indeed, more mad than she was slow.

Mother Superior’s quiet voice filled in the rest of the details and comprised the information she’d gathered preceding her phone call. This man who had brought the child to the villa had once made Domenica pregnant. She’d been seventeen at the time. She was now twenty-six. To the poor girl, the age of the child seemed right. But it was, of course, no child of hers.

“Perché?” Salvatore asked the nun.

Again, the captain answered for her. “She prayed for God to take that child from her body so that her parents would never know she was pregnant.”

“È successo così?” Lynley asked.

“Sì,” Captain Mirenda confirmed. That was indeed what had occurred. Or at least that was the tale Domenica had told Mother Superior when she’d been summoned into the convent upon the terrible screaming of the little girl. Captain Mirenda herself was on her way to question Domenica Medici about this. She would have no objection to the other policemen attending her.

Mother Superior spoke one last time before they left her. She murmured, “I did not know. She said it was her duty to prepare the little girl for God.”

VILLA RIVELLI

TUSCANY

Lynley had followed the conversation perfectly well, but he very nearly wished he hadn’t been able to do so. To have managed to track Hadiyyah to this place—for who else could it be but Hadiyyah brought into the Alps?—and to find themselves just hours too late . . . He couldn’t imagine how he was going to tell the girl’s parents. He also couldn’t imagine how he was going to relay the information to Barbara Havers.

He walked slowly in the wake of the carabinieri officer and Lo Bianco. Captain Mirenda had been told where Domenica Medici was to be found. A short distance from the villa and sheltered from it by a hedge of camellias in bloom, a stone barn stood. Within this barn a woman dressed in garb similar to the Mother Superior’s sat on a low stool milking a goat, her cheek resting on the animal’s flank and her eyes closed.

Lynley would have thought she was a nun herself, save for the subtle differences in her clothing from the habit worn by the Mother Superior. The essentials of it were the same: a white robe, a simple black veil. Most people, seeing her, would assume she was a member of the cloistered community.

She was so involved in what she was doing that she wasn’t aware anyone had entered the barn. It was only when Captain Mirenda said her name that her eyes opened. She wasn’t startled by the presence of outsiders. Less was she startled by the fact that one of them wore the uniform of the carabinieri.

“Ciao, Domenica,” Captain Mirenda said.

Domenica smiled. She rose from her stool. A gentle slap on the flank of the goat sent it on its way, and it moved to join three others who were gathered at the far end of the barn, near a door the top half of which was open, revealing a fenced paddock beyond it. She brushed her hands down the front of the garment that went for her false nun’s habit. In a gesture reminiscent of cloistered nuns Lynley had seen depicted on television and in films, she buried her hands in the sleeves of this garment, and she stood in an attitude that mixed humility with anticipation.

Lo Bianco was the one to speak although Captain Mirenda shot him a look that indicated he was out of place to be doing so. The carabinieri had, after all, been the agency of police first on the scene. Courtesy demanded that Lo Bianco allow the other officer to get down to business while he and Lynley observed.

He said to the young woman, “We have come for the child that your cousin Roberto Squali gave into your keeping, Domenica. What have you done with her?”

At the question Domenica’s face took on a look of such placidity that for a moment Lynley doubted they’d found the right person. “I have done God’s will,” she murmured.

Lynley felt the grip of despair. His gaze took in the barn. His thoughts shot from one place to another where the mad young woman could have hidden the body of a nine-year-old girl: somewhere in the woods, somewhere on the grounds, a shadowy corner of the villa itself. They would need to bring in a team to find her unless the woman could be made to speak.

“What will of God have you done?” Captain Mirenda said.

“God has forgiven me,” Domenica replied. “My sin was the prayer and the relief in having the prayer granted by Him. Ever since, I have walked the path of penitence to receive His absolution. I have done His will. My soul now magnifies the Lord. My spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” Again her head bowed, as if she’d said all she was going to say on the subject.

“Your cousin Roberto Squali would have told you to keep the child safe,” Lo Bianco said. “He would not have told you to harm the child. You were to keep her until he came for her. Do you know your cousin Roberto is dead?”

She frowned. For a moment she said nothing, and Lynley thought that the news alone might loosen her tongue as to the whereabouts of Hadiyyah. But then she said, surprisingly, that it was the will of God that she should have witnessed what happened to Roberto. She, too, had thought her cousin was dead because God had clearly taken his car from the road and sent it soaring into the air. But the ambulanza had come for him and she’d understood from this that patience was required when one sought to understand the greater meanings behind God’s hand in one’s life.

“Pazza,” Captain Mirenda said tersely. Her voice was low, and if Domenica heard this declaration, she said nothing in reply to it. Slings and arrows couldn’t hurt her now. Obviously, she’d moved to an unearthly realm in which the Almighty had blessed her.

“You witnessed this accident to your cousin?” Lo Bianco said.

That, too, was God’s will, Domenica told him.

“And then you wondered what next to do with the child you were supposed to be keeping for him, vero?” Lo Bianco clarified.

All that was required was to do God’s will.

Captain Mirenda’s expression said that she wished God’s will to be that she herself should throttle the young woman. Lo Bianco’s looked only marginally different. Lynley said to Domenica, “What was God’s will?”

“Abraham,” she told him. “Deliver your beloved son to God.”

“But Isaac did not die,” Lo Bianco said.

“God sent an angel to stop the sword from falling,” Domenica said. “One only has to wait for God. God will always speak if the soul is pure. This, too, I prayed to know: how to purify and ready the soul for God so that the state of grace we all seek to be in at the moment of death could be acquired.”

The moment of death was enough to spur Lo Bianco to action. He went to the young woman, grasped her arm, and said, “God’s will is this,” in a voice that boomed in the stone walls of the place. “You will take us to this child at once, wherever she is. God would not have sent us into the Alps to find her if God did not intend her to be found. You understand this, sì? You understand how God works? We must have that child. God has sent us for her.”

Lynley thought the young woman might protest, but she did not. She also did not appear cowed by the demand or its ferocity. Instead, she said, “Certo,” and seemed happy to comply. She headed for the great doors of the barn.

Once outside she went to a stairway that climbed to a door on the barn’s south side. The others followed her up these stairs and into a dimly lit kitchen, where the sight of fresh, bright vegetables in an ancient stone sink and the fragrance of newly baked bread acted as a mocking contrast to what they understood they were about to find in this place.

She approached a door on the far side of the room, and from her pocket she withdrew a key. Lynley girded himself for whatever was behind the door, and when she said, “The waters of God washed away her sins, and her purity made her ready for Him,” he saw Captain Mirenda cross herself and he heard Lo Bianco give a quiet curse.

Domenica didn’t cross the threshold of the room beyond the door. Instead, she welcomed them to do so. They hesitated, and Domenica smiled. “Andate,” she urged them, as if eager for them to see what God’s handmaiden had done in the name of Abraham.

“Dio mio” was Lo Bianco’s murmur as he passed the young woman and entered the room.

Lynley followed him, but Captain Mirenda did not. She would, he knew, want to prevent Domenica Medici from fleeing the scene. But Domenica made no move to do so. Instead, as the two men entered a small chamber furnished with only a narrow bed, a small chest of drawers, and a prie-dieu, she said, “Vuole suo padre,” and the little girl cowering in the corner of the room repeated this declaration in English.

“I want my dad,” Hadiyyah said to them. She began to cry in great heaving sobs. “Please can you take me to my dad?”

VILLA RIVELLI

TUSCANY

Salvatore allowed DI Lynley to carry the little girl from the place. She was gowned in white from head to toe, like a child dressed for a Christmas pageant, and she clung to him, burying her face in his neck.

The Englishman had crossed the room to her in three steps. He’d said, “Hadiyyah, I’m Thomas Lynley. Barbara has sent me to find you,” and she’d held out her arms like a much younger child, trust established at once by his use of English and by the mention of this name. Salvatore did not know who this person was, this Barbara. But if it served to comfort the child in some way to hear her name spoken, he was more than happy to have Lynley invoke it.

“Where is he? Where’s my dad?” the child wailed.

Lynley picked her up, and she clung to him, thin legs round his waist, thin arms round his shoulders. “Barbara’s in London waiting for you,” he told the child. “Your father’s in Lucca. Shall I take you to him? Would you like that?”

“But that’s what he said . . .” And she cried anew, somehow not comforted by the idea of being taken to her father but rather terrified anew in some way.

Lynley carried her outside and down the stone steps. At their bottom a rustic table and four chairs stood in a square of bright sunlight. He set the girl on one of these chairs and drew a second chair close to her. Gently, he smoothed her chestnut hair, saying, “What did he say to you, Hadiyyah? Who?”

“The man said he’d take me to my dad,” she told him. “I want my dad. I want Mummy. She put me in water. I didn’t want it and I tried to stop her but I couldn’t and then she locked me up and . . .” She wept and wept. “I wasn’t scared at first ’cause he said my dad . . . But she made me go into the cellar . . .”

The story came in fits and starts and from it Salvatore picked up snatches and the rest was translated by Lynley as the little girl spoke, telling the tale of what in her confused mind Domenica Medici had determined to be the will of God. A visit to the cellar clarified matters further, for deep within the labyrinthine shadowy place was an ancient marble bathing pool in which disturbingly green and cloudy water had waited for the immersion of a frightened child, baptising her and washing away whatever “sins” stained her soul and made her less pleasing to the sight of God. Once she’d been thus baptised, locking her away was the only manner in which her keeper Domenica could assure her continued purity while she herself awaited the next sign from God to tell her what to do with the child.

When Salvatore saw the place to which Domenica Medici had dragged the little English girl, he understood the screaming that had brought the carabinieri to the convent. For the vast and vaulted cellar of the Villa Rivelli would be a place of nightmares for any child, with one crypt-like chamber giving onto another, with looming dusty disused wine barrels the size of military tanks in rows, with ancient olive presses looking like instruments of torture . . . It was no wonder that Hadiyyah had screamed in terror. There was more than a good chance that she would wake up screaming from her dreams for a very long time to come.

It was time to get her out of this place and back to her parents. He said to Lynley, “Dobbiamo portarla a Lucca all’ospedale,” for Hadiyyah would have to be examined by a doctor and spoken to by a specialist in childhood trauma if one could be found whose English was adequate.

“Sì, sì,” Lynley agreed. He suggested that they phone the parents and have them meet them there.

Salvatore nodded. He would make that call once he spoke to Captain Mirenda. The carabinieri would, for the present, take charge of Domenica Medici. He doubted they would get much more from the young woman than they’d got already, but she had to be dealt with. She didn’t seem to be an accomplice so much as an instrument of her cousin Roberto Squali. But buried within the confusion of her mind could be something that would tell them more about the commission of the crime. She, too, would need to be examined by a doctor. This doctor, however, would be one of the mind so that an assessment could be made of her.

“Andiamo,” Salvatore said to Lynley. Once these things were accomplished, their work here was finished and whatever details Hadiyyah herself might be able to provide about her kidnapping, those could wait until she’d been seen to at the hospital and until she was reunited with her parents.

VICTORIA

LONDON

It wasn’t as difficult as it had used to be, getting an officer from Special Branch to talk. Time was when the blokes from SO12 were a deeply secretive lot, not only closemouthed but also nervy. They had trusted no one, and who could blame them? In the days of the IRA and bombs on buses, in cars, and in rubbish bins, pretty much everyone looked Irish to them, so it didn’t matter if a questioner happened to be from another branch of the Met. The SO12 blokes were tight-lipped and all the et ceteras. Prying information out of them generally took a court order.

They were still careful, but sharing information was sometimes necessary in these days of fiery clerics in English mosques exhorting their listeners to jihad, British-born young men schooled in the beauties of martyrdom, and professionals from unexpected fields like medicine deciding to alter the course of their lives by wiring their cars with explosives and planting them where they would do the most harm. No one could afford unsafe convictions in any of these matters, so if one agency within the Met needed information from another agency within the Met, it wasn’t impossible to find someone who could impart a few details if a name was given.

Barbara got inside to talk to Chief Inspector Harry Streener by using the magic words Pakistani national living in London and a developing situation in Italy. The bloke had the accent of someone who should have been whistling commands to his sheepdog in the hills of Yorkshire and the pasty cue-ball complexion of a poor sod who hadn’t seen the sun for the past ten years. His fingers were yellow from nicotine and his teeth weren’t much better, and when she saw him, Barbara made a mental note that giving up smoking wasn’t an entirely bad idea. But she set this aside for future consideration and gave him the name she was loath to give him.

“Taymullah Azhar?” Streener repeated. They were in his office, where an iPod in a docking station was playing something that sounded like hurricane-force winds in a bamboo grove. Streener saw her glance in its direction. “White noise,” he said. “Helps me to think.”

“Got it,” she said with a wise nod. It would have driven her to the nearest Underground station for shelter, but everyone’s boat floated on different water.

Streener tapped at his computer’s keyboard. After a moment, he read the screen. Barbara itched to get out of her seat, crawl over his desk, and have at the information, but she forced herself to wait patiently for whatever it was that Streener decided to impart. She’d already sketched in the facts for him: Azhar’s employment at University College London, his entanglement with Angelina Upman, their production of a child together, Angelina’s flight with Hadiyyah to destinations unknown, and Hadiyyah’s disappearance via kidnapping. Streener had listened to all this with a face so impassive that Barbara wondered if he was actually hearing her. At the end of her recitation, she’d said, “Superintendent Ardery’s put me onto the London end of things while DI Lynley’s working the Italian end. I thought it best to check with you lot and see if you’ve been having a look at the bloke.”

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

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

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

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

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

“C’n you tell me why?”

“It’s the job,” he said.

“I know it’s your job, but—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Page five, Barb,” Mitchell Corsico said.

“Page five what?”

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

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

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

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

“You should have told me, Barb.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s what I mean.”

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

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

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

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

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

LUCCA

TUSCANY

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

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

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

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

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

She nodded solemnly.

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

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

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

“English.”

“And what was from your father?”

“A card.”

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

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

“And was it signed?”

“It said ‘Dad.’”

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

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

She nodded, tears still dribbling down her face.

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

“Khushi,” she said against his shoulder.

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

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

“The man with the card?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LUCCA

TUSCANY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How is Hadiyyah?” Azhar asked at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He did what?” she asked.

“Tutto, tutto!”

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

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

VICTORIA

LONDON

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

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

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

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

“Thanks go to Chief Inspector Lo Bianco.”

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

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

“Peace?” Barbara asked.

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

“Did Mura hear all this?” Barbara asked.

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

“Was he pulled from the case?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And?”

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

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

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

“And that would be?”

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

“And the other direction?”

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

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

“D’you still want me to—”

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

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

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

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

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

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